Former Joe Biden Aide Writes Controversial Tell-All Book: 'Egomaniacal Autocrat

US Vice President Joe Biden introduces US President Barack Obama during a campaign rally October 23, 2012 at Triangle Park in Dayton, Ohio. (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

A former aide to Vice President Joe Biden has written a tell-all book that describes the VP as an "egomaniacal autocrat" who was "determined to manage his staff through fear" – an October surprise that the Obama campaign probably didn't see coming.

Author Jeff Connaughton, a former Biden Senate staffer, says Biden originally inspired him to get into politics but the experience working under the former Delaware senator caused him to become disillusioned with the political system in Washington.

The book is called "The Payoff" and it was actually quietly released last month. Connaughton writes, as Politico describes it, "in the fashion of a guilt-racked whistle-blower: he was a party to a corrupt system and now he wants to blow the lid off the game."

“I came to D.C. a Democrat and left a plutocrat,” writes Connaughton.

Per Politico's Jonathan Martin:

As chief of staff to former Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), Biden’s successor, Connaughton was radicalized by his unsuccessful experience trying to get an amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill that would have broken up the country’s largest banks. So he left Washington politics and wrote what he believes is the unvarnished truth about the country’s political system. The big reveal: Big banks control both parties.

“It’s time people understand why – and how – Wall Street always wins,” Connaughton writes at the outset of his book.

He is harshly critical of his own party and the Obama administration, arguing that the president is no different than most other Washington Democrats in his willingness to kowtow to Wall Street.

President Obama and Biden, he writes, are “both financially illiterate.”

Connaughton also writes about the 2008 campaign gaffe when Biden said Obama would be "tested" quickly into his first term.

Biden reportedly told his staff that Obama had "called and told him sharply that he didn't need public tutoring: 'I don't need you acting like Henry Higgins.'"

“Biden said his private reaction was, ‘Whoa. Where did this come from? This is clearly a guy who could restrict my role to attending state funerals or just put me in a closet for four years,'" the author writes.

"I’m going to have to earn his trust, but I’m not going to grovel to this guy. My manhood is not negotiable," Biden also reportedly said about Obama.

For a more in depth look into the Biden tell-all, click here.