Biden Roasted Obama For Not Saying ‘F*ck You’ Properly: New Book

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

President Joe Biden privately roasted ex-President Barack Obama for not saying “Fuck you” with the proper intonation, according to a new scoop from Franklin Foer’s book “The Last Politician.”

Excerpts from “The Last Politician” have generated a low hum of buzz for the past week or so among White House correspondents and other political reporters, even without any apparent bombshell revelations.

But Foer’s book dropped Tuesday in hardcover, and according to Politico Playbook is “already a bestseller in several categories on Amazon.”

Several passages in the book describe tension that Foer says existed between Biden and Obama despite their close friendship and eight years as president and vice president.

One anecdote illustrates what Foer sees as a profanity lesson that’s a stand-in for class division:

By the end of their presidency, Biden was so in sync with his boss that the pair had what the journalist Jonathan Alter described as “secret code.” When Obama tipped back his chair in meetings, Biden took that as a cue to ask provocative questions that Obama wanted answered but didn’t want to raise himself for fear of shifting the tenor of a meeting.

But 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. There was the tinge of class rivalry to their gibes. The lunch-pail cornball and the effete professor culturally chafing each other.

Biden told a friend that Obama didn’t know how to say fuck you properly, with the right elongation of vowels and the necessary hardness of his consonants; it was how they must curse in the ivory tower.

Of course, one of Biden’s defining moments as VP was his own use of profanity on a hot mic when he told his then-boss that passing the Affordable Care Act was “a big fucking deal!”

And in another passage, Foer filters the respect and prominence Biden has invested in Vice President Kamala Harris through the lens of Biden’s experience as Obama’s VP.

After VP Harris took fire over an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Biden made a point of being supportive:

Over the next two days, he kept calling to check in with her. “Don’t let them get to you,” he told her. As he described his reaction to his senior staff, he told them, “Make sure you have her back.”

And, Foer writes, “Biden wanted to treat Harris with the respect that he felt Barack Obama hadn’t accorded him. He made a point of referring to her as the vice president, as opposed to my vice president. He was a stickler for asking her opinion in meetings—and making sure that her office was kept in the loop.”

Then-President Obama referred to “my vice president” frequently during his time in office, but President Biden has used the phrase only a handful of times since taking office.