WASHINGTON — Sick with COVID and abandoned by allies, President Joe Biden has been fuming at his Delaware beach house, increasingly resentful about what he sees as an orchestrated campaign to drive him out of the race and bitter toward some of those he once considered close, including his onetime running mate Barack Obama.
Biden has been around politics long enough to assume that the leaks appearing in the media in recent days are being coordinated to raise the pressure on him to step aside, according to people close to him. He considers Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, the main instigator but is irritated at Obama as well, seeing him as a puppet master behind the scenes.
The friction between the sitting president and leaders of his own party so close to an election is unlike anything seen in Washington in generations — especially because the Democrats now working to ease him out were some of the allies most critical to his success over the last dozen years. It was Obama who elevated Biden from a presidential also-ran to the vice presidency, setting him up to win the White House in 2020, and it was Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, who pushed through Biden’s landmark legislative achievements.
But several people close to Biden, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal matters, described an under-the-weather president coughing and hacking more than 100 miles from the corridors of power as his presidency meets its most perilous moment.
He has watched with rising exasperation as a succession of news stories appeared, one after the other, reporting that Schumer, Pelosi, Obama and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, all had warned of a devastating defeat for the party in November.
And he certainly noticed that Obama has not done anything to help him in recent days even as his own former aides publicly have led the way in calling on Biden to withdraw in what was interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as a message from the former president’s camp. The unseen but clearly felt presence of Obama, in particular, has brought a Shakespearean quality to the drama now playing out, given their eight-year partnership.
While Biden and his team publicly insist that he is staying in the race, privately, people close to him have said that he is increasingly accepting that he may not be able to, and some have begun discussing dates and venues for a possible announcement that he is stepping aside.
One factor that may stretch out a decision: Advisers believe that Biden would not want to do it before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel visits Washington on Wednesday at the initiative of Republicans to address Congress, unwilling to give the premier the satisfaction, given their strained relations lately over the war in the Gaza Strip.
Yet Biden bristles at pressure, and those pushing him risk his getting back up and prompting him to remain after all. Two people familiar with his thinking said he had not changed his mind as of Friday afternoon.
In privately railing about Obama and even aides to former President Bill Clinton, Biden has made clear that he finds it particularly rich that the architects of historic Democratic losses in the 1994 and 2010 midterm elections would be lecturing him about how to save the party after he presided over a better-than-expected midterm in 2022. While one person said Biden is not irked at Clinton himself — in fact, he is grateful the former president has been pressing donors to keep giving — others said that Obama is another story.