18 hours ago
3
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
In a new set of oral histories, David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s political adviser, described how he urged Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. not to challenge Hillary Clinton for the nomination.
By Peter Baker
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and covered the Obama-Biden administration.
March 23, 2026, 12:01 a.m. ET
As the Democratic presidential contest heated up in 2015, it fell to President Barack Obama’s political strategist to tell Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. what he did not want to hear: He should not run for president because he could not win.
It could not have been an easy mission for the strategist, David Plouffe. Mr. Biden was well liked in the Obama White House. But as the vice president mulled jumping into the race, he was grieving the death of his son Beau Biden from cancer and was many months behind the two main candidates, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders.
“I talked to Biden many times during this period,” Mr. Plouffe recalled in a newly released oral history of the Obama presidency. “What I would say is: ‘Listen, sir, first of all, I’m concerned about you as a human being. I’m not sure you’re in a state to run. But if this was six, seven months ago, it’s a different conversation. There’s no room. There’s just no room for you.’”
Mr. Plouffe shared his account of those discussions with researchers from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which is posting the first installment of its Obama presidential oral history on Monday morning. The Miller Center has conducted oral histories of every presidency since Gerald R. Ford, making it the nation’s premier repository of original recollections of key moments in the modern White House.
Unlike his recent predecessors, Mr. Obama opted to cooperate with Columbia University’s Incite Institute rather than the Miller Center for his official oral history. The Incite Institute released its own oral histories last month. But the Miller Center decided to proceed with an oral history of the Obama presidency on its own and interviewed 80 cabinet members and senior officials. The first 36 of those interviews are being made available on Monday.
The Plouffe interview sheds additional light on one of the pivotal moments of the Obama presidency. The decision by Mr. Obama and his team to throw their weight behind Mrs. Clinton instead of Mr. Biden for their party’s 2016 nomination is often second-guessed, given that she ultimately lost to Donald J. Trump in the general election. Mr. Biden went on to run in 2020, when he beat Mr. Trump, then dropped out in 2024 amid concerns over his age.
