When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Wednesday dropped out of the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, that gave the last man still standing — Joe Biden — the nomination.
The race is over.
While many powerful Democrats have now endorsed the former vice president, there’s one endorsement that is conspicuously missing — Barack Obama’s.
Biden worked with the former president for eight years, but despite their long relationship, Obama refused to endorse his former partner during the primary season. Back in April, when Biden announced he would be running for the nomination, Obama issued a statement through spokeswoman Katie Hill.
“President Obama has long said that selecting Joe Biden as his running mate in 2008 was one of the best decisions he ever made. He relied on the Vice President’s knowledge, insight, and judgment throughout both campaigns and the entire presidency. The two forged a special bond over the last 10 years and remain close today,” the statement said.
But the statement was notably lacking a formal endorsement.
Biden, though, said he had personally asked Obama not to issue an endorsement. “I asked President Obama not to endorse, and he doesn’t want to. Listen, we should — whoever wins this nomination should win it on their own merits,” he said when asked by reporters why Obama had not endorsed him.
President Trump has long questioned the lack of the powerful endorsement. In April, the president claimed that it’s “rather a big secret” why Obama had yet to come out and endorse Biden.
“How he doesn’t get President Obama to endorse him — there has to be some reason why he’s not endorsing him,” Trump said outside the Oval Office in an exclusive interview with The Hill.
“He was the vice president. They seem to have gotten along. And how President Obama’s not endorsing him is rather a big secret,” Trump said. “Then he goes and lies and said, ‘I asked the president not to endorse me.’ Give me a break.”
Trump said Biden is making that claim because he’s “embarrassed by the fact that Obama’s not endorsing him, so he goes out and says, ‘I asked President Obama not to endorse me.’ Well, he was trying to get that endorsement. So it could be that President Obama knows something, but there is something going on in that brain of his.”
And the president continues to ponder the odd absence of Obama’s endorsement. “It’s a weird deal going on there,” Trump said Wednesday. “I don’t know why President Obama hasn’t supported Joe Biden a long time ago. There’s something he feels is wrong.”
Some Democrats have begun to call for Obama to get in the game. “‘IT IS TIME – RELEASE THE SUPER SURROGATE,’ Democrat Doug Landry, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, wrote Wednesday on Twitter. The post included a cartoon of Obama as Superman.
A source close to the former Democratic president said on NBC that Obama will join the campaign “when the moment is right and when he feels he can have the maximum impact, the country will be hearing more from him.”
During the primary season, Obama met with hopefuls in his Washington, D.C., offices, Politico reported in November 2019. But he never met with Biden.
“Ostensibly the meetings are for the aspiring candidates to gain some wisdom from the last Democrat to win an open presidential primary and the presidency, but they also allow Obama to collect his own intelligence about what he and his closest advisers have made clear is all that matters to him: who can beat Donald Trump,” Politico wrote.
Sometimes he offers candid advice about his visitors’ strengths and weaknesses. With several lesser-known candidates, according to people who have talked to him or been briefed on his meetings, he was blunt about the challenges of breaking out of a large field. His advice is not always heeded. He told [former Massachusetts Gov. Deval] Patrick earlier this year that it was likely “too late” for him to secure “money and talent” if he jumped in the race. Occasionally, he can be cutting. With one candidate, he pointed out that during his own 2008 campaign, he had an intimate bond with the electorate, especially in Iowa, that he no longer has. Then he added, “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”
The New York Times also reported that Obama quietly urged Biden not to run. “The two men spoke at least a half dozen times before Mr. Biden decided to run, and Mr. Obama took pains to cast his doubts about the campaign in personal terms,” The Times wrote in am August 2019 piece headlined “Obama’s and Biden’s Relationship Looks Rosy. It Wasn’t Always That Simple.”
“‘You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t,’ Mr. Obama told Mr. Biden earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the exchange.”