Democrats are finally getting their dream ticket, Clinton-Obama, eight years after many expected — and months later than some on Clinton’s campaign would have hoped.

From the start of the 2016 cycle, two things were clear: First, Barack Obama was fully behind Hillary Clinton and more than happy to raise her spirits with cheerful out-of-the-blue phone calls during the primary season’s many low ebbs; and second, that he wasn’t prepared to endorse her publicly until she proved she could win without his help.


Sitting presidents often endorse their favorites much earlier in the primary process. But Obama and his team deferred an announcement, a half dozen top officials close to the 2008 rivals told POLITICO, to protect the president — and Clinton — from a backlash born of belief that the election was rigged.

It was a characteristically cool political calculation: Loyalty was a powerful motive to jump sooner, but preserving Obama’s credibility with rebellious progressives was even more important.

“It’s hard to be the president who is elected in the strength of a movement and then throw yourself on the tracks to stop a movement candidate,” said former Obama adviser David Axelrod of his former boss’ strained but cordial relationship with Bernie Sanders.

“The president, by hanging back, ultimately did her a service,” he added. “He was cross-pressured. He has a lot of affection for her, but he recognized that Bernie had a movement behind him. If he had jumped too soon, he would have just reinforced the notion that the establishment was conspiring — and his goal was to be an honest broker who reknit the progressive movement back together.”

Mitch Stewart, Obama’s 2012 battleground states director and a Clinton supporter, said an earlier Obama endorsement would have fueled Sanders’ white-hot insurgency — especially in mid-March when the Vermont senator won a string of victories that filled his coffers with online cash and deeply unsettled Clinton’s team.

“You couldn’t have him out there endorsing her, especially when the Sanders people were saying the whole system was rigged,” Stewart said. “It would have prolonged the whole process. … Look at what he did today — he endorsed, Elizabeth Warren is about to endorse, the whole party seems to be coming together within 36 hours of the California primary.”

Clinton, in an interview with POLITICO’s Annie Karni, said she was grateful for Obama’s support — public now, and privately over the past 18 months. “[He] has been very supportive to me throughout this campaign,” she said, adding that “we went from being fierce competitors to true friends, and I’m very grateful for this endorsement.”

Despite his personal pique at various shots Sanders took at him over the past year, and the slow-simmer pressure from Clinton supporters and staff, he held his endorsement until after Clinton has decisively won the day on her own with an unexpectedly resounding double-digit win in California on Tuesday. “All’s well that ends well,” said a longtime Clinton ally who pushed Obama’s staff for an earlier endorsement. “But there were times we thought it wasn’t going to end well and we could have used him.”

At a time when establishments are being savaged and partisan bonds snapped like old yard signs in a dumpster, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are banking on the kind of old-fashioned party unity trashed by the transformational candidacies of Donald Trump and, to some extent, Sanders.

A year ago, Republican operatives signaled their intentions to paint Clinton as seeking a third-term for an unpopular two-term president who had united the GOP — now Clinton herself is embracing that strategy as Obama’s approval numbers rise and the threat of an unpredictable Donald Trump looms.

There was never any doubt that the president always planned to endorse Clinton from the start of the 2016 cycle, but he was careful not to thumb the scale too much outside his closest circle of West Wing advisers, and told one aide he intended to “let the process run its course.”

Obama was, at times, caustically candid about the political shortcomings, people close to him said repeatedly over the last year, and he was personally stung by her mid-campaign opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, eventually shrugging it off as an opportunistic but necessary tack to take against Sanders.

But as the months dragged on, it became hard to differentiate — at least at the staff level —where the West Wing began and where Clinton’s Brooklyn staff ended. Top Clinton advisers, like communications director Jennifer Palmieri, economic jack-of-all-trades Gene Sperling, campaign Chairman John Podesta and Jake Sullivan — all former high-ranking members of the Obama administration – shuttled in and out of the White House to discuss strategy and policy.

And quietly working below the surface on Clinton’s behalf was the most respected Obama operative of all, David Plouffe. Obama’s former 2008 campaign manager, now an executive at Uber, seemed to be on a quiet one-man mission to elect the woman whose defeat he so cold-bloodedly engineered eight years earlier.

Plouffe consulted Clinton at her Washington mansion in late 2014, advising her to hire members of the president’s highly regarded data and voter outreach team – and to avoid the toxic infighting that hobbled her campaign eight years ago. Plouffe, several Clinton staffers said, has been a constant — and unpaid adviser on logistics and strategy, and has acted as mentor to Clinton’s campaign adviser Robbie Mook — keeping in touch with the young operative several times a day during the nail-biting Iowa caucuses.

“David was very much a safety blanket for people who hadn’t been through this process before,” said Stewart, founder of 270 strategies a D.C.-based data, organizing and analytics firm.

For all the actions of his allies — and the president remains close to Plouffe — Obama himself was content to wink his endorsement. That frustrated some in Clinton’s camp, especially after her unexpected loss in Michigan — a defeat that the candidate herself blamed on a less-than-stellar voter outreach effort in black urban neighborhoods where the first African-American president is a political deity.

Obama did help, from time to time, especially on the issue of gun control, by forcefully expressing support for legislation allowing the victims of gun violence the right to sue weapons manufacturers, a measure Clinton campaigned on and Sanders opposed.

Showing some of the discipline he employed to defeat Clinton in 2008, Obama seldom expressed his preference in overt ways, even behind closed doors. Instead, he reached out to Clinton four or five times during the campaign — typically after a low ebb, like her blowout loss in New Hampshire, calling without notice to offer his emotional support and “buck up her spirits” in the words of one West Winger.

—Still, there were times when he clearly wanted to send the world — and Clinton — the message that he was on board. In late January just before the first ballots were cast, with polls showing Sanders mounting a stout challenge in battleground states, Obama sat down for a POLITICO “Off Message” podcast in which he extolled Clinton’s experience and leadership abilities while damning Sanders with fainter praise.

He also expressed a tinge of regret for his bare-knuckles ’08 campaign against her — and acknowledged that she had a tougher task as a candidate because of her gender.

“She had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels,” Obama said. “She had to wake up earlier than I did because she had to get her hair done. She had to, you know, handle all the expectations that were placed on her.”

In April, Clinton told POLITICO “I really appreciated that. … It was really touching to me, and, you know, especially his analogy that he understood.”

On Thursday, Obama finally took the plunge — a move that is far more than merely symbolic for Clinton and her team. The president, who pines for the heady of days of early 2008, has told his staff he’s eager to hit the road for Clinton — eager to take his whacks at Trump and galvanize minority and young voters in the general election.

“I have seen her judgment, I’ve seen her toughness, I’ve seen her commitment to our values up close,” Obama said in a video released hours after he met with Sanders, who vowed to compete in the D.C. primaries but seemed less fired-up about pursuing his stated goal of contesting Clinton’s coronation at the Democratic convention next month in Philadelphia.

That reference to values was the most important passage in Obama’s endorsement, says 2008 Clinton pollster Geoff Garin, who believes the president’s most important role will be as a validator for Clinton’s personal character at a time when a majority of voters cite trust as their most significant criticism of the presumptive Democratic nominee.

“The Good Housekeeping seal is important,” Garin said. “But it’s the character reference, directly from Obama’s lips, that’s most beneficial.”