President Joe Biden doesn’t think his old boss knew how to swear.
According to “The Last Politician,” a new book by Franklin Foer, “Biden told a friend that Obama didn’t know how to say f*** you properly, with the right elongation of vowels and the necessary hardness of his consonants,” Politico reported.
The book portrays Biden as “someone fueled by an endless reservoir of class-based status anxiety that causes him to both sneer at the Ivy League liberals and Democrats he has often competed with as well as desperately seek their approval.”
Biden’s inferiority complex is understandable from the perspective of a liberal elite.
After all, the last two Democratic presidents, Obama and Bill Clinton, studied at Harvard and Yale, respectively. Heck, even Jimmy Carter graduated from the Naval Academy.
Biden has no such upper-crust pedigree, so he has to lean into his image as Uncle Joe from Scranton who knows how to curse and drive an 18-wheeler.
But could it be that Vice President Biden also resented living in the shadow of the younger and far less experienced Obama?
According to Foer, lingering resentment may have shaped Biden’s relationship with his own vice president: “Biden wanted to treat [Kamala] Harris with the respect that he felt Barack Obama hadn’t accorded him.”
If playing second fiddle to Obama stuck in Biden’s craw when he was vice president, it must really infuriate him now that he is president.
News has emerged recently that Obama is taking more than a little interest in the upcoming election, assuring Biden that he will “do all he can” to help him and hosting “informal, but lengthy” meetings in his Washington, D.C., office.
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That is not surprising, considering that a new Wall Street Journal poll shows that 58 percent of voters view Biden unfavorably. While that rating is the same as Donald Trump’s, 27 percent of voters view Trump very favorably, but only 17 percent view Biden very favorably.
Pollster Nate Silver wrote recently, “This election is probably going to be close, and Trump might be only one Biden-has-a-McConnell-moment away from winning.”
Obama may be right to offer help.
But Biden may see the offer as annoying as an improperly pronounced “f*** you.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.