The Long Alliance, page 35
Biden kept in regular touch with Jones as his race unfolded, telling him he thought the state—which hadn’t elected a Democratic senator in decades—had a chance to redeem its soul and asking about how influential Trump was on the ground against Jones’s offer of hope and his promise to avoid the national political back-and-forth. To Biden, the race was a simulacrum of the overall national picture, even though Alabama was far more conservative than the country at large. When Jones narrowly won, Biden told the new senator and his friends that his moderation and promise of steady leadership had fine-tuned a formula for victory. Lamb soon used it, too.
Biden always denied that his interest had anything to do with 2020, but as the Jones race unfolded he also stepped up his casual check-ins with allies in battleground states like Florida, asking increasingly pointed questions about local dynamics in the ensuing months. By the time Lamb won, heralding a possibly big year for Democrats in November’s midterms, Biden was reconnecting with a handful of the party’s leading donors through his new PAC, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg, hedge fund manager James Simons, and Meg Whitman, the former Hewlett-Packard executive and Republican gubernatorial candidate in California. He also started handing out one of a trio of books to people, including possible future supporters, who he thought might be interested. One, White Working Class by Joan C. Williams, was about finding empathy for, or at least understanding of, that group of people so often dismissed by liberals in the days after Trump’s win. Another, How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, spoke for itself. So did the third, which came with a title that would seem familiar if you’d been listening at all to Biden in recent months: Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America, a history of American challenges and how hope won out each time.
* * *
Much of the liberal angst over Obama’s relative silence—he wasn’t fundraising enough! Why wouldn’t he say more about Trump?!—faded as the midterms approached and the party’s best campaigner first endorsed vast swaths of candidates up and down the ballot and then returned to the trail to boost Democrats and expose his successor’s failings. He was surprised by the appetite for his help.
Biden, meanwhile, never doubted that his endorsement would be in high demand, even though in reality this was because he was viewed by many middle-of-the-road Democratic candidates as an undoubtedly popular but mostly harmless elder statesman, not a dynamo or a particularly influential name to put in their ads. Still, he saw in the promising midterms an obvious opportunity to highlight the political versatility he still felt—his team searched for a diverse group of endorsees all around the country—and to make a point about the moderates’ role as the heart of the party, even with progressive energy surging.
Sometimes Biden’s decisions about who to back were emotional and intense. When he met with James Smith, the South Carolina legislator who’d been trying to convince him to run for president for years, Biden insisted Smith had to run for governor in 2018. Biden told him he and Jill believed in Smith, and the state senator thanked him for taking the time, as if to end the meeting for Biden’s benefit. (Surely he had other places to be?) The ex-VP grew agitated. “Come on, man!” he said. “Wait a minute! I’m your friend! That’s ridiculous! We’re going to do this together!” They talked the race through for another half hour. Other decisions were more strategically careful, especially after Biden sat down with John Anzalone, Obama and Hillary Clinton’s old pollster, in the fall of 2018 to talk through what he was seeing. Anzalone focused especially on three of his gubernatorial clients—Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Steve Sisolak in Nevada, and Fred Hubbell in Iowa—and told Biden each of those pragmatist Democrats had a chance to prove there was a moderate path to victory in important states after beating lefty primary opponents. They also highlighted the gap between real voters’ preferences and insiders’ and activists’ beliefs about what voters needed.
Meanwhile, Biden was using the tour for his new book about 2015, Promise Me, Dad, to test if he could still handle the travel and constant attention he’d need to endure if he was going to seriously approach another campaign. He quickly grew exhausted but was buoyed at each stop by the diversity—of age, sex, and ethnicity—in his crowds, and he invariably walked off the stage after his emotionally draining appearances and nodded smilingly to his aides, as if to say, “You see that? I’ve still got it.” He extended the book tour, and then did it again, keeping the swing going on and off for over a year.
But it was on this tour that he was also bluntly reminded that 2020’s race was already starting to unfold, and that he better hurry up and make some plans if he was serious about it. Before one stop at the University of Montana in Missoula, he sat for thirty minutes with Steve Bullock, the governor who was thinking of running for president as a Bill Clinton–like consensus-maker from a red state. Bullock had been friendly with Beau, thanks to their shared time as attorneys general, and now Biden listened as he said he figured he had something to offer in the race, even though Biden was leading in the way-too-early polling of the theoretical field. Biden was encouraging and told Bullock to make sure his family was ready for the grind of the campaign, but he ended the meeting with a friendly warning: he was still expecting to run if he didn’t think anyone else could win. Bullock wasn’t the only one to hear this message. As he traveled the country Biden had the same conversation with Ohio congressman Tim Ryan and Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti.
Still, Biden didn’t appreciate the wall of skepticism he was about to hit. As sure as he was that he was going to run and should be considered the front-runner, most of his party’s leading lights were equally convinced he wouldn’t go through with it. For one thing, there was the inescapable matter of his age. Sure, Sanders was a year older, but Biden had physically slowed visibly since leaving office, speaking more slowly and less precisely, even though he was still mentally as sharp as ever. He would be seventy-eight when inaugurated, which would make him the oldest president ever to assume the office, and the topic of age and lucidity was a live one with someone as erratic as Trump in power. (One bizarre quirk of presidential history: Trump, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush were all born in summer 1946. Biden was four years older.) Even if he could surpass that concern, there were immediate practical ones to consider. For one, he hadn’t run a presidential campaign of his own since 2008, and that one had been a disaster. Campaign technology had transformed completely even since then, and he hardly had a state-of-the-art digital or data team surrounding him, though he was slowly trying to change that. One of his leading moneymen marveled in 2018 that his children had shown him that campaigns could raise serious money online now. This would’ve been news to a properly plugged-in Democrat a decade and a half earlier.
This was all before you even considered the state of the party itself—and whether Biden was in step with its modern incarnation at all. When he’d appeared for Jones in Birmingham in 2017, Biden had grown nostalgic for his early days in the Senate. Back then, he said, “the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists. You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.” Speaking for plenty of baffled liberals, longtime blogger and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas responded in the New Republic, “If Biden’s solution to eight years of Republican obstruction and conservative slash-and-burn tactics against him and Barack Obama is to talk about ‘bipartisanship’ and ‘consensus,’ then he might as well pack up and go home. Because if he’s that stupid to believe that shit, then he’s no longer got any business being in the public face.” The awkward thing for Biden was that it wasn’t just progressives who were eager for new blood. Third Way, the centrist Democratic think tank, didn’t even think to invite him to their big 2018 conference aiming to chart a path to 2020 and find an acceptable candidate; a number of Biden’s allies were there but the group’s leaders instead invited younger pols like Tim Ryan and spent their time trying to woo former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu.
Biden started to grasp the depth of doubt that fall and resolved to use the final stretch before midterm election day to dispel some concerns and to solidify his role as the party’s top public counterweight to Trump. In the final weeks, he scheduled far more events for Democratic candidates than any other potential 2020 contender, making an extra point of visiting House districts in out-of-the-way suburbs to prove his value in areas that had been swinging in recent presidential elections. This was on top of the expected visits to traditional battlegrounds like Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin, and, of course, Pennsylvania. And he made sure to spend extra time and energy on behalf of candidates in Missouri and North Dakota—two red states—to clear up any doubt that he was the Democratic surrogate who could go where no other could due to his popularity and crossover appeal. The effort outstripped that of his closest theoretical competitors. Sanders traveled plenty, too, for example, but seldom to the most competitive areas, where many competitive swing-district candidates were spooked by his uncompromising leftism.
Biden spent election night glued to his phone, as usual. Monitoring the results from the rented home in McLean, he talked to most of the candidates he’d campaigned for, and plenty he didn’t, either to congratulate or console them, or just to catch up. This time felt better than 2016 had in part because Democrats were winning big, at least in local races and in the House.
But it was also because of a refrain he kept hearing, and not always from the most expected sources. At one point he connected with Mitt Romney, who’d been easily elected to the Senate that night as a rare Trump-opposing Republican. They were warm as Biden cheered Romney’s win. Then Obama’s old rival got to the point: You have to run, Romney said.
CHAPTER 17
2018–2019
Doug Jones visited Biden at the ex-VP’s rented office in DC a few months after he became a senator. Biden had been hosting a stream of visitors throughout 2018, showing off his view of the Capitol and musing about his next moves. He caught Jones up on his latest thinking, and asked how he was experiencing the party’s leftward sprint, which, aside from Trump, was the talk of the town. Twice, Biden threw off the pace of the conversation by insisting “I’m pretty liberal on this” about policy decisions Jones was working through. The third time, Jones interrupted him. “You need to get out a little more,” the Alabaman said with a grin. “Because in this world, you’re not a liberal anymore.”
Biden thought it was funny, but by that point his confidence about his place in the political landscape was at an all-time high, even amid the unrelenting commentary about a progressive takeover. For months, Biden made a practice of waving around a printed-out report that John Anzalone had put together for him making the case that he was the most popular Democrat still on the scene among a wide group of Americans (“I’m more popular with women than Hillary was!”) and that with Trump bulldozing his way around the world, voters were putting a premium on experience. A few months later, in the wake of the successful midterm elections, the pollster wrote another presentation for Biden. This one, which was also designed to allay Jill’s latest fears that maybe another run wasn’t a good idea, laid out the beginnings of an argument about how Biden might win a crowded presidential primary. It focused on how different 2020 was looking from 2016, particularly because even Sanders’s voters thought favorably of Biden, unlike their feelings about Clinton. He followed up with one more deck aimed at dousing BidenWorld’s fears that the party really was undergoing a lefty-led revolution that would leave Biden behind, especially after a charismatic and media-savvy twenty-nine-year-old ex-Sanders volunteer named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez instantly became one of the most recognizable Democrats by upsetting leading House member Joe Crowley in a Bronx-and-Queens-area primary. Anzalone’s upshot: real voters in politically important parts of the country weren’t as interested in this story line of progressive ascension as the DC media was.
The view from Biden’s Constitution Avenue office, however, was only drifting further from the elite consensus that was felt by many professional Democrats and expressed spikily in the press. In December Frank Bruni wrote in the Times that Biden’s boosters were “of unsound mind” because they believed in “a man who failed miserably at two previous campaigns for the nomination, the first one all the way back in 1988, a year before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born,” and who “spent nearly forty-five years in Washington, a proper noun that’s a dirty word in presidential politics.” (He softened the blow by titling the column, “I Like Joe Biden. I Urge Him Not to Run.”) This wasn’t long after Politico Magazine had called Biden “a deeply flawed candidate who’s out of step with the mood of his party” (Headline: “Joe Biden Is the Front-runner. Uh-oh.”) and soon before Mehdi Hasan argued in The Intercept that Biden would be “an utter disaster both as the Democratic nominee and as president” because of his “shocking inability (refusal?) to see that Trump is a symptom of longstanding Republican nihilism and derangement—not the cause of it.”
Unprinted opinions were harsher. Though Biden’s possible rivals could also see that he was leading the early polls before anyone had even announced his or her candidacy, they were convinced this was simply a product of nostalgia and Biden’s name recognition, and that his standing would slip dramatically as soon as others started introducing themselves, let alone attacking him. Versions of “the first day of his candidacy would be his best” became a common refrain in Democratic circles, as did reminders that no modern Democrat had won the presidency if they’d run before, and that one obvious and related takeaway from the midterms was the party’s appetite for new faces.
In response, Biden got both atypically philosophical and predictably defensive. He still believed his go-to aphorism that “in politics you’re either on your way up or on your way down,” and he had no interest in losing a messy primary only to feel sidelined again in the general election before being forced into retirement. But he had experienced enough real, personal grief for multiple lifetimes; he was, by the end of 2018, a seventy-six-year-old with the weight of not just two failed presidential campaigns but four agonizing near-campaigns under his belt already. It wasn’t political loss that worried him. He knew the territory. He disagreed with the prevailing analysis, anyway—he believed Trump, his own profile, and the emerging shape of the primary combined to render comparisons to 1988 or 2008 fatuous.
He kept hearing from people who agreed, and some of them might be legitimately useful allies to have. Biden and Ricchetti both kept in touch regularly with Harry Reid, who was retired in Las Vegas but still in control of his state party’s political machinery and holding some power over their influential caucuses. Soon after the midterms Biden also caught up for forty minutes over the phone with Harold Schaitberger, whose firefighters’ union had boosted Biden in 2015 by effectively unendorsing Clinton. Schaitberger told him he couldn’t promise an endorsement this time before his group went through its formal process, but that he had no doubt his members would be with the ex-VP from Day One. When Brendan Boyle, a young Philadelphia-area congressman, soon visited Biden in DC for what was supposed to be a thirty-minute drop-in, he pointed out that history since the 1970s showed that Democratic primaries tend to be won by the candidate who best appeals to working-class voters, both Black and white. The only time progressive intellectuals got their pick was in 2008, he continued, but that was because African American voters had also backed Obama. Biden, Boyle said, fit the winning mold and could win back Pennsylvania, while all his likely opponents were too much like failed candidates Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, or Howard Dean.
Biden nodded along as the meeting galloped toward an hour and perked up when Boyle took a step back and warned that a second Trump term would transform the country into something different from the one their Irish ancestors had come to. These bigger-picture appeals were what really stuck with Biden, even when they came from old friends who were themselves no longer relevant politically. He was especially heartened by encouragement from Bill Nelson, who’d lost his Florida Senate seat in November after a campaign rife with veiled accusations about his own advanced age and fitness for office. (Nelson was only two months older than Biden.)
And yet Biden wasn’t really moving forward. He told Boyle in December that he was 60 percent of the way to running, then proceeded to blow through multiple self-imposed deadlines by which to make a final decision as 2019 neared. First it was “by the end of the year,” then “around January first,” then “after the holidays,” before, in December, he said he’d decide “in six weeks to two months,” and people close to him started wondering if he wouldn’t be wise to wait until after the first quarter of 2019 to avoid fundraising comparisons to other candidates who might launch then with more online fanfare and better preparation. It quickly became exhausting both to members of his inner circle who were readying a campaign and to potential hires, plenty of whom backed out of assumed jobs with a campaign that showed no signs of launching, leaving Biden without staffers lined up in strategically necessary states. On days when Biden sounded like he was 75 percent of the way there, he would talk to advisors and potential donors about how ready he was to squash Trump’s ideology; on days when it was more like 25 percent he still sounded worried about whether he was making the right decision, since he risked sacrificing his role as beloved elder statesman and making his final career chapter a depressing failure rather than the triumph of the Obama years. He knew a primary would be bruising even if he won it, and that he’d almost certainly have to answer for his former bank-friendly position on bankruptcy policy and his role in the Anita Hill hearings. He also clearly couldn’t avoid a public reevaluation of his 1994 crime bill, widely regarded as the source of disproportionate incarceration rates of Black Americans and one of Sanders’s favorite punching bags. Biden had no doubt he was ready to meet the moment. But had the moment already left him behind?
