President Joe Biden welcomed Barack Obama back to the White House on Tuesday to mark a dozen years since passage of the health care law that Biden famously called a “big f------- deal.”
The former president returned to the White House for the first time since he welcomed Donald Trump on the morning of the 2017 inauguration. It’s a pivotal moment in Biden’s presidency, as he struggles with sagging poll numbers, persistent inflation, a war raging in Ukraine and bleak prospects for Democrats in the November midterm elections.
The timing of Obama’s appearance, more than a year into Biden’s term, is a sign of the president’s desire to form a political identity separate from his time as Obama’s vice president. But it also shows Biden is willing to seek advice about the challenges he faces from a predecessor that aides call a personal friend to the president.
“I heard some changes have been made,” Obama said, after jokingly addressing Biden as “vice president.”
“There’s a cat running around, which I guarantee you Bo and Sunny would have been very unhappy about,” he said, referring to his two dogs.
“Welcome back to the White House, man,” Biden told Obama during his own remarks. “Feels like the good old days.”
Biden signed an executive order intended to strengthen the 2010 Affordable Care Act, including by closing a loophole that prevents millions of Americans from accessing subsidies for their monthly insurance premiums. At the signing ceremony for the law 12 years ago, a microphone picked up Biden whispering to Obama that the measure was a “big f------- deal.”
“To get the bill passed, we had to make compromises. We didn’t get everything we wanted; that wasn’t a reason not to do it,” Obama said Tuesday. “If you can get millions of people health coverage and better protection, it is, to quote a famous American, a pretty big deal.”
The event is part of a White House effort to focus on pocketbook issues that affect average Americans. The health care law
“The Affordable Care Act has been called many things,” Biden said. “But ‘Obamacare’ is the most fitting.”
Before signing the executive order, Biden joked, “Barack, let me remind you, it’s a hot mic.” He gave Biden his pen afterward and hugged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of several Democratic lawmakers who attended the event.
Obama’s greeting of Trump on Jan. 20, 2017, proved to be a turning point in the typically cordial relationship presidents enjoy with their predecessors. Trump routinely denigrated former presidents, didn’t invite them to visit the White House and never sought their counsel.
By contrast, Obama met with all four then-living former presidents on multiple occasions, including George W. Bush, whom he routinely attacked during the 2008 campaign.
Biden speaks fondly of Obama, but they have seen each other only a handful of times since Biden became president, even though Obama’s D.C. residence is only two miles from the White House. Their last in-person meeting was at a New York ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
“They are real friends, not just Washington friends,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday. “I’m sure they will talk about events in the world as well as their families and personal lives.”
Obama had lunch at the White House in addition to attending the health care event. The pair ate lunch together at least once a week during Obama’s eight-year presidency.
Biden joked that during Tuesday’s lunch, the two presidents were unsure where they should sit.
There has, however, sometimes been a divide between the two men. Obama declined to endorse Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, after backing Hillary Clinton in her presidential bid four years earlier.
Biden has critiqued Obama’s leadership style. He said last March that his predecessor was too “modest” in selling the 2009 stimulus law and that Democrats “paid a price for it, ironically, that humility.”
— With assistance from Josh Wingrove
