The Long Alliance, page 15
Biden considered a list of relative moderates he’d served with and approached them to gauge their openness to compromise: beyond the Mainers, he talked to his frequent Amtrak travel companion Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Ohio’s George Voinovich, and Florida’s Mel Martinez, and he thought about trying Richard Lugar and Utah’s Bob Bennett. Each warned him that a vote for the bill would probably be a step too far for them, since they’d likely be ensuring themselves primary challenges from hard-core right-wingers if they sided with Obama. Biden couldn’t believe that they actually believed this and narrowed his focus to just Collins—he called her constantly, even when she was at home in remote rural Maine with bad cell service—and his old friend Specter. (Snowe already appeared to be on board.)
It was, he thought, a matter of persistence. It worked, especially once Reid secured a massive funding bump for the National Institutes of Health that Specter requested. The bill passed with sixty-one votes.
It was a triumphant moment for Biden, if not for the administration as a whole, which by this point was so mired in economic bad news that Obama held the bill signing in Colorado, far from the glare of Washington’s cameras and the bulk of the political press corps. Still, the effort had made clear that Biden could deliver for Obama when it was most needed. The vice president heard only later that Collins, Snowe, and Specter were immediately treated like outcasts by their fellow Republicans, who scarcely even spoke to them for six weeks after the vote. It got so bad that Biden in April succeeded in convincing Specter to become a Democrat, bolstering Obama’s majority. Murkowski, Lugar, and Bennett all got, and later lost, the primary challenges they warned about; Voinovich, Martinez, and Snowe retired rather than continue in this environment.
Obama himself was conflicted as he signed the bill. It was one of history’s largest investments in hugely important fields. Some of his aides occasionally reminded him that some whole presidencies passed without accomplishing anything of that scale, let alone during a crisis like the one still playing out around the country. But Obama knew it was already unpopular and he was furious with the near-unanimously negative GOP response—not one House Republican voted for it. An old warning by former Bill Clinton advisor James Carville became a mantra in the West Wing when Obama’s top aides discussed how to turn its image around: “You can’t get caught whistling past the graveyard,” he’d said repeatedly. As they saw it, too many people were in economic pain for them to start cheering their legislative victory or insisting things were getting better.
So Obama was skeptical when, a few days later, Biden proposed what he called a “recovery summer” (after focus grouping the terminology, Obama’s aides had decided “recovery” was preferable to “stimulus”). He wanted to take charge, he said, and not just to ensure that the money was spent correctly on efficient and helpful projects but also to pitch the investments to voters by focusing on individual stories of Americans helped by the measure, even as the rest of the administration struggled to convince an increasingly disillusioned electorate that they were doing their best to create jobs. Obama agreed to Biden’s proposal, opening a new door for him. Almost immediately, the vice president began convening and running regular cabinet meetings to talk about implementing the law through the federal agencies, calling mayors, governors, and local officials to gauge their needs, and traveling around the country to try to draw positive headlines for the administration.
It was frustrating work at its best, but Biden insisted to Emanuel that it was necessary if they wanted people to understand the legislation—Clinton had failed to do that with the crime bill in 1994, he said, and he’d never forgotten that lesson. The unemployment rate was still hovering around 10 percent into the summer, and even Biden’s former colleagues in the Senate regarded him quizzically when he visited their caucus lunch and encouraged them to get their chins up: there was massive political opportunity in the bill, he said, if they focused on promoting its construction or education projects in their states. He didn’t get much buy-in. They looked on, unimpressed, as he insisted, “There’s gold in them thar hills!” He didn’t get far with the outside game—that, perhaps, was better left to Obama, and the rest of the world’s disasters soon took precedence for the president. But the relationships Biden started to build within the government with the push would prove invaluable over time.
* * *
This became obvious within the White House almost immediately: Obama’s aides were, by and large, far more interested in him than most staffers are with their bosses, some bordering on obsessive. On the outer edges of the administration, this dynamic surfaced in cringeworthy ways. Around Washington, it was common to see young Democrats carrying marked-up copies of Dreams from My Father, which they tore through, considering it a key to the new president’s thoughts. But closer to the Oval Office, this dynamic had the effect of tightening the circle of confidence around the president, the staffers with direct access to him guarding it closely and effectively shutting out advice and chatter from outsiders, no matter how well meaning they were. Depending on whom in this orbit you asked, various members of the Biden team were on the bubble between confidant and interloper. Some Obamans had read Angler, a searing new book about Cheney’s vice presidency written by the journalist Barton Gellman, during the transition, and they entered the administration on the lookout for warning signs of encroaching Cheneyism. When Biden floated the notion of giving Blinken—his longtime aide and now his national security advisor—the designation of assistant to the president, too, Emanuel rejected it out of hand, fearing a situation like the one Cheney had engineered with some of his advisors, granting them disproportionate access to, and sway over, the president.
More potentially troubling, though, was the accumulation of eyebrows slightly raised by Obamans at BidenWorld’s suggestions. Once, when a senior staffer in the VP’s office suggested that the White House consider establishing outreach offices for specific constituencies within the Office of Public Engagement, he was dismissed with a sigh in front of a packed room of his new colleagues: You clearly don’t understand the people’s mandate. Obama has unified our country. (The offices were greenlit a year and a half later.)
Still, at the highest levels this precise attitude was rare. Klain was regularly present at the daily 7:00 a.m. senior staff meeting from the start, and Mike Donilon was quickly integrated into the political planning meetings initiated by Emanuel. Tom Donilon became Obama’s deputy national security advisor. The first and second families, too, were starting to spend more time together. Not everyone bought in—Biden’s son Hunter was especially wary of the Obama loyalists after what he saw as nonstop condescension from them on the campaign—but Hunter’s daughter Maisy was fast friends with Sasha, the younger Obama daughter, and they soon became basketball teammates. This, in turn, drew Michelle and Hunter’s wife, Kathleen, close.
All the while, though, Obama and Biden themselves were still figuring each other out, sometimes disjointedly—Biden still rolled his eyes behind Obama’s back at his aloofness and discomfort in glad-handing with fellow pols, while Obama still sighed when Biden went on for too long in meetings, occasionally tapping him on the arm to shut him up—and sometimes in public.
One day after the inauguration, they met with a large group of incoming senior aides in the auditorium of the office building across the street from the West Wing. Traditionally, the president would address them and then the vice president would swear them in, but Biden had been told by the advance team that there’d been a change of plans and that they’d do that part later, in private. After Obama spoke, however, he turned to Biden and asked him to swear them in. Biden was surprised and froze for a second. The day before, Chief Justice John Roberts had fumbled as he delivered the oath of office to Obama, forcing the pair to redo it in private after the formal inauguration, just to make sure there was no question about the legality of Obama’s presidency. “Am I doing this again?” Biden now asked, hesitantly inching toward the lectern. Told yes, he tried killing time before he got a copy of the oath to read out and joked, “My memory is not as good as Justice Roberts’s.” The room laughed, but Obama, in full view of the cameras, grimaced and lightly pushed Biden toward the microphone to get down to business. It was a light, throwaway moment to Biden. To Obama, it was a needless jab at Roberts, someone he didn’t want to antagonize. He told Biden as much once they left the room.
Biden, who’d come around to the idea that his boss was a prodigiously smart and complex thinker with a finely tuned political acumen, was surprised by Obama’s humorlessness. He was baffled when something similar happened again a few weeks later. Addressing House Democrats just as Washington was focused on the stimulus package, Biden admitted: “If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, if we stand up there and we really make the tough decisions, there’s still a thirty percent chance we’re going to get it wrong.” This notion wasn’t controversial to the VP, it was just the basic deal with government programs. Klain, however, immediately started fielding calls from livid Obama aides who couldn’t believe Biden was handing their opponents ammunition, just like he had while campaigning in Seattle a few months earlier. Asked about Biden’s comments soon after, Obama forced a laugh. “I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to—not surprisingly,” he said, then went on to explain away Biden’s comments as a meditation on how no single measure would solve the huge problems ahead of them. Biden thought this was uncalled for. Why would Obama make fun of him on TV instead of just talking to him in person? He said as much at their lunch soon after, arguing to Obama that while he had misspoken, statements like Obama’s would undermine Biden’s ability to contribute to the administration. Obama apologized and agreed that their disagreements shouldn’t play out in public.
Obama kept his promise. When Biden’s tongue next got him in trouble—a few months later, amid a swine flu outbreak, he told interviewers he would advise family members not to travel, contra administration guidance that was designed to avoid a panic—Obama said nothing in public and shrugged behind the scenes. That’s just Joe, he said. It was left to Robert Gibbs, now the White House press secretary, to clean up Biden’s remarks after a tense back-and-forth with his apologetic press staff, who knew Biden was just being honest about protecting his family, even if he was wildly off message.
In typical Washington rumor mill style, this was all significantly more dramatic in the eyes of people two or three degrees of separation away from the conversations that Obama and Biden were having themselves than it was to the principals. Inside the building, Biden figured he’d know it if he ever truly fell out with Obama, and this wasn’t that—especially not after he’d proven his worth on the recovery bill and they’d begun holding their lunches, which were already comfortable. On the contrary, he felt enough like a member of the team that he immediately preferred his West Wing office to the larger space he had across the street, not just because of its proximity to the Oval Office power center—just a matter of steps, he liked to show off—but because it was easy to catch Obama’s attention from it.
The space itself wasn’t very big, and Biden often winked to guests that his Senate office had been fancier. But he tried to cultivate a grand aura there. The walls were painted the kind of rich blue that accents the impor-tant rooms of official Washington. In meetings, Biden often made a show of gesturing toward the president down the hall, and of looking up and nodding at the portraits he’d hung of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the first and second vice presidents. It scarcely occurred to visitors to point out that they were the second and third presidents, too.
CHAPTER 7
2009
Six days before the inauguration, Biden’s mood was grim. He’d just landed back stateside after a fact-finding trip to Kuwait, Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and he had little good news for his new boss. He’d flown out with low expectations—he knew the territory as well as any elected US official and had even brought a Republican ally, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, because the debates over the wars’ futures would undoubtedly be intensely political and he wanted to start off on a bipartisan footing. Biden also knew he’d probably play an especially large role in the knotty task of setting the countries’ future paths since Obama was sure to be preoccupied with the economy for a while.
The Afghan leg of the trip was even more of a disaster than he’d anticipated, and, back in Washington, he told Obama as much. For months, he’d suspected military leaders were presenting an unrealistically rosy view of the state of play and he’d been getting fed up with the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, who he didn’t think was serious about fighting obvious corruption. Still, Biden had long said, at least it wasn’t Iraq, where Bush had in 2007 multiplied the American military presence to quell the violence before ordering a withdrawal. The situation in Afghanistan may have been unacceptably disordered, but maybe that war effort was still salvageable, Biden thought. It’s why Obama was arguing for a shift in attention and resources to Afghanistan, which had been getting short shrift, especially considering that 2008 was the deadliest year yet for American troops there.
Now, though, Biden said he was perplexed. They had been elected on a wave of antiwar sentiment and Obama would soon send more troops into Afghanistan—the “good war,” some people around the president-elect called it, in contrast to Iraq—to right the campaign there. Yet in person, Biden saw no evidence of a long-term plan. Karzai once again proved impossible to pin down and unwilling to pledge full cooperation, so trusting his government to stabilize seemed naive.Who knew when his country would have functioning and trustworthy leadership? Biden now asked, forecasting minuscule political appetite in DC for a long, sustained commitment in Afghanistan. The takeaways from his meetings with Americans and allies on the ground were even worse, he revealed to Obama. Ask ten different people to describe the US goal in Afghanistan, he said, and you’ll get ten different answers. They were better off focusing their efforts on targeted missions aimed at threats across the border in Pakistan, he suggested. It was time to ditch lofty ambitions of so-called nation-building, and to be realistic.
Years later, veterans of the administration would describe the ensuing months of debates over the future of American engagement in Afghanistan as the crucible that sealed the Obama-Biden bond and understanding. The saga forced each of them to repeatedly consider and reconsider the other’s motivations, experiences, and influences. They were under intense sustained political and emotional pressure, with a constant, defining imbalance—Biden always having to, and more willing to, think more about Obama, the ultimate decision maker, than vice versa. Instead of wrenching them apart, this pushed them to forge a reliable working pattern. It revealed Biden to be more loyal than his skeptics feared and Obama to be more ideologically flexible than his fans wished. But the repetitive gauntlet of alternately methodical and slapdash disputes about troop levels also made one thing impossible to deny: both were discomfitingly unprepared for the churn of their own administration’s internal politics, neither Obama’s insistence on plowing through politics-as-usual nor Biden’s expertise in Washington’s halls of influence sufficient to break the restraints. This proved far more significant than either expected.
Biden entered 2009 clear about where Obama stood on Iraq and Afghanistan after debating against and then campaigning with him for nearly two years, but their personal dynamic on foreign affairs wasn’t intuitive, since they’d had little one-on-one time on the Senate committee. It still wasn’t obvious when the president-elect first dispatched his deputy to Central Asia and the Middle East that January, nor even when Biden returned and they showed private signs of a burgeoning friendship between discussions on the topic—like when they wandered the West Wing together the afternoon of their inauguration grinning at the oversize photos of them that the White House staff had hung along the halls that morning.
Biden frequently professed his admiration for Obama. After one early marathon, meeting-packed day, he marveled to aides about the president’s seemingly natural and unbothered ability to lead three sessions in a row on three different issues with obvious mastery of the material. Biden, by contrast, demanded notoriously intensive briefings before every big meeting to make sure he understood every possible angle. (Obama was often well briefed, too, just not within earshot of Biden, and not so obsessively.) Still, Biden also openly admitted that he was slow to understand how Obama operated, so he asked some of the president’s confidants like Jarrett to come by his West Wing office for a series of weekly one-on-one breakfasts that he hoped might decode the president’s decision-making processes and provide a key to his priorities. He was surprised after thirty-six years in Washington’s byzantine murk to find that Obama had no code or style of subliminal messaging. If he said something, he meant it.
