Former President Barack Obama has avoided endorsing a Democratic presidential primary candidate, but as Politico reported, he told one candidate that former Vice President Joe Biden "really" does not have an intimate bond with the electorate.
The comment came during a sit-down with a presidential candidate, whom Obama told he himself had lost the intimate bond he had with "the electorate, especially in Iowa," according to the report.
"And you know who really doesn't have it? Joe Biden," Obama told the candidate, per Politico.
Somewhat uncharacteristically for a former president to inject himself in a political race after leaving office, Obama had famously warned Democratic donors earlier this fall of a party that is going "too far left" – perhaps veiled shots at avowed Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
"In a perfect world, he would have retreated to a greater degree from public life than he has, much in the same way that I think George W. Bush did in his post-presidency," former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder told Politico. "He would have liked to have been, though he's too young, an elder statesman."
But even in 2016, Obama had opposed a campaign by a centrist Biden, as The New York Times reported earlier this year, Obama had urged Biden not to run for president in 2016.
"Eventually, the president arranged for his own strategist to deliver a daunting assessment of the odds against a race," the Times' Peter Baker reported. "Mr. Biden got the message. 'The president was not encouraging.'"
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