The Long Alliance, page 40
Biden believed it, so he never budged from his demand to always be talking about presidential policy, no matter how far he seemed from the Oval to commentators and rivals, and no matter what else was going on in the political world. He just didn’t see the point of chatting about attack ads or impeachment votes, and definitely not precinct strategy, at this point. He’d listened as his advisors debated—then ditched—the idea of skipping Iowa altogether when it looked especially forbidding, and he’d chosen to ignore the mixed messaging they were sending out about the state’s importance to him, buying into Ricchetti’s belief in the final weeks that he really could win it. He’d even brushed it off when he learned that John Kerry had been overheard the day before the early February caucuses musing about jumping into the race himself to stop Sanders. (The former secretary of state insisted he’d been misheard, and that he still fully believed in the ex-VP.) Why would Biden want to get caught up in it all? If things really were going so poorly around him—poorly enough to unravel his final bout of presidential ambition—well, they’d see about that when the voting started. That would be a conversation for after Iowa. Even on the eve of the caucuses, his final opportunity to sprint around the state lining up potential voters after a year of mad campaigning, he watched the Super Bowl with about a dozen friends from the Senate and his many campaigns, only wanting to discuss the importance of passing infrastructure legislation, branding it well, and selling it around the country.
It wasn’t until late on caucus night that it was no longer possible to deny that something was clearly going wrong. Reality flooded in: Biden was completely unprepared for this precise political moment. He sat at the hotel, surrounded by Ricchetti, Schultz, Bedingfield, and a rotating cast of family members, as the numbers sputtered in slowly, too slowly, and rumors started flying that the software used for reporting the results wasn’t working, so no one could trust what they were seeing on TV or Twitter.
And surely it wasn’t working, because Biden’s numbers looked terrible. He wasn’t just not winning, he was well behind Sanders. And also well behind Buttigieg. And he was trailing Warren. Impossibly, he was in a close race for fourth—fourth!—with Amy Klobuchar. (Amy Klobuchar?!) He sat there as the campaign team dialed into conference calls about how to make a legal challenge to the results because of the vote-counting disaster, and then, slowly, he agreed that he’d have to say something that night to reassure his voters, even though he still didn’t know what the hell was happening. But his family was running all over the place, and he wouldn’t leave the suite without all the grandkids, and he couldn’t find one of them, and before he knew it there was Klobuchar on TV effectively acting like she was declaring victory. (What?!) Only then did he get in front of a mic. He promised, unconvincingly, “Folks! Well, it looks like it’s going to be a long night, but I’m feeling good.”
He couldn’t know it then, and he couldn’t know it when his general counsel that night sent the party a stern letter demanding “full explanations and relevant information regarding the methods of quality control you are employing, and an opportunity to respond, before any official results are released.” But the caucus-tallying software’s implosion saved him. It had stolen the spotlight.
The numbers, after all, were right, even though they took forever to add up. If the system hadn’t fallen apart that night, it sure seemed like all anyone would have been talking about was how Biden, the national front-runner and elder statesman—the beloved nostalgic hawking a return to the calm, comforting Obama years—had somehow limped into fourth place, destroyed by a socialist and a mayor half his age and beaten even by the person he’d once wanted as his Number Two.
* * *
There was no good way to spin it when Biden and his campaign team met in New Hampshire the next morning: they were almost out of money and this iced-over state looked even worse for him than the last one. If he was still the front-runner, he was the weakest one anyone could remember, his pitch of steady leadership now looking as outmoded as it was naive, with Sanders in pole position. This was unacceptable, Biden decided, but rather than taking time to feel personally chastened or at fault, he demanded action. He charged Anita Dunn with taking the campaign’s reins from Greg Schultz and considered the team’s debate over how to handle New Hampshire, which voted in a week, and where the national press was now on Biden death watch. Ricchetti wanted to go all-in and try to do well there, and Biden agreed to at least give it a shot, since it would be hard to explain abandoning the state altogether. Biden and allies leaned hard on Maggie Hassan, one of the state’s senators and its former governor, to promise him an endorsement, and they believed they would get it.
But his crowds were thinner than ever, his polling got worse, and Hassan, reading the writing on the wall, decided against backing Biden publicly. A week wasn’t enough to right the ship, and two days before the primary the brain trust gathered once again. It was clear Biden was going to lose New Hampshire in embarrassing fashion, and that he needed at least a respectable showing in Nevada, which voted ten days later, in order to survive until South Carolina, a week after that. That’s where the comeback would start if there was one, but even that now seemed like a desperate stretch. How could he justify staying in the race if he kept losing brutally, draining his campaign funds as he spiraled? New Hampshire’s public polls were fluctuating between putting Biden in fourth and—unthinkably—fifth place, and the campaign was in dire enough financial shape that it had almost entirely stopped paying for daily polling of its own.
There were no good options left, but Biden, still struggling to believe that this shit was really happening yet unsure who to blame, agreed that they might as well try avoiding another mortifying night in front of a listless crowd in Manchester, and just go straight to South Carolina. That would mean acknowledging what everyone already knew: he’d lose badly in New Hampshire and a big win in the South was his only hope at this point—and maybe moderates’ last chance to halt Sanders. Biden called John Lynch, a former governor of New Hampshire, to make sure he wouldn’t be offending anyone by skipping town, and then departed. Enough of Iowa and New Hampshire. He never wanted to run in either of these states’s primaries again.
Biden was hardly in a better mood in Columbia, but at least the crowds there were diverse, and they seemed to appreciate him. Recognizing that it was now or never for the campaign’s survival, Dunn redirected all the money it was spending on states that would vote in March. Those resources would now go to Nevada, where, after a quick spurt of issue polling paid for by leftover cash, Team Biden decided to lean on a message of taking gun control seriously in a final bid to leap past Buttigieg, Warren, and Klobuchar—all of whom did beat Biden in New Hampshire—and at least make things competitive with Sanders, who’d crushed him with more than three times as many votes in the Granite State.
It was a lot to take in, even for the people zoomed all the way in on the campaign minutiae for a year now. Obama, getting antsy back home in Washington, was as surprised as anyone when it actually worked. He knew some of his advisors were in touch with a pro-Biden super PAC, urging it to pump as many resources into ads in Nevada as possible, and he understood Dunn’s contention that a second-place finish out west would be good enough to at least keep Biden in the game for South Carolina.
But Biden’s runner-up finish in Nevada was also reason enough for Obama to reconsider some bigger-picture things. Maybe the modern party wasn’t as hopelessly captive to its young lefty energy as Obama was starting to suspect. Then again, he’d remained in irregular contact with Biden, seldom offering real advice but agreeing to stay on the line as the candidate ranted about the new political environment and fretted about what would happen if Sanders won. So Obama at least understood Biden’s old-school view of the political landscape. He’d never quite pulled for him but never entirely abandoned him either. Obama had never fully bought into the idea that Biden was a total relic.
Still, Obama remained unwilling to do anything overt to trip up Sanders, who won Nevada and still seemed close to being unstoppable. If he was going to win, Obama wanted to maintain a productive relationship with him. And that still felt like it might be in the cards, though Biden’s small, initial step toward a comeback—he beat Buttigieg and Warren and Klobuchar in Nevada! That was something!—was reason enough to keep some hope alive for his old friend.
Biden’s phone rang one morning four days before the South Carolina primary, as he and his fellow candidates made last-minute preparations for February’s final Democratic debate that night. He’d been awful in the last few debates, and he knew it—he was tired, fed up, and struggling to land an effective punch on Sanders. But now Obama was unexpectedly on the line on a debate day for the first time since 2012.
The ex-president shared no secret tips, unveiled no hidden strategy. He figured he might simply buck his old partner up. Listen to your team, Obama said: stay tight, and keep yourself above the fray. Biden just had to stay alive and remain a plausible savior for regular, exhausted people who weren’t on board for Sanders’s brand of change but sure as hell weren’t down with Trump.
For years Biden’s friends believed he carried himself differently after good conversations with Obama, and this was no exception. His old partner’s words of encouragement rang in his ears as he approached the stage that night. Go out there, Obama had said, and be president.
* * *
Biden wouldn’t put it this way, since he insisted that he deserved some more credit, but the next seven days’ procession of unlikely events was as compelling a testament to the power of luck—and the importance of forcing luck to go as far as it can—as he’d experienced in his already winding career in politics.
First, there was the vote in South Carolina, where he was feeling good after a solid debate. A stream of reports still suggested that Sanders could actually compete with Biden in South Carolina, and everyone knew that if Sanders got too close there, it would be near-impossible to dislodge him from the nomination. Biden was always going to win South Carolina, but he needed it to be by a serious margin to make a convincing case that he could still consolidate the party’s Sanders skeptics around him. In later months he would attribute the last-minute public endorsement by James Clyburn, the beloved civil rights activist and congressman, as the catalyst for the state’s heavy swing toward him. But behind the scenes, too, Clyburn helped pause some of Sanders’s momentum.
The morning after the debate, Sharpton had been preparing to make huge political waves by throwing his support behind Sanders, who would welcome the backing of an unquestionably influential Black leader with a huge audience that had historically been unsure about the Vermonter. Clyburn, however, approached Sharpton at a breakfast the Rev was hosting to reveal that he’d soon be endorsing Biden, who was also standing there. Sharpton—who’d discussed the race with Obama earlier in the primary and took his own role as endorser seriously—understood the encounter to be a signal that the tides were turning. “Oh?” he replied, taken aback by Clyburn’s faith in the ex-VP so many were leaving for dead. “Well, you just froze me. I can’t go against you.” Biden thanked him, also recognizing the weight of the dramatic about-face. Still unconvinced by Biden but willing to hope for a miraculous comeback and to trust Clyburn, Sharpton replied, “I’m doing this for Jim and Jim’s late wife. They paid too many dues.”
When Biden then won nearly half the state’s vote even though six other candidates remained in the race—some of them paying for a near-constant loop of Obama-hugging campaign ads on South Carolina TV—he took a moment to revel. “To all those of you who’ve been knocked down, counted out, left behind, this is your campaign. Just days ago, the press and the pundits had declared this candidacy dead,” he told a rollicking room in Columbia, standing between Jill and Clyburn. It was the first presidential primary he had ever won, over four decades after he first started really thinking about it. Suddenly the idea of his return to the White House no longer seemed so ridiculous. Just like he told the Times, he wasn’t going to die.
He knew he still had to defeat Sanders, and then oust Trump, to get there, but this was a moment for reflection. He’d done this alone, and no one could pretend the doubters hadn’t been out in force, he thought and later told friends. No one could say this was because of Obama’s political magic—his old boss had thought he was out of touch, and hadn’t been convinced of Biden’s “battle for the soul of the nation” pitch or his emphasis on compromise. But Obama had been wrong, no matter how often he’d played pseudotherapist on their occasional calls. And these voters had chosen Biden because he’d spent years cultivating them, he was sure, not because of loyalty to anyone else. “Now, thanks to all of you, the heart of the Democratic Party, we just won, and we’ve won big because of you,” Biden said to cheers.
It was, however, one of the last times he’d hear such cheers for months, thanks to yet another unanticipated dynamic crashing in to his surprise benefit. Biden had been monitoring reports of a virus spreading in China and Europe for weeks and felt lucky to have Ron Klain back at his side as an advisor after their 2015-era political estrangement. Klain had run the Obama administration’s response to a 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and could now whisper in his ear about how seriously to take this thing. It was the kind of issue Biden liked to talk about—not necessarily sexy, but understandable to real people and, he thought, all about basic competence in government. He’d written a USA Today Op-Ed to that effect back in January. (Opening line: “The possibility of a pandemic is a challenge Donald Trump is unqualified to handle as president.”)
Now it was starting to become the issue, and people were scared—not just to show up to events with thousands of others, but also about how this would hit their workplaces and homes. Suddenly the issue that had always animated many Democratic primary voters—Who could beat Trump?—became the only subtext to the campaign, the president’s mismanagement of the pandemic’s early days understood as a given by this crowd. The prospect of a long, drawn-out primary that might not end until that summer’s convention now looked even less acceptable to voters than it had a few days earlier.
Watching from Washington as the campaign trail suddenly started shuttering—the candidates unsure of what to do with themselves after South Carolina amid worries that they might infect one another or their voters when they brought them together—Obama couldn’t help but conclude that the primary had to end. He couldn’t say so out loud with Sanders still going strong, but voters were in need of reassurance, and he identified only one plausible candidate who could offer it at that point.
The calculus from here was simple, as he saw it. March 3, Super Tuesday, when a huge chunk of delegates would be awarded, was four days after South Carolina, and too many candidates were still in the race. This threatened to split the delegates up and keep the nomination technically undecided but likelier to go to Sanders for weeks longer, if not months. Obama’s role, now, was to step in and ensure the kind of smooth end to the primary he’d been promising to facilitate. He was deft enough to know he couldn’t demand that anyone drop out, but he could argue to some of the remaining candidates that they had to seriously consider what their path forward looked like, and how—realistically—they wanted the primary to end. By this point Biden knew more or less what Obama was thinking but didn’t quite know what he was going to do.
Nor did Biden know that his old boss had been keeping up an occasional dialogue with Buttigieg in recent weeks, which made Obama’s call to the Hoosier that much easier after South Carolina. Buttigieg was on his way back to South Bend after a stop to see Jimmy Carter in Georgia and a swing through Selma, Alabama, when he got the call. Obama’s message was careful. He didn’t need to spell out to Buttigieg that he had essentially no remaining path to victory, and that his supporters would presumably back Biden instead of Sanders—and possibly propel the ex-VP to the nomination—if he left the race. Instead, the former president said the young ex-mayor now had a chance to shine, to make clear he knew that the party and future were bigger than his political aspirations, to build his capital with the next president, and to leverage his new following to the greatest possible effect. Obama called Klobuchar next, with much the same message.
By that Monday night, the former rivals were at Biden’s side in Dallas, joined by Beto O’Rourke. Neither ever credited Obama with pushing them across the line to drop out or endorse the ex-VP—they’d both already been considering it. No matter: by the night after that, Biden was nearly sweeping Super Tuesday, even winning states like Klobuchar’s Minnesota, where he hadn’t spent a dime. Voters were suddenly rallying to his side, with no better options and a pandemic bearing down, after a year of dismissing him. Before Sanders even arrived at his Tuesday night rally in Vermont, Biden looked to nearly have the nomination in hand.
No one on TV or on any stage that night thought to say anything about Obama. No one knew how closely he was watching or what he’d done behind the scenes. This was finally Joe’s moment.
* * *
This final major act of the partnership was as unlikely as it was unusual: it would be the one time in their decades orbiting each other that Obama and Biden effectively switched roles, the generationally gifted speaker who’d once seemed like a herald of a new era now necessarily playing the part of behind-the-scenes fixer and expert while the onetime sidekick eager for assignments assumed the mantle of national mass-reassurer and moral leader—the part of the presidency and its pursuit he’d always known was important but that he had always been content to leave to the more politically rousing Obama.
Their first task was sticking the party back together by making nice with the skeptical and shell-shocked left that had just days earlier appeared ascendant. Sanders was still in the race and Warren only dropped out after Super Tuesday. Both Sanders and Biden called to congratulate her on her campaign and to angle for an endorsement, but it was Obama who kept her on the phone for an hour complimenting her, asking for ideas about how to keep her younger voters engaged, and—subtly, he hoped—making sure she didn’t have any notion of backing Sanders at that late point. The Vermonter was the harder problem to solve, insistent as he was on sticking to the race even as the pandemic deepened and the remaining states almost uniformly fell to Biden, who figured he had to tread lightly on pushing Sanders aside, lest he infuriate Sanders’s voters and doom himself for November. Obama, however, was getting impatient, especially after Sanders answered a journalist’s question about his timeline by insisting he was focused on combating the spread of the virus, not the wind-down of his campaign. Obama and Sanders had started talking every few days, and Eric Schultz and Sanders’s campaign manager Faiz Shakir were now in constant contact, too. Obama understood that Sanders felt the COVID-19 situation vindicated his politics—who could now deny that the country needed a truly universal health-care system? But Obama also wanted to avoid a redux of 2016, when Sanders didn’t exit the race until he was mathematically eliminated, long after it was obvious Clinton would win. The ex-president still blamed that decision for poisoning Clinton’s image and therefore her chances. And he knew that when he spoke, Sanders listened, even if he didn’t always like what he heard.
