Obama official unknowingly admits they messed up in 2016

American Thinker 

A new batch of oral histories of the Obama presidency published Monday includes a telling admission from a top strategist.

According to reporting by The New York Times' Peter Baker, David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, reveals that in 2015, he personally delivered a message to Joe Biden that was meant to shut the door on a 2016 run. Obama had decided Hillary Clinton was the stronger candidate, and Plouffe was sent to make sure Biden got the message.

I talked to Biden many times during this period. 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.”

Biden later wrote in his memoir, “The president was not encouraging.”

So Biden backed off. Publicly, he cited his grief over the death of his son. He stepped aside and watched as Hillary Clinton marched straight to defeat against Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Biden was the stronger general-election candidate in 2016. He was seen as a blue-collar Catholic guy from Scranton, not as Clinton Foundation baggage. He could talk to union voters without sounding like he’d been focus-grouped. The Rust Belt Democrats who drifted to Trump in 2016 — and ultimately decided the election — were exactly the kind of voters Biden had spent decades working with.

Further, these same Obama-world geniuses were simultaneously treating Donald Trump like comic relief. The 2026 oral histories make clear that Obama’s team was dismissing Trump as a joke as far back as 2011. David Axelrod recalled laughing off Trump’s ambitions around the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Later, Axelrod admitted his mistake:

“I don't think any of us really anticipated that Donald Trump would be a serious candidate for president, much less president.”

Plouffe eventually admitted what this whole machine helped create. But it took him until the 2025 book Original Sin to say it out loud, and even then, he didn’t exactly do any soul-searching. Instead, he blamed Biden:

“He totally f---ed us. It’s all Biden.”

The man who helped push Biden out in 2015 — clearing the runway for Hillary Clinton, who then lost to Trump — spent the next decade acting as though Biden was always the problem. In 2015, Biden was supposedly too weak to win. In 2024, Biden was too frail to finish the race. But in Plouffe’s mind, the Obama machine itself is never wrong.

Conservatives, on the other hand, understood what was happening in real time.

Democrats didn’t lose in 2016 because of Russia, James Comey, or Jill Stein. They lost because a smug, insider group of party operatives decided the nomination was theirs to hand out, picked the wrong candidate, and then spent the next decade dodging responsibility.

David Plouffe delivered the message in 2015 that helped clear the path for Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton’s nomination cleared the path for Donald Trump.

A decade later, they still can’t see their handiwork staring them in the face.