Why was the Democratic establishment so united behind Clinton in the beginning?

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Well, the party has been the Clinton since the 90's, they have an entrenched structure & with loyalty scores, they would weed out dissenters. One of the reason why Obama failed was his total dis-interest in getting his hands dirty. For example, he did nothing for the party - A sitting president didn't even give his list to his own party for 7 years, that's crazy. Then you have OFA & what not. Hillary Clinton handed over her list to Perez. Obama was an outsider who appointed many Clinton folks to party positions (DWS - Clinton campaign chair as DNC Chair), Clinton was the Democratic machine for years & there are still remnants of that !Like her or hate her, Clinton was committed to party building.

Biden is one who would campaign with gaffe's & ridiculous remarks, sure he is good middle class authentic Joe but that is not what DC wants. Also Biden did poorly in his previous runs & isn't charismatic or considered some amazing orator or with grass-roots support! Biden is older too (he is only 1 year older than Bernie). Also, money is considered a huge indicator to who will win pre-2016. That is why Jeb Bush was the favorite. That is why Clinton's 100 of Millions of $ through Super-pacs was an entry deterrent for Biden. Obama never considered Biden worthy enough to win a Presidential election, Biden was always considered the VP/SoS or a leading voice in Senate types !

BTW DC people have an alternate idea of multiple situations. Feinstein has had 0 townhalls in the last 25 years. They are totally cut off from the base. What DC establishment thinks is a good candidate & what the base thinks are very different. Also, Bernie Sanders was contemplating a run after 2012 itself & everyone knew this. And later polls showed that Biden was drawing anywhere between 67 to 75% of Clinton voters & the rest Bernie voters. If it was Biden vs Sanders vs Clinton, then Sanders' would have easily won. The last thing DC wanted was Bernie Sanders winning due to a ferocious Biden vs Clinton fight exposing the cracks of the Obama administration (even without polls, it was obvious where Biden would draw mostly from) Why risk the nomination for Hillary?

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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/2016-barack-obama-hillary-clinton-democratic-establishment-campaign-primary-joe-biden-elizabeth-warren-214023

It was really Obama's decision. He didn't want a scorched earth primary between Biden (or another centrist) and Clinton resulting in someone like Bernie getting the nomination.

Fantastic article. Thanks for sharing. Some key points -

Clinton as the stronger GE candidate

He honestly believed Biden would be crushed by a defeat he viewed as inevitable. Protecting his vulnerable accomplishments from the GOP wrecking ball and safeguarding his legacy have always been top priorities for Obama, and he had told friends as early as late 2014 that Clinton, for all her flaws, was “the only one” fit to succeed him. “After the 2014 midterms, when he could sense the end … it was like, ‘Who gives me the best chance to win?’”

NH Primary chaos in CLinton camp

The one thing he wouldn’t do was endorse her before she cleared the field. And once, when things were darkest after Clinton’s devastating defeat to Senator Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, Clinton’s staff urged him to break his pledge and rescue her—but his team refused, a senior Democrat told me.

Obama's support for Clinton with aides even before Biden refused to run

He has offered his former rival strategic advice, shared his top talent with her, bucked her up with cheery phone chats after her losses, even dispatched his top political adviser to calm the Clintons during their not-infrequent freakouts over the performance of their staff, according to one of the two dozen Democrats I interviewed for this story.

Hugging Obama was the most effective strategy for Clinton polling showed

Sanders’ unexpected success and Obama’s 80 percent-plus approval ratings with registered Democrats have forced the former secretary of state into a tighter embrace than she anticipated. Indeed, her campaign’s internal polling showed that one of the most effective attack lines against the socialist from Vermont was his 2011 remark that Obama’s moderate governing record was “weak” and a “disappointment” to progressives.

Obama did everything to stop Biden from running

For most of last summer, Obama emphasized Biden’s weaknesses, gently jousting with him at their weekly lunches. He dispatched his de facto political director, Dave Simas, to Biden’s office to deliver a steady diet of polls showing a steep uphill climb, while a former Obama communications adviser presented Biden a plan that showed how tough it would be to attack Clinton, a woman Biden had previously praised in over-the-top terms. The most influential naysayer from the presidential orbit was David Plouffe, the disciplined brand manager and architect of Obama’s two White House campaign victories who remains Obama’s political emissary despite his day job on the board at Uber.

Eventually, Obama toughened his tone, telling Biden in a meeting that it was simply too late to run, a former White House aide told me.“Mr. Vice President, you have had a remarkable career, and it would be wrong to see it end in some hotel room in Iowa with you finishing third behind Bernie Sanders,” he said, according to a senior Democratic official briefed on the effort to ease Biden out of the race.

When Biden finally did tell Obama he wasn’t running, on the morning of October 21, the president comforted his veep—then sprinted into action like a man liberated. Within minutes, Obama ordered up a Rose Garden announcement—that same day. Although Obama saw it as a generous way to give his friend a chance to bow out on his own terms, several former White House staffers told me it also reflected Obama’s jitters; he wanted to lock in the decision before Biden had a chance to change his mind.

Holy shi*, had no idea Obama did so much to prevent Biden from running. He must have felt totally let down. That's why he keeps on saying "I should have run, I would be a good candidate"

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Obama & Clinton were scared of a Warren run or Warren joining forces with Sanders & hence needed to clear the field for Hillary & wooed Warren

They didn’t anticipate the populist uprising that hit both parties, and missed the Sanders revolution until it was nearly too late, in part because they were so focused on eliminating what they saw as a far more dangerous threat on the left, Elizabeth Warren. So as Obama’s team was jockeying behind the scenes to maneuver Biden to the sidelines, Clinton’s aides were desperately doing all they could to keep Warren happy and prevent her from joining forces with Sanders.“Elizabeth is all about leverage, and she used it,” a top Warren ally told me. “The main thing, you know, is that she always thought Hillary was going to be the nominee, so that was where the leverage was.”

Warren, several people in her orbit say, never really came close to endorsing the man many progressives consider to be her ideological soulmate. She made a point of meeting with Sanders to hear his pitch and continued checking in. But she prioritized opening a channel to Clinton on policy.  In early 2015, Warren sent a major signal that she would ultimately endorse Clinton, telling a senior campaign aide, “I’m getting a lot of pressure to endorse Bernie, but I’m not going to do it.”

Warren made her agenda plain to Clinton when she earned her own tea-and-tactics invitation to Clinton’s Washington home in December 2014—a stilted meeting that left Clinton annoyed and put upon, according to one top Democrat. And when Warren pointedly pressed Clinton not to appoint Wall Street-friendly officials, Clinton didn’t appreciate the full-court press, but she signaled her general agreement, according to a person in Clinton’s inner circle. It was hardly a coincidence that, that spring, she named a key Warren ally, Gary Gensler, a former federal regulator loved by the left for his clashes with Obama’s Treasury Department, as her campaign’s chief financial officer.

Biden asked Warren to not endorse Clinton

None of this was quite enough to push Warren into an early endorsement. Support for that position came from an unexpected quarter: In an early 2015 conversation, Biden counseled the Massachusetts senator to hold off on endorsing Clinton until after the primary, according to a Democrat briefed on the interaction.

Warren was regularly in touch with Clinton campaign

By late spring, Warren and Clinton were talking on the phone from time to time, lamenting the timidity of Democrats still reluctant to bash Trump. Warren’s effectiveness as a punch-thrower played a critical role in the Clinton campaign’s late-May pivot away from fighting Sanders to taking on Trump directly. Warren viewed the former secretary of state as a fighter, and opined to friends that Clinton would make a tougher-minded negotiator on all kinds of deals than the comparatively easygoing Obama.

Obama-Sanders rift & Obama's refusal to openly endorse for fear of backlash

Plouffe and Obama shared the opinion that Sanders simply didn’t have the bandwidth or willingness to compromise his job required. (When I asked Obama in January whether the 74-year-old senator reminded him of himself in 2008, the president quickly shot me down: “I don’t think that’s true”).

In mid-February, three officials with direct knowledge told me, Podesta approached Plouffe and McDonough to float an idea: If Clinton somehow managed to lose the upcoming Nevada caucuses, which had been unthinkable weeks earlier, would Obama offer his endorsement to stop Sanders’ momentum? It was clearly an act of desperation—“a break-glass and push-the-panic-button moment,” in the words of a Democrat close to the situation—and Obama’s team quickly vetoed it. He said, it would be “counterproductive”—prompting a backlash that would swamp both the president and his chosen successor.

The Sanders' campaign being a total surprise

He watched Sanders’ rise with alarm and a tinge of admiration for the septuagenarian’s out-of-nowhere challenge to the system. Both Clintons had initially dismissed Sanders’ candidacy as a long shot. “He’s a socialist!” she had said incredulously when someone in late 2015 suggested that Sanders’ message was taking root.

Internal polling showed the anti-financial elite, anti-establishment message was the most effective pitch for Sanders

And what really sustained him was his positive message of generational change, liberally borrowed from Obama’s 2008 campaign, and broadcast to his faithful through a series of iPhone-friendly videos. Sanders continued to emphasize policy disagreements, especially on foreign affairs, but what drew the 15,000-student crowds were his shout-himself-hoarse denunciations of Clinton’s connections to financial elites; his repeated attack on her six-figure Goldman Sachs speaking fees was the most effective attack line of the campaign, his advisers say.

Sanders-Obama-Clinton deal

Sanders took a long time to accept the reality of his primary defeat personally. The Clinton camp was eager to give him almost everything he asked for in the Democratic platform by agreeing to embrace a new proposal to subsidize public college tuition, a public option for Obamacare and a break-up-the-banks plank. The uncompromising Vermont revolutionary would have to compromise—and he did—by accepting the pro-TPP plank debated during the Orlando meetings.

Clinton camp thought Bernie would betray him but Sanders' was always going to stick to his word

Yet until the very last moment, Clinton’s jittery team couldn’t quite believe Sanders was really on board, seizing on a rumor that he was boarding a plane to Florida to blow up the final agreement. Never mind that everyone on the Sanders campaign laughed it off. The calls from Brooklyn kept coming—“We’re hearing he’s on the plane right now!” —until one close aide to the senator bellowed into his phone, “Godammit, Bernie’s in Burlington, and he’s staying in Burlington!”

The senator was good to his word. The next time Clinton’s team saw Sanders, he was sharing a stage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with his party’s presumptive nominee—and declaring himself a loyal Democrat in Clinton’s anti-Trump crusade.

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Obama managed a big part of Hillary's campaign

The most important early meeting, in terms of both symbolism and synergy, was in late 2014, when Plouffe, acting with Obama’s blessing (and a mandate to report back), sat down with Clinton in her Washington mansion to map out his vision of her campaign. Plouffe, a low-key, data-obsessed strategist who made his name as the architect of Obama’s two campaigns, had been one of the last anti-Clinton holdouts in 2008, and he was also the party’s most-respected electoral engineer. He was dispatched with Obama’s explicit intention to help “stand up” Clinton’s effort, according to a person involved in the planning. But he took to the Clinton cause with the zeal of the converted and would emerge over the following 18 months as a surprisingly hands-on campaign operative, coaching Clinton’s young staff during free time.

Plouffe laid out a set of imperatives to deal with the shortcomings of her ’08 effort: She needed to assemble a first-rate analytics, targeting and data team; limit the freakouts and impulsive personnel changes; and hire (as well as empower) a steady, technically proficient campaign manager. He threw his support behind the leading candidate, a thirtysomething party stalwart named Robby Mook.

Obama should totally take some responsibility for Hillary's failing campaign!