The Long Alliance, page 44
Neither had any reason to think that this would be the least of their concerns as the Georgia runoffs approached on January 5.
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Obama was in Hawaii on January 6, unsure what to make of the news alerts pinging in, since he wasn’t watching TV. He’d been surprised but happy that the Georgia races had gone well the previous day, but he hadn’t anticipated paying any more attention to DC, where the only important thing expected to happen that Wednesday was the formalizing of Biden’s win, one last procedural stamp.
Ever since September his plan had always been to hang back and offer himself as a resource if things got hairy due to Trump’s lies about the legitimacy of the election and to let Biden, the president-elect, take the lead in responding. He hadn’t fathomed the kind of violent insurrection—an attempted overthrow of the democracy—that his aides were now describing in a rolling set of email updates, and as the situation escalated it became obvious that he would have to say something. All the living presidents would, for the sake of continuity. They checked, using the loose lines of communications that ex-presidents had long maintained: George W. Bush would release a statement, too, and so would Bill Clinton, plus even ninety-six-year-old Jimmy Carter.
For once, finally, Obama let his anger show after four years of building fury and impatience with his successor, who not only hadn’t let him live a normal, detached postpresidency but who had recklessly imperiled the world order and now threatened to finish the job. Still, the main response had to be Biden’s, so Obama—still getting used to deferring to his old deputy—stuck to releasing a statement laying the blame for the deadly riot at the feet of “a sitting president who has continued to baselessly lie about the outcome of a lawful election.” It was “a moment of great dishonor and shame for our nation,” he continued, yet “we’d be kidding ourselves if we treated it as a total surprise,” since Republicans and right-wing media had been complicit in Trump’s lie, he wrote. “Their fantasy narrative has spiraled further and further from reality, and it builds upon years of sown resentments. Now we’re seeing the consequences, whipped up into a violent crescendo.” He put the challenge to GOP leaders: “They can continue down this road and keep stoking the raging fires. Or they can choose reality and take the first steps toward extinguishing the flames.”
Biden, meanwhile, had been watching it all unfold from Delaware, where he’d started the day expecting to give a talk about his plans for the economy. When he connected with his brain trust, he told the aides he absolutely had to speak out on the theme he’d been considering daily since 2017’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia: Trump’s assault on American institutions. On camera, he called on Trump to call off the rioters and insisted this was not “true America,” but rather the work of “extremists dedicated to lawlessness.” But, he conceded, “our democracy’s under unprecedented assault, unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times. An assault on the citadel of liberty, the Capitol itself.” The storming of the Capitol, he said, “borders on sedition.” For the first time in over a decade, it no longer made sense for him to call Barack for guidance or a gut-check or a heads-up midcrisis. He didn’t need to call Honolulu.
Nor did he peel back on his transition work over the next two weeks. Yet in private, when he could steal a second away, he was quieter than ever, not quite seething but clearly restless. Eventually, he conceded to friends that he was now conscious that every time he opened his mouth he would be speaking for history, not just the next day’s Washington Post. This was his new reality not just as the incoming president but also as the nation’s leader at one of its perilous junctures. He was thinking of Obama’s example still, but now also Lincoln’s and Washington’s.
The once-ubiquitous comparisons to the calamitous circumstances Obama had faced in January 2009 no longer felt so apt. Not only did Biden think he needed to speak for an ailing country—the night before he was inaugurated, he and Harris visited the Lincoln Memorial to honor the victims of the pandemic, now up to 400,000 in the United States alone—but now also for democracy itself.
He was, at this point, comfortable thinking of the moment in these historical terms, and therefore with the idea that his inaugural address, composed with Donilon and historian Jon Meacham, would be remembered as a defense of basic democratic values against an unprecedented assault and a promise of healing, both medical and social. He wouldn’t say a word about Trump’s second impeachment, determined to move on and not to get dragged back into the muck even while his colleagues on Capitol Hill investigated.
The imperative to send this message only strengthened when, a week before the inauguration, security concerns forced Biden to scrap plans to take an Amtrak train to Washington for the ceremony, just like he’d done for much of his career. He was facing a new challenge. Yet few people but he and Obama remembered that they had also taken a train into Washington for their own inauguration a dozen Januarys earlier.
AFTERWORD
Biden had always been big on symbolism, especially when it came to his work spaces. As a senator he’d treasured the table that was handed down to him from the Philippine government via Harry Truman and then a pair of anti–civil rights movement senators because he thought it represented progress, diplomacy, and bipartisanship. He displayed it prominently. As VP, he’d preferred his room in the West Wing to his larger office across the street in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and his ceremonial one in the Capitol. He enjoyed pointing out that it was just down the hall from Obama’s, and he often noted its portraits of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the men who first defined the vice presidency and then took the top job. When it was finally his turn to decorate the Oval Office, he saw little reason for subtlety.
Excising the cold air of Trump and replacing it with homages to liberal-minded advancement was the obvious part. With help from his brother Jimmy and Meacham, he substituted out a portrait of Andrew Jackson for one of Benjamin Franklin and arranged busts of Cesar Chavez, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, Truman, and Daniel Webster around the room, which he also dotted with his own family photos. The more politically pointed choice was to replace the art above the fireplace, directly across from the president’s desk. Each of his predecessors dating back to Richard Nixon had looked up at portraits of George Washington. Lyndon Johnson, however, had Franklin Roosevelt on that wall half a century earlier, and Biden decided he liked the way Johnson, the architect of the “Great Society” program, had thought. Biden had been considering LBJ and FDR a lot since the previous spring, for months progressively making his stated vision for the country’s pandemic recovery sound more and more like a comprehensive New Deal–style plan composed not only of trillions of dollars in spending on economic stimulus but also infrastructure financing and climate investments. He returned Roosevelt to the mantel and moved Washington a few feet away.
He was even using Bill Clinton’s carpet, but there was no explicit nod to Obama in the decorations. That probably would have been superfluous. No one who came across Biden in those days could possibly doubt that his old boss took up significant real estate in his head as he conceived of his task, in both purposeful and unconscious ways. Biden sat in the exact same spot Obama had for eight years when he gathered aides for meetings at the couches in the Oval, and for a while Biden referred to his predecessor’s accomplishments, or White House procedures he remembered, as “the way we did it” in “our administration.”
For the first six months of his presidency, too, he and his aides—many of them holdovers from the Obama years—openly spoke of learning the hard lessons of that administration and leveraging them to far greater effect this time. This seemed like an obvious approach to everyone, and the upsides to acknowledging it seemed clear to loyalists of both presidents, as well. “For them to go back four years later, with the benefit of eight years of White House–based political experience—it’s an advantage I don’t think any administration has ever had,” Pfeiffer told the Washington Post that spring. The mission appeared to be not just on track but also ahead of schedule when Biden signed a nearly $2 trillion COVID-targeted relief bill in March full of easy-to-understand and popular provisions. It was regularly compared to Obama’s 2009-era stimulus of roughly $800 billion, which, in its day, was considered unfathomably enormous and therefore politically dubious.
As Biden then set out to add another roughly $3 trillion in spending on social programs and infrastructure, however, he ran into some of the same kinds of limitations that had bedeviled Obama, starting with a Republican Party categorically opposed to collaborating on his programs. He was also hamstrung by his tiny margins in both the House and Senate, which limited his capacity for progress, no matter how much time he spent trying to play his old-school Capitol Hill schmoozing card. Public sympathy, however, was in short supply as he repeatedly thudded up against the unmoving limits of the presidency to effect change unilaterally. He was both a victim of his own floridly set expectations about a new FDR-inspired era—which came from a time just months earlier when he’d expected to be working with a more heavily Democratic Senate, but which he didn’t temper as he took office—and a man unable to reinvent himself politically yet again so late in his career. After the last decade it simply didn’t seem realistic to those around him to think he could now approach the office in some entirely different way to adapt to this latest unforgiving moment. He couldn’t easily bring himself to choose more attainable priorities that fell far short of his campaign pledges, just as he couldn’t now reconsider either the public conception of his refusal to compromise on Afghanistan or the ramifications of his stubbornness. Similarly, it was an inexcusably big ask to reset benchmarks for how the exhausted country could begin to move on from an emergency footing even as the pandemic persisted, he thought. Any such concession seemed unthinkable to him for his first year in office, an admission of disappointment he wouldn’t countenance.
It was possible to read Biden’s first twelve months, thus, as either something of a microcosm of the Obama years or as their frustrating natural next step in the face of unrelenting right-wing attacks not just on his government but also on the legitimacy of the democratic system itself. Biden’s overpromises were hardly a mortal political sin, but his inability to convince an aggressively riven populace that it was still on a positive post-Trump track felt painfully similar to the lead-up to the 2010 midterms and Obama’s famous “shellacking,” never mind how much historic legislation both presidents signed in Year One. This was largely thanks to protracted negotiations within the Democratic Party itself as it searched first for its post-Bush, and now, much more urgently, post-Trump identities.
Still, though Biden hated when people put it like this, there was always an argument to be made that no matter what he accomplished in office, his legacy would first and foremost be Trump’s defeat. That would, in fact, be enough for so many to consider Biden a success, both in the immediate sense of day-to-day threat elimination and for years to come in terms of the world’s stability. Yet the defining question of his first year was how to convince Americans and a few recalcitrant counterparts-cum-roadblocks in DC that there was still so much more on offer—so much more needed—after he swept into office promising not just to eradicate Trumpism in the White House but also to heal the nation more broadly. For evidence that this wasn’t just a theoretical concern, he had to look no further than the many states where GOP legislators, still in Trump’s thrall, were working on bills to make voting harder, and possibly to lay the groundwork for overthrowing elections altogether.
Obama saw the problem as structural, as he had for so many of the presidency’s ills for a few years now. In his view that structure—modern DC and its Republican-driven political culture—needed exposing, then renovating. He wouldn’t blame Biden for trying to make compromises in office, he told one of his favorite columnists, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, in December 2020, but “there comes a point where you have to clearly communicate over and over again for the American people what the cause is for gridlock. Why something is not happening. That I think is a good lesson for them to learn.” Biden, eventually, professed to embrace the lesson, and promised to implement it, at a White House press conference marking his first year in office. His approval rating was only slightly above where Trump’s had been at a comparable moment, a far cry from the previous summer, when over half of Americans were happy with his performance. “I’m going to get out of this place more often, I’m going to go out and talk to the public,” he said, also promising to listen to more external perspectives and to campaign more for Democrats. He wanted people to know “Mitch [McConnell] has been very clear he’s going to do anything to prevent Biden from being a success,” and to ask, “What’s he for? What’s he proposing to make anything better?” Biden continued, asking of Republicans, “What are they for?” It was a good question, but one that even Obama, a far better communicator, had strained to get across during his tenure. It was still hard to make the case after a year of the Biden administration that simply raising the question would be anything more than a first step back toward progress.
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Biden never saw any use in obscuring the ways in which he was drawing inspiration from the Obama years, even when some members of his administration were worried by the prospect of a right-wing conspiracy campaign insisting that Obama was really pulling the strings. (The conservative New York Post’s salty April 2021 headline after Jen Psaki showed no interest in talking about how often the presidents were speaking privately: PSAKI SAYS OBAMA, BIDEN TALK REGULARLY BUT REFUSES TO SAY HOW OFTEN.) It was true that in closed-door meetings Biden often insisted that his team discuss the Obama experience, but Obama wasn’t there and Biden usually just wanted to ask what they could do better this time, knowing what they now knew. Biden was still sensitive to the ideas, occasionally shared on cable, that Obama had somehow carried him to the presidency or that he would simply be Obama 2.0. But he was also still equally proud of his predecessor’s record and so would occasionally admit to allies that he was constantly chagrined to learn how much of the Obama years’ progress had been unwound by Trump. He found himself occupied with the question of how to first restore it, and then how to cement his own accomplishments to ensure they couldn’t be rolled back by the next Republican president.
As a result, one of his most frequent contentions was that he had to be far more intentional about selling the stuff he was passing to keep it popular, a point he’d tried making to Obama back in 2009 but had conceded as their political standing sagged and other crises arose. Shortly after his own rescue bill first passed the House in late February, Biden appeared virtually for a gathering of Democratic members of Congress and promised the crowd—whose political fortune was tied to his—that he wouldn’t repeat Obama’s error. “We didn’t adequately explain what we had done. Barack was so modest, he didn’t want to take, as he said, a ‘victory lap.’ I kept saying, ‘Tell people what we did.’ He said, ‘We don’t have time. I’m not going to take a victory lap.’ And we paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility,” Biden recalled, unwilling to even winkingly recognize that he was obviously criticizing his old boss.
Biden’s bill’s passage had actually been a rapid-fire display of how to learn from one’s errors. For one thing, it was hard to find anyone left in Democratic politics who would say Obama had been right to wait so long for Republicans to join him while he was trying to pass Obamacare. Now Biden took one meeting with Senate Republicans and rejected their proposal to cleave the bill into about a third of its $1.9 trillion size. He figured this measure needed to pass as soon as possible and he knew it could become law through a simple-majority vote rather than needing sixty votes because of Senate rules for spending legislation. He thus determined it would have to move ahead quickly with or without Republicans onboard. The image of bipartisanship just wasn’t relevant here because of how urgently Americans needed the funds, and neither, really, were deficit concerns or worries about the price tag for purely political reasons. There was no redux of the Emanuel and Summers arguments from 2008 to slim down that bill, because the political moment was so different now. (Biden had agreed then, but now scoffed at such arguments when pundits floated them, though he also dismissed economists’ prescient worries that so much spending would contribute to inflation a few months down the road.) Meanwhile, after seeing how fickle public opinion was a decade earlier, Biden this time figured as many programs would have to fit in this one bill as possible. He was now under no illusion that they could return to the drawing board for a second round of funding legislation if they needed to.
He hoped they wouldn’t need to in part because he had other priorities to get to, and in part because he expected the bill’s components would get enough people back on their feet, designed as they were to jump-start the national recuperation from the pandemic. As such, Biden not only ordered an array of his new cabinet secretaries to start talking up the provisions to make sure people knew about them, but also leaned into the point that it was all intended to be immediately useful—far more so than its 2009 analogue, which was more focused on longer-term investments and which contained smaller one-time payments to residents. “We didn’t do enough to explain to the American people what the benefits were of the [2009] rescue plan,” Psaki said in March. “We didn’t do enough to do it in terms that people would be talking about it at their dinner tables. And that’s one of the reasons we—of course—have been trying to break down the impact of the American Rescue Plan into key components that will impact people directly: the direct checks, you know, ensuring funding to help expedite vaccine distribution, and of course reopening of schools.”
