The Long Alliance, page 8
Of course, not everyone was encouraging, even among the crowd Obama handpicked to ask for advice—the types least likely to share the obvious conventional wisdom that Clinton and the Democratic establishment would steamroll him. When Obama asked to see Harold Schaitberger, the head of the international firefighters’ union, which had helped fuel Kerry’s campaign, the labor chief said over breakfast on Capitol Hill that he wasn’t sure Obama was ready. Lieberman, too, was careful, if slightly more encouraging. He’d been Gore’s running mate only to drift right and lose a primary for his own Senate seat, which he then won back by running as an independent that fall. He told Obama his own standards for considering new campaigns: make sure you know why you’re running and that you’re confident you can do a better job than the other candidates, and don’t do it if you think you can’t succeed. He paused and told Obama that unless he really screwed it up, it couldn’t hurt to run, since he’d increase his visibility and stature in the Senate. Obama asked what Lieberman would do in his position, at which point the elder senator paused for about ten seconds before replying, “If I were you, I would run.”
All this advice was on Obama’s mind when, at a book event in Philadelphia in late October, just about every person in line urged him to run. On the car ride back to Washington afterward, Axelrod and Gibbs brought up Obama’s appearance the next morning on Meet the Press. Host Tim Russert would surely now roll out the tape from January 2006, when Obama had denied any interest in 2008, Axelrod said. Obama agreed it was inevitable, then surprised his advisors. Tomorrow, he said, he’d tell Russert he was seriously looking at running. Gibbs and Axelrod looked at each other before Gibbs turned back to Obama and asked if he’d mentioned this to his wife. Obama paused, and looked back blankly, then said Gibbs had a good point and that he’d call her when they got back to DC.
Obama called Michelle, Russert played the tape, and Obama made the news—“After November seventh, I’ll sit down and consider. And if at some point I change my mind, I will make a public announcement and everybody will be able to go at me.” But, he said, “it’s fair, yes,” to say that he was now considering running for president. He’d seen enough of DC to know what the capital now needed.
Democrats won back the House and the Senate on November 7. On November 8, a group including the Obamas, David Plouffe, Pete Rouse, Valerie Jarrett, Alyssa Mastromonaco, consultant John Kupper, and strategist Steve Hildebrand, plus Obama’s close friend Marty Nesbitt, piled into Axelrod’s office in Chicago. They were there to finally, really, start the conversation by considering the fundamental questions. Should Obama run, and why? And, more to the point, could he win?
Nearly five hundred days had passed since Biden’s announcement. It never occurred to either senator to discuss the coming campaign with the other.
CHAPTER 3
2007–2008
Bill Clinton had a word of warning for Biden. The senator was about to officially launch his campaign in January 2007, and the ex-president’s wife looked poised to dominate the field. This didn’t stop the two world-class chatters from catching up, though, and Clinton—four years younger than Biden but living the comfortable life of a retired pol with less time-consuming pursuits—laid out a problem he predicted Biden would soon encounter. When long-serving senators ran for president, he warned, they tended to deploy “Beltway Speak”—talking about laws and government programs in too much technical detail without tying them back to voters’ lives.
Clinton had a point, but not about Biden. For one, he’d been a senator forever but had always gone to some explicit, self-conscious lengths not to act like one. He still went home almost every night to his family in Wilmington, so he didn’t hang out socially with his colleagues as much as one might expect, and had thus avoided picking up their worst insidery habits. Plus, he was notorious among those in the know on Capitol Hill for demanding, sometimes cuttingly, that his aides talk like real people when briefing him, nixing jargon and abbreviations specifically to avoid the problem Clinton was talking about. Then there was Biden’s well-earned reputation for simply talking far too much, and far too loosely.
He didn’t make it past his first half-day as a candidate before this once again became his problem. He had choreographed a launch to establish himself as a serious contender for both votes and donor dollars. The idea was to start by talking about moving toward a resolution in Iraq, which he and his inner circle thought might propel him toward the informal top tier of candidates then occupied by Hillary, Edwards, and Obama—who each looked like they stood a real chance at the presidency given Bush’s terrible image and Republicans’ consequent unpopularity.
Instead, Biden was greeted with a wave of outrage when the New York Observer published an interview in which he described Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” At first, Biden didn’t see the issue—Wasn’t it obvious he was complimenting Obama?—but supporters immediately inundated him with dismayed calls.
It took a few hours for him to acknowledge the misstep in a private phone conversation. Obama was unamused but replied that he didn’t think Biden was racist and also knew he didn’t mean offense. It was a delicate moment for Obama, too. He knew he would speak about race as the campaign continued, but thought this was too early in the election season to make a major statement, since he was trying to introduce himself to as wide an audience as possible and didn’t want voters to think his campaign was predicated on the fact of his race. Anyway, his overall campaign message was supposed to be about overcoming differences, and this was hardly the kind of comment he wanted to respond to at length.
Biden also apologized to the Reverend Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist who’d run in 2004, and said he hadn’t meant to insult him, Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, or Carol Moseley Braun, all Black Democrats who’d campaigned for president before. Soon after, on a call with reporters, Biden tried to clean his message up further, calling Obama “probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or Republican party has produced at least since I’ve been around.”
Obama was eager to move on. So were some of Biden’s prospective donors and endorsers, who stopped answering his calls less than twenty-four hours into his campaign—they saw what he refused to: this obviously wasn’t his moment. That Biden couldn’t or wouldn’t see this was indicative of his broader inability at this point, so many years into his comfortable Senate perch, to read national politics as he once had and would again years later. It was Obama, not him, who seemed to have a finely tuned divining rod for the unsettled country’s mood.
A few days later, the senators saw each other at a committee meeting. Staffers watched from afar as they approached each other and, just out of earshot, started talking, then quietly laughing. It was cordial, even friendly, but quick—an acknowledgment that both of them wanted to move on, and that neither had much else to discuss with the other. While Biden’s aides sighed with relief—their boss’s reputation was mostly intact, even if his presidential ambitions had been mortally dented—not all of Obama’s staffers were over Biden’s comment, and thought their boss still might confront him in person. But he was much more sanguine about Biden than they were. What, they asked each other, the fuck?
* * *
Here, again, was the mismatch. If Obama seemed perfectly built for modern campaign trail politics, Biden was immediately exposed as out of sync with the times. Biden, as a result, was simply not the point for Obama. From the start there was a categorical difference in their candidacies. If Obama caught on, as he looked likely to do, he could be a historic world figure, and as his campaign matured his transformational promise turned him into an international phenomenon. Even in his best moments, Biden never looked like more than a talented senator, and he wasn’t out there promising a new political culture, let alone an era of unity. You could read the difference as a matter of naivete versus realism born of experience—plenty in DC, and certainly in Biden’s orbit, did—or as a gulf in aspirations and hope sprouting from differing understandings of what the country was looking for after eight years of Bush. But Obama vs. Biden was not even a comparison most would think to make.
It would later come to feel inevitable that the race became a legendarily brutal war of attrition between Obama and Clinton, but in the opening months they circled each other more carefully. Clinton, who’d hung a picture of Obama in her office after meeting him, didn’t even think her younger colleague would actually get in the campaign at all until it suddenly felt like a fait accompli at the end of 2006. Obama, too, started out with no personal animosity for Clinton, though he and Rouse dispatched a team of senior aides led by Lu to monitor every statement and move coming from her office, just to make sure they were cosponsoring the same bills and being careful about their points of departure on policy.
That the story of the primary did almost immediately become “Obama vs. Clinton” suited him well, though, especially as he got off to a shaky start. Obama had decided to run late in 2006 after lengthy conversations with Michelle and his inner circle and a ruminative trip to Hawaii. He had an OK chance of winning, he figured, and he was convinced he had a unique opportunity to change the culture in Washington, to represent a much bigger change in the country and its politics overall, and to inspire a generation of Americans, including Black children who would grow up with the first Black president. But it wasn’t all blind hope and anti–status quo talking points. Axelrod, Plouffe, and co had carefully planned out his path to the nomination—focusing at first on pockets of young liberals and undertargeted minority communities, and planning a robust online organizing presence unlike anything the 2004 race had seen, especially in states with caucus contests where they could pick up delegates in unexpected ways. They combed through results from focus groups that pollster David Binder stealthily ran with caucus-goers in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, too, to gauge how he was resonating. But despite the excitement surrounding Obama’s launch in January, Clinton still looked formidable, if not nearly impossible to beat, with most of the party establishment in her corner and filling her campaign’s bank accounts. Obama was never far from her in polling or national media attention, but her mastery of policy and support from the party’s longtime leaders were staggering. Plus, at some important early moments Obama fell dispiritingly flat, like when, at a Service Employees International Union forum on health care, he struggled to articulate the details of his plan despite promising it would be an important piece of his presidency. The disappointing performance led some pundits to question his preparedness and some policy wonks to doubt his seriousness.
Still, he was drawing crowds and leaning into the distance between him and his leading opponents on the issue of the day. Every time he retreated into moody silence off the trail, second-guessing the wisdom of his campaign or its tactics and agreeing with his critics, Axelrod would remind him, “The same people who are saying this are the people who thought invading Iraq was a good idea,” which would again crystallize for him the promise of change central to his bid and his opposition not just to Clinton but most of the rest of the field, too, including Biden. The truth was that there was some nuance to the difference between his position on Iraq and most of his opponents’—many had backed the war, but few of them had actually been as gung ho about invasion as campaign trail rhetoric made it seem. Yet voters by and large read the matter as a binary between him and Clinton, an impression Obama’s team leaned into by handing out copies of the text of his 2002 speech opposing the war.
Obama was, at the time, becoming comfortable with the idea that his job as a campaigner and politician was to tell voters stories about who they were as a collective, a far more expansive view of the role than many longtime pols were willing to take. (Ask Biden, who tried winning votes by reciting his résumé, and who seemed to view the domestic job of the president at least through a Hill angle: passing legislation, first and foremost.) Obama wasn’t dismissive of legislative nitty-gritty—far from it—but, in his typical unemotional and slightly detached way, he saw it as a tool in his more sweeping mission, rather than an end itself. When, during the primary, he said that Ronald Reagan had been more transformative as a president than Bill Clinton, the resulting reaction and commentary illustrated the stark divides in the party: Obama’s point was that Reagan had shifted the culture. But to a taken-aback Clinton, his wife, and her supporters, it was an affront that maligned the effectiveness of the forty-second president’s governance.
Biden watched these scraps with both interest and significant annoyance to be left out of them. He seldom disagreed with Obama’s policy priorities in the main, even if he had marginal nitpicks, and he remained impressed with his chops as a campaigner. But he tended to agree more with Clinton’s view of the world than with Obama’s. Clinton and Biden held more faith in institutions than in people to change Washington. Stylistically, too, Biden and Obama couldn’t have been more different, a fact that played out daily on the trail. Biden could be overwhelmingly tactile and affectionate with voters, even when he wasn’t catching on. Obama was good at retail politics, too—he liked talking to real people—but he always held himself back from fully engaging with every last voter’s life story, drawing less energy from the exchanges than Biden and remaining, at his core, distant with everyone except family and longtime advisors, self-consciously cool in both senses of the word. This only added to his reputation, which he built up with his big, inspirational speeches. When Biden and Obama saw each other on the trail, their own interactions could be markedly friendly, almost clubby, compared to the somewhat icy relationships both started to form with some of the other candidates like Edwards. But it was always Biden who approached Obama backstage at debates and forums—he could see that Obama was catching fire, and he was impressed. Always eager to be near the center of the action, he sidled up to the younger man and did his usually chummy bit, and felt the aura, though he still struggled to fully understand it. Their backstage conversations were seldom longer than a few minutes, and never particularly interesting.
Still, to the degree that Obama thought about Biden as an opponent, it was often with eye rolls. When Obama was scheduled to speak after his older, still notoriously talkative colleague at multicandidate events, Obama would turn to his traveling campaign team and ask, lightly but pointedly, how far behind schedule they thought he’d be this time.
Biden, though, thought about Obama plenty. But no matter how impressed he was, he started throwing elbows when it became clear that his young colleague wasn’t fading away and thus stood in his way. The Iowa Democratic Party’s Jefferson-Jackson Dinner is remembered for Obama’s holy-shit breakout speech among the state’s voters and for Clinton’s jab at him (“Change is just a word if you don’t have the strength and experience to make it happen”), but Biden, too, got in on the Obama ribbing, remarking on the audience’s heavily Obama slant by walking onstage and pronouncing, “Hello, Chicago!” which some in Obama’s orbit read as a clumsily veiled accusation they’d packed the crowd with out-of-staters.
Most of Biden’s idea, though, was to highlight his own experience in contrast to his opponents’. In Promises to Keep, the book he published before the campaign, he tartly wrote that the Jimmy Carter years made him understand “that on-the-job training for a president can be a dangerous thing,” and he made the argument even more explicitly in the campaign itself. In August in Iowa, George Stephanopoulos opened the first debate by bringing up a recent statement Biden made to Newsweek that Obama was “not yet ready” to be president.
Biden started by softening the blow now that he was on the same stage as Obama, but only on the surface: “Look, I think he’s a wonderful guy, to start off, number one,” he said. The Newsweek quote, he continued, was specifically about Obama’s preparedness with respect to Pakistan policy and the threat of jihadists with nuclear weapons. Biden tried pivoting to his proposal to establish “a long-term relationship with Pakistan and stability.” Stephanopoulos, though, didn’t let Biden off the hook. “You did go beyond talking about Pakistan. You were asked, Is he ready? You said, ‘I think he can be ready, but right now I don’t believe he is. The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.’” Biden replied, “I think I stand by the statement.” He had to. All his ads and speeches were about his steady hand after three decades in DC.
No one in Obama’s orbit was happy with this line of discussion, naturally, but they weren’t terribly upset by it, either. He had been clear with his contention—arguably the whole point of his campaign—that Washington experience wasn’t necessarily equating to good results, and that a new perspective was needed. Left unsaid, but never far from the surface, were the questions: How had things gone over the fifteen years since the Clintons arrived in Washington, anyway? Let alone the thirty-five years Biden had been around? When Obama finally got to defend himself from Biden and Clinton, who was making a similar case, he shrugged it off. “I don’t actually see that much difference, or people criticizing me on the substance of my positions,” he said onstage in Des Moines. It didn’t escape him that the debate had opened with the recitation of poll results showing him effectively tied for the lead in Iowa with Clinton and Edwards, with the levels of support for all three in the mid-20 percentages. Biden, Stephanopoulos revealed, was at just 2 percent.
* * *
At least as far as politics goes, Biden’s story is often told through the lens of his presidential campaigns, so it often begins in 1987. In truth, he started feeling out the edges of national politics, yearning for something more than his beloved Capitol Hill, even earlier. Biden spent his first restless years in the Senate trying to establish himself as a sensible moderate who could chart a path forward for his aging party, dismissing Washington liberals and admitting as early as 1974, at thirty-one years old and just two years since his family tragedy, that he’d likely consider running for the White House.
