The Long Alliance, page 42
The experience also hardened Biden’s views of Trump on race, and the backlash to Black Lives Matter protests gave him reason to second-guess his 2017-era insistence that the president’s voters weren’t racially motivated. “They have real fears. It’s not based on race, they voted for a Black man two times,” he’d said then. Now, though, there was little point in arguing that there wasn’t a hefty element of racism involved for some of them. Obama agreed, and both fretted later in the summer that, after unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following yet another police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, Trump would succeed in turning the campaign into a racist, 1960s-style referendum on “law and order.” Biden had little choice but to argue that voters knew better than to think of him as a violence-supporting and cop-threatening radical, but Obama still worried that the entire project of American cohesion was in the balance. He’d started talking more openly about protecting the rule of law itself after Trump had ordered Lafayette Square, in front of the White House, forcibly cleared of protesters as he marched to a church across the way with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in uniform, at his side.
This was all on Obama’s mind as he prepared his eulogy for civil rights hero and congressman John Lewis at the end of July. Obama had been trying to think critically about his own record for years as he wrote the first volume of his memoir, and he kept running into the notion that Republican refusal to cooperate had gotten in his way at every turn, and that he could have seen this more clearly. Yet it was the experience of the last few months, especially, that had started to push him even further, toward the conclusion that structural changes were needed to ensure a fair political system—an argument he had long resisted. He thus decided that the funeral was the right time to argue that honoring Lewis meant passing new voting rights legislation, “and if all this takes eliminating the filibuster—another Jim Crow relic—in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.”
Biden’s advisors had known that Obama would endorse the end of the filibuster while promoting his book, but it wasn’t due to come out until after the election, and they were uneasy when told the former president would call that summer for the effective elimination of the sixty-vote threshold in the Senate to pass major legislation. Biden wasn’t ready to go that far and turn his beloved chamber into a simple-majority-rule body, so this felt like Obama was putting him in the uncomfortable situation of looking like a hidebound traditionalist unwilling to consider change. This wasn’t precisely Obama’s intention, but he succeeded in forcing a debate in broader terms about GOP obstruction, and in at least persuading Biden to think about it.
They were both evolving, but at different speeds, and on different matters—Obama faster on tactics and dealing with the opposition after reviewing his own eight years in power, Biden more swiftly on how to appeal to voters amid the crisis, thanks to his time on the campaign trail. As Democrats appeared to be on track for big enough majorities that he’d have plenty of leverage over Republicans, the candidate was spared a real interrogation of his continued insistence that he, with his decades of Senate experience, could get some of them to go along with him. To many in his party, it was unthinkable that after his time as vice president, and after the searing Trump years, he might still have hope in the modern GOP’s willingness to compromise.
CHAPTER 20
2020–2021
It was inevitable. Obama knew that there was no way Biden wouldn’t be hearing from everyone who’d ever had his phone number. He needed to find a running mate, and everyone who’s anyone had an opinion to share—that’s just how this works every four years. What Obama didn’t anticipate was that they would be calling him, too, which wound up involving the ex-president in the process far more than he’d expected as it inched along for months, deep into the summer of 2020. Really, it was fair enough, and not just because everyone around Biden thought he’d done a pretty good job of picking a running mate himself. By that point Obama was increasingly likely to be found on the line with the nominee himself on any given day. Biden was eager to talk it all through, and he could finally pick Obama’s brain again, mostly unencumbered by awkward politics for the first time in five years. The distance between them—their half-calculated and fully stressful semiestrangement—had been impossible to ignore just a year prior. Now it could hardly have felt more like ancient history, although the power in the relationship had unmistakably shifted, and a distinct wariness lingered on both sides of the calls.
Biden set out straightforward instructions for his vice presidential search committee, which was led by Eric Garcetti, Chris Dodd—who’d spent most of his post-Senate years as the movie industry’s top lobbyist—Delaware congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester, and Biden’s former aide Cynthia Hogan, Apple’s chief lobbyist. Part one was simple: they should look for a woman, since Biden had pledged to pick one in his final primary season debate. They should take seriously Biden’s role as leader of a diverse and shifting party, and talk to elected officials, labor groups, constituency organizations, and anyone else who might have thoughts on whom he should consider. The eventual finalists would have to pass a vet and would have to perform well in the secret polling Celinda Lake would be undertaking to gauge their images. They’d also have to meet his most important personal criteria: that they be prepared to do the job if something happened to the seventy-seven-year-old—who would be the oldest president ever inaugurated but who was promising to be a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders—and that they be “ideologically simpatico” with the nominee, even if they disagreed on some details or methods of making change.
The advice started trickling in, some welcome and much unbidden, almost as soon as Super Tuesday. It opened into a flood after Sanders dropped out. Dunn first asked for the senator’s input, but he demurred and said that while he’d prefer a progressive, they really just needed to pick someone who would help Biden beat Trump. This was a common refrain, but with Biden’s lead appearing to build by the day, less of a daily concern to his team than it usually is for nominees, who tend to need more political help. Sharpton offered his take repeatedly. In March in Selma, he made a point of acknowledging “our vice president” in the congregation at a church gathering, publicly clarifying to Biden, who was there, that he was referring to Abrams, who was also in the audience. By the summer he was on the record encouraging Biden to choose a Black woman, and he wasn’t alone—Klobuchar removed herself from the running in June and urged him to pick a woman of color. When Biden and Sharpton spoke at a soul food restaurant in Houston for half an hour before the nominee’s meeting with George Floyd’s family, they talked about Abrams, Orlando area congresswoman Val Demings, and Kamala Harris. Any one of them would be the first Black VP as well as the first woman in the job.
Biden was slow to narrow down his long list, which started at over a dozen names and stayed uncommonly long for weeks. This sometimes led to uncomfortable conversations with allies offering their views. Once a politically influential friend suggested Biden look closely at Michelle Lujan Grisham, the governor of New Mexico and a former congresswoman, and Biden replied, blankly, “Who?” before he remembered she was on the list. A similarly unfamiliar dynamic surrounded mentions of Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo early in the process, and Biden occasionally brought up others to gauge associates’ temperature on them, too. Before she removed her name from contention, that included Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto (Harry Reid’s suggestion and the favorite of some Latino groups, as well as an old ally of Beau’s), Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth—who had the backing of veterans’ groups—and, later in the process, Congressional Black Caucus chair Karen Bass of California, whom many progressives liked.
This was all secret. But his private conversations mirrored the public ones in one important way: they always came back to one name, not unlike how Obama kept gravitating back to Biden twelve summers earlier. This situation was more fraught, however, because of how the campaign had played out. Biden had trained himself over many years in the Senate not to hold grudges whenever he could avoid it, so Jill took it upon herself to be the family grievance-keeper when she felt it was necessary. And while the ex-VP saw the makings of a loyal partner in Kamala Harris, with whom he always caught up chummily when they saw each other backstage and at private airport terminals on the campaign trail, his wife was far slower to come around to the idea. She still felt betrayed by what she saw as Harris’s debate ambush the previous June. The issue was that Harris had genuinely been close to Beau thanks to their collaboration on mortgage settlements as attorneys general, and that the Bidens had thought of her as a friend. Candidate Biden had moved on, understanding that Harris didn’t feel that she could apologize and reverse her position on busing, but believing that she was eager to put the topic behind her entirely, given how little traction it had ultimately gotten her and how unable she’d been to follow up her initial attack.
Yet it took his wife longer to come around to the idea, and some Harris allies even met with Biden aides late in the process after hearing that Dodd, too, wasn’t over it. (Biden, for his part, acknowledged privately that this was a problem and sought to calm the waters by convincing others of his equanimity on the matter; he was photographed holding a talking-points note card with the reminder “DO NOT Hold Grudges.”)
Harris was clearly a top-tier choice no matter how you sliced it: she and Biden had similar political viewpoints as consensus-first liberals, though she was more sensitive to the influence of lefty activists. She would be a historic and exciting pick, too, not just the first female vice president but also the first Black VP and the first Asian American one. And her campaign launch, at least, showed that she could create buzz like few others—she’d drawn over twenty thousand in Oakland in January 2019. Schumer counseled Biden to seriously consider her, as did Kaine. Biden never downplayed the chatter around her, and his allies could be forgiven for reading into it when, in April, he thanked her for her support in front of a star-studded group of about fifty donors: “The idea, Kamala, that you ran a hell of a race and endorsed me—it means a lot. It’s not an easy thing to do, but, you know, thanks for making the time and for being so loyal,” he said. “And I’m so lucky to have you as part of this, this partnership going forward, because I think we’re going together we can make a—we can make a great deal of difference, and the biggest thing we can do is make Donald Trump a one-term president. So I’m coming for you, kid.”
She made sense, too, to Obama, who by the summer was happily watching from afar in the Martha’s Vineyard home that he and Michelle bought in late 2019. He hadn’t been impressed by Harris’s campaign in the end, but he’d admired her from afar for years, even offering her a chance to be considered for attorney general in 2014 (she declined). He told Biden as much, but Obama still didn’t see his job as recommender-in-chief.
Instead, he wanted to guide Biden along as much as would be useful, but only when Biden asked. So he was happy to lay out his own advised criteria for the job. As had been the case for them, Biden’s pick should have complementary strengths to his, but Obama didn’t think Biden needed to worry as much as he had about finding a political match to fill his electoral holes, since he figured the life-or-death stakes of the race guaranteed maximum turnout and intense partisanship anyway. He was happy, too, to offer advice as Biden considered names to sit on his selection committee and later as he wanted a sounding board to talk through some candidates’ pros and cons. Obama was even fine with answering the phone when some of the contenders themselves came calling, though he didn’t have much advice for them and he came away thinking they were just trying to get him to recommend them to Biden. He grew most interested and involved when Biden started saying he was looking for “his own Biden”—that he was trying to replicate their relationship as much as possible, believing it to be the gold standard. On repeated calls, Obama agreed with Biden’s general wish but cautioned him to remember that it took time for them to grow close, and to feel like they had a connection of both head and heart, to put it in Bidenese. This relationship, he kept saying, will feel different no matter what.
Still, Obama was on Biden’s mind often as he assessed the people who had a real shot at the position. The shape of their bond and their general ideological agreement were front and center as he thought about Warren, who openly wanted the job and had been advising Biden regularly for months, but who was still further left than Biden was comfortable with, even though she said she was willing to go along with his policy prescriptions since he’d won. And Obama was surprised when Susan Rice, his friend and old national security advisor with no history in electoral politics, became a finalist. Biden came to see her as a serious option because of her experience in Obama’s White House, and Obama was intrigued but thought her lack of political reps made her too risky a pick. Biden also took Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer far more seriously than was publicly appreciated, especially once Anzalone and Emanuel told him they were fans. But he was shaken out of the Whitmer reverie by the reminder that she was too politically similar to him—a fellow unflashy white moderate with a Rust Belt focus—and wouldn’t necessarily be a complementary pick, like Obama had advised.
When the time finally came for Biden and Harris to have a formal interview over video chat, Biden was delighted that she quickly made clear she wanted a relationship like his and Obama’s, too. This was an obvious thing to say to Biden, but he indulged her and laid out the reality that this would be his expectation for their entire term. Unlike when Biden met with Obama in Minneapolis in 2008, Harris brought no conditions for how to structure their interactions, instead just a general pitch for herself as a partner. It wasn’t a hard case to make, since Biden was already looking for parallels to Obama’s search for him, and there were plenty here. Even if it didn’t feel urgent, she could help with voters who might still need convincing, like Biden had done for Obama—this time, well-educated white suburban women who needed a push, and some Black voters who remained on the fence about voting. She didn’t know it, but she’d also aced Lake’s poll test by being seen as the most qualified of the contenders to take over on Day One if needed—a metric Biden cared a lot about, and which was perhaps the most important reason Obama had picked him. Biden didn’t even mind that Harris’s campaign had ended in embarrassment. So had his in 2008, and Harris had at least had the wisdom to drop out before Iowans rendered their verdict. (It had taken a while for the extent of Biden’s good fortune to sink in back in 2008—he was the first VP candidate ever to run in the primaries and get picked for the ticket after finishing lower than the runner-up. Harris would be the second.)
Yet as Biden grew more comfortable with the idea of Harris, he also saw a chance to correct a wrong that still lingered from 2008 to 2016 to now. There would be no room for ambiguity this time, if he had his way: Harris would almost certainly run for president again, and he absolutely thought she represented the future of the party. She seemed to recognize the significance of Biden implying this when they first appeared together as a ticket in Wilmington in August, and he underscored the point that he saw obvious parallels here to his own arrangement by saying, “I asked Kamala to be the last voice in the room.” He also bestowed on her an honor he’d previously given to Obama: he said she’d been “an honorary Biden for quite some time.”
* * *
If Obama’s political origin story centers on his star turn at a convention and the story of Biden’s political career could plausibly be mapped through his eleven convention experiences—from beside-the-point hotshot on the sidelines to also-ran to prime-time speaker who still couldn’t get top billing—perhaps it was fitting that Biden’s twelfth one and his crowning event looked so different from the rest. There was little realistic talk of holding the ceremony in person in Milwaukee as scheduled thanks to the virus. Biden had barely ventured out of his house, and Trump’s first big in-person rally in June after the initial lockdowns was a cautionary tale—a fiasco that appeared to cause a huge spike in COVID infections in Tulsa and perhaps the death of 2012 Republican candidate Herman Cain, who was there and died of the virus about a month later. But no one knew what a fully virtual convention should look like, and the prospect rattled Obama, in particular, who kept repeating throughout the summer that Biden needed to keep in mind that politics were visceral—voters needed to feel the Democratic passion and not think they were being too cautious or too precious by playing it overly safe pandemic-wise.
Obama was sure Biden had better things to worry about than programming—like planning his fall campaign—and that it might play better to his strengths than Biden’s anyway. He also knew he could get anyone to pick up his calls and he was getting slightly bored on the Vineyard. So he rang Steven Spielberg, who agreed to help consult with the team as they tried to make the show as engaging as possible. The director and the ex-president gathered a Hollywood advisory panel, envisioning rotating hosts, coast-to-coast speeches, and a quick pace that would make Trump’s drawn-out super-spreader event on the muddy White House lawn look like a gothic relic. Getting excited by the project and the mandate to make Biden look as presidential as possible so voters could remember what it was like to have a seminormal and responsible commander in chief, Obama even got involved with setting the speaking schedule in conjunction with his old aide Stephanie Cutter, who was running the convention planning. He agreed with Biden’s team that Michelle should be the first night’s main speaker, and he liked the idea of Jill taking the next night. But when presented with the plan to have him close the third night, Obama and his staff thought it would instead be wise to instead lift Harris’s voice and have her finish the evening, after he spoke. That way he could draw as many viewers as possible for her time in the spotlight.
