The Long Alliance, page 37
Obama was particularly certain that Biden and his advisors simply didn’t understand internet-era campaigning, and he and his own aides remained especially unimpressed by a series of self-consciously corny tweets Biden’s staff had been sending every once in a while from his official account depicting a pair of children’s friendship bracelets reading JOE and BARACK. There were obvious political dynamics to consider, too: Obama knew well, and often repeated, that no Democrat older than fifty-five had been elected to the presidency in six decades. And though Obama remained skeptical of Sanders’s wing of the party, he had no doubt about it being where the energy was. So wouldn’t Biden quickly be exposed as out of touch? When Obama bounced these notions off his advisors, no one disagreed.
What occupied him more, though, was Joe himself. Obama had thought his old VP seemed tired ever since they’d first caught up after leaving office, and the prospect of him going through a draining campaign seemed unthinkably painful. His concern was reputational, too. Obama figured that if Biden’s campaign failed, which seemed likely, the former VP’s legacy and ultimately his memory would be painted by that embarrassment—as would Obama’s. Wouldn’t he want to go out on top, with the public’s final memory of him more “Medal of Freedom” than “1 percent in Iowa”? The problem, as Obama saw it, was that he couldn’t say anything like this to Biden himself, not after the way 2016 had ended. Biden hadn’t forgotten their searing White House chat about how Biden wanted to spend the rest of his life, even though Obama didn’t resurface it. Surely Obama couldn’t bring the topic back up, he felt. He could tell Biden was still sure that he could have saved the country from Trump had his personal circumstances been different in 2015—and had Obama, and especially his political advisors, just gotten out of his way.
As a result, Obama felt his hands were tied. He was left sitting in his office quietly, wondering if maybe some other candidate would catch enough fire before Biden even launched to dissuade him from trying.
So when they finally started talking about it outright, Obama’s message was crafted to be caring, not calculating, even if his hope to convince Biden was obvious to the ex-VP. Obama asked Biden if he thought he really wanted to go through with a campaign, since he really didn’t have to. You don’t have anything left to prove, he insisted, trying not to make it seem like he was strong-arming Biden out of running so much as hoping to provide him with breathing room to make the correct decision away from the heat of the political moment. Obama outlined his worries about Biden’s legacy and emotions—he just didn’t want to see him get hurt, he said—but Biden had no trouble decoding Obama, and stood fast. He wasn’t going to go through this again. He had a chance to remove Trump from office, he said, and simply couldn’t abide passing that up.
* * *
Late in January 2019, Biden pulled Obama’s old friend and advisor Al Sharpton aside for a gut-check. He was in New York City for the reverend’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast event, and, standing in the green room before his speech with Sharpton and Martin Luther King III, he started talking solemnly about Charlottesville, then said he was thinking about running. Sharpton replied by posing Obama’s question more directly than the president had. “You have to make up your mind: Do you really want it?” he asked Biden. “Because right now you’ll go down in history as the vice president at an epochal moment. Do you want to risk that if you lose?” Biden seemed unfazed. Sharpton was right, he said, “But we’ve got to do something about the direction of the country.” He’d started repeating this point whenever anyone asked him about 2020, and soon added an addendum: he would happily step aside if he was given reason to believe any of his prospective competitors could actually beat Trump.
To Biden, Trump was a monster with one special political power: defining people, especially enemies, in the public eye. That meant it would take someone with a precemented reputation to take Trump on, he figured, and his advisors were starting to believe the primary itself would be shaped by the question of who seemed best positioned to win the general election. So sure, Biden was as impressed as anyone by Buttigieg, but he also thought everyone was kidding themselves. The guy had gotten destroyed in the piddling race for DNC chair in 2017, so how was he going to be the party’s presidential nominee? And Beto? He was good, but he lost his Senate race to Ted Cruz, the most hated senator around. Plus, Biden suspected O’Rourke had thrown the race away by refusing to hire a pollster. What was the realistic case for Booker? Warren? Harris? During the midterms Biden had pitched himself as the guy best positioned to excite Obama-missing liberals while winning back former Democrats who’d gone for Trump, and he proposed to do the same now for a national audience by focusing on the fight for the soul of the nation while his opponents waged a different, smaller battle for their party’s heart.
He no longer thought he had good arguments not to do it, and he started telling confidants that he felt called to run as he finally began building out a full-size team under Greg Schultz. He just had to make a few fundamental decisions, like whether he should heed the unsolicited and mostly unwelcome advice he’d been getting from some quarters and announce preemptively that he’d only serve for one term, promising to retire at eighty-two. It was worth discussing, he supposed, but he mostly hated the notion. Or maybe he should announce a running mate from Day One to get buzz and distract from his age, an updated version of his briefly considered 2007 ploy for attention. Without even telling him, some of his allies zeroed in on Stacey Abrams, the dynamic speaker and voting rights crusader who’d nearly become the country’s first Black woman governor in November 2018. But Biden hadn’t changed, so of course he just kept the idea vaguely alive, but unaddressed, long enough for it to fizzle.
* * *
And then Obama did something uncharacteristic. He ever so briefly got excited. As spring 2019 approached and dozens of candidates kept piling into the race, he finally conceded that there were no two ways around it: Biden really was going to run, and if that was going to happen, Obama at least wanted to know what his friend, the man who had some claim to his record, was up to. The problem was that Biden’s launch looked like it was happening in slow motion, so Obama summoned Anita Dunn to the West End and asked her to bring the people in charge of Biden’s comms and digital operations.
When Dunn and Bedingfield arrived with a pair of midlevel aides it quickly became apparent that their job was to reassure the ex-president. Obama opened the meeting by laying out his worries: the political environment was brutal these days, so he wanted to make sure Biden’s image would be protected aggressively in what was likely to be his final act as a public servant. Obama had an hour marked off on his calendar for the session, and he launched into a back-and-forth with Dunn and Bedingfield. He asked for details: What would the kickoff look like, and how were they planning to make the case for Biden? They explained that the idea was to argue that Biden was the “antidote” to Trump, to which Obama replied that they might still run into problems with the party’s progressives on big issues like immigration, where activists had sometimes clashed with their administration. Dunn and Bedingfield agreed, and admitted that their challenge would be to present Biden as a change agent after his long, well-documented career. After two hours Obama was more satisfied but he made sure his visitors understood that if this all unraveled they wouldn’t be disappointing just Biden, they’d be letting Obama down, too.
A less diplomatic staff-to-staff conversation followed. Obama had already explained to Biden his reasoning for staying away from an endorsement, and Eric Schultz had been keeping in touch with Bedingfield and others as a general quality-control check on Obama’s behalf and to coordinate their message as journalists wrote about the Obama-Biden relationship ahead of the campaign launch. Now they just had to work out the nuts and bolts of how Biden could talk about Obama in public, a politically fraught proposition for the pair that was outwardly insisting there was no substantive distance between them, even as Obama withheld his endorsement, and even as Biden’s verbal discipline showed no signs of improving. They settled on a plan to hand the 2012 campaign’s email list over to Biden and to have Obama’s spokeswoman Katie Hill issue a rare statement praising Biden once he launched his campaign—something no other candidate got. Biden, in turn, would be free to invoke Obama as he made nostalgic appeals and discussed their record, but he had to be vigilant about not implying that he had his ex-boss’s support. He could use video and images of them, too—everyone knew he would obviously deploy the emotional Medal of Freedom speech prominently, considering how he still talked about what “we” had accomplished and even used Obama’s signature walk-up music at his appearances during the midterms—but only if the clips and pictures were already publicly available and unaltered.
Both Obama and Biden signed off on the plan, and Biden started talking differently about Obama in private, clearly chuffed to be back in more frequent contact and thrilled to be working on something like a joint project with him again—so much so that a few times during planning sessions in Delaware he ostentatiously started to describe conversations he’d had with “Barack—I mean President Obama” only to cut himself off and say, “actually, I’ll keep that between us.”
But the flurry of activity had the opposite impact on Obama, who felt himself getting dangerously close to straying from his long-held insistence on not weighing in on intraparty fights. He was also running up against his revulsion at becoming a political football if the extent of this coordination leaked. He and his team pulled back a bit to maintain neutrality, and the calls slowed back to a trickle. When asked, they offered an explanation that could easily have been read as a rationalization: Obama wouldn’t be doing Biden any favors by putting his finger on the scale for him. Biden would emerge stronger if he did it alone.
* * *
Biden’s slowly growing political team figured this wasn’t much of a problem, at least to start, since while his ties to Obama were an important part of his support levels among Black voters especially, research undertaken separately by Anzalone and fellow pollster Celinda Lake showed most Americans had little grasp of what, exactly, he’d done as VP. Anyway, the shape of his appeal was fundamentally different from what Obama’s had been. He struggled with younger voters but did better with old ones, especially white ones, and was more convincing when he leaned on his empathy rather than messaging about making change. He could talk about Obama plenty, but he couldn’t run as an Obama retread even if he wanted to.
Instead, he set out in the early spring to gather an arsenal of endorsers for a show of force to present himself as the party’s juggernaut. He tried recruiting Terry McAuliffe, the ex–Virginia governor and DNC chair who was considering a run of his own, to lead his fundraising efforts. He asked Reid for his support, as he also wooed House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, the most influential Democrat in South Carolina, and labor leaders like AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. That this approach smacked of old-school, antiquated campaigning (“That’s so Hillary,” said one Obama friend, sighing) wasn’t as troubling to Biden’s supporters as the fact that almost none of his top targets signed on, with the exception of Schaitberger’s firefighters.
And, as always, Biden’s family loomed larger than his underwhelming political maneuvering. He’d been trying to keep the latest painful developments extraquiet, even as far as Obama was concerned. Kathleen and Hunter had split in 2016 as his drug use and infidelity spiraled following Beau’s death, and for a while he and Hallie, Beau’s widow, then became a couple. Joe Biden only found out when the New York Post’s Page Six started sniffing around, and he and Jill issued a quick statement professing to be happy for them without mentioning Kathleen—an omission that offended her friends, a group that still included Michelle Obama. The intervening years hadn’t been much better for Hunter, whom Biden had trouble contacting for days at a time until he checked into rehab in February 2019. That didn’t take, though, and Hunter grew furious and bolted from Wilmington when Joe and Jill then tried holding an intervention for him a few weeks later.
It was within these unsettled waters that Biden approached his campaign launch in fits and starts, first considering kicking off with a rally in either Scranton, Pittsburgh, Gettysburg (Donilon’s favored option), or Charlottesville, which seemed like a natural fit. Quickly, though, the inner circle second-guessed itself: Could they be certain neo-Nazi protesters wouldn’t show up if he appeared there? He couldn’t pop up in town and film an announcement video unnoticed, could he? (No.) They finally settled on a video about Charlottesville, in which Biden insisted, “I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all that he embraces as an aberrant moment in time,” before an informal kickoff at a union hall in Pittsburgh and then a bigger rally in Philadelphia meant to hammer home his message of unity and his intention to vanquish Trump’s ideology. Biden was rusty overlooking the crowd of about six thousand, which was significant in size but still noticeably smaller than the opening audiences drawn by some of his competitors. A chair that had been reserved for Hunter remained empty. But Biden hit his stride when he brought up Obama as a contrast to Trump. “Barack Obama is an extraordinary man, I watched up close, his character, his courage, his vision. He was a president our children could, and did, look up to,” he said while pitching himself as the natural next step, earning his biggest applause of the afternoon whenever Obama’s name was mentioned.
It didn’t take long before Biden’s team rolled out a video featuring the Medal of Freedom ceremony, after briefly considering using it as the launch clip. By then Biden’s campaign Instagram accounts featured the pair laughing together, and Obama’s face peppered his Facebook ads, too. This was just days after Biden had laughed off a reporter’s question about his ideology by replying, “I’m an Obama-Biden Democrat, man.”
Obama, all the while, stayed silent, even when Biden insisted to his press pack at Wilmington’s Amtrak station, “I asked President Obama not to endorse,” before slipping over his own words. “He doesn’t want to—this—we should—whoever wins this nomination should win it on their own merits.” Watching from Washington, Obama couldn’t help but laugh.
CHAPTER 18
2019
Obama told anyone who asked that he wasn’t following the primary that closely: He’d tune in fully when the general election came around, but he had better things to do than dedicate himself to the daily back-and-forth until then, and he wasn’t about to start watching cable news again after avoiding it for years. This was true in spirit, and the explanation usually worked. Friends tended to change the subject after they invariably shared their own punditry and realized it was futile to try to get his take. It was also true that the ex-president wasn’t exactly setting his schedule around the never-ending parade of debates. But it might have been hard to find anyone who was reading the Times’ coverage more closely on their iPad every day, or who was quicker with an eye roll and an exhaled “this is a shitshow” whenever he did walk by a TV that an aide had tuned to CNN in the office.
Part of the problem was that the candidates weren’t letting him ignore them. At one early debate both Julián Castro and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio laid into his administration’s record of deporting undocumented immigrants, and Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard argued that his signature health-care law had been written by “big insurance companies and big pharmaceutical companies who’ve been profiting off the backs of sick people”—an especially inflammatory version of an argument that others were implicitly making: Obama’s approach to health care had been too conservative, and perhaps this was true for plenty of other matters, too. Obama’s allies were outraged. DNC chief Tom Perez told some of the candidates they were being idiots and, considering how popular Obama still was, alienating the party’s most important voters. At home in Kalorama, Obama didn’t let Castro, de Blasio, or Gabbard offend him personally. They didn’t matter; they clearly had no shot at winning.
What bothered him more was the direction of the overall conversation, especially as Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal became a focal point of debate, and the ACA came in for hours of sidelong but nonetheless nationally broadcast pokes. Obama was encouraged by the energy coursing through the contest but couldn’t see how any of this talk was particularly productive toward the end goal of beating Trump. He started conceding to confidants that he was still unimpressed with the field, unconvinced that any of the Democrats were proving they could win. And though some of them—Harris, Buttigieg, O’Rourke, and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar included—called him every once in a while for general advice, they almost never had specific questions that might actually help them, and he couldn’t figure out why. It also didn’t help that his thoughts on the primary were proceeding on two separate tracks. The first was broad: Is anything happening that will hurt the eventual nominee, no matter who it ends up being? The second was more directed: What’s going on with Joe?
The answer to the latter question was even less encouraging by summertime 2019, when the debates began. Due to the sheer size of the field, the candidates split into two separate nights for the first showdown in Miami, and Biden was randomly put on the second stage. He was still the national polling leader by a wide margin, but few of his opponents or analysts in the press—or Obama—had seen any reason to revise their dim view of his prospects in the campaign’s opening months. So when the first ten candidates squared off, not one even mentioned the theoretical front-runner’s name. As far as they were concerned, it wasn’t worth it—Biden was still a popular enough guy that attacking him might backfire among rank-and-file voters. But that’s all he was; no one saw him as their biggest real long-term threat. It seemed so likely that he would soon fade from relevance that they could simply wait for his supporters to drift away from him without going to the trouble of even alluding to him.
