Michelle Obama’s private frustration with the Bidens
Former First Lady Michelle Obama privately has expressed frustration over how the Biden family largely exiled her close friend Kathleen Buhle after Buhle’s messy divorce from Hunter Biden, two people familiar with the relationship told Axios.
Why it matters: The family tensions — and the former first lady’s disdain for partisan politics — are partly why one of the Democrats’ most popular voices hasn’t campaigned for President Biden‘s re-election, the sources said, even as former President Obama has been a willing surrogate.
- Michelle Obama also was initially reluctant to campaign for Biden after he became the Democratic nominee in 2020, people familiar with the situation told Axios.
- Biden’s team says the relationship between the families is strong, pointing to public displays of camaraderie that continue today. But the sources told Axios that the relationship changed in 2015.
- That was when then-Vice President Biden was weighing a presidential run, and President Obama was not encouraging it.
- It also was the year Biden’s son Beau died of cancer, setting off years of tumult within the family that included Hunter Biden and Buhle’s divorce in 2017.
Driving the news: This year Barack Obama has attended fundraisers and appeared in videos for President Biden’s re-election effort, but Obama has done so solo, without his popular spouse.
- Obama attended a reception at a state dinner for Kenya’s president at the White House in May, without the former first lady.
- The former president regularly praises and boosts Biden in posts on X, but Michelle Obama hasn’t posted about Biden’s re-election campaign since he got in the race (she re-posted his announcement).
- Instead, she’s largely focused on the non-partisan voter registration group, When We All Vote.
The intrigue: In the fall of 2017, Barack Obama — without Michelle — attended a fundraiser in Wilmington, Del., for the Beau Biden Foundation, a children’s advocacy group.
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