New Report Details 'Obama/Biden Rivalry,' Staff Clashes, and What Joe Said in Hur Interview About Barack

I know there's been a lot of speculation about the role that Barack Obama may play behind the scenes as Joe Biden occupies the Oval Office.

Even Obama saw Biden in 2021 as "essentially finishing the job ... 90% of the folks who were there in my administration, they are continuing and building on the policies we talked about."

But there's a new report from Axios that reveals more about the rivalry between Obama and Biden, and the clashes going on now in the administration between the Biden aides and the Obama people working there.

The report shows just how delusional Biden is. According to Biden aides, Biden's rivalry with Obama has informed some of the decisions Joe has made. He thinks that "Obama would be jealous" of what he, Biden, has managed to achieve. That's sort of quietly hilarious as Biden is one of the most unpopular people ever to occupy the office and he's had some monumental failures.

Meanwhile, Biden aides felt that Obama and his people didn't appreciate Biden's experience with foreign policy and his experience with Congress and were "disrespectful."

One former Biden aide told Axios: "The Obama people thought Biden would suck as president. They didn't think he'd be organized enough to execute."

That's one thing the Obama people were right about.

In the interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur, Joe Biden even revealed how hurt he was that Obama supported Hillary Clinton for the nomination in 2016 rather than him. Yet the report says that he talks more to Bill Clinton than he does to Obama, which is interesting. Either one is problematic, but that adds another element to the question of Biden's influences.

Some on the Biden team were upset about all the Obama people who were brought into the Biden administration. "We do have too many Obama people who don't care about Joe Biden. It's about them," one former White House official said.

"When people say, 'This is what worked for Obama,' their first response is often, 'We're not Obama,' " one senior Democrat who has been in touch with the White House said of Biden's team.

That rivalry informed Biden's decisions in his administration. He felt Obama was wrong on surging troops in Afghanistan in 2009, that's why he was set on pulling them all out when he came in. He told Robert Hur he was "quite frankly, trying to save his [Obama's] ass" when he argued against the surge and argued for withdrawal. Biden's thinking then led to the disastrous pullback, with the deaths of 13 U.S. military members. Joe Biden's approval has been in the tank ever since.

He thought Obama didn't go for enough money for the Recovery Act in 2009, so that's why he went even bigger for $1.9 trillion in the American Rescue Plan. That likely made inflation even worse.

That's so Joe Biden. He thought he was right, but as with so many other things, he was wrong in both cases.

It sounds like the Biden and the Obama team are having a lot of problems with each other, if this report is true.

Add that onto the report that Biden is "seething" about how former President Donald Trump is beating him in the polls and it sounds like there's a lot of chaos going on with the Biden team behind the scenes.