The Long Alliance, page 22
He was antsy because he didn’t have a good explanation for why he’d waited this long, or for some of his past statements. He’d campaigned in 2008 in opposition of the Defense of Marriage Act, which since the Clinton administration had prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex unions, and then in 2011 ordered his administration to stop defending it in court. But when he spoke privately about these moves there was always a sense of lingering sheepishness about his contortions since his 2004 Senate campaign.
After answering the question a few different ways as a local candidate in the 1990s and early 2000s, in 2003 he’d backpedaled slightly on his earlier embrace of a registry of same-sex domestic partnerships and said in a questionnaire that gay couples should be allowed to have domestic partnerships recognized, but that the benefits they got should be examined for their fiscal ramifications. He was leaning not only into his ties to the fairly socially conservative local Black church at the time, but also trying to stay in line with Democrats’ presidential candidates, who were largely in favor of civil unions. Privately he said this was all about trying to be practical, but then he’d appeared to backtrack even further in the 2004 general election, saying he believed marriage to be definitionally between a man and a woman before God.
Obama knew how baldly political this all looked in hindsight. As the reelection campaign launch neared in spring 2012, he determined that all the waiting and calculating was no longer tenable, and he signed off on a tightly held plan to make the announcement in either an interview with Robin Roberts on Good Morning America or on The View to get liberal voters engaged a few weeks after he got back on the trail.
* * *
Biden was happy to be a team player. He’d spent the last few months basking in the new, friendlier perception of him that voters seemed to have ever since he’d stopped trying to act like a self-serious senator most comfortable on the stodgy Sunday shows, but the Obama people had nonetheless asked him to do Meet the Press to help kick off the reelect in May. He’d agreed out of a sense of cooperation, knowing full well that he’d have to submit to five days of “murder-board” prep with staffers who ended up drilling him on basic campaign messaging and talking through precisely nothing of any news value.
Even once that was done the interview was still a day away, though, and his mind was elsewhere as he sat, tired and dissatisfied, on Air Force Two heading toward LA for a quick fundraising stop for the campaign. He’d just asked his traveling staff for a copy of the remarks he was going to give at this LGBTQ issues–focused event hosted by a gay couple in their home, but had blown up when he saw that it was just the same old talking points and then learned that there was nothing new for him to share as far as the administration’s positioning on gay rights went. He hated feeling unprepared and he steamed as the plane landed, sketching out some quick lines on a note card while his staff stared on in silence.
At the donor’s home, he chatted with the hosts’ kids on a staircase while his aides set up. Concerned about what he would say, they determined they’d have to have someone lying down in front of him holding up a boom mic to record his remarks. It was a ridiculous arrangement, but Biden was in no mood to fix it, and when the time came, he let loose. Why should those children’s parents be treated any differently from how his own children’s were? he asked, though he never brought up marriage explicitly. He launched into his standard praise of Obama—it’s his administration, not mine, he said—and then brought up how careful the president had been in making sure the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal had been handled correctly with respect to the skeptical Pentagon over time, seeming to imply that the audience just had to trust Obama’s processes, that he was headed in the right direction on the equality issues that mattered most to them.
No one had much to say as Biden flew back east, and no one could tell he was still thinking about that fundraiser when he sat down for one last round of uneventful prep ahead of Meet the Press.
The interview itself started without much spark, as host David Gregory teed Biden up to share the administration’s economic talking points before pivoting to Chinese human rights and briefly trying and failing to get Biden to engage on the ticket-switch rumors. It was only on his thirteenth question that Gregory asked the VP where he stood on same-sex marriage, and Biden parried it. “Look, I just think that—that the good news is that as more and more Americans come to understand what this is all about, it is a simple proposition. Who do you love? Who do you love?” he said. “And will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out, is what—what all marriages, at their root, are about, whether they’re marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals.”
Biden hadn’t really answered the question, but Gregory seemed to sense that he wanted to, and tried again. “Is that what you believe now?” he asked, and Biden quickly shot back: “That’s what I believe.” Gregory tried one more time, directly: “And you’re comfortable with same-sex marriage now?” Biden gave in. “Look, I am vice president of the United States of America, the president sets the policy,” he said, thinking back to Los Angeles. But “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction, beyond that.”
Neither of them seemed to recognize the monumental scale of the reveal in the moment, and Gregory plowed along, asking if the administration would formally back same-sex marriage in its second term. Biden again hesitated before Gregory said it sure seemed like that’s what Biden wanted. The VP now tried widening the lens, pointing out Obama’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal and his moves to ensure equal treatment for gay couples through executive orders. And—Why not?—he went for a broader cultural point, too. “When things really begin to change is when the social culture changes,” Biden said. “I think Will and Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far,” he continued, referring to a TV show featuring gay characters that had been off the air for six years. He then told the host about the kids at the fundraiser, at which point they moved on to other matters.
Walking away from the cameras a while later, Biden turned to an aide and revealed that one thing from the interview was bothering him. “Did I get the jobs numbers right?” he asked. He had, he was assured. His staff sent the transcript over to the West Wing without warning or comment, as always.
* * *
Plouffe was the first to internalize the transcript, and he called over Jack Lew, the chief of staff, to take a look, too. The West Wing fell silent as staffers double- and triple-checked Biden’s words before a shout rang out from Dan Pfeiffer’s office: “Will and Grace?!” The quiet broken, a disbelieving fury took its place, wedged in by Obama loyalists who suddenly let loose every last frustration they’d had with Biden: We can’t trust him to say his lines and he’s out of practice anyway, went the nice version. He’s ruined what should have been Obama’s historic moment because he can’t control his loud mouth, went the other. Both started and ended with What the fuck?
The elation that some staffers felt—the vice president had just endorsed marriage equality, which itself was a massive step—was drowned out in the moment by the political team’s anxiety. If the immediate frustration was with Biden’s freelancing, a secondary political concern soon stepped in. No one knew how this would play, and they hadn’t prepared to defend it or to back Biden up. A few people close to Obama himself and the heart of the political operation thought it was tantamount to a betrayal, an example of Biden trying to position himself in front of the president, and Plouffe started calling Obama staffers who’d worked closely with Biden to ask how they could have let their guy ruin the careful plan. This was the biggest concern. What was Obama supposed to do now? If he went along with his initial idea and held off for a few more weeks, he’d look like he was just following Biden.
Obama himself was never one for the drama in which some of his staffers seemed to revel. When Plouffe and Lew told him what had happened, he stayed calm: surely Biden just didn’t know about the rollout, he said. To Axelrod, he also urged that they all take a breath. “I’ll talk to Joe,” he said. “It was sloppy, but I can’t get mad at the guy for saying what he believes, and what’s in his heart. I’m not going to yell at him.” To everyone he repeated, with a shrug, “That’s Joe being Joe”—Obama had known what he’d signed up for four years earlier.
This was all fine to say out loud. It was probably the only thing he could say out loud. But Obama was, in fact, pissed that his planning had gone up in smoke, and then that Biden hadn’t even given him a heads-up after the interview, or called him once it was clear they had a problem. Biden, meanwhile, basked in the positive headlines but bridled when, within a few hours, he started to read reports that included blind quotes accusing him of making Obama look bad on purpose. When he next saw him in person, he apologized to Obama for putting him in that situation but asked what on earth was going on with all this knifing in the press? Obama acknowledged that his team was forced to do quite a bit of cleanup but said, “Well, Joe, you told me you weren’t going to wear any funny hats or change your brand.” All that mattered was that their relationship stayed intact, Obama said.
This much Obama and Biden both later told staffers, creating a public perception that their meeting was easy. But Obama had actually kept going. He knew Biden had been in the room for the meeting in which Obama had revealed to his team that he was going to announce his change of heart but insisted that they needed a careful plan, and he now told Biden he couldn’t believe the VP had put himself in front of their joint project. He had long since decided not to scold Biden every time he stepped out of line, so he left it there. But neither had much doubt after that lunch that this had been a serious bump in the road for them. Equally, though, neither had any doubt that Biden had been right.
* * *
That resolution only went so far. Obama still needed to figure out his own announcement, an imperative that grew more urgent in the ensuing days. Biden’s initial follow-up statement minimizing the differences between them—put out under pressure from the Obama side—did little to calm anyone down, and on the following Monday Arne Duncan, their education secretary, said during an interview that he, too, was for marriage equality, which in turn led to a barrage of questions about Obama’s stance for his press secretary, Jay Carney, at that day’s White House briefing. Carney, who’d prepared for the question, said he’d leave it to Obama to discuss his personal views. (This was all uncomfortable for Carney, too; he’d been Biden’s comms director first.)
Plenty of Obamans were annoyed with the pileup of negative coverage about the president—What was taking him so long?—and the next day North Carolinians voted by a wide margin to ban same-sex marriage in the state. At that point, Obama’s silence was becoming one of the biggest political stories in the country, a fairly excruciating diversion from his campaign’s brand-new relaunch. Pfeiffer and Plouffe set up the interview with Robin Roberts for that Wednesday.
The staff exhaled only when Obama got to the immediately televised point: “I had hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought civil unions would be sufficient. That was something that would give people hospital visitation rights and other elements that we take for granted. And I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, you know, the word ‘marriage’ was something that evokes very powerful traditions, religious beliefs, and so forth,” he said. But, he continued, having gotten to know so many same-sex couples who still felt constrained, “I’ve just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” He immediately cautioned that he’d been hesitant to weigh in because he thought adding his voice often made issues hyperpolitical—as if this one wasn’t already—and that he thought it appropriate that the matter be resolved at the state level. Yet as far as his political team was concerned, the saga was over. In Chicago, his fundraising staff soon reported its best day for online donations of the entire year. The campaign’s leadership had banned them from raising money off Biden’s announcement.
In Washington, though, a new coolness set in between some of Obama’s loyalists and Biden’s aides, some of them no longer getting invites to regular White House staff meetings. Even the VP himself noticed when, despite being under the impression that he was supposed to be a leading voice on the reelection campaign as an attack dog against Romney, his public schedule was cut back for a few weeks.
From then on, he rarely brought any of this up with colleagues. But in private, in his innermost inner circle, he was still proud, no matter how uncomfortable he’d made Obama. Once some of the dust had settled, he and Beau sat down in front of a TV and together rewatched the interview over and over, to marvel at what he’d done.
* * *
Biden wasn’t exactly worried about repeating 2008, but by the time he and Obama were both campaigning regularly for reelection that summer, he knew enough about the president to know that his own influence—internally, with negotiating partners, and as far as the public was concerned—was dependent on the health of their relationship. And he knew enough about that relationship to know that meant he needed face time. Their lunches were where they’d become friends, their daily hours of briefings where they’d become partners. So no one on his senior team was surprised when Biden pulled them aside soon after Romney finally won the GOP nomination and gave them a set of specific instructions. Make sure you know exactly what Obama’s schedule looks like, he said. If he’s out campaigning three days a week and back in DC for the other four, I want to do the same—I want to be in town whenever he is. Biden knew he couldn’t be the last guy in the room for the president if he was always calling in from Orlando or Reno, and he knew it was on him to make sure he kept that status.
Biden was less worried about the campaign’s big-picture strategy sessions, which were held monthly first in Chicago and then, after a while, in the White House. For one thing, those were often just used to share operational updates. For another, Mike Donilon was now a fully equal member of the team, giving Biden an important in for this go-round. What he didn’t know for a while was that plenty of the real strategic discussions were happening on Saturdays, when Messina, Axelrod, and Cutter would fly to DC to meet privately with Obama. The very existence of the meetings was news to him when he read about them in the press one day over the summer, at which point he asked Obama what was going on. Obama, who had little patience for this kind of insecurity, brushed him off: Jim just comes by, it’s not formal, he said. This wasn’t totally true, which Biden quickly figured out, and he started joining, too.
No one thought twice about this, though, since it actually did make sense to have him there. If 2008 had been a campaign largely about Obama, the intervening years of economic trouble had made politics in 2012 an exercise in demonstrating understanding to struggling voters, and the Democratic brain trust, led by the president, now saw Biden as at least a stylistic match, especially for white voters in the upper Midwest and transplants to Florida who’d soured a bit on Obama and his perceived elitism, or at least distance, but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Republican. In practice, that meant Biden would be deployed to do local interviews and intimate events in parts of those states where Obama would likely lose, but where the idea was keeping the margin of loss small while the president tried running up the score with bigger rallies in the more liberal and diverse population centers. No one was talking about voter microtargeting on Facebook here—they were speaking Biden’s language. As Biden’s team came to think of it, Obama would take Cleveland, and they’d take Chillicothe, a small city in south-central Ohio.
Another aspect of the functional division of labor was that Biden would do the stuff Obama didn’t want to, even when it meant the VP would go deep on matters he hadn’t actually had a direct hand in to make the case for his boss. He loved using a statistic that their Ohio state director Greg Schultz had puzzled together, pointing out on the trail that one in eight jobs in the state existed because of the auto industry—which the administration had saved. His favorite line on the stump was made famous at the convention in Charlotte in September, when with obvious devotion he spoke at length about Obama’s leadership: “Because of all the actions he took, because of the calls he made, because of the determination of American workers and the unparalleled bravery of our special forces, we can now proudly say what you’ve heard me say the last six months: Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive!” Rarely did anyone stop to point out that Biden had been the strongest voice urging caution about the bin Laden raid and that he hadn’t exactly been the face of the auto rescue.
This all worked because Obama implicitly trusted Biden while he himself was so focused on Romney. As he read more about the man, he grew to seriously dislike Romney and came to consider him a wooden version of Ronald Reagan reincarnate. As such, Obama had little interest in the minor parade of gaffes Biden began dropping as the campaign grew repetitive in the late summer, only letting himself become mildly exasperated—not outright frustrated—with the reports, which felt like they came in once a week. For one thing, Romney was proving plenty adept at sticking his own foot in his mouth, usually making himself look forehead-slappingly out of touch. (At one stop in economically struggling Detroit in February, he’d first bizarrely said he liked being in Michigan because “the trees are the right height,” and then, in the same paragraph, revealed that his wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.”) The Bidenisms only caused real headaches, anyway, when Romney and the Republicans tried using them to drive wedges between Obama and his core groups of voters, and they only came close to succeeding in doing so once, when the VP told a largely Black crowd in Danville, Virginia, that Romney’s deregulatory agenda would “let the big banks once again write their own rules—unchain Wall Street.” With those policies, he added, “they’re going to put you all back in chains.” Still, even with such an egregious misstep—an apparent invocation of slavery—there was little the Obama team could do but ride out the negative press and not schedule events for Biden in Virginia for a while. No one was going to force him back on a teleprompter at this point.
