Not long after the 2008 Democratic Convention, Barack Obama had a chilly phone conversation with his running mate, Joe Biden. Obama was annoyed that Biden seemed to be saying something stupid on the campaign trail practically every week. This time it was Biden aimlessly speculating that Obama would be “tested” overseas after becoming president, which highlighted the nominee’s inexperience.
That testing didn’t happen, but something else did: Obama and Biden became exceptionally close, arguably the closest of any president and vice president in American history. How that happened tells us something important this campaign season.
With Biden, familiarity breeds not contempt, but respect and even love. As his admiring old Senate colleagues and loyal staff attest, the longer you know him, the better he looks.
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Since he first ran for president in 1988, Biden has been an erratic and undisciplined candidate. In Iowa this year, I saw him ramble right into the first quarter of the Super Bowl as even his family members looked at their watches. At 77, he is showing his age more than Bernie Sanders, who is a year older. This could be a challenge for Biden in one-on-one debates. He frequently has trouble finding the exit ramp on his garbled sentences and seems to return occasionally to his childhood stutter. A solid stump speech, interview or debate performance is often followed by an appearance where—like an anxious parent—you fear that at any moment he might ride his bike right into the bushes.
If Biden is the nominee, this concern will persist all the way to the election. And if he wins, the corny bloviating will be part of his presidency. The walls of the East Room will reverberate with, “Folks, the fact of the matter is…”
But none of this is likely to be fatal. In the Trump era, gaffes vaporize and everything is forgiven within a news cycle. When Biden had to apologize last week for wrongly claiming he was once “arrested” in South Africa, it was barely a blip. Voters have factored in that Joe Biden will be, well, Joe Biden. His genuine warmth, decency and—as Obama found—competence and good judgement will sustain him.
Biden is no Franklin D. Roosevelt but there are intriguing comparisons. FDR was nominated in 1932 without much enthusiasm and elected that fall mostly out of disgust with President Herbert Hoover. He favored reform, not revolution. When asked his ideology, FDR replied, “I’m a Christian and a Democrat, that’s all.” (Biden wouldn’t likely be able to stop with “that’s all”). Like Roosevelt, who was afflicted by polio, Biden has been ennobled by his suffering. It deepens him and binds him to others who have experienced setbacks. Roosevelt was not an intellectual, either, but he had high emotional intelligence. So does Biden.
In one area, Biden has already surpassed FDR: management of the federal government. During the Depression, the alphabet soup of new agencies blew through so much money that a new word—boondoggle—was invented to describe wasteful projects. In 2009, Obama assigned Biden to ride herd as “Sheriff Joe”over more than $1 trillion in stimulus spending. Republicans and the press worked overtime looking for waste and corruption. With thousands of programs receiving money from the Recovery Act, boondoggles shouldn’t have been hard to find.
None surfaced. The GOP thought it had one when Solyndra, a federally-subsidized energy company, went bankrupt. But the department of energy loan program that funded Solyndra was so successful that it returned large sums to the treasury. Biden hired the right auditors and asked the right questions. His deep knowledge of the substance of government—gained in part from his voracious reading on his long daily Amtrak commute between Wilmington, Delaware, and Washington, D.C., during 36 years in the Senate—paid off for the taxpayers.
And his deep contacts on Capitol Hill bolstered Obama, who was so toxic with the Republican base that GOP legislators could not be seen negotiating with him. So in the lame-duck session of every Congress, he assigned Biden to cut all the deals for his legislative program, which included everything from an arms control treaty to ending “don’t ask don’t tell” in the military to the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the most successful anti-poverty program in a generation.
On foreign policy, Biden also grows stronger on closer inspection. He has acknowledged that he erred in backing the 2003 resolution that authorized President George W. Bush to use force in Iraq, which Sanders will make an issue. But after the war, he proposed a novel solution—the federalization of Iraq into semi-autonomous regions—that might have finally brought some justice to the Kurds. As vice-president, his approach to Afghanistan—a “counter-terrorism” program that relied on drones, not troop surges and nation-building—looks prudent in retrospect. In 2010, I was sitting in his office when Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki called. Biden’s ability to navigate the subtleties of Iraqi politics was impressive. After Trump, experience in government should count for something.
As president, Obama so trusted Biden that he eventually gave him the entire Iraq portfolio to manage. And inside the Situation Room they had a secret non-verbal code for making the debate among advisers more candid. Every time Obama leaned back in his chair, it was a signal for Biden to offer provocative ideas that Obama wanted discussed but didn’t raise himself for fear of tilting the debate.
When Beau Biden got sick, Obama was extremely attentive. When Beau died in 2015, Joe worried how he would pay for college for Beau’s children. As Biden later told me, an emotional Obama got up from the table at their weekly lunch, walked over and put his hands on his vice president’s shoulders. “Joe, promise me you won’t sell the house,” he said. “I’ll give you the money.” (That proved unnecessary).
Obama believed Biden was in too much pain to run for president in 2016, and Biden finally agreed. “A campaign should not be therapy,” Biden said later. This time around, Biden asked Obama not to endorse him. He thought it would make the 2020 nomination seemed rigged in his favor.
But now Sanders is running an ad where he uses a voice-over of Obama that makes it seem as if 44 is endorsing him. This is deeply misleading. Not only did Sanders consider running against Obama in the Democratic primaries in 2012, he often made a point of telling reporters (including me) that he thought Obama was a sell-out.
Soon enough, Sanders’ back will be against the wall. Even if he recovers in Michigan, he will have a tough time against Biden in big states like Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The premise of his campaign—that a multi-ethnic, multi-generational revolutionary wave will wash over American politics—was dashed by Super Tuesday.
But Bernie Sanders’ bigger problem may be that Joe Biden has his friend Barack Obama in his back pocket. And even as Biden’s unsteadiness remains a concern, he is emerging as the old shoe of the Democratic Party—wearing well for the long journey ahead.
