Joe Biden is still annoyed that Barack Obama didn't want him to run for president in 2016 (or 2020). He even brought this up to Special Counsel Robert Hur seemingly unprompted during their discussions about classified documents.
"By the way, there were still a lot of people at the time ... that were encouraging me to run [for president] in this period, except [Obama]," Biden recalled, according to interview transcripts published last week. "He just thought that [Hillary Clinton] had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did."
Obama was wrong, obviously. Hillary Clinton was never going to win a presidential election. Practically every living American, including Biden, had a better shot of beating Donald Trump in 2016. Nevertheless, Obama tried again in 2020 to stop his former vice president from running. "You don't have to do this, Joe, you really don’t," he reportedly told Biden in 2019. The rest is history.
Multimillionaire Obamas Haven't Donated to Joe Biden's Campaign
For a guy who served two terms in the White House, and will probably be the first U.S. president to become a billionaire after leaving office, Obama's political instincts are shockingly bad. After going all in for Hillary in 2016, he was reportedly "enamored" with Beto O'Rourke during the Democratic primary in 2020. After making a splashy debut with the help of a Vanity Fair cover story, Beto dropped out of the race three months before the Iowa caucuses.
There is at least one thing Obama was (sort of) right about. He tried to warn Democrats (and the rest of us) in 2020 not to "underestimate Joe's ability to f— things up." Even though Biden proved Obama wrong about his ability to win an election, Obama was basically right about Biden's prodigious capacity for self-humiliation and f—ing things up for everyone else.
Generally speaking, though, no one cares what Obama thinks about anything. He's the worst. We don't need another pathological narcissist spouting their bad opinions about politics. He should focus on getting rich, producing movies for Netflix, and finishing volume two of his presidential memoir.