Biden griped Obama couldn’t say ‘f–k you properly’: book

WASHINGTON – President Biden griped that his onetime boss Barack Obama wasn’t down-home enough — and couldn’t even properly say “F–k you!” claims “The Last Politician’’ by well-connected author Franklin Foer.

While President Obama and his then-vice president were in sync on a lot of things, there was an underlying “tinge of class rivalry to their gibes,” according to the new biography.

Foer described the pair as “the lunch-pail cornball” — Biden — “and the effete professor culturally” — Obama — “chafing each other.

“Biden told a friend that Obama didn’t now khow to say f–k you properly, with the right elongation of vowels and the necessary hardness of his consonants,” Foer writes. “It was how they must curse in the ivory tower.”

Biden, 80, was concerned Obama, 62, wasn’t being tough enough, including in Afghanistan, listening too much to his advisers without pushing back, Franklin Foer says.

Biden had advised Obama to rebuke his generals’ advice on staying put in Afghanistan, whispering to his boss soon after the pair took over the White House, “These generals are trying to box in a new president” and, “Don’t let them jam you,” according to the book.

Biden and Obama reportedly developed a “secret code” for when the vice president needed to play bad cop during high-level meetings, according to the book.

“When Obama tipped back in his chair at 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,” Foer writes.

Once Biden took over the White House as president, he pushed the envelope hard to shake things up fast – with everything from the economy to the end of the war in Afghanistan, the tome says.

“If Obama erred on the side of under-reaction, Biden was going to err on the side of overreaction,” says Foer — who claims to have had “unparalleled access to the tight inner circle of advisers who have surrounded Biden for decades” when writing the book.

Biden’s hubris played a large role in his actions — and inactions — during the withdrawal and evacuation from Kabul in Afghanistan, Foer says.

Biden overestimated his own competence in foreign affairs ahead of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, making unhelpful and impractical suggestions while displaying a “swaggering faith in himself,” according to the book.

It left his administration unprepared for the devastating chaos of the evacuation of Kabul, Foer writes.

“Biden had developed a theory of how he would succeed where Obama failed. He wasn’t going to let anyone jam him,” Foer says. “With his lifetime of experience, he had a plan to resist the pressures to stay.

“America didn’t know how to win the war in Afghanistan, but Biden knew how to win the bureaucratic argument.”

Relying on his five decades in politics, Biden rejected advice and viewed experienced diplomats and pundits as “risk adverse, beholden to institutions [and] lazy in their thinking,” according to the book.

Once described by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates as having been “wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades,” Biden set the Afghanistan withdrawal for a date just seven months after taking office.

Although given an order it didn’t wholly agree with, the military began rapidly withdrawing troops and equipment from Afghanistan in May.

Meanwhile, the State Department was operating under the Biden administration’s devastatingly false prediction that it would retain an embassy in Kabul after troops left.

That assumption would lead to grave problems in the withdrawal’s final months, with officials scrambling to make last-minute evacuation plans that August.

Since taking office, the Biden administration had believed that the US-trained Afghan forces could hold off the Taliban from overthrowing the government at least until the last American troops left the country.

So when the commander in charge of US military operations in Afghanistan, Gen. Frank McKenzie, warned Aug. 8, 2021, that the Taliban could have Kabul completely encircled within 30 days, it fell on deaf ears, according to the book.

“Strangely, McKenzie’s dire prediction did little to alter [evacuation] plans,” Foer writes, and the Biden administration rejected his pleas to declare a non-combatant evacuation operation before the Taliban overtook the capital city one week later.

The extra time could have allowed the US to evacuate more people – perhaps even the hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghan allies who had helped troops over the 20-year war who were left behind.