Obama's Patience Tested by Biden: Book

Newsweek journo says President has chided his No. 2

President Obama has privately admonished gaffe-prone Vice President Joe Biden, believes Ronald Reagan will go down as a great president and lived a youth of "drink and drugs and lazy days in Hawaii," according to a new book.

Those revelations and others fill the pages of  "Renegade: The Making of a President," by Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe and due out June 2, according to Fox News. In writing the book, Wolffe interviewed the president  a dozen times, as well as speaking to members of his inner circle.

Obama is so "distracted by his vice president's indiscipline" that he has had to chide Joe Biden, Wolffe quotes one insider as saying.

"He can't keep his mouth shut," the unnamed source says of Biden.

During the presidential transition period, Biden insulted Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama's closest confidantes, the book asserts. Jarrett was Obama's top choice to fill his vacated Senate seat in Illinois, but she pulled out of the running after a wiretap caught then-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich saying he would not do Obama's bidding without a payoff.

"Soon after Jarrett pulled out of consideration for the Senate seat, the senior transition team met to discuss cabinet picks," Wolffe writes. "Biden tried to compliment Jarrett after one contribution. 'You should be in the Senate,' he quipped. After the meeting, as everyone returned to their offices, Obama stopped Biden to warn him not to say anything like that again. 'It's not funny,' he told him."

Obama had high praise for former President Ronald Reagan, according to Wolffe.

"Reagan would probably go down as a great president," Wolffe quotes Obama. "I don't think there's any doubt that Ronald Reagan had a profound effect on our economy, on our politics, on our culture."

Wolffe describes Obama's youth as "filled with drink and drugs and lazy days in Hawaii." But he said that all changed when Obama attended Columbia University in New York.

"That's when I stopped drinking. I stopped partying," Obama said. "This was my ascetic phase. Everything was stripped down."
 

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