Patrick Semansky/AP
- Joe Biden said that Barack Obama couldn't use one of the core curse words properly.
- According to a new book, Biden once told a friend that Obama didn't properly pronounce "fuck you."
- Biden viewed the failure as an example of the class divide between him and his former running mate.
For all of former President Barack Obama's blessings, Joe Biden still sees one curse. Admittedly, it's not a big fucking deal, but according to a new book it's just another way the current president sees himself as different from his former running mate.
"Biden told a friend that Obama didn't know how to say fuck you properly, with the right elongation of vowels and necessary hardness of his consonants; it was how they must curse in the ivory tower," journalist Franklin Foer writes in "The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future." (Insider obtained a copy of the book shortly before its publication.)
Foer pulls at the thread of past reports that have documented how beneath the bromance and friendship bracelets (pre-Eras Tour), the 44th and 46th presidents very much remain leaders with healthy egos that see key differences in themselves and their respective presidencies. In particular, one of the book's reoccurring themes is how Biden views much of his success as a quasi-fuck you to everyone who doubted him along the way. Obama clearly wanted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be his successor, a perceived slight that hasn't been forgotten.
The love between Biden and Obama is very real, Foer wrote. But it's also clear the pair could grate on each other.
"Biden also chafed at the constraints of his job — and if Obama sometimes rolled his eyes at him, he would roll his own right back," Foer wrote. "There was the tinge of class rivalry to their gibes."
Interestingly, Foer also wrote that for whatever frustrations Biden expressed as vice president he may be passing on some of the pain to current Vice President Kamala Harris.
It should be noted that for whatever class divide that exists between them, Obama obviously grew up as a Black child in the 1960s, confronting racism from a very young age.
Biden, as Foer points out, also has an odd relation with class himself. He takes great pride in not graduating from an Ivy League university (he went to Delaware), but some of his closest aides are the product of the elite institutions Biden somewhat detests. Foer describes these aides as Biden's "meritocratic trophies" with his "eternal wunderkind" being Ron Klain, a Havard Law School graduate and Biden's future White House chief of staff.
As for Biden and Obama, the core premise of Foer's book is that former President Donald Trump, and to a lesser degree Obama, failed to adequately appreciate the art of politics. Obama, especially, viewed some of the glad-handing and schmoozing as beneath him. Foer sees Biden for better or worse as one of the last true politicians in the nation, a man who clearly finds himself at home in the throes of dealmaking that are behind the reality and legend of Washington, D.C.
"That, in the end, might be his profound achievement, providing an instructive example of the tedious nobility of the political vocation," Foer concludes in the prologue. "Unheroic but honorably human, he will be remembered as the old hack that could."