Obama, Clinton: Alliance forged in fire

They appear to be on friendly terms now, occasionally hashing out U.S. foreign policy in one-on-one meetings at a picnic table on the White House grounds.

But it wasn’t so long ago that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were locked in a mortal struggle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A new Obama biography by New Yorker editor David Remnick revisits a fraught period when the contest was getting increasingly personal.

As Obama closed in on the party’s nomination in 2008, he spoke ruefully about her refusal to quit. He told a friend at one point: “Do I have to drive a stake through her heart? She just will not die!” the book says.

The book, called “The Bridge,” also offers fresh insights into Obama’s relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose incendiary sermons nearly sank Obama’s campaign.