Former president Barack Obama is a pathological narcissist who only cares about hanging out with celebrities and being extravagantly wealthy, regardless of the death and destruction it causes. Nevertheless, he tried to stop Joe Biden from becoming president and made an effort to warn us about his dangerous incompetence.
"Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up," Obama told a fellow Democrat during the 2020 presidential primary. The former president disparaged his running mate again during a conversation with a Democratic candidate: "And you know who really doesn't have it?" Obama said. "Joe Biden."
Before that, Obama did his best to persuade Biden not to run. "You don't have to do this, Joe, you really don’t," he reportedly told Biden in 2019. According to journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, authors of Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, Obama "worried that his former vice president would embarrass himself on the campaign trail and that the people around him would not be able to prevent a belly-flop."
Obama had urged Biden not to run for president in 2016 and told an adviser that he didn't think Biden was a viable candidate. "It had stung Biden badly in 2015 when Obama made clear his preference for Hillary Clinton," Allen and Parnes wrote. "Adding insult to injury, Obama's advisers told Biden aides back then that they didn't think he could beat Clinton. They pressured him to get out of the way."
Though he ultimately decided not to challenge Clinton in 2016, Biden ignored Obama's advice by jumping into the 2020 primary. The rest is history.
After Biden launched his campaign, Obama declined to offer even a token level of support for his former vice president. After winning the South Carolina primary in March 2020, Biden reportedly told aides that Obama hadn't "lifted a finger" to help him. Despite being multimillionaires, neither Obama nor his wife, Michelle, donated a single dollar to Biden's campaign, even during the general election.
Generally speaking, Obama's political judgment is terrible. He thought Hillary was a formidable candidate in 2016. (She wasn't.) In 2020, he was reportedly "enamored" with former representative Beto O'Rourke (D., Texas), who dropped out of the race three months before the Iowa caucuses. But he was right about Joe Biden.
Obama tried to warn us. The American people underestimated Biden's ability to fuck things up, and now we're paying the price.