(Headline USA) Former President Barack Obama considered replacing Joe Biden with Hillary Clinton as his vice president, according to a new book.
Following a 2010 midterm election “shellacking,” Obama instructed his aides to research potential replacements. One of those options was Clinton. The Obama team even conducted tests to see how Clinton would play over with voters, according to an upcoming book, “The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama,” written by New York Magazine national correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti.
Obama officials have denied these rumors before.
“I think one of the jobs of chief of staff is to recommend lots of things out of the box,” Bill Daley, former Obama White House chief of staff, previously told CBS This Morning. “But not for a moment was there a serious discussion or a belief that Joe Biden should be replaced, period. That doesn’t mean issues were not looked at.”
But the new book claims Obama’s frustrations with Biden ran deep. He would sign during meetings if Biden rambled for too long, and sometimes nudged him to get him to stop talking, Debenedetti alleges.
Biden, in turn, was “slightly annoyed” by the national attention Obama received.
Ultimately, Obama chose to stick with Biden because he wanted to be “pragmatic, not emotional,” and he didn’t want to lose support among white voters.
But Obama maintained a close relationship with Clinton and even said she would be an “excellent president” in 2016. Biden felt “personally stung” by this comment, since he was also considering a presidential run at the time, and tried to convince Obama’s team that she had “too much baggage.”
“No one trusted her. … Clinton was turning into a toxic candidate,” Biden told aides at the time.
