The relationship between Barack Obama and Joe Biden grew so strained during the 2008 campaign,
according to a new book, that the two rarely spoke and aides not only kept Biden off internal conference calls but refused to even tell him they existed.

Instead, a separate campaign call was regularly scheduled between the then-Delaware senator and two of Obama’s top campaign aides – “so that they could keep a tight rein on him,” write journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann in “Game Change,” a long-awaited account of the 2008 campaign.

The book, based on over 300 interviews, reveals a series of previously undisclosed stories about the epic race. POLITICO obtained it Saturday at a Washington bookstore.

In addition to the discord between the president and vice-president, the authors write:

–Before the 2004 Democratic presidential primary, party strategists Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald, both then working for Sen. Joe Lieberman’s presidential candidacy, met secretly with then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and a group of her closest confidantes to consider a last-minute entry into the race – and even polled New Hampshire voters about the idea. Ultimately, though, Chelsea Clinton persuaded her mother to opt out of a run, arguing that voters wouldn’t forgive her for breaking a pledge to serve a full Senate term.

–In lobbying the late Sen. Edward Kennedy to endorse his wife, former President Clinton angered the liberal icon by belittling Obama. Telling a friend about the conversation, [size=16pt]Kennedy recalled Clinton had said “a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,”[/size] the authors paraphrase. A spokesman for the former president declined to comment on the claim.

-Of all the freshly revealed anecdotes, though, none may be as eye-opening as the previously-unknown friction between the president and vice-president – which on Saturday a Biden spokesman dismissed as “rumors.” The tensions began in September of 2008 word got back to Obama’s campaign headquarters that Biden had told reporters on his campaign plane that he was more qualified than his running mate to be president.
“A chill set in between Chicago and the Biden plane,” Halperin and Heilemann write in the book, to be released Monday. “Joe and Obama barely spoke by phone, rarely campaigned together.”

And when Obama campaign manager David Plouffe was asked about having Biden dial into the nightly campaign conference call, he responded: “Nah.” Instead, Biden had his own call with Plouffe and senior campaign adviser David Axelrod.

Obama himself was growing increasingly frustrated with his running mate after Biden let loose with a string of gaffes, including a statement that paying higher taxes amounted to patriotism and criticism of one of the campaign’s own ads poking fun at John McCain.

But when Biden, at an October fund-raiser in Seattle, famously predicted that Obama would be tested with an international crisis, the then-Illinois senator had had enough.

“How many times is Biden gonna say something silly?” he demanded of his advisers on a conference call, a moment at which most people on the call said the candidate was as angry as they had ever heard him.



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