The Long Alliance, page 6
Obama, however, drew back. “Oh,” said the forty-three-year-old, “we can go to a nice place. I can afford it.” Biden, surprised, detected more than a hint of arrogance and a hefty serving of presumptuousness. The meeting ended on a sour, and uncomfortable, note, with no dinner scheduled.
* * *
At least that’s how Biden saw it.
Obama wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the senior senator the first time they sat down in DC; he had too much going on inside his own head to think about Biden much at all. It wasn’t just cockiness, though his immense confidence was evident to anyone who interacted with him. His own life was changing dramatically by the hour. Obama had spent his first few days in Washington dodging a swarm of reporters and trying to work out how he’d balance his responsibilities there with family time in Chicago and constituent time in the rest of his state. He also scheduled a requisite round of suck-up meetings with older members—the kind of glad-handing he hated deep in his core and suspected to be near the center of modern politics’ rot, but also, he acknowledged, probably the kind of thing that was necessary if he wanted to achieve anything of consequence in the Senate. Closer to home, not only was he now a bona fide famous person, but real money was also starting to fill his bank account for the first time as a result of the arrangement to reprint Dreams from My Father and publish a second book soon.
So when this old-school senator who’d first been elected when Obama was an eleven-year-old going by “Barry” offered up a cheap dinner, it was hard not to take it at least somewhat personally. The gesture struck him as condescending at best, borderline offensive at worst. His reply was as much a rejoinder that Biden needn’t treat him any differently from any other senator as it was an impatient reflection of his new truth. He could afford it now. He wasn’t upset to walk away from the meeting without scheduling the dinner.
Obama didn’t think he needed much more veteran guidance on the Hill, anyway. By January he’d already spent weeks talking to an ideal Sherpa. After Obama met Pete Rouse, Tom Daschle’s chief of staff, at the convention, they chatted on occasion about what Obama could expect when he got to the Senate. Obama was pretty sure he knew how to legislate, thanks to his time in Springfield, but recognized he had little clue about how to navigate the specific egos and traditions of the Hill, especially as his notoriety and expectations rose in tandem. So when Daschle lost his seat Obama tried convincing Rouse not to retire after thirty-odd years in the Capitol and to instead take a massive status cut and join Obama’s office despite his ninety-ninth position in the Senate’s seniority ranks. He had to ask twice before Rouse relented, won over by Obama’s pitch: he needed to learn the personalities and the quirks of the chamber, and wasn’t looking for more national fame or higher office. Someone had to help him understand what pitfalls to dodge and what toes to avoid stepping on, and after developing and following a strategic plan for a year and a half or so, Rouse would be free to finally retire.
The first parts of the project were simple. Obama needed to establish his areas of focus, so needed committee assignments. Most of his campaign team the previous summer had been unaware that Obama had convened a series of late-night, hours-long calls organized by aides and allies including his longtime staffer Raja Krishnamoorthi and University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee with subject-matter experts to get him up to speed on federal issues. This gave him some guidance as he tried figuring out how to use his newfound public profile to the greatest policy effect. Determined to prove his seriousness, he was at first worried that Harry Reid would ask him to head up Senate Democrats’ campaign wing, so he made his interest known instead in a wide range of prestige committees, including Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, the commerce committee, and both the finance and agriculture panels. Obama had a mind for policy specifics but hadn’t picked a lane yet. His concern for now was more about getting a good assignment than the details of what it was.
A big part of his plan also involved ducking away from the spotlight for at least a few months lest Illinoisans start to get the impression they’d elected someone with more interest in his own political future than in legislating for them. Rouse, Axelrod, and Gibbs took Obama off the national TV circuit, sensing little upside when he got questions about a possible presidential campaign the day after he won his seat in November. He denied interest, but it was a fair topic to discuss, and he’d had to convince Rouse he had no intention of running when he was recruiting him to run the Senate office. In fact, he had started informally and secretly discussing the possibility of pursuing national office with Valerie Jarrett almost immediately after winning his spot in the Senate. But for now it was “categorically untrue,” he’d told Rouse: his children were too young, Michelle would be against it, and he still wanted to get established in DC. The line of inquiry flattered but also annoyed Obama.
Still, it clearly wasn’t going anywhere—after he took the oath of office, reporters overheard his daughter Malia, then six years old, asking the question, too. It wasn’t crazy, but he couldn’t possibly say so out loud. It would be committing an unforgivable Washington faux pas to admit even fleeting interest in higher office, let alone so early in his Senate career, and it would likely tank his relationship with his suspicious older colleagues who liked to see new senators pay their dues.
Perhaps the most delicate piece of Obama’s entry to DC was his introduction to a group of senators who, a generation or two ahead of him, had seen their fair share of hotshots come and go. Biden was one of many. He was on the list because of his spot on the foreign relations committee, but plenty of others, like Reid, were higher priority. Others still had simply seen enough to warrant an in-person meeting, for which Obama would trek from his new seventh-floor office in the Hart Building. When Obama was assigned Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman and Ohio Republican George Voinovich to be his formal mentors, he spent their lunch in the Senate dining room flattering their experience by asking them for details on life as a senator. “I don’t think Senator Obama needs much mentoring,” Lieberman told Voinovich after.
Never particularly adept at feigning interest, though, Obama for the most part found these meetings a slog. He was happy to make time for older senators from whom he thought he could learn, and he only slowly found them. One was Ted Kennedy, who had near-legendary status within the Democratic caucus thanks to his family and his liberal record, and the larger-than-life aura he actively cultivated in official Washington.
They met soon after the election, and Kennedy was still so personally affected by Bush’s reelection that he wouldn’t discuss it directly. If anyone knew about promising young liberal senators, though, it was Kennedy. Not only was he himself a former great hope and brother to John and Bobby, but he’d also seen decades worth of Democrats try to emulate his family or soak in its atmosphere. Biden, a fellow Irish Catholic whose initial 1972 Senate campaign positioned him as a kind of working-class Kennedy, was one, and Teddy had joined him that year in Wilmington for a campaign stop. That was fifteen years before Biden ran for president with even more explicit attempts to mimic the Kennedy appeal—he tried to be the fresh-faced energizer reinvigorating America—before his plagiarism of Bobby helped bring him down. Obama, meanwhile, was less open about his sentimental feelings for the family but privately loved finding out that the desk he’d been assigned on the Senate floor was RFK’s old one. In person, Obama said little to this effect to the seventy-two-year-old. But Kennedy was charmed, not offended, by Obama’s confidence and his questions about the photographs of Cape Cod on display in the office. Soon after, he sent Obama one of them.
Still, Obama’s North Star was Hillary Clinton. Four years earlier she’d arrived as the Senate’s biggest celebrity in ages, but she’d since kept her head down and forged enough internal relationships to build a reputation as a respected senator. As early as October, before the election, Gibbs had emailed Philippe Reines, a top Clinton aide, for advice on setting up Obama’s press shop, and once the Obama team arrived in Washington most of the new senator’s other aides sought wisdom from ClintonWorld counterparts, too. Rouse and Clinton’s chief of staff met, and Obama’s body man, Reggie Love, sat with Clinton aides at the Senate café Cups to talk about staffing a famous senator. Another senior Clinton advisor walked Obama’s new legislative director, Chris Lu—the senator’s ex–law school classmate and himself an accomplished Democratic lawyer—through how Clinton’s team had balanced her time in New York City with her upstate responsibilities, an equation Obama was now considering about Chicago and rural Illinois.
At the beginning of February, Obama and Clinton met at her office in Russell. Her advice was straightforward—talk to people ahead of you in seniority to show respect and try to work on some serious legislation soon—and they hit it off more than Obama had with almost any other colleague. They soon found themselves gravitating to each other on the Senate floor in the downtime between votes. Obama didn’t know it, but he was doing a pretty good job of following the keep your head down advice Biden had given Jimmy Cauley in Boston half a year earlier.
* * *
Washington was a discouraging place to be a Democrat in the opening months of 2005. Biden’s situation was typical: plenty of the party had been confident Kerry would win not only on a wave of anti-Bush sentiment but also because of his basic competence, and had been planning their next steps accordingly. Obama was no exception; to the degree they’d thought about it, his advisors assumed he’d be able to grow close to the Kerry administration and avoid having to worry about his own national profile for a while. As a result, no one with much influence had given a lot of thought to what, exactly, the party should stand for in a second Bush term other than opposition to his ill-fated plan to privatize Social Security, a vacuum that bore grief and then fury after the campaign ended in volleys of rancorous attack ads. The party, really, had been struggling with its direction ever since Bush won election with the help of a Supreme Court decision in 2000, though increasing skepticism about the war in Iraq was, at least, offering it an organizing principle that it might still choose to embrace even more fully after Bush’s reelection.
This all made for a foreign environment for Obama, in particular, fresh as he was off coasting to victory. He was taken aback when, on one of his first days in Washington, some Democrats tried objecting to the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes—a move he found so provocatively undemocratic that he ditched a set of scheduled interviews with prospective staff members to make an impromptu maiden speech on the Senate floor, which is usually a momentous and meticulously planned rite of passage for first-year legislators a few months, not days, into their tenure.
“I am absolutely convinced that the president of the United States, George Bush, won this election. I also believe that he got more votes in Ohio,” Obama said, trying to tamp down the left-wing protest while acknowledging concerns about disenfranchisement. “This is not an issue in which we are challenging the outcome of the election. And I think it’s important for us to separate out the issue of the election outcome with the election process.” He’d come to Washington at least somewhat hopeful he could transcend the day-to-day political scrum, but his honeymoon ended abruptly when influential liberals who’d expected him to be a savior after his convention speech now complained about him on their blogs.
Obama quickly concluded he’d been right about DC when he inveighed on the campaign trail against its unproductive culture. It didn’t help that he’d grown close with Daschle, who became embittered about the Senate after being booted from it, or that he hadn’t spent much time thinking about the day-to-day aspects of the job. He was dismayed by how busy he suddenly was, his days packed with endless meetings about nothing. He developed a practice of carving out time on his schedule for one-on-ones with aides during which he’d ask them to walk alongside him as he worked through ideas, but also, sometimes, where he just had them stroll along to maintain the appearance of being busy. He would listen to music on his headphones and decompress before going home to watch SportsCenter in his small rented apartment—after which he’d resume writing his book, only to wake up, go to the gym, and do it all again.
It was a solitary way to be a senator, made all the lonelier by his family being in Chicago, and he was extrasensitive about being present for his daughters, given his own father’s absence when he was a child. He worked out a plan to arrive in Washington on Mondays or Tuesdays whenever possible, to return to Chicago on Thursdays or Fridays, and to reserve Sundays for the family. This left Saturdays for his travel around the state for town halls, a central component of the more formal strategic plan Rouse drew up with input from Axelrod and Gibbs, which also included finishing his second book and launching a political action committee to help other Democrats.
The idea was to set Obama’s Senate career on a promising track. But already there was a national-level subtext. Obama would be on any nominee’s short list for the vice presidency in three years’ time whether he liked it or not, they figured, so he might as well position himself. He chuckled dismissively whenever this prospect was brought up—he’d be a terrible Number Two, he’d always say. His aides, who had incentive to see him rise to national office as soon as possible, by and large agreed given his impatience with Washington. But this was also because he was considering another possibility: returning to Illinois to run for governor if the race opened up in 2010, a concept that appealed to him because he was already starting to get the sense he’d be a better executive than a one-in-a-hundred legislator, let alone anyone’s second-in-command.
* * *
Biden was just back from his fifth trip to Iraq when he sat down with Bob Schieffer on set at CBS in mid-June 2005. He was there to talk about the state of the war, as he so often had on the Sunday morning shows. He exhibited little restraint in informing the Face the Nation audience that the Bush administration was “not telling the truth” about the circumstances on the ground or Iraq’s capacity to stand up a democratic government anytime soon. He was preaching to a divided congregation: though the war had plummeted in popularity since 2003 and this downward trajectory seemed obvious, national polling showed that the nation was still roughly split on whether the decision to invade was a good one, whether the war effort was moving in the right direction, and whether troops should stay in Iraq until it stabilized or return home sooner. So Schieffer kept at that topic and held off until the final moments of Biden’s two segments on air to try another question. He surely figured it wouldn’t make real news, but that he had a journalistic duty to ask it: “How far along are you on this idea of running for president? Is that a real possibility, or—”
Biden couldn’t help himself: “It’s a real possibility. My intention, as I sit here now—I’ve proceeded since last November as if I were going to run,” he said, revealing a process no other pol would ever publicly expose so long before election season. He was trying to gauge support, he continued, but “I’m acting now, in terms of finding that out, as if I’m running. My intention now is to seek the nomination.” He conceded he could still change his mind, but Schieffer, surprised, tried to get him to repeat his announcement. “My intention is to seek the nomination,” Biden repeated. “I mean, I know I’m supposed to be more coy with you, I know I’m supposed to tell you, you know, that I’m not sure.”
This was not exactly shocking to Biden’s colleagues, not least the ones he worked with most on the foreign relations committee. They’d watched as he relished becoming Bush’s Democratic foil in the Senate as far as the nation’s foreign entanglements went; his glee in questioning Republican officials for the camera was evident. His inability to resist making news about himself was even less surprising.
It was all happening just as Obama arrived at the committee, looking to expand his international chops and eager to stack his days with its hearings and reports rather than the busywork required by another, less exciting assignment, Environment and Public Works. At first, though, he had little reason to interact directly with Biden at much length, at least not one-on-one. The senior-most Democrat only convened his colleagues occasionally to make sure they were on the same page ahead of controversial hearings featuring Bush administration officials, and since Obama was so junior, he had no role in setting tactics. Obama did, however, spend plenty of time watching Biden after he grudgingly agreed to follow Lu’s suggestion that he get in older senators’ good graces by sitting through every committee hearing from start to finish, even when they took all day.
They tended to take longer, Obama quickly realized, when Biden was speaking. His role as the newest member of the panel meant Obama always spoke last, after every other senator took their turn. Biden usually spoke at the top of hearings, and he tended to ramble, clearly loving every minute of it. “Joe Biden is a decent guy, but man, that guy can just talk and talk. It’s an incredible thing to see,” Obama told Axelrod, a nice version of his growing feeling that Biden represented a generation of senators who’d overseen Washington’s decline into impracticality, even if he was perfectly friendly and obviously knew his stuff. (This wasn’t exactly self-aware analysis: Obama also had a penchant for talking at extreme length when he felt like it, but at least he spoke in neatly diagrammable paragraphs, not epic-length run-on sentences.) Obama usually kept this sentiment between him and his closest aides—once, as Biden held court during confirmation hearings for Bush’s secretary of state nominee Condoleezza Rice, Obama handed a staffer a note reading, “Shoot. Me. Now.” He didn’t see much improvement in committee hearings. Later, he looked at Samantha Power, one of his foreign policy aides and a former star journalist, and said, “Here we go again” as Biden resumed speaking. He leaned back toward her, as if he was going to ask for advice, and whispered, “I’m sorry you have to witness this.”
