Former Obama chief of staff endorses Biden

Former Obama White House chief of staff Denis McDonough endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden’s White House Bid in an op-ed on Super Tuesday.

McDonough’s opinion piece in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on Tuesday said he worked “closely” with Biden throughout former President Obama’s tenure, and that he would be an “excellent president.”

“In what he did — and importantly how he did it — he demonstrated not just why the president trusted him to take on tough assignments but why he will be an excellent president,” he wrote. 

McDonough said the former vice president “routinely took the hardest assignments,” writing that Biden oversaw how billions of dollars in stimulus funding was spent, got the Senate to ratify the New START arms control treaty with Russia, led efforts to improve gun background checks and promoted cancer prevention, prompting the 21st Century Cures Act in 2016.

“In his decision-making he’s always open to new ideas, not driven by ideology but by results, science and data,” he wrote. “On national security he seeks out the opinions of experienced military, diplomatic and intelligence professionals, trusting their experience and welcoming their input even — or maybe especially — when they disagree.”

McDonough, who also served as a deputy national security adviser, said Biden is “the kind of president the United States needs now.”

“It is this decision-making and thought process — on the hardest issues and in the most high-pressure situations — that lead the people who work most closely with Vice President Biden to value him and his leadership most strongly,” he wrote.

The op-ed comes as Biden competes for more than a third of the delegates in the 2020 primary in 14 states and American Samoa on Super Tuesday. The former Delaware senator currently sits in second place in the Democratic field at 54 delegates, following a rough start in Iowa and New Hampshire.

But Biden won big in South Carolina, leading his moderate competitors former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) to drop out of the race and endorse him on Monday.

Meanwhile, self-described democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had a strong start to the primary season, nabbing the popular vote in Iowa and the most delegates in New Hampshire and Nevada. He sits in the lead at 60 delegates before the Super Tuesday votes come in.