Some of the harshest jabs against 2020 Democratic front-runner Joe Biden are coming from once friendly corners.
Key advisers to President Barack Obama, with whom Biden served as vice president from 2009-2017, aren’t mincing words about 2020 campaign trail tactics they find wanting.
David Axelrod, the Chicago-based consultant who engineered Obama’s 2008 win and reelection strategy, is swiping at Biden over his late in political life change of heart to oppose the Hyde Amendment. The annual congressional bill provision bars federal funding for most abortions, which Biden backed repeatedly during his Senate tenure from 1973 to 2009.
Axelrod on CNN Friday called Biden’s contortions over the Hyde Amendment a “flip-flop-flip,” which highlights some of the larger problems with his candidacy. Biden’s age and less-than-vigorous campaign schedule all raise questions about his ability to defeat President Trump in fall 2020, according to Axelrod.
“He’s 76 years old, he would be 78 when he became president, and that would be eight years older than the oldest president who has ever taken office, which is Donald Trump. There are questions about that,” Axelrod said. “If you are unsteady on the campaign trail, that is going to intensify those questions. This is one reason I think they’ve kept a relatively leisurely pace on the campaign trail and away from some of the major events and away from reporters, frankly, because they are worried about things, just as the one we have just seen.”
Jen Paski, who served in numerous Obama administration positions, including communications director for its final 20 months, on Sunday echoed Axelrod’s concern about Biden’s campaign.
“He’s rusty, and out of touch, and out of sync with the electorate,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think he really needs to be out there more to be more in tune with the electorate.”
In a sense, the anti-Biden jabs aren’t surprising. The top echelons of Team Obama have never been as close with Biden. Unlike Obama, a political wunderkind who rose from the Illinois state Senate to the presidency within four years, always compared more favorably to the slog-it-out vice president, whose bids for the 1988 and 2008 Democratic nominations failed.
In putting Biden on the ticket in 2008, Obama advisers figured the then-Delaware senator’s presidential ambitions were behind him. Biden’s role was to be more statesman-like, in an advisory role along the lines of Vice President Dick Cheney under President George W. Bush.
Obama and Biden did work in unusually close fashion in the White House — to the point that Obama, in his waning days in office, presented Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But that kind of magnanimity didn’t extend to presidential politics. As the 2016 race approached, the Democratic establishment aimed to tilt the primary process in favor of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Behind the scenes, Obama quietly leaned on his vice president to forgo the race, a decision made easier by the death of Biden’s son, Beau, in 2015.
But backing Hillary Clinton proved a political disaster for professional Democrats. Facing a field of mostly second- and third-tier primary rivals, the former New York senator and first lady still took longer than expected to vanquish Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-proclaimed socialist. Her shocking loss to Trump in the fall made for one of the biggest political upsets in modern times.
