President Joe Biden appeared to throw former President Barack Obama under the bus on Wednesday when he blamed him for underselling the 2009 stimulus bill.
Biden Discusses 2009 Stimulus Bill
“[T]he economists told us we literally saved America from a depression,” Biden bragged on Wednesday night during the House Democratic Caucus Virtual Issues Conference.
During this time, Obama entrusted Biden with making sure that there was no waste in the massive $787 billion spending program.
“To you, he’s Mr. Vice President, but around the White House, we call him the sheriff,” Obama said in 2009.
Last night, Biden said that he wishes Obama had not undercut his attempt to show off the success of the stimulus program.
“[W]e didn’t adequately explain what we had done,” Biden said. “Barack was so modest, he didn’t want to take, as he said, a ‘victory lap.’”
Related: Barack And Michelle Obama Congratulate Biden As They Celebrate His Inauguration
Biden Doubles Down
Not stopping there, Biden doubled down on his attack on Obama as he urged Democrats not to make the same mistake that the former president did when promoting his newly proposed $1.9 trillion spending package.
“I kept saying, ‘Tell people what we did,’” Biden stated. “He said, ‘We don’t have time. I’m not going to take a victory lap.’ And we paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility.”
Shifting away from Obama, Biden said that Americans are loving his spending package.
“We never had anything this urgent and this ambitious that was so widely embraced,” he said.
Biden then said that if Democrats manage to pass the package and promote it successfully, their party will be successful for many years to come.
“I know parts of this — and everything else we seek to do — are not easy, but people are going to remember how we showed up in this moment, how we listened to them — to them — not special interests; to them — and how we took action,” he said.
Potential Tensions Between Obama And Biden Are Explored
This is just the latest indication that Obama and Biden are not nearly as close as they would have the public believe. Many noticed that Obama waited until virtually the last minute to endorse Biden. The new book “Lucky” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes delves further into the pair’s relationship.
“A lot of the reporting in the past has been about them being very close,” Allen told ABC News. “And, you know, they describe themselves as having a mentor-mentee relationship, but it does not appear that they agree on who the mentor is.”
“And I think that causes a lot of friction between the two of them and has over the course of, you know, basically 12 years now,” he added.
They added that Obama was confused about the fact that Biden continually said that he had asked the former president not to endorse him.
“I think Obama folks, people around him were sort of scratching their heads every time Biden said ‘I asked him not to endorse me,’” Parnes said.
“And that was one of the most revealing details that we learned when we talked to people very close to him,” she continued. “These are people that talk to him regularly and basically said they never had that conversation. We don’t know where that came from. ”
This piece was written by James Samson on March 4, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
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