Biden says ‘Obama would be jealous’ and constantly compares himself to his predecessor even as Barack’s ‘people’ believed Joe ‘would be bad as president’, reports claim

President Joe Biden repeatedly measures himself against Barack Obama, sometimes bragging about his better performance than his former boss — and bringing up their complex relationship in his interview with special counsel Robert Hur.

As he faces re-election, Biden finds himself presiding over a string of job gains after pulling troops out of a war he advocated for Obama to end — but he’s gaining little traction at the polls and continues to be plagued by commentary on his blunders compared to his eloquent former partner.

Biden sometimes brags to aides that “Obama would be jealous” when talking about his own achievements, Axios reported.

Facing a tough re-election bid against Donald Trump, Biden continues to gnaw at his ill-fated decision not to seek the presidency in 2016 after eight years as Obama’s vice president.

He even brought it up unprompted as Hur and prosecutors grilled him during interviews in October about classified documents stored in his home, office and garage.

He recounted how his late son Beau urged him to seek office around 2017 and 2018, then referenced the internal White House debate over whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – a former rival of Obama whom he had brought into his administration – would have played an important role. stronger candidate.

He brought up Obama, but emphasized that it was “not a mean thing to say.”

“He just thought she had a better chance of winning the presidency than I did. And I wouldn’t have done that at this point — even though I’m at Penn, I wouldn’t have run away from the idea that I could run for office again,” Biden said.

Biden clearly regrets that decision, given how Donald Trump defeated Clinton — in part because he defeated her in the battlegrounds of Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Biden sees as his strength.

Barack Obama thought Hillary Clinton “had a better chance of winning the presidency than I did,” Biden said

While Biden hunkered down while mourning the death of his son, Beau, in 2015, Hillary Clinton captured the Democratic Party nomination and lost to Donald Trump, with her Electoral College defeat set off by major losses in rust belt battlefields .

The president personally told his aides According to Axios, he could have defeated Donald Trump in 2016.

Some of Biden’s aides — he has surrounded himself with old loyalists and also brought in former Obama aides — share the president’s scars of being shortchanged.

“The Obama people thought Biden would be worthless as president. They didn’t think he would be organized enough to execute him,” said a former aide.

White House spokesman Andrew Bates rejected the idea of ​​intrigue.

“We recognize that the actual level of drama in this White House is insufficient to meet some reporting quotas, but President Biden does not make such comments in private. As President Biden has said, President Obama is family to him,” he said.

Beyond their personal bond, they overwhelmingly agree on the issues facing the country, including building an economy that works from the bottom up and from the middle, protecting our crucial freedoms and countering attacks on our democracy . There are no stronger supporters of President Biden’s leadership and agenda than President Obama, his team, and alumni of the Obama-Biden administration – many of whom are serving during this presidency. And the president often talks to both former President Obama and President Clinton,” he said.

Biden continues to show confidence in his ability to take on Trump, despite polls showing him trailing both nationally and on the battlefield.

‘I’m the only one who ever beat him. And I will beat him again,” Biden told the BBC New Yorker this month.

Biden also spoke at length in the Hur interview about the handwritten memo he wrote to Obama arguing against the troop buildup in Afghanistan.

It was for a last-ditch policy argument that Biden personally sent to Obama.

He was so willing to talk about it that he went against his lawyer’s advice when a prosecutor asked why he wrote it.

“Is that an appropriate question?” asked Biden attorney Bob Bauer.

‘I’ll tell you why I wrote it. But it’s none of your business why I wrote it,” Biden first joked. “I wrote it because I was trying to change the president’s mind, and I wanted to let him know that I was willing to speak out unless he told me not to say a word,” he said.

He also talked about Obama’s faith in his foreign policy. “The president thought I knew a lot more about Afghanistan than he and other members of the administration did,” Biden said.

He also describes himself as passing on policy bromides to Obama, who rose from the Illinois statehouse to defeat Clinton and Biden in the primaries to become the country’s first black president.

“I often have breakfast this way on a whole range of topics,” he told Hur. “I would take down senators. The bad joke is that with President Obama, I would always say to him, Mr. President, all politics is personal.”

According to a WashingtonPost profile this month, Biden leans on Bill Clinton and Barack Obama for advice, but contacts Clinton more often.

Regardless of the scorecard, there is one Obama achievement that may not be tested until November: winning election for a second term.