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Franklin Foer
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Franklin Foer
Author, The Last Politician
Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on March 5, 2024, prior to Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Biden as “Part of the Furniture” in Washington
What was it that made you interested in Joe Biden as somebody to report on?… What drew you to his story, to reporting on him?
In fact, I wasn't especially drawn to reporting about Joe Biden.Joe Biden was somebody who seemed like he was a part of the furniture of Washington.He kind of struck me as a bloviator.There was something about him that was cheesy.In a way, he was the quintessential politician.And it took me a while to connect with him as a character.
When I first talked to Joe Biden, when I was 24 years old as a cub reporter, I got him on the phone, and five minutes into the conversation, I was like, “Oh, my God.How am I going to get him off of the phone?This guy tells the cheesiest stories.They go on forever.”And it took me a long time to figure out what was different about Joe Biden, what was admirable about Joe Biden; that the qualities that he has seem hard to discern when set in contrast with somebody like Barack Obama.
Barack Obama governed in poetry.He was somebody who loved ideas.He was somebody who inspired people.Joe Biden has none of that.He speaks in these monologues.He tells the same stories over and over again.And there's something about him that just represents the quintessential politician. ...
And it took me a long time to understand that the prose that is Joe Biden, as opposed to the poetry that is Barack Obama, has its own merits; that there is this street savvy that he possesses; that his desire to understand the person who's sitting across from him, to understand their emotional baggage, their insecurities, their ambitions, is something that becomes—“superpower” is not the right word, because there's nothing heroic about Joe Biden, but it becomes his weapon.It's his ability to cut a deal, to have a conversation with somebody, is born of this famous empathy that he possesses.
That's fascinating.Do you think it's not just you?This guy who you say is part of the furniture of Washington, who has been there for so long, it's hard to remember that there was a time when he wasn't there.Do you think he's misunderstood?
I think he's taken for granted.I think that he is misunderstood, that when people look at Joe Biden, they have a hard time taking him totally seriously; that during the Obama administration, there was this tendency that Barack Obama had to make Joe Biden the punchline of his jokes, which then gave permission to everybody else in the room to roll their eyes at Joe Biden.
And I think that's true of the Washington elite in general, that one of Joe Biden's curses is that he was somebody who came out of a Democratic Party that was much more working-class when he started, and then it got taken over by all of these Ivy League graduates of fancy law schools.And the way that Joe Biden talks is definitely not like the way that the fancy elites in Washington talk, so when they hear him engage in his folksy anecdotes, their instinct is to mock him.And that element of class bias is something that infected my own thinking about Joe Biden, and it certainly infects the way that a lot of columnists and a lot of talking heads on TV think about Joe Biden.
Biden’s Youth
… So let's go back to the early years.And let me just ask you first about the place, because Biden grows up in different places, not just one.But he talks about Scranton as the place that he comes from.Where is Biden from, and how does that shape him?
So Joe Biden tells his story in an almost mythological sort of way.He comes from Scranton, Pennsylvania, which in his mind is Eden.It's the place where community was deeply rooted, where people had tremendous values, where middle-class existence flourished.And everything that's come afterwards, in a way, is a fall.And his whole life is an attempt to recover this world of his youth.
And in fact, his life is a fall—that he does have this moment where his father loses his job.His family experiences downward mobility, and that becomes a very defining moment in his biography, but also in his politics.When you listen to Joe Biden talk about the world, the thing that matters to him most is this sense of dignity that comes with having full-time employment, because he saw in his own father's life and in his own family the scars that are left when you experience that kind of precipitous drop in security, the precipitous drop in status that his family experienced.
And so when he talks about something like full employment, or he talks about how you respond to an economic crisis, his primary concern is preventing people from experiencing the same sort of psychic damage that he saw his father experience.
So his dad becomes a car dealer after having business success before, and Scranton is a working-class place.Is it pride in that background, or is it sort of shame of that background that he's trying to build his way out of?What is it that shapes him from that background?
Right.When Joe Biden talks about his past and the place that he comes from, when he talks about the fact that he grew up in this working-class place, when he talks about the fact that he's one of the few presidents to have attended a state school, there is this sense of pride that he has, but there's also this edge that is encrusting the whole conversation that he has about this, which is that, “You all don't think about this world that I come from with enough respect.”And so there is insecurity.There's resentment that exists alongside pride.
What about just the times that he grows up in?He's born in 1942.It's a different era than a lot of Americans, a lot of voters who only voted for him now didn't experience it.How did that time that he grew up in shape him?
He's somebody who comes from the Silent Generation.He predates the baby boomers, which is a crazy thought to have.… We thought we had the last baby-boomer politician, but it turns out we have somebody who predates the baby boom.Joe Biden's politics are kind of born of a sense of nostalgia, in my mind, for the 1950s; that when he talks about the world that he wants to see for the country, when he talks about the strength of labor unions, when he talks about the dignity of work, when he talks about middle-class communities, when he talks about how he'd like to see corporations behave, he's really imagining DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware, circa 1955, at a time when companies were not global, when they were more rooted in communities, when you did have these patriarchal families that existed.
And in a sense, his vision is a form of return.There was an article that his aide, Jake Sullivan, who went on to become national security adviser, wrote in Democracy Journal before the election.It was called “The New Old Democrats,” and I think that that's a way to describe Joe Biden, that there are ways in which he's broken with the orthodoxies of the Clinton and Obama eras, but really, he's breaking with them not in this way that is establishing the next chapter in the history of progressivism or the Democratic Party, but really going back to something that had existed in his youth.
Biden’s Irish-Catholic Roots
He's also growing up Irish-Catholic, and he talks about the church and about maybe becoming a priest.And we've heard different theories about how that influenced him.How do you think that it shaped him growing up in the church and in that powerful institution in his family?
I think that Joe Biden is a devout Catholic, and I think that that is very much connected to the way that he thinks about Washington; that he is somebody who really believes in institutions, that even when institutions can be battered and bruised, and even when those institutions can batter and bruise you—you've got to remember, Joe Biden has been criticized pretty intensely by his own church—he still has this fidelity to the institution itself and this faith that, in the end, the most important thing is the preservation of those institutions. …
In one of his memoirs, he writes about his affection for nuns, and he says, “Whenever there are nuns, it felt like home.”And I think about his journey.I think about all the trauma that he's experienced, all the pain that he's experienced.And at core, he's somebody who is longing for home.He's longing for this time in the past before he suffered all of these grievous wounds.And part of that nostalgia, I think, is a nostalgia for the warm embrace of the church of his youth.
That's fascinating.It's a fascinating connection, because so many people do describe him as an institutionalist and the idea that it may have been started that early.
You've got to remember, he goes through the Civil Rights era.He experiences the 1960s in their countercultural form, but he's older than the people who go off to Woodstock.He's a little bit older than the kids who take the Freedom Ride buses down to the South.He comes from this more conformist era in American life, and part of conformism is an underlying faith in institutions.
The Biden Family
… From the beginning, there's some sense of the Bidens against the world, and there's this idea that “your word as a Biden.”And his sister stays with him, connected to his politics, his whole life.
One of the things that's so interesting to me is that for Joe Biden, the family is kind of the atomic unit of American politics.And he grows up in this time where the Kennedys begin to define American life, and as an Irish-Catholic with political aspirations, he couldn't help but look at the Kennedys with a sense of awe and admiration.I think the way in which his family operates as a political unit is self-consciously modeled off of the Kennedys.
When he first ran for local office in Delaware, his mom held coffee klatches that were modeled off of the ones that Rose Kennedy held when [John F.] "Jack" Kennedy was starting to run for Congress.His sister, Val, has always been his most important political adviser, and she's the one person in his life who's been able to kind of say, “Look, Joe, you're being ridiculous here.You're using the word 'hyperbole.'Nobody understands what ‘hyperbole’ means.Use a word that simpler and gentler.”He's relied on his brothers when he was moving into the White House, on the first day.His brothers were the ones who helped him unpack and arrange things before he could get in there.
And even as it relates to his own sons, I think he always imagined that Beau Biden, his oldest, the gem in his life, would be the Jack Kennedy, and he always imagined that Hunter would be a little bit more like his Bobby Kennedy, who would be the hatchet man, who would be at his brother's side, helping him realize the family's dynastic destiny.
Is it reading too much into it to say his dad had this downward trajectory, and he sees the Kennedys and politics as a way to rebuild the family?
That's totally fascinating, and I hadn't thought of that before, but I think that there's so much to this.So you look at—I look at his ambition, and Joe Biden is just, he wants to grab you by the lapels to tell you, “Goddamn it, I am smart.Goddamn it, I am a great man in history.”
And where does that come from?I'd say that clearly there is this drive that's born out of the scarring experience of his father taking this downward tumble after getting fired from his job.I also think it's intimately connected to the stammer, that he was somebody, because of his stammer, he was bullied as a kid, and that that creates this desire to assert himself, to assert his dignity, to assert his place in the world.
I always thought it was striking that, as he was coming up as a young politician, his oratory and his eloquence was one of the things that people lauded him for; that this guy, Joe Biden, could give a real stem-winder.And if you think about it, it's an incredible thing.It's this virtuosic display of this thing that had hobbled him and had been the source of bullying and shame for most of his life.
The Kid with a Stutter
That's when he talks about his childhood, or writes about it.That's what stands out, is the stutter—is not just the stutter, but is also the bullying, the being made fun of, the sort of humiliation.How searing an experience was that for him growing up?
The fact that he was bullied, I think, is a searing experience for him.I think it creates that chip on the shoulder that fuels his rise through public life.And I think one of the things that that experience also lent to him was this resilience, which keeps reasserting itself at every single chapter in his biography.This guy keeps getting knocked down, keeps getting dealt these horrible blows, keeps being humiliated at various stops along the way, but he keeps going.
And when you get to this point, when you're rounding your 80th birthday and you still want to keep progressing through public life, and you still want to keep proving the doubters wrong, you have to say that's an awfully—it's a boulder of a chip that's sitting on his shoulder.
So that resilience, where does it come from inside him, if you know, if you have a theory on it?He says his dad says, “Get up when the bullies push you.”Or is it just part of his nature?
… His temperament is such that he definitely is able to hold a grudge, and he's definitely able to think that people are doubting him all the time.But he has a fundamentally optimistic temperament when it comes to life.I think his temperament is probably one of his great strengths, that he is able to shake off all of these things that beset him and befall him.And it's fairly unusual that somebody has the type of resilience that he's exhibited through his personal life and through his public career.And to some extent, that is just something that you're born with.
When we look back at his past, one of the things that stands out, especially because of the problems with Hunter, that Joe Biden has this uncle, I think it's Boo-Boo, who also has a stutter, who has an alcoholism problem, who's sort of living with them for a while.And Biden decides not to drink, and presumably more than that, but to change his life and to sort of not be like that.
Yeah.Well, Joe Biden is somebody who is known as being undisciplined when he opens his mouth, but really, when you examine his life more carefully, there's a huge amount of discipline that he applies.It starts with the fact that his family has a history of alcoholism, and he is the one person who militantly resists the bottle.It goes to the fact that he was accused of plagiarism at a defining moment in his political career, and he became a guy who ended up doing his homework incredibly diligently.Joe Biden doesn't want to get caught making a mistake, so he studies incredibly hard.
All those train rides that he was taking back and forth to Wilmington those years, he was sitting there with his briefing books, doing the homework.And that's something that people never give him any respect for.They think of him as this very plastic, superficial guy.But really, the truth is, is that he knows his stuff.He's put in the legwork.
Early Political Aspirations
Why politics?Do you know?It starts—[many] say maybe when he was 7.It certainly starts by high school.There's early, "I want to be president."Why, a guy with a stutter, from his background, so early, is that the place he's drawn to, to prove himself?
He grew up in the shadow of the New Deal, and in his memoir he talks about these gatherings in Scranton at the kitchen table, when his relatives and some of the other characters from Scranton would sit, and they'd talk about politics.It was a time when great men actually went into the political profession and when they were respected by everyone in the world.FDR's face hung in the windows of stores and on people's homes in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
So if you were going to live this life where you're going to try to exert your sense of self against the bullies, against the doubters, politics becomes almost a natural field for displaying your self-worth.
It's also, if you think about it, there is this deep need that Joe Biden has to be liked by everyone around him, which is also a very natural response to have when you've been bullied.It's a defense system.You're, "How could you attack me?I'm so likable; I'm so affable."And that is politics, right?So politics is the art of making people like you enough to want to vote for you.
And so I think probably, to some extent in his head, it grows out of these other early experiences, where he's always having to fend off the kids who are trying to put him down, and this was his armor.
Yeah.When you say it like that, you see it.You see it throughout his life, not just the trying to win people over, but you see flashes of anger and of insecurity and those same things he must have had as a kid.
Yeah, absolutely.Joe Biden is among the more human people to occupy the office of presidency in my lifetime; that he wears his emotions on his sleeve.He's somebody who it's not that hard to figure out, because he flashes all of these parts of his persona constantly.He can't inhibit them.As much as he'd like to, he can't inhibit them.There are these episodes where he'll put his hand on somebody's shoulder and point his finger in their face and dress them down, and you say, “OK, this is a guy who's capable of incredible anger.”
You see these moments when he talks about having gone to a state school, and it's clear that he's expressing this chip on his shoulder, this resentment, this sense of wanting.It's sitting right there in front of you.And I think that's part of the reason why people underestimate him.To some extent, they must think of him as a pretty boring person, because his persona is so transparent.
I used to think there had to be this private Biden that was different than the public Biden.But then, when you sit with him in the Oval Office, or you hear these stories about him, you think, well, actually, there's a cigarette paper's difference between the public Biden and the private Biden.There's not a whole lot of artifice to this guy.He is who he is.The same cheesy stories that he tells on the stump, he's telling people in private.What you see is what you get.
… He enters politics in 1970.It's two years after 1968, Robert Kennedy, a hero of his, the Wilmington race riots—a lot of things are happening as he enters politics.How does it shape who he is, who he presents himself as, as a politician in those early days?
It was always striking to me that his hero was Bobby Kennedy and not Jack Kennedy.That Jack Kennedy was the smooth Kennedy; he was the Kennedy everybody was star-struck by.And Bobby Kennedy was the more human of the Kennedys.He was somebody who was filled with anguish, who had regrets, but who essentially loved politics, and that politics was the thing that defined Bobby Kennedy more than Jack Kennedy.So I always found that affinity to be a very telling one in his biography.
Joe Biden, as he arrives onto the scene, is somebody who presents as being a liberal.He's very much trying to be in keeping with the times.But you've got to remember, Delaware, as he enters the political scene, is a very unique state.It's a divided state.The half of the state that is north, that resembles Philadelphia, resembles a mid-Atlantic city, is part of it.And then there's the southern part that is extremely rural, that does not share the northern parts of the state's views on racial questions.
And it creates this interesting dynamic for Joe Biden, where he's somewhat torn between his own liberal instincts to be on the right side of racial issues, the right side of the Civil Rights Movement, with the political realities of Delaware, which is one where you need to be able to at least talk to this segregationist, country, yokel part of the state.And that becomes essential to his political persona writ large, that he's somebody who always seemed to be positioned square in the middle of the Democratic Party, that he was able to take certain risks as it relates to civil rights, but never risks that were heroic or too great.And he was always trying to navigate these differences.
Biden’s First Senate Race
… You talked a little bit about this already, but how does he present himself in the first race against Cal Boggs?You talked about his mom.He's also got Neilia, his new wife.His sister is there.And what is the presentation he makes with his family?And maybe—you suggested maybe it's even a conscious modeling on the Kennedys.
When he first steps into the political scene, he's coming just after the deaths of Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, and he's clearly self-consciously presenting himself as somebody who, if not their heir, is in their mold: that he is an Irish-Catholic politician; he is young; he is at least connected to some of the liberal politics of the time.His youth becomes—which is so hard to imagine from the vantage of the present, but you're decades later—he came on as this gust of fresh air, of vigor, of youth.And that's one of the things that carried him over the edge in his first race.
You wonder, what would Joe Biden of today think of Joe Biden then, of the young Joe Biden?
As Joe Biden goes through his political life, he begins to become this devout institutionalist.He becomes somebody who is so self-confident, based on his decades of experience, his trial and error in negotiating, deal-making, running of all of these processes.His experience is the reason why he's his own best adviser in his own head.So I imagine he would look back on the young Joe Biden as a bit of a whippersnapper who was entering the system naive about the ways of the world.
And it's right after that that the car crash happens.He loses his wife and daughter.But what does that moment do to Joe Biden?
Well, Joe Biden has a crisis of faith in the most profound sorts of ways.It's actually a crisis of faith.He cannot believe in a benevolent God after having his wife and daughter taken from him.I think there's a crisis of faith about his own destiny and his own place in the world.He's on the cusp of being the youngest senator, and he feels as if this is not the thing for him to do.He tells these stories about wandering the streets of Wilmington late at night, spoiling for a fight.He was bubbling over with anger.
And the reason this moment ends the way it ends is because there are these old lions of the Senate, the likes of Hubert Humphrey from Minnesota, Fritz Hollings from South Carolina, who keep hectoring him, keep insisting that he join their fraternity, that he come over for dinner.Joe Biden would go on to describe himself as being a “Senate man” and just being this great believer in the deliberative body.
And part of the reason that he has this faith in the Senate is that the Senate literally saved him from the pits of despair.It was the thing that lifted him from this personal hell.It was his brothers in this fraternity who told him, “Move on with your life, and we're going to help you do it.”
It's like it becomes a liability, too, in a way.He's so invested in the Senate and those people when he runs in 2020, questions about, “How could you be friends with a Strom Thurmond type?”, “How could you be friends with a segregationist, with people who hold these views?", does all that start from a very emotional connection with the Senate that's in the wake of the car accident?
Joe Biden has always called himself a fingertip politician, which implies that there’s this instinct and emotion baked into the way that he navigates the political world.And I think the same is true for his personal life, that there is this intuitive way that he has of assessing people and connecting with people.He's not at base an ideological person, and so when it came time to deal with the likes of Strom Thurmond, arch segregationist, he wasn't going to treat him in an ideological way; he was going to treat him in an instinctual way.Joe Biden is somebody who is always going to try to win over the person he disagrees with.And so that was his approach.
And he was also a realist.Part of what happens when you suffer the way that he suffered, you begin to understand that we live in a finite world, a world where everybody dies, where things are taken from you in unexpected moments.And that creates an almost tragic sensibility about the world, but it also creates a certain pragmatism, that you have to take what you can get when you can get it, even if you're dealing sometimes with some fairly despicable characters.
We don't know what he would have done if there hadn't been the accident, if he would be the same guy who travels back to Delaware on Amtrak and to try to be home every night for the boys.But how does that shape him, that way he is known, as Amtrak Joe?
Yeah.Well, so before he was Amtrak Joe, he was actually driving every day from Wilmington to Washington with Ted Kaufman, who was his chief of staff and who became his best friend, because he made this vow to Hunter and Beau that he would always be a phone call away from them.And so, in an age before cell phones, he bought a very, very chunky mobile phone that took up almost the entirety of the trunk of his car so that he would always be available to them.
It's so poignant, because there was so much guilt that was associated with his relationship with these two boys, because he was constantly having to leave them.And even when he was returning late at night, it was often after they were already asleep.And so it seems like he was doing something more to assuage his own guilt about being a working dad at a moment when his two boys most desperately needed him.
But just to go back to your question, which is about Amtrak Joe and commuting, this does become—he has this ritual, where every, every day, he's getting on the train in Wilmington, taking it to Washington Union Station, walking to the Senate.And it creates this ritual where he becomes both an insider in the Senate, but in his own head, he's always remaining an outsider, because he's not actually socializing with a lot of the columnists, not going to the fancy Georgetown cocktail parties at night, because he's going back home to be with his boys.
And I think that that is also part of this uncomfortable dynamic he has with the Washington elite, where he is the Washington elite, but he doesn't ever feel like they know him or accept him in a way that makes him feel included in their gang.
Biden Runs for President in 1987
That's fascinating.Leading up to his run in 1987, when he's again running on the younger end of candidates, just right before that moment, who does he build himself into as a senator?Who is the young Joe Biden that's going to make this decision, that he's ready to run for president?
There's a terrible Washington cliché.It's a terrible Senate cliché, where they break the world down into show horses and workhorses.And at the beginning of his career, he's a bit of a show horse.He does some real work on committees, but the thing that he's known for is his electrifying oration.And to go back and to look at a lot of the early Joe Biden speeches is really fascinating, because they're so different than the speeches that he delivers now as president; that they were filled with complex rhetorical structures; there was call and response sometimes; they would build to these moments.
And it really felt as if, not to return to the same archetype, but that he was trying to be the Kennedy-esque politician.He was trying to be the guy who could make everybody's hearts beat a little bit faster.And that ultimately is the thing that lands him in a bit of trouble.
I was just going to say, that's a good transition to the Kinnock scandal and to the question of—I mean, when he's framing this run for president, of who is he and what does he stand for, just help me understand that, what leads up to that moment, and how Biden is trying to define himself and how Kinnock fits into that.
Neil Kinnock, a great leader of the British Labor Party, was somebody who came from a mining background.He was somebody who had this real, authentic, old-fashioned connection with the British working class, and his biography was at the center of his story.Joe Biden's speech writers crafted a wonderful set-piece oratory that quoted from Neil Kinnock, and Joe Biden gets in trouble because he stops attributing Neil Kinnock's words, which were quoted in his speeches, to Neil Kinnock.
And I always thought about this in light of his stutter, that here was this guy who was trying to almost inauthentically become this great orator in order to transcend all these things, the stammer that had afflicted him earlier in life, and so he would just get caught up in telling a story.He would get caught up in giving a speech.And he would almost lose himself in the course of doing it.
And actually, he did lose himself.He confused his biography with Neil Kinnock's biography in a way that proved to be politically lethal to his career.
Does he also have a problem at that point, and maybe throughout his career, of defining what it is that he—like why he is running, what he stands for, who is the Joe Biden who should be president?
I like to think about Joe Biden as being the quintessential politician, and the problem with politicians is that everybody thinks that they're artificial, that they're theatrical, that they tell you one thing in public and then do another.I remember one of the first jokes that I learned as a kid was about a man walking into a used-brain store, and he turns, and the most expensive brain in the brain store belongs to a politician because it was hardly ever used.
And so we bring to the figure of the politician all of this cultural baggage and all of this dislike.And I think that gets pegged on Joe Biden, because that is unmistakably who he is.He is a politician.He wants to—he's not a grand idealist.He's not in this in order to prove some important point about history.He's in this business in order to do great things, I think in order to satisfy this sense of self that he has.But also, I think he genuinely wants to help people.
So the ego coexists with the desire to do good.… He's at the center of the Democratic Party, ideologically, all the time.He's at the center of his profession as a politician all the time.He is not an extraordinary person.He's kind of the every-politician.
As this scandal grows, he does a press conference.You could sort of see, like we were talking about before, you could see flashes of who he is as it's happening.And there's footage of an interaction in New Hampshire, I think, with a voter who's questioning him, and he's going back about his law school, and he seems really indignant.And this is where he gets in trouble for inflating his résumé, saying a bunch of things that aren't true right after the Kinnock scandal.When you see something like that, what does it say about Joe Biden, the boy who's now a politician, who's in a moment like that?
Well, Joe Biden has an almost mythological sense of self.He wants to believe in a version of Joe Biden that is the best version of Joe Biden, even if it doesn't track with the actual record of Joe Biden.And I think, in his head, there's some confusion sometimes between the best version of Joe Biden and the actual version of Joe Biden.And when he gets challenged on that, he can react with incredible anger.
But does it reflect those insecurities from going back as a kid and the stutter?Is that part of it?
You can't understand Joe Biden without understanding the insecurities at the core of his being.You can't understand his rationale for wanting to be a politician without understanding that those insecurities that are born out of the bullying, born out of the stutter, born out of his father's fall from social mobility.Those are the things that keep propelling him.They're the diesel fuel that keeps pushing him forward, and they're the reasons why, when he's challenged, when he's challenged about his virtue, when he's challenged about his biography, when somebody implies that he's not as smart as he thinks he is, he reacts with this defensiveness that can be sometimes volcanic.
He later says he was too arrogant; maybe he shouldn't have been president.Who was he at the end of that failed run?Was he changed by it?
I think he was pretty chastened and embarrassed by the 1988 aborted run for the presidency, that when he comes out of it, he makes this transition I mentioned before, that he had been a show-horse politician, and I think he's determined to be a workhorse politician, that he doesn't want to ever be accused of being an artificial, plastic politician again.He doesn't want anybody to ever question his smartness ever again.And I think he becomes much more dedicated to doing the work.
The binders, the briefing books, the homework that is essential for being a good senator, for being a member of a committee who can ask the tough questions, who knows what they're talking about, Joe Biden wanted to be that person after the debacle of 1987.
The Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Hearings
Maybe that sets us up well for the next thing, which is he's part of rebuilding that is the Judiciary Committee.But it's also the place of another sort of—I don't know if humiliation is the right word, sort of scandal with his handling of the Anita Hill hearing.He would always get a lot of criticism.What is it that you think leads him into that moment, where he becomes seen as the symbol of—he's at the center of the panel of all these white men handling this matter that becomes so controversial.What is it about Joe Biden that leads him into that moment, and maybe doesn't sense the danger that it represents for him politically?
Why did Joe Biden so badly botch the Anita Hill hearings?I think some of the answer has to do with him being this resolute institutionalist, a bit of a member of this fraternity, a member of this old boys’ society that is the U.S.
Senate and its cozy relationship with the rest of the institutions of power in Washington.He didn't want to push too hard on these questions because it, I think, struck him quite wrongly, quite despicably, as being somehow impolite, ungentlemanly, against the rules, unvirtuous, not senatorial behavior.
And his performance on that committee is something that the United States has certainly had to live with for the rest—for generations, as Clarence Thomas becomes this fixture on the judiciary who shapes jurisprudence.But it's also something that he lives with.I think there are scars that he continues to treat women's groups with a lot of resentment because he blames them for making him look bad and being the fall guy in these hearings.So it really sticks with him.
Does part of it go back to the accident and to the family?These people who are questioning Anita Hill—Orrin Hatch, Alan Simpson—were these his friends, and he sees it partly from that perspective because of that past?
Absolutely.As somebody who looks at his fellow senators, who looks at the likes of Orrin Hatch and Arlen Specter as part of this group that lifted him out from the pits of despair after the accident, of course he's going to be deferential to them.He's not going to want to have an adversarial relationship with them.He's not going to want to humiliate or embarrass them in any sort of way, and so he lets them go off on this terrible mission, where they unfairly try to discredit and slime Anita Hill as she's bringing forth a pretty solid case against Clarence Thomas.
The last thing on this.Do you also see something about the way he operates politically?Because part of [what he did] are the other women are not called.What is he trying to do?Is he trying to prove that the Judiciary Committee is a valid institution?Is he trying to get his way to the middle of it?What does it reveal, the handling of the whole thing?
Well, there is an episode that predates the Clarence Thomas hearing, which is the Robert Bork hearing, where he did something fairly extraordinary, which is that he stopped a president from getting their chosen nominee into the Supreme Court because he issued this huge warning about the way in which Bork would transform American life.
But one of the things that Joe Biden isn't is a bomb thrower.He's not somebody who wants to rewrite the rules of American politics, and so my sense is that Anita Hill and the Clarence Thomas hearing was his attempt to return to the regular order of things."Regular order" is a phrase that kind of dominates the Biden administration when they talk about how policy processes should be run.I think that comes from the top.And that is, in a way, his natural instinct.So he throws one bomb, and now he sets about trying to restore the normal order.
The Obama-Biden Relationship
Thank you. I think that will be useful background when we get into his presidency as well.But first, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.How different are they?They're both in the Senate.They overlap for a very short period of time.But just as personalities, how different are they?How unlikely are they as future running mates?
There was a great moment when Barack Obama was sitting in one of his first meetings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Joe Biden was doing his Joe Biden thing.And he was delivering some lengthy discourse about whatever, talking about all these trips that he had made, and he was going on and on and on.And I think Obama, at that moment, pulled an aide aside and was like, “Oh, my God, this guy, Joe Biden.Get me a gun.Get me out of here.”
And there was something about the Biden style that just did not attract, and in fact repelled, Barack Obama, because remember, Barack Obama was somebody who campaigned against the system.Barack Obama's whole political story is that he is the ultimate political outsider.He's somebody, he's the guy with the funny name, who was born—who grew up in Hawaii, who is descending from outside to save America from the system itself, and Joe Biden is the system.And so there was always this aesthetic, this cultural, stylistic clash between these two figures, the outsider and the insider.
It must have been quite a thing, too, for Biden, who had been waiting for another chance to run for president, who had been building his credentials and becoming a preeminent member of the Senate and sees 2008 as a chance to run, and then finds himself in that race, where he's quickly overshadowed by this guy who's only been in the Senate for a couple years.
One of the insane features of the United States Senate is that it turns every senator into a caricature of a U.S. senator if they stick around for too long, that they begin to become self-indulgent and self-important in incredibly unattractive ways.And so when Joe Biden runs for president in 2008, he's not running as the best version of his political self.He's running as this kind of faintly ridiculous image of what a U.S. senator behaves like.
And then Barack Obama comes in, and Barack Obama is this gust of eloquence and poetry.And if Joe Biden had always wanted to be a member of the Kennedy clan, Barack Obama is actually the person who the Kennedys embraced; that he is the one who seems to be the truest heir to the Kennedy legacy, with his virtuoso on the stump, in the way in which he's able to commune with the great and the good.And that must have just driven Joe Biden to distraction.It must have just really pissed him off.
And he comes off almost as a punchline.He has a gaffe about Obama from the very beginning.It must be a bit of a humiliation or something from the very beginning to just be instantly overshadowed.
Yeah.And how humiliating to basically—if you're Joe Biden, to be hoist on this dumb aside that he makes about Barack Obama that's tinged with kind of these racial stereotypes.And it's, "There goes Joe Biden running his mouth one more time."And, of course, that's going to be the thing that does him in.It's totally, completely humiliating.
And then the question of why of vice president.And I guess we could ask why does Obama choose him, but maybe the more important question for us is, why does Biden say yes?Because it's—then I think he said, or it's been reported, that his first instinct is not to do this.Why would he give up being in the Senate to be the vice president and cut ribbons?Why do you think he does accept that job?
He accepts the vice presidency because Barack Obama I think genuinely seems to need Joe Biden, and there's a way in which it flatters Joe Biden's ego to feel like he's needed in this sort of essential sort of way, and that Barack Obama comes into the presidency, or is on the cusp of coming into the presidency, as someone who doesn't have foreign affairs experience, who doesn't have relationships in the Senate, and Joe Biden is this wizened veteran of all these worlds who does have all of these relationships, who does have all of this expertise.And if you're Joe Biden, somebody who always wants to feel essential, indispensable, this was a moment to actually be essential and indispensable, even if he could probably see all the ways in which the vice presidency is a notorious trap for any politician.
He's also, at that stage—it's so hard to believe, because it feels pretty distant from the present — it seemed like he was at the end of his runway, that he had achieved everything he could achieve in the Senate, he was never going to be president again, and this was one last hurrah in his career, one last chance to do something big, important and different from this thing that he had been doing for decades already, which was being a senator.
… That must be difficult for Biden to navigate, somebody who's naturally a self-promoter and wants to speak up in meetings, to have this dynamic with Obama.
The vice presidency is the comic premise for a show on HBO.It is the butt of every joke in Washington.And even if you have Dick Cheney as his immediate predecessor, who was seen as the master, the puppeteer, who was actually pulling the strings of government, he knew that he couldn't compete with Obama's star power coming into this job.He knew that Obama was a smart guy who wasn't going to be played by Joe Biden.
And to sit in meetings I think was extraordinarily hard for him, because he doesn't have impulse control in meetings; that Joe Biden's natural tendency is to talk and to talk and to talk some more.And Barack Obama was extremely impatient with a lot of that, and he would just roll his eyes when Biden would get going, at least in the early stages of his presidency.
And when Obama would roll his eyes at Joe Biden, the rest of the aides in the room took it as license for them to roll their eyes at Joe Biden.And you know who knew he was the butt of all of these jokes and all of this eye-rolling?Joe Biden, which made him just want to try even harder to win over the people in the room, to show them how smart he was, with his eloquent monologues, and with all of these references to these past plot points in his own biography.
And so it was this death spiral for Joe Biden, where he just kept tumbling down the status order of the White House until the White House understood they actually needed Joe Biden to take on certain missions, because, well, it turns out, he was quite good at them.
And it's also public, right?There's articles at the time about "Uncle Joe" and the White House staff being anxious about gaffes.This is another type of humiliation moment.
… How must it feel to be a gaffe machine and to know that you're always on the brink of misspeaking in some sort of consequential way?I think, as president of the United States, one of the reasons why he hasn't been this ubiquitous figure, one of the reasons why he doesn't give press conferences and interviews all the time is because he understands this tendency about himself.He knows that he doesn't have the best impulse control when it comes to filtering his impromptu monologues, and he knows that as president of the United States, the costs are just too, too high for him to bear that kind of risk.
So I don't think it's age so much that keeps him cloistered up.I think that's part of it.But I think it's really, it's some form of self-awareness that he has and that his aides have about the verbal tendencies that he has.
Do you think it motivates him, that that feeling of being dismissed is going to push him to try again and to prove him wrong, that he's up to it, that he can be president?Is that part of sitting next to Obama in these meetings?
So it should be said that as the Obama-Biden relationship evolves, there is a measure of respect that clicks into place.One of the Obama speechwriters told me that when Obama came into office, he would write all of these lines into speeches that denigrated Washington, that denigrated politics, that denigrated the type of, basically, the Joe Biden approach to the world.But Obama, at a certain point, pulled him aside, and he said, “Let's take these lines out of the speech, because my view of politics has changed.I've actually come to respect politics.I've come to respect the likes of Joe Biden in a way that I never fully appreciated that I would, because I've seen how his approach actually managed to get things done that I couldn't get done on my own.”
Beau Biden’s Death
Maybe his relationship with Obama may have improved over those years, but the last couple years were really tough for him.And part of that is Beau's cancer and his death. …
What's the effect on Vice President Biden?
When people would come into meetings with Joe Biden as Beau Biden was in his decline, and then after his death, detected incredibly noticeably these dramatic changes within Joe Biden.It was—he was no longer the gregarious guy trying to monopolize the air time.He would recede in meetings as he—his mind was clearly in other places.They noticed physical changes in Joe Biden, that this guy who had been really vigorous was starting to age rapidly in front of them, as he was confronting his son's mortality, and then his own grief.
And it's part of the reason why he doesn't run for President in 2016.He was clearly considering it.Barack Obama was clearly trying to nudge him out of the way in order to make space for Hillary Clinton.But I think in his own mind, Joe Biden knew that he was not emotionally there.He wasn't up to the exertions of stumping across New Hampshire and Iowa.He just wasn't up for all of the extroversion required when you're running for President. ...
You mentioned Obama believing that Clinton was probably his successor over Joe Biden, and Obama certainly does the opposite of encouraging Biden to run.What is the effect of that on Biden, do you think, to have served those eight years?Their relationships improved, but at the end of it, to know that that's where Obama comes out?
I look at that relationship as a bit of a sadistic one, that Biden ends up taking on all of these tasks that are exceedingly difficult for Obama, whether it's trying to end the war in Iraq or playing the role in meetings of the guy who's got to ask the uncomfortable questions, or then having to deal with the migration issues in Central America; that he gets assigned all of these tasks, and then when the moment arrives for him to become the natural heir to Obama—because that's the natural course of the way that vice presidencies work—it's kind of that football is ripped away from him again, and it's one more source of pain and humiliation.
I think it's complicated by the fact that Biden was grieving at that moment, and he probably wasn't up for the job of running for the presidency in 2016.Even so, I think the polite thing to do would just to be to say, “Look, this is your turn.Are you up for it?,” rather than nudging him aside in the way that he did.
When you see him go out at the Rose Garden and announce he's not going to run with Obama behind him, where is—His son has died.Politics has been his life.He's now announcing that he's not going to run.Where is Biden?Where is he on his life's journey at that moment?
Without politics, what is Joe Biden?I think that's the question that he probably asks himself all the time.It's probably a question that he's asked himself many times over the course of the last couple years.And the idea of going out, making money, giving speeches, getting a university gig, I don't think that these are things that satisfy all of these animal spirits that he possesses, to try to prove himself to the world.For a guy who's got the insecurities that he has, going out and getting rich is not going to be the thing that's going to sate those things.He has one identity that's core of who he is.It's being a politician.It's existing in public life.Anything short of that is aimlessness.
Hunter Biden
So let's go back.We're in the period of the Obama presidency, the end of it.And one of the things we hadn't talked about, we talked about Beau, but we haven't talked about Hunter. …
What I'm really interested in is the family dynamics between Hunter and Biden during that period, as Hunter is doing these business deals, and Joe Biden is the vice president.
So these two sons survived this horrible car accident.They become the most precious items in his life, and he doesn't want to do damage to either of them.But the love that he shows to Beau, the way in which he sticks him up on a pedestal, makes him the heir to the dynasty, can't help but make Hunter feel a bit smaller.And I think that ultimately Joe Biden knows that he's shown disproportionate love and affection, or disproportionate attention to Beau because of his political career, and knows that he's caused Hunter some damage in the course of doing this.
And so you have these relationships that are encrusted in all sorts of guilt and all sorts of self-protectiveness.… When Hunter goes to Ukraine and sits on the board of Burisma as his father has assumed control of the Ukraine portfolio in the Obama administration, is trying to instruct Ukrainians to refrain from their corrupt practices, Hunter is undermining his father's work.
But Biden, who knows this on some level, doesn't want to damage his son.He doesn't want to take something away from his son, and he doesn't want his aides to come to him and to say that his son is a problem.And so you get this dynamic where everything is disconnected.People aren't saying what needs to be said out of this excessive desire to self-protect, to bubble-wrap this kid.And it becomes a problem that ends up recurring in Joe Biden's political assent from here on out.
And by that point, he knows about—he hasn't had the complete downward spiral, but he knows about some of the drug problems and the [military] discharge, and he knows about the family history of alcoholism.1How does that shape his concern?
1
So I think it's, on some level, it's hard to empathize with Hunter Biden, because he goes off and he does these things that are legitimately scuzzy.On the other hand, we know that he comes from a family where addiction is real.It's inherited; it's passed down from generation to generation.We know that he's survived incredible trauma in his life—the death of his mother, the death of his sister.We know that his father has lived this public career, which is inherently hard for all political children.
And so on that level, one's heart needs to go out to him, and we need to understand that to some extent, he's not fully in control.I think Joe Biden has always understood that his son is not fully in control, and to some extent, he's implicated in the problem, whether intentionally or completely innocently; that he's led this public life, that his DNA is encoded with whatever propensity for addiction exists.
And he wants to save his son.But he knows that his son exists in this incredibly fragile state of mind, in this incredibly precarious position, and maybe the best that he can do is to try to provide some sort of safety net for him as he starts to spiral downward.It's an unenviable position for a parent.
Because of the way this all plays out, and because of who Joe Biden is, you can hear his voicemails to his son played on Fox News, and you can hear the pain in his voice as he's calling Hunter at his darkest moments.
I mean, and that's—so the thing that I think is probably most painful for Joe Biden, at the end of the day, is the knowledge that his son would not be subjected to all of this public scrutiny were it not for his own political career and his own political ambitions; that Hunter Biden is exposed in a way that most people who do corporate lobbying or sit on boards, who peddle influence in Washington, are not exposed; that most people who fail to pay their taxes get dealt with in a way that's quieter.
But for Hunter Biden, his laptop gets hacked and becomes a national issue.Everything about his life ends up becoming a controversy.And if you're Joe Biden watching this, you definitely feel some sort of sense of responsibility and guilt and culpability for what's your son's being subjected to.
He makes the decision to run in 2019 knowing Hunter's problems, and he must know the glare that it will bring him.
But he's always known that his public career redounds against the people who are closest.Joe Biden is a veteran politician.He knows the price that political families pay.For somebody who venerated the Kennedys, he watched the way in which they paid with their lives for their public careers.He knows the ways in which all of the descendants of the Kennedys have been affected by the glare of the public spotlight.He knows.He knows that there's a cost for Hunter.There was probably some cost for Beau from public life.But that's what all politicians know and what all politicians do.
Biden Runs in 2020
Why does he run in 2019?And as you know, he says Charlottesville and Trump.But as we were talking, too, there's this other question of, he's a politician.That's his solace after the car accident.That's possibly a road to solace after Beau and Hunter's problems.Why do you think that Joe Biden, as old as he is in 2019, decides to run for president?
… We have just been talking about Joe Biden's family and his place as a father figure.And I think in his household, he was the indispensable man.He was the only man.He was the only parent in his kids' life.And that sort of sense of indispensability, the sense that people need you, I think is very important to the way in which he pushes forward, day to day, in spite of his grief and trauma.
And to think that the country actually needed Joe Biden at this moment to slay Donald Trump is something that he must have felt so compelled by that it squared with all of the stories that he tells himself about his place in the world, and it's something that makes him feel as if he's not a superfluous human being still.How amazing to feel like your country has descended into a crisis of democracy, hate is running rampant in American streets, and "I am the guy that the country needs to turn to in order to extricate ourselves from this crisis."
And he wasn't necessarily wrong about that.We could run the counterfactuals any way we'd like, but there was a reason that the Democratic elite rallied around Joe Biden in February of 2020, that they all collectively agreed that he was the safest, best bet to knock off Donald Trump.
… There's also Obama and Trump had both beaten him in their own ways as disrupters, as change agents.But he still is that guy who is normalcy and compromise and the institutions, isn't he?How does he fit in after those two in appealing to a public which seems like they are going from one person promising radical change to the other?
Right.So both Barack Obama and Donald Trump campaigned for president as disrupters.They're people who are trying to break the system.They're trying to break politics as usual.And here is Joe Biden, the quintessential politician.Why does the nation turn to him in 2020?Well, I think you have two things that are happening, primarily.One is that Trump, in his presidency, showed the cost of turning to somebody who was a disrupter from the outside, that he had really destabilized so much of American life.He made polarization so much worse.So the idea of having a candidate who was vanilla, who would return to some sort of status quo, and he was hugely appealing at that moment.
And then you had the fear that came with the pandemic descending on the country.And so Joe Biden represents somebody who could actually deal with a big public policy problem in a conventional sort of way, as opposed to instructing people to guzzle bleach.
President Biden
As Joe Biden is sworn in, in that very odd sort of inauguration, in the midst of COVID, what is his theory of the case?What is his theory of the presidency, of political success, of the type of president that he wants to be?
I'm going to answer this question in two different chunks.The first thing to remember about Joe Biden is that a lot of the way in which he understands the presidency is established as he's sitting in Barack Obama's second chair.So he was there watching all these big decisions happen, but he didn't have final say over those decisions, and he began to formulate an alternative theory of how he would respond to certain problems and would succeed in ways in which Barack Obama hadn't.
So some of that is born of a rivalry that he has with Barack Obama.But also, it's just he would observe, and he would say, “OK, if I was in this chair, this is what I would do differently.I would get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible.I would respond to the financial crisis by going as big as possible, with stimulus.”So that shapes the way in which he responds.
The other thing is, is that people misunderstand the way that Joe Biden talks about bipartisanship; that there is this sense that he is this naive nostalgist yearning for the 1970s and the 1980s, when everything could be resolved over a good steak and a backroom conversation.And even though you're an arch segregationist and I'm a civil rights guy, we can all just get along, and isn't it just great to shake hands and cross the aisle?
I think Biden believes that to some extent.But I think, when he becomes president, the country is so riven by division.You have the pandemic.You have the insurrection.I think he legitimately thinks that he can demonstrate a way to get out of the democratic crisis that we're in by modeling good democratic practice; that it was possible to build a popular front, to combat COVID, to combat the insurrectionists, because there were enough people of goodwill, who, if you dealt with them through persuasion as opposed to shouting at them, if you looked for those places where you could find that Venn diagram intersection, where there was common ground, you wouldn't just be able to get things done; you would be able to model a way of behaving that would help the country escape the mess that it found itself in.
Are you saying that by making government work, by making compromise work, he can rebuild faith and democracy?I mean, is it that big?
He’s an institutionalist who saw his job as restoring a broken American institution, as Donald Trump had wrecked the ship of state.And it was his job to come in and sort through the wreckage and rebuild things.And you don't just rebuild institutions by installing the right wonks and the right jobs.You need to rebuild faith in those institutions to show that they're not just servants of one party, of one interest group.
So yes, I think that he very much saw America as engaged in a struggle with autocracy, with autocratic forces at home, in the form of Donald Trump and his supporters, and abroad, in the form of China, which was modeling a very different sort of system, where you could rely on an autocratic leader to behave efficiently.You could get past all of this messiness, this sclerosis that was infecting American politics.
So his solution to that was to show that the system could work.And the way that he could show the system would work is by showing that politics could still work, that it was still possible to make deals, that it was still possible to persuade.To put it in psycho-biographical terms, he was basically showing that democracy could be saved if you could show that politics could be saved, which meant that having a politician descend and making things perform effectively was the way out of this mess; that Joe Biden was, in fact, the way out of this mess.
The Afghanistan Withdrawal
You document a lot the reasons why things turn after the first couple months that are good, but after the first couple months that are positive, and things in his presidency start to turn.But one of the most certainly visually graphic moments is the withdrawal from Afghanistan.You mentioned some of that may have come from his experience during the Obama years.How much responsibility does he have for the failure to pay attention to at least the logistics of the withdrawal, of how it was going to play out?
Things went belly-up in Afghanistan because the president had a very specific set of emphases in a way in which the policy was crafted.He saw that Barack Obama wanted to get out of Afghanistan, but had been jammed by the military into staying in Afghanistan and actually surging troops in Afghanistan.And his determination was to get out, to avoid getting jammed by the military, to avoid losing a war in the press, where people were leaking against him.
So he crafted a process that had this one overriding mission: get out, get out, get out.And when he crafted that policy, he was, in fact, thinking of one person.He was thinking of Beau Biden.His empathy extended entirely in the direction of American soldiers who were being sent on repetitive, endless, fruitless missions to try to make this project of nation-building work when everybody knew that that project was doomed.
And so that was his emphasis.And then when it came to the process of getting out, he left that to the professionals.But the thing was, I think ultimately, that he was so frustrated with the Afghans themselves and their inability to make good on their moment that his empathy didn't run in that direction, and so he just never allowed himself to focus on the humanitarian cost of withdrawal.And so in the policy-making process, that was just never elevated to the level of ultimate priority.We never had a plan for a mass humanitarian evacuation of Afghanistan in the event that the Taliban fell while we were still in the country.
It's also an amazing moment in his life, because he had been, in his own mind, able to be an expert on things in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or as vice resident, have opinions.And other people are the ones who screwed things up.And here he is, the president, and he has to go to Dover as the bodies of American troops are coming back.And the families are angry at him.I mean, what is that moment like for Joe Biden, who's lost a son, to be in that position, to be responsible for people who were frustrated or more than frustrated with him?
So, U.S. Marines die in front of Abbey Gate, in front of Hamid Karzai International Airport, as they're trying to let in a group of Afghans who were fleeing.And they get killed in terrible explosions launched by ISIS-K.And their bodies come back via Dover Air Force Base, in his home state of Delaware.And there's a whole procedure for how the caskets get marched off of the plane, taken to the mortuary.Families of the deceased are there, greeting the bodies.And the families congregate in a room at the Air Force base.And Biden has to go in, and talk to these families, who are just furious with him.They blame him personally for the losses, the greatest losses that have been inflicted upon them.
And Biden's theory of grief is that he can always cut across the line.He can always connect with somebody by calling on his own experience, the experience of Beau dying, the experience of his wife and daughter dying.But that just doesn't work in this instance, because the anger is so raw.And so, he has to go in and have these families scream at him.And I think it was the one moment in the course of the entire withdrawal from Afghanistan, where he was second guessing himself.He never second guessed himself about all of the decisions that were made, in the run-up to the withdrawal.He never second guessed himself about all the decisions that were made in the course of the withdrawal.But he second guessed himself about his interactions with these grieving parents.And I think it haunted him.
Ongoing Crises
It seems to be almost like a pattern in this administration, of a crisis that's in the news; it's a failure; they marshal and try to fix whatever the problem is—prices, or gas prices, or whatever it is, and by the time they've dealt with it, it's moved on.Is that part of the challenge Biden has had?
We have diagnosed the physical condition of long COVID, but there is kind of a metaphorical condition of long COVID that the country is also suffering, that when Biden comes to power, you have all of these rippling effects of COVID, whether it is inflation, whether it is all of the political frustrations that built up over that period of time.You have the legacy of Donald Trump that they have to reckon with.You have the fact that the world, for reasons that have nothing to do with Joe Biden, is on fire.
And so, so much of his presidency has been about dousing those fires.And sometimes it's not possible to douse those fires.Sometimes you can just contain them and try to let them burn out on their own.And all of that firefighting may be extremely heroic; it may be the best that you can do in any circumstance.But you're not going to get credit for firefighting at the end.And people will just remember the fact that the world felt out of control in that moment.
Biden’s Legislative Success
We won't do the details, but you can't ignore the legislative success, the COVID stimulus, the infrastructure, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS [Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors] Act.How big a deal is it, and what was Biden trying to do with all of that?
Let's step back and just consider the type of political economy that Biden has helped usher into the world in contrast to the one that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presided over.So Bill Clinton and Barack Obama came in a world where Democrats were essentially supportive of free trade, lukewarm to trade unions, didn't do a whole lot to combat monopoly, didn't give the state a very big role in shaping the trajectory of the American economy.Joe Biden has gone in a totally different sort of direction.We have the most robust antitrust enforcement in recent memory.We have a president who was the first president to walk on a picket line with a striking union.And in the constellation of bills that passed the Congress, you have a government that's engaged in what's known as industrial policy: that the government is essentially acting like an investment bank, making these big investments in clean energy and semiconductors, because they are both good for national security, good for the climate, but they're also going to make the United States the economy that's sitting on the commanding heights of the industries of the future.He's broken with political orthodoxy in a way that I think he doesn't get a whole lot of credit for and that people just are generally oblivious to.
And the skill at getting it passed, it was painful to watch, to see the back-and-forth on all of these different pieces, especially the infrastructure, and Build Back Better, and the Inflation Reduction Act.Was that him as the senator being able to maneuver these different pieces of legislation through?
Legislation is usually born through a whole series of circumstances and complications.And there's never one parent of success in the birthing of legislation.But I think he deserves credit for two reasons.The first is, is that he was able to give space to a political center in the Senate that was able to agree on an infrastructure bill, pass that.I think in terms of negotiating with Joe Manchin on the Build Back Better program, and what became the Inflation Reduction Act, there was a measure of persistence that he showed—that even though he kept getting knocked down, even though the process was just so exceedingly ugly to watch, he kept at it.And by the time the Inflation Reduction Act emerges, everybody had written it off as dead.And people were completely shocked when what emerged was the biggest climate bill in the history of the United States, maybe the history of the world, and something that has made us kind of the envy of Western economies.
Israel and Gaza
A little bit closer to now, we won't spend as much time on things, but as you mentioned, Israel is a big question, because this is something he's worked on through his whole career and has known [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, and he finds himself in a politically difficult moment in America on responding.What do you see in his response that comes from his past and how it affects the politics of this reelection?
Joe Biden is a genuine Zionist.He's somebody whose father would talk to him about the Holocaust and would talk to him about the birth of the state of Israel, which was something that was happening when he was a kid.And his father would tell him, “Joey, if the state of Israel didn't exist, we'd have to create it.”And so he has a bond with the state of Israel that, I think, younger generations of Democratic politicians don't necessarily have.
He recounts conversations that he had with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on the eve of the 1973 war, so he has this history.He also has a psychological theory of the Israeli public that I think has shaped a lot of the way that he has responded to this crisis, which is that he understands that there's a fragility there and that if he can—I think his theory has been, at least in part, that if he shows empathy, if he shows that he gets it in terms of the traumas that they have experienced and the ways in which they have been shaken by what happened on Oct. 7, [2023,] then ultimately, when it comes time for him to craft a grand plan, a solution, he's going to have emotional capital that he's going to be able to spend down.
Now whether that's the case or not, I think we're about to see in a fairly significant way.You're starting to see these cracks that are forming in the relationship with Netanyahu, and you're starting to see this plan that he's about to present.I think the Ukraine diplomacy was very complicated, but this is so much more complicated.And if you told me on Oct. 8 that Joe Biden would be able to have a normalization deal with the Saudis, the Qatari, the Emirati, were going to normalize relations with the Israelis and subsidize the reconstruction of Gaza, I would have laughed, because that just seems implausible.
But he's gotten that part of the deal, it seems like, pretty close to done.The problem is, is that he is dealing with Benjamin Netanyahu, who has his own self-interested, venal reasons for wanting to prevent that deal from ever coming into reality and for trying to forestall an end to the war.
Yeah, it's a good note.And you note examples after examples where he's written off in the middle of a process, and everybody says it's over with Manchin or whatever, and it's not.But there's also the politics of it.And does that history of Zionism, of the bipartisan support for Israel that he grew up in from an early day, create a blind spot in the left here that says, “Why doesn't he have empathy for the Gazan people?Why doesn't he have empathy for the Palestinians?”
Yeah, there's no doubt that, at certain pivotal moments, Joe Biden whiffed when he was presented with an opportunity to empathize with the tremendous suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza, and so it felt like his empathy was flowing only in one direction, not to innocent people who were suffering on both sides of the conflict.And I think that those atmospherics have certainly hurt him with younger Democratic voters, have hurt him with Arab American voters, and he's going to have a hard time getting past some of that in November.
It's also of a piece with a broader problem that he's had with younger voters, that he's just not found a way to connect with younger voters.So he cancels an enormous amount of student debt, and some of those plans get slapped down by the courts, but some of them actually come into fruition, and it's just another example of the strange disconnect, where he's able to do something that makes people's lives better, and he gets no credit for it.And you have to think that on some level, the oratorical shortcomings, the political shortcomings of this administration, the son of a car salesman is not able to actually sell the product.
Biden’s Age
So the last territory we'll talk about is the big one right now, which is his age, which is the perception of him.Before his age, though, one of the things throughout his presidency, these moments of he oversteps himself, or—that's the wrong word—he has a gaffe that overshadows what he's trying to do.He has a staff that goes out and tries to correct the record.Help me understand the dynamics for Biden, who's had, since he was stuttering, and going back to '87 and throughout his career, has had these issues of gaffes, and what his public statements are, and how it's different in the presidency, and whether it's frustrating for him.
At various moments, whether on the eve of the Ukraine war, where he talked about the response to a partial invasion of Ukraine, or he went to Warsaw and he couldn't help himself, and he talked about wanting to remove Vladimir Putin from power, he's repeated his pattern in the rest of his life, where he's been a gaffe machine, where he said the thing that was sitting there, rattling around his brain, but didn't say it necessarily in the most articulate sort of way or said it in a way that was impolitic, and it became the story.
And then his aides have to step out of the shadows and clean things up.They put out a statement, retracting or amending or clarifying.Biden agrees to all of this because he knows that he did something that was not in the best interest of his presidency or the best interest of the United States, so he can't help but agree to the mop-up job.But the fact that he's being mopped up by his staff really irks him.It makes him feel like he's being babied.It makes him feel like he's being made to look small or unprofessional or whatever it is, and so that becomes a source of resentment that festers within him.
I do wonder, with some of the specific examples, why he lets them clean up for him, right, about "Putin has to go."And that's the type of rhetoric—that's actually why people like Biden.He says stuff like that.And the cleaning up overshadows what the other things they’re doing.Why does he go along with the cleanup?
Because Joe Biden wants to be a responsible steward of the country.I think he genuinely wants to say the right thing and do the right thing.And if there's a risk of something being misinterpreted or sending the wrong sort of signal, he's willing to take the personal hit in order to mop up the mistake.
I think he's very, especially with Russia, he's especially worried about triggering some sort of dangerous escalation.And so if he says something that could be misperceived by Vladimir Putin, he doesn't want that just sitting out there for Putin to make whatever he wants out of it.He wants that cleaned up, so that there's no mistaking his real intentions.
And does it create a weakness in his presidency?Does he withdraw?How does he respond to that, and does it affect the way he communicates?
I think he knows his capacity for gaffing, and I think it scares him, to some extent, because he suffered for it over time.And so I think it makes him more cautious in appearing in public, even though he always veers off of the teleprompter, and there's always this moment in his remarks, where he says, “I'm going to get in trouble for saying this,” or, “I shouldn't be saying this, but.”And it's like you could see the wheels turning in his head: “I'm about to go rogue, and my staff is going to hate me for this, and they're going to have to mop this up, but I can't help myself for the moment, so I'm just going to say it.”And it's kind of funny to watch it unfold in real time, because you know that he knows exactly how it's going to land, and the rippling effects of that.
And that's funny because he's up against Trump, who does a little bit of that, but who just barrels on and never, never—the contrast of the two of them is fascinating, because they sort of have that same proclivity to say things.
Trump's proclivity is for saying the hateful thing, for saying the bombastic thing, and he doesn't actually care about the consequences of it.Joe Biden wants to do right, and so when he gaffes, his instinct is going to be to try to clean it up, as opposed to letting the chips fall where they may, because that's dangerous.Joe Biden may gaffe, but he's at least self-aware.And he wants things to be contained, be controlled, not for there just to be this running chaos, which is the Trump reality.
In 2020, there were stories; Biden never attached his name to them.Maybe he's a transitional figure.Maybe he only has one term.Lots of speculation to this day, still, of whether he would run again.What was going on on the inside?Was there any doubt that he was going to run again?
The way that Joe Biden positioned this on the inside was, "You should all be preparing for me to run for reelection.That's the default.Unless you hear otherwise from me, just assume that's going to be the case.Start coming up with plans for doing this."So I think that whole dynamic left some room for doubt, because it wasn't a hedged message, but there was this moment where he said, “Maybe I will change my mind, but this is the default.”
But what's interesting to me about the decision to run for reelection is that none of the Democratic insiders—not Nancy Pelosi, not Hakeem Jeffries, not Chuck Schumer, not Barack Obama—went to him and said, “Joe, you're too old.Don't do this.”Everybody assumed that this was a legitimate, OK, politically, acceptable default position for him to take.
There's so much anxiety on the left about what he's risking by running, about his low popularity.Does he see it in those terms?Does he see that he's taking a calculated risk?Or how would Joe Biden see those concerns?
I think he would look at what the potential alternatives were, and he would say, “Those alternatives are themselves risky.I'm the only guy who's actually beaten Donald Trump in the past.I have run an accomplished presidency.I have a record that I think I can defend and run on.”And when he thinks about his own age and his own mental capacity, he says, “I feel fine.I can do the job.Why shouldn't I do it?”Because that's the normal thing that happens in the course of an incumbent presidency, is that the incumbent decides to run for reelection again.There are only a few instances where that hasn't happened, and it hasn't necessarily turned out OK for the Democrats in those instances.Lyndon Johnson turning over the reins to Hubert Humphrey did not result in a Democratic victory.Harry Truman not running for reelection again in '52 did not result in a Democratic victory.
So I think it's a fair question to ask.This pundit desire, this desire in a lot of people on the left for there to be a deus ex machina, for there to be this politician who's never really been tested on a national stage to descend and save the country from Trump.But maybe that would happen.But maybe we just get a messy Democratic primary where everybody beats themselves up over Gaza, and the Biden legacy, and you have all of the internal divisions that you saw in the 2016 primary that helped Trump win in the first place.
I also wonder, given the psychological profile we've been talking about of the kid who was stuttering, people said, “You're not smart,” or feeling he has to prove himself, what's the psychological impact of all these people saying, “He doesn't seem like he's fit to be president.He doesn't seem like he's got it.It's not that he's not smart, but he's older; he's losing it”?Just as the psychology of Biden that we know, how does he respond to that?
When Joe Biden hears these conversations about his mental acuity or his age, it just makes him angry, because in his view, he's demonstrated his vigor.He flew to Israel to sit in the Benjamin Netanyahu's war cabinet for several hours to try to persuade them about how they—he's negotiated all these sessions where he stayed up very, very late.He's demonstrated his vigor.
There are all these people who go into meetings with Joe Biden.Kevin McCarthy doesn't walk out saying, “This guy is out to lunch.”Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't walk out saying, “This guy is out to lunch.”They had very motivated reasons for saying that he's not up to the job, yet they don't say that.So Joe Biden is listening to this conversation, and he just feels as if he's being smeared and misunderstood.And it just—it plays on his insecurities.It makes him even more want to show that he's got it, that he can do it, that he deserves credit for what he's done.
And as far as television goes, the moment he responds to the Hur report, and he comes out, and he seems angry.And he's got Beau's rosary in his hand.Who's the Biden at that moment that we've been talking about in his life?
When you see those flashes of anger, when you see him pushing back against the Hur report, or you see him pushing back against the people who say he's too old to run, you're seeing the Joe Biden who had been bullied, who, as a kid, who kids made fun of his stammer, pushing back, asserting himself, demanding that the world treat him fairly, treat him squarely, treat him with the dignity that he thinks that he deserves.He feels like he's being underestimated yet again.This is the narrative of his life playing on a loop.
And there's the gaffe again, the one that wouldn't be unrecognizable at any other point of his life, but that becomes a thing that's where there's all the attention again.
Right.He confuses Egypt and Mexico.It's totally a verbal slip.It has no implications for policy.It's not like anybody in the world would think that he doesn't know where Egypt is or who the president of Egypt is.And yet it ends up confirming this impression that voters have, that the pundits have, that's so deeply cemented, that he's not really able to ever overcome it, that his age has somehow come at a mental cost, that he's paying a policy price for.
Just to think about his own frustration when he walks back from that, his voice that had betrayed him when he had a stutter, his gaffes, which have betrayed him throughout his political career, and in a moment like that, which he seems to take personally, about Beau's death. …
The question is, is he—why can't he overcome this?The first question for you is, is he losing it?And why can't he overcome it?Why is this the question now that seems to be above all others?
So there's a fair way to frame the age debate, which is, do you want to have an 86-year-old president?Totally legitimate question to be asked of a candidate running for the highest office.And then there's an illegitimate way to phrase the question, which is, doesn't it stink that you have this guy wandering aimlessly around the West Wing?Because that is, in fact, not the case.I mean, yes, he gets lost in stories.Yes, he occasionally mistakes a name or a date.But there is no evidence that he doesn't have the mental acuity to do the job as he exists in the present.
And there's almost this conspiratorial edge to these questions—that there must be somebody working in the background who keeps pushing this old guy out there, and it's kind of cruel that he's forced to keep doing this job that he doesn't want to do, and that somebody else is making the decisions or pulling the strings.And that's just not the case.Joe Biden, I think as much as any modern president, is way deep into the weeds of policy and details.He's not somebody who especially likes to delegate to other people.I think that if there was a fault to the Joe Biden presidency, it's that he takes on too much himself, that he could easily have other people out negotiating for him or conducting some of this foreign policy, but he doesn't like that.He wants to be in command.
As a politician, though, why does it stick to him?Donald Trump has had some tremendous gaffes, mix-ups, and yet it's Biden that's the center.I guess that's the question.
The answer is, never underestimate the superficiality of media coverage or the superficiality of the American people, that when you see somebody who walks funny and walks stiffly and who talks in a raspy sort of way and who mixes up Mexico and Egypt, then you're going to assume the worst about them.
Donald Trump is somebody who superficially projects strength, who projects vigor, because he screams and yells a lot.But that doesn't necessarily mean that he's got the mental acuity to do the job of president of the United States.In fact, in my opinion, a lot of the evidence suggests that he dangerously doesn't.
This is one of the things that I think has been so, so dangerous about the way that this election has been framed, which is that if it's about mental acuity, it doesn't exist on a continuum.Joe Biden's issues with mental acuity, whether they relate to the inability to remember a name or to finish a story, are not the same as the questions of mental acuity that are being posed about Donald Trump.They're just not apples and apples.
How does Biden view the stakes for this election, in personal terms, for the country?How high does he think the stakes are, going into this reelection?
He's framed his whole presidency around questions of democracy and autocracy, which has imposed a huge burden on his presidency.It means the four years that he's been president either lead to a continuation of the republic as we know it, or it results in the end of it.There's no binary there. [sic]And so I think he really surely understands that his defeat would be a defeat for the democracy writ large.Everything that he's accomplished as president, and I happen to think that he's run a fairly accomplished presidency, would be eviscerated.His legacy would become that he was the guy who lost to Donald Trump and ushered in the end of American democracy.
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