President Joe Biden rose to prominence as vice president under former President Barack Obama. However, he was a known liability to Obama and his inner circle.
A new book charges that the so-called bromance between Obama and Biden was a public spectacle that covered up serious tension between the two, the Washington Examiner reported. Things reportedly got so bad that Obama considered replacing Biden with Hillary Clinton in his 2012 re-election bid.
"The biggest insult to Biden was how little his input mattered to Obama's inner circle," the book, The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama," claimed, according to the Daily Mail. "Biden could hardly shake the suspicion that Obama's eggheads saw him as a foolish distraction they couldn't fully trust."
The former president saw Biden as "condescending" and believed he prattled on too much to be taken seriously. "Shoot. Me. Now," the president reportedly wrote to an aide while Biden was droning on during Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's nomination hearing.
Initially, Obama had courted Biden as his running mate despite the then-Senator's reluctance to play second fiddle. Obama promised the run would be a "capstone" rather than a "tombstone" to Biden's long but unremarkable political career.
The contentious relationship between the two came to a head in 2012 when Biden scooped Obama's statement of support for gay marriage. Obama had hoped to make the announcement on ABC's Good Morning America, but Biden spilled the beans.
"We can't trust him to say his lines and he's out of practice anyway," one staffer said. Another was angry that Biden "ruined what should have been Obama's historic moment because he can't control his loud mouth."
Obama was a terrible president, but his judgment of Biden was spot-on. Biden is not fit to serve in office because of his verbal gaffes and embarrassing blunders, and yet here he is leading the free world -- thanks, in part, to the boost he received from Obama.