This would be easier to believe were it not for the fact that Biden leans very, very hard on his relationship to Obama, referring constantly to the former president as a means to boost his 2020 primary campaign.

Biden has, for example, defended himself from recent attacks on his civil rights record by playing up the fact that he served as the vice president to America’s first black president.

If Obama “thought it was good enough for me … he did a significant background check on me for months with 10 people, I think,” Biden told the NAACP forum last week. “I doubt whether he would have picked me if [these] accusations about my being wrong on civil rights was correct.”

Note that Biden did not defend his actual legislative record on civil rights. He merely cited Obama, calculating correctly (the crowd went crazy) that pointing to a popular black president would be sufficient to insulate himself from criticism.

“[T]he fact of the matter is, this is not a continuation of Barack’s admin — our administration,” Biden added elsewhere at the same event. “There’s new problems that we face today that are different than the ones we faced at the time.”

He was careful to conclude, “But the fact of the matter is [Obama’s] a close friend, I’m very proud to have served with him.”

At campaign events, the 2020 candidate who claims he does not want Obama’s endorsement refers to himself often as an “Obama-Biden Democrat.” At one event specifically, Biden claimed President Trump inherited the “Obama-Biden” economy, adding further that Obama was “a president our children could and did look up to.”

Then there are the Biden campaign social media accounts, which drop frequent reminders that he once worked for Obama. This Instagram post, for example, is from April:

This tweet is from June:

There is precedent for former presidents to take their sweet time endorsing their second-in-command’s subsequent White House bids. Ronald Reagan did not endorse George H. W. Bush’s candidacy until it was clear who the GOP nominee would be that year. Then, there was the 1968 Democratic presidential campaign, where Lyndon Johnson declined to offer a robust endorsement of Hubert Humphrey until a little more than a month before the general election.

A nonendorsement is not the issue with the Biden campaign. The issue here is that he claims he does not want Obama’s support all while campaigning on Obama’s name. For a guy who claims he does not want the endorsement, Biden sure leans hard on 44.