President Barack Obama has expressed “exasperation” over Democratic presidential candidates’ apparent lurch to the Left, according to CNN.
Obama’s record on immigration and healthcare were subjected to criticism during the presidential debates Tuesday and Wednesday, including by top left-wing candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
“He has not been surprised that aspects of his tenure are now being criticized,” CNN reported Friday. “Still, he also has privately expressed exasperation at some policy proposals and promises that he believes are unrealistic. And he and people around him question the wisdom in assailing the record of a popular ex-president rather than the unpopular-by-comparison current one.”
2020 front-runner Joe Biden, who was Obama’s vice president, was put on the defensive as other candidates criticized Obama administration policies and, by extension, his more centrist proposals during his appearance on the debate stage. For instance, Biden was asked by two other candidates, and hecklers in the audience, to answer for the 3 million people that were deported under the previous administration.
Biden said afterwards he was “surprised” by all the attacks on Obama. “He was a great president. We don’t say that enough,” he tweeted Thursday.
Obama has largely remained out of the political realm throughout the first stages of the primary season. But he warned Democrats from attacking each other while speaking in Berlin, at an Obama Foundation event in April.
The former president remarked, “One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States,” is that, “we start sometimes creating what’s called a ‘circular firing squad’, where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues.”
