There’s buzz swirling within the Biden camp that the president’s swift endorsement of Kamala Harris was his revenge on prominent party leaders — including Barack Obama — who pressured him to bow out of the race against his will, sources told The Post.
Joe Biden, who said he was dropping out “in defense of democracy” during his public address Wednesday, had been told by Obama to allow delegates at next month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago to decide a new candidate, a source close to the Biden family claimed.
“It was Joe’s big f–k you,” the source said. “Joe said, ‘If I’m out, then I am endorsing her.’”
Talk among insiders is that Biden saw this as a final way to assert some control over his ouster.
A well-placed Democratic Party source said they have heard the same, telling The Post that Obama, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and New York Senator Chuck Schumer wanted to hold “a mini primary” which Obama believed Harris would not win.
Multiple sources told The Post that Obama had wanted Arizona Senator and former astronaut Mark Kelly “at the top of the ticket” at the convention.
On Sunday, Biden resigned from the 2024 presidential campaign in a statement posted to X and almost immediately followed up with a social-media endorsement of Vice-President Harris as the Democratic nominee.
Biden’s endorsement of Harris was “Joe truly knifing Obama and Pelosi in the back for making him stand down,” the Democratic Party source told The Post.
Another longtime Washington insider revealed that Biden plans on taking an active role in Harris’s campaign.
“It allows Biden to retain leverage as a much more experienced hand at national politics, which will be good for her,” the Washington insider said. “It means her campaign won’t be run by a bunch of insular advisors.”
There have long been “simmering tensions” between Obama and Biden, which began in 2015 when Obama convinced Biden not to run for president in the 2016 race, the well-placed Democratic Party source said.
Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama officially endorsed Harris on Friday. NBC previously reported that the former president waited because he did not want to overshadow Biden’s televised address to Americans on Wednesday.
The knives were out for Biden, 81, after his disastrous debate with Republican nominee for president Donald Trump last month.
During the car-crash 90-minute debate, Biden appeared confused and bumbling and at one point froze up.
According to a source close to the Biden family, prominent Democrats threatened to invoke the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution and urge the vice president and the cabinet to remove Biden from office, the source said.
The source said that the belief within the family is that Obama wanted to get Biden out of the race — and an op-ed written by George Clooney in the New York Times, asking him to step aside, was a part of that plan.
Calls to the offices of Obama and Biden, as well as the Democratic National Committee, were not returned.
Obama persuading Biden not to run for the presidency in 2016, allowing Hillary Clinton a shot at the Oval Office, has since been a sticking point between the two men, according to reports.
“He was not encouraging,” Biden later told the New York Times, referring to Obama.
As for the race ahead, Obama has little faith in Harris, the source close to the Biden family claimed.
“Obama knows she’s just incompetent — the border czar who never visited the border, saying that all migrants should have health insurance,” the source said. “She cannot navigate the landmines that are ahead of her.”
