Three presidents and one mission: beat Trump

Sometimes, when a president needs help, just another president – ​​or two others – will do.

President Joe Biden's bid for a second term and his re-election campaign coffers will receive a major boost on Thursday (28) when he joins his two immediate predecessors as Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, in New York. .

The lucrative fundraiser in New York will send a message of commitment from the 42nd and 44th presidents to the 46th's attempt to prevent the 45th president, Donald Trump, from returning as the 47th.

Biden's reelection campaign announced Thursday that fundraising has raised more than $25 million — building on an already impressive war chest as Biden heads toward a general election rematch against Trump.

Obama, especially, has become increasingly involved in Biden's reelection campaign in recent weeks, driven by alarm at the possibility that his friend and former vice president would be forced, as he was, to hand over the Oval Office to Trump. MJ Lee and Jeff Zeleny from CNN , reported on Wednesday (27) that Obama was at the White House for a working visit last week. Sources said Biden has also been in regular contact with Clinton, who was in the White House when the current president was a leading voice in the Senate on foreign policy and judicial issues.

The appearance of the three men together at Radio City Music Hall will evoke a moment of symbolism that will underscore the stakes of the election. Two Democratic presidents who won second terms are teaming up to try to usher in a successor, who is older than both of them, into the same rarefied political air.

It will also mark a rare occasion when four presidents will be in an area other than Washington on the same day. Trump, who is permanently removed from the former presidents' club because of his extreme behavior, is expected to be on Long Island on Thursday to attend a wake for the murder of New York police officer Jonathan Diller. The other living former presidents are Jimmy Carter, who has been in hospice care for over a year, and George W. Bush, who is close friends with Obama and Clinton but as a Republican is unlikely to campaign for Biden, even given the his disdain for Trump’s disregard for democracy.

Biden, Clinton and Obama are part of the only group of men who have known the lonely burden of the presidency, the responsibility of sending military personnel to war abroad and the strain of trying to win a second term while performing a day job in the Oval Office.

The fundraiser is Obama and Clinton's first major joint appearance on Biden's behalf this campaign cycle. But it will also raise questions about whether the two former presidents have the political clout they once enjoyed. While both remain Democratic rock stars and possess more charisma and campaign rhetoric talent than Biden, it has been 16 years since Obama was first elected in a euphoric climate of hope and change. And Clinton has been out of the White House for nearly a quarter of a century. The two former presidents maintain strong support among African-American voters, who are vital to the Democratic coalition. And Obama is expected to be sent to college campuses to try to work some political alchemy on young voters — a difficult crowd to get to the polls. But both the Clinton and Obama presidencies now appear ideologically somewhat conservative to many progressive and younger voters, whom Biden has his own challenge in reaching.

Still, Leon Panetta, who served Clinton as White House chief of staff and Obama as Defense secretary and CIA director, told CNN on Tuesday (26) that Obama could be especially helpful to Biden, particularly on health care – an issue that Biden and Obama came together to highlight in a call last weekend.

“I think they need to be careful about using the former president,” Panetta said on “CNN News Central” on Thursday. “I would probably wait until we get closer to the convention, the election and the fall. But I think he can be a tremendous asset in terms of reaching not just the average American, but obviously the Latinos, the young people, the minorities who are going to be essential to Joe Biden if he wants to win this election.”

Biden's two explainers-in-chief

Biden supporters hope Obama and Clinton's impact on the campaign will be similar to Clinton's impact on Obama's 2012 re-election run. The then-president was having difficulty convincing voters that he was properly managing the economy at a time when that many Americans, then as now, did not feel the full impact of an economic recovery after a crisis. But Clinton delivered a vintage prime-time speech at the Democratic National Convention, using a folksy, persuasive turn of phrase that made a better case for Obama's second term than the president himself.

“I want to nominate a man who is nice on the outside but who burns for America on the inside,” Clinton said. Obama was deeply grateful for an appearance that injected new momentum into his campaign against Republican nominee Mitt Romney and dubbed Clinton his “explainer in chief.”

Thursday night's event will mark the latest twist in the fascinating relationships between three men who have reached the pinnacle of politics. People who become president, by definition, have substantial egos. Clinton, Obama and Biden, although they now work towards the same goal, have also sometimes gotten in the way – and at times there have been tensions between them.

And the dashed hopes of another historical figure, former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost two bids for the White House – to Obama and Trump – deepens the intrigue in the three presidents' interactions.

It is a mark of his extraordinary longevity as a politician that Biden actually ran for president before any of them. He was seen as a great future hope of the Democratic Party, but his bid for the nomination in 1988 – four years before Bill Clinton's candidacy – ended in the embarrassment of a plagiarism scandal.

When Obama, looking for some foreign policy ballast, picked Biden as his vice presidential nominee in 2008—after another failed presidential bid by the then-Delaware senator—many of his own staffers were skeptical of Biden, whom considered a gaffe machine. The Democratic candidate would also have despaired of the meandering speeches and hyperbole of the old Senate bull. Journalist Gabriel Debenedetti told an anecdote in his book “The Long Alliance” about the Biden and Obama relationship: When Biden launched into a huge speech during a congressional hearing, the then-Illinois senator passed a note to an aide that said: “Shoot. In me. Now.”

But in the White House, the two men gradually became close. Biden has played a valuable role as devil's advocate and ultimate sounding board in foreign policy debates. And his deep loyalty to the president and his role in implementing the Recovery Act's spending plans have earned him new respect. On one occasion, however, the vice president angered Obama's team when he came out ahead of the president in supporting same-sex marriage at a time when the issue was extremely controversial.

Biden leaned more and more on Obama as his beloved son, Beau, was dying of cancer. And Obama delivered a moving eulogy that was as much a tribute to his vice president as his late son, ending his remarks by hugging Biden and giving him a kiss on the cheek.

In the final days of his presidency, Obama surprised a tearful Biden by awarding him the presidential medal of freedom. He quoted an unnamed Republican who said of Biden: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you have a problem. He is the best man God ever created.”

Biden and Obama appeared together several times during the current administration. And in the 2020 Covid-19 campaign, the former president gave a powerful prime-time speech on behalf of the Democratic nominee, in which he warned that Trump posed an unacceptable threat to democracy.

But one thing still doesn't sit well with Biden: his belief that Obama thought Hillary Clinton, not him, represented the Democrats' best bet to keep the White House. Biden was still thinking about that last year when he was interviewed by special counsel Robert Hur, who was investigating his handling of classified documents. “I’m not – and it’s not a mean thing to say. He just thought she had a better chance of winning the presidency than I did,” Biden said. Some former Obama aides have denied that their former boss did anything to prevent Biden from running in 2016.

Clinton and Biden are even older than Obama and Biden

As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1993, Biden helped bring Clinton's pick, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to the Supreme Court, in one of the most enduring achievements of the then-president's legacy. During the war in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Biden at times angered the White House as one of the most aggressive voices on Capitol Hill, arguing for U.S. intervention, which Clinton long procrastinated on. He eventually launched a peace initiative that ended the most damaging post-World War II war on the European landmass until Russia's invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

But Biden was also a valued Clinton ally after the president's impeachment over an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. And after becoming vice president, Biden developed a friendly and cordial relationship with Hillary Clinton, maintained by regular breakfasts at the vice president's official residence in Washington.

Obama and Bill Clinton also had a tumultuous relationship before the former president came to Obama's aid in 2012. Clinton was one of the first political heavyweights to understand the threat the charismatic Obama posed to his wife's 2008 campaign. Relations between the Clinton and Obama campaigns were, at times, deeply adversarial, as the young senator challenged and then defeated the Clintons, breaking their hold on a party they had dominated for nearly two decades. Bill Clinton, who prided himself on his relationship with black voters, became especially exercised when the African-American Democratic establishment broke away from his wife and rallied around Obama.

At one point, Clinton described Obama's opposition to the Iraq War — key to his appeal among many Democrats — as a “fairy tale,” which fueled complaints from some Obama supporters that he was using a racist trope. Clinton's fury exploded openly in South Carolina, where Obama defeated the former first lady in the Democratic primary, a victory that put him on the path to the White House.

But the three presidents have long since buried their various disputes, for the most part, and will unite on Thursday to combat a threat that they all believe poses a near-existential risk to US democracy – a second Trump term.