Joe Biden

The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now

Evan Osnos

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781982174095
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

*A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR*
A concise, brilliant, and trenchant examination of Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s successful lifelong quest for the presidency by National Book Award winner Evan Osnos. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest man and the unluckiest—fortunate to have sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White House, but also marked by deep personal losses and disappointments that he has suffered.Yet even as Biden's life has been shaped by drama, it has also been powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of politics, to confront his shortcomings, errors, and reversals of fortune. As he says, "Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable." His trials have forged in him a deep empathy for others in hardship—an essential quality as he leads America toward recovery and renewal. Blending up-close journalism and broader context, Evan Osnos, who won the National Book Award in 2014, draws on nearly a decade of reporting for The New Yorker to capture the characters and meaning of 2020's extraordinary presidential election. It is based on lengthy interviews with Biden and on revealing conversations with more than a hundred others, including President Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and a range of activists, advisers, opponents, and Biden family members.This portrayal illuminates Biden's long and eventful career in the Senate, his eight years as Obama's vice president, his sojourn in the political wilderness after being passed over for Hillary Clinton in 2016, his decision to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency, and his choice of Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate.Osnos ponders the difficulties Biden faces as his presidency begins and weighs how a changing country, a deep well of experiences, and a rigorous approach to the issues, have altered his positions. In this nuanced portrait, Biden emerges as flawed, yet resolute, and tempered by the flame of tragedy—a man who just may be uncannily suited for his moment in history.

CHAPTER 1 Annus Horribilis

The lush, well-to-do Wilmington suburbs, in the rolling woods of the Brandywine Valley, are popular with heirs to the chemical fortune of the du Pont family. Their estates and gardens are tucked away in what is known as Delaware’s Chateau Country. On a modest patch, by those standards, Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, live on four sloping acres that overlook a small lake.

On the ninety-ninth day before the election, I pulled into Biden’s driveway. To avoid contagion, his advisers put me in a carriage house, a hundred yards from the home where the family lives. “Welcome to my mom’s house,” Biden called from the bottom of the stairs, an instant before his sweep of white hair rose into view. He reached the second floor of the cottage. He wore a trim blue dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a pen tucked between the buttons, and a bright-white N95 mask.

Biden was three weeks away from becoming America’s Democratic nominee for president. The headline on the front page of The Washington Post that morning was “America’s Standing in the World Is at a Low Ebb.” The death toll from the coronavirus pandemic was approaching 150,000, three times as many lives as America lost in Vietnam; the economy had crumbled faster than at any other time in the nation’s history; in Portland, Oregon, federal agents in unmarked uniforms were tear-gassing protesters, whom Donald Trump called “sick and deranged Anarchists & Agitators.” On Twitter that day, Trump warned that the demonstrators would “destroy our American cities, and worse, if Sleepy Joe Biden, the puppet of the Left, ever won. Markets would crash and cities would burn.”

The man who stood between Americans and four more years of Trump looked pleased to have company. In the strange summer of 2020, the Biden place was as solemn and secluded as an abbey. The cottage, styled in Celtic themes (green shutters, a thistle pattern on the throw pillows), doubled as a command post for the Secret Service, and large men with holstered guns stalked in and out. Biden settled into an armchair across the room from me and splayed his hands, a socially distanced salute. “The docs keep it really tight,” he explained.

Later that afternoon, the Bidens were due on Capitol Hill, to pay their respects to the recently deceased John Lewis, of Georgia, a civil rights icon who endured a fractured skull at the hands of state troopers in Selma, Alabama, before rising to the House of Representatives and becoming known as the “conscience of Congress.” It would be a rare excursion. Since the Covid-19 shutdown began, in March, Biden had circulated mostly between his back porch, where he convened fund-raisers on Zoom, a gym upstairs, and the basement rec room, where he sat for TV interviews in front of a bookcase and a folded flag. The campaign apparatus had scattered into the homes of some twenty-three hundred employees.

Before I could ask a question, he explained the origins of the cottage. When his father, Joe Sr., fell ill, in 2002, Biden renovated the basement of the main house and moved his parents in. “God love him, he lasted for about six months,” he said. “I thought my mom would stay.” She had other ideas. (Biden’s late mother, the former Jean Finnegan, plays a formidable role in his recounting of family history. In grammar school, he recalls, a nun mocked him for stuttering, and his mother, a devout Catholic, told her, “If you ever speak to my son like that again, I’ll come back and rip that bonnet off your head.”)

After Jean became a widow, Biden said, she offered him a proposition: “She said, ‘Joey, if you build me a house, I’ll move in here.’ I said, ‘Honey, I don’t have the money to build you a house.’ She said, ‘I know you don’t.’ She said, ‘But I talked to your brothers and sister. Sell my house and build me an apartment.’ ” For years, Biden, who relied on his government salary, was among the least prosperous members of the United States Senate. (In the two years after he left the vice presidency, the Bidens earned more than $15 million, from speeches, teaching, and book deals.) Biden renovated an old garage and his mother moved in. “I’d walk in and she’d be in that chair downstairs, facing the fireplace, watching television,” he said. “There’d always be a caregiver on the stool, and she’d be hearing her confession.”

Joe Biden has been a “public man,” as he puts it—holding office, giving interviews, dispensing anecdotes—for five decades. I last interviewed him, mostly about foreign affairs, in 2014, when he was in the White House and Donald Trump was hosting Season 14 of The Apprentice. Biden is seventy-seven years old, and he looks thinner than he did six years ago, but not markedly so. He has parted with youth grudgingly. His smile has been rejuvenated to such a gleam that it inspired a popular tweet during the 2012 campaign: “Biden’s teeth are so white they’re voting for Romney.” His hairline has been reforested, his forehead appears becalmed, and Biden generally projects the glow of a grandfather just back from the gym, which is often the case. His verbiage is as meandering as ever. James Comey, the former FBI director, once wrote that the typical Biden conversation originated in “Direction A” before “heading in Direction Z.” (In December 2019, Biden’s campaign released a doctor’s summary of his medical records, which pronounced him a “healthy, vigorous” man of his age.)

The implications of age, in one form or another, hovered over the presidential race. Trump took office as the oldest president in history. By the summer of 2020, he was seventy-four. To deflect questions about his mental acuity, he and his allies presented Biden as senile, a theme that dominated right-wing TV and Twitter. Biden saw little of it; he didn’t look at social media. (Compared to Trump, Biden’s campaign made only perfunctory use of it. Trump had over 114 million combined followers on Twitter and Facebook; Biden has less than ten million.)

If there is something big, his staff included a tweet in the morning roundup of news that he read on his phone. But, he said, “I don’t look at a lot of the comments. I spend the time trying to focus on the trouble people are in right now.”

By the end of August, ten weeks before the election, Biden led Trump by an average of at least 8 percentage points. But no earthly inhabitant expected an ordinary end to the campaign. Some polls showed the race tightening, and it could be transformed by a sudden jolt in the economy or in Congress or the Supreme Court. “I feel good about where we are,” Biden said. “But I know that it’s going to get really, really ugly.” As Trump disputed the legitimacy of mail-in voting, his postmaster general was brazenly cutting service in ways that could prevent ballots from being counted. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the oldest Supreme Court justice, had recently begun chemotherapy, raising the prospects of a bitter partisan fight over a successor. Republican operatives were helping Kanye West, the pro-Trump hip-hop star, get on the ballot in multiple states, which critics suspected would siphon away Black votes from Biden. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence warned that, as in 2016, Russians were working to damage Trump’s opponent, this time with phone recordings edited to support the canard that Biden had used the vice presidency to help his son Hunter make money in Ukraine.

For a front-runner, Biden was hardly sanguine. “I am worried about them screwing around with the election outcome,” he said. “When the hell have you heard a president say, ‘I’m not sure I’ll accept the outcome’?”

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The trials of 2020 dismantled some of the most basic stories we Americans tell ourselves. The world’s richest, most powerful country botched even rudimentary responses to the pandemic—finding masks, making tests—and some agencies proved to be so antiquated and starved of resources that they used fax machines to share data. The White House offered policies that read like mock Kafka; even as people were advised against dining out, it was proposing a corporate tax break on business meals.

Unlike World War II, when middle-class Americans skimped on basic staples—meat, sugar, coffee—many Americans of the Covid-19 era had rejected appeals to stay at home or cover their faces. Some ventured out on spring break, while stock clerks, nursing home aides, and delivery personnel returned to work under orders that they were “essential.” In Washington, even basic standards of political cohesion were failing. When Larry Hogan, of Maryland, a Republican governor at odds with Trump, ordered test kits from South Korea, Hogan felt the need to deploy his state police and National Guard troops to protect the shipment, for fear that the federal government would try to seize it. Trump boasted that he had withheld aid and equipment to states with Democratic leaders. “Don’t call the governor of Washington,” he recalled telling his vice president, Mike Pence. “Don’t call the woman in Michigan.” On Fox News in April, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and one of the leaders of the coronavirus response, declared the administration’s effort “a great success story.” In the four months afterward, at least 110,000 more people died.

And, in the midst of the pandemic, the death of George Floyd under a policeman’s knee opened a second epochal turn in American history—a reckoning with the entrenched hierarchy of power, which Isabel Wilkerson, in her book Caste, called “the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats.”

Cornell William Brooks, a Harvard professor, an activist, and a former head of the NAACP, likened the killing of George Floyd to the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, which inspired the Montgomery movement for civil rights. The scale of the protests reflected a rage that ran deeper than the horror that incited it. “The hottest element in this cauldron is frustrated hope. Many of us remember ‘hope and change,’ and what we got in the wake of that was literally anger and fear. People have just had enough,” Brooks said.

Biden believed that Trump’s failures of leadership, particularly in the pandemic, had become clear even to steadfast Republican advocates. “Everybody knows, even people supporting him: this is all about his self-interest. It’s all about him,” he told me. “It has had profound impacts on people’s ability to live their life.” Still, he conceded, it might not suffice to change voters’ minds. When Biden characterized Trump’s supporters, they were not duped or culpable or deplorable. “They think that they will be materially better off if he’s president,” he said. “He has gotten through, I think, to some degree—to about 40 percent—saying, ‘The Democrats are socialists. They’re here to take away everything you have.’ ”

Republicans had long accused Democrats of plotting to smuggle socialism into the United States. But leveling that charge against Biden, whose career had been distinguished mostly by careful centrism, was an awkward task. Biden entered the Democratic primaries with a narrow goal: to end the Trump presidency. Most Americans, he argued, did not want a revolution. At an early fund-raiser in New York, he promised not to “demonize” the rich and said that “nothing would fundamentally change.” (Online, people circulated mock campaign posters, in the color-block style of Obama’s “Hope” picture, with the slogan “Nothing Would Fundamentally Change.”) But, by the time Biden effectively clinched the nomination, in March, he had begun to describe his candidacy as a bid for systemic change on the scale of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. According to a senior aide to Bernie Sanders, Biden told Sanders, in a phone call about a possible endorsement, “I want to be the most progressive president since FDR.”

That evolution confounded critics on all sides. Biden was simultaneously accused of being a socialist puppet and a neoliberal shill. To his detractors on the left—especially younger, highly educated, more ideological Democrats who are particularly active online—Biden was a creature of the ancien régime and a cheerleader of the national security state, with such timid appetites for change that, when he won on Super Tuesday, the price of health care stocks went up. Liberals were dismayed that the most diverse presidential field in history had yielded a white man in his eighth decade. It was as if a waiter had returned from the kitchen with news that the specials were gone, and all that was left was oatmeal. (Of course, they always had the option of more rat poison.)

Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, told me, “People said, ‘Oh, this man’s a hack.’ He’s not an ideological person, and ideology clearly matters to us. He was running a retrograde candidacy during the primary. It was all about going back to the track we were on with the Obama years.” Mitchell, who was also a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, said that Biden’s change of tone caught the attention of progressives: “He’s recognizing that this might be a Rooseveltian moment. He’s not all the way there—nobody thinks Joe Biden is a progressive star—but he can be a product of either your most cynical thinking or a product of your most optimistic thinking.”

In an interview as the election approached, I asked Barack Obama how he interpreted Biden’s swerve to the left. “If you look at Joe Biden’s goals and Bernie Sanders’s goals, they’re not that different, from a forty-thousand-foot level,” he argued. “They both want to make sure everybody has health care. They want to make sure everybody can get a job that pays a living wage. They want to make sure every child gets a good education.” The question was one of tactics, Obama suggested. “A lot of times, the issue has to do with ‘How do we go about that, and what are the coalitions we need?’ ” he said. “What I think the moment has done is to change some of those calculations, not because necessarily Joe’s changed but because circumstances have changed.”

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The tensions afflicting the Democratic Party reflected a clash between liberal meliorism—the “long-view” politics of Obama and Biden—and the urgent movement that Sanders called a “revolution.” The two factions claim competing virtues: one emphasized realism, coalition-building, and practical politics, and the other the inescapable evidence that regular “reform” had failed to confront pervasive inequalities, the cruelties of American health care and incarceration, and ecological catastrophe.

The division was as much generational as it was ideological. Young Americans have been reared on fiascoes—the invasion of Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis—and have come to blame that record partly on gerontocracy. The median American age in 2020 was thirty-eight years. The median U.S. senator was sixty-five. The current Congress was among the oldest in history. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was seventy-eight; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was eighty. The difference in age was at the root of a profound difference in worldview. In the words of Patrick Fisher, a Seton Hall professor who specializes in the political dynamics of age, “Demographically, politically, economically, socially and technologically, the generations are more different from each other now than at any time in living memory.”

Millennials constitute the largest generation in America today, and the most diverse in the nation’s history. They entered the job market during the worst recession since the 1930s. People under twenty-five have faced unemployment rates more than double those of other age groups. By 2012, a record number of adults between eighteen and thirty-one were living with their parents. In the 2010s, as Trumpism was germinating on the right, a rival political movement was growing on the left, driven by young people. In their view, older Americans were using the political system to steer resources away from younger generations. In 2014, the federal government spent approximately six dollars per capita on programs for seniors for every dollar that it spent on programs for children, according to Paul Taylor, the author of The Next America, a study of the demographic future.

Many young Americans had put their hopes in Obama; in 2008, he won an astonishing two thirds of millennials. By the end of his term, they had concluded that if he could not marshal political parties to act then nobody could. Between 2013 and 2017, the median age of members of the Democratic Socialists of America dropped from sixty-eight to thirty-three. Many others expressed a desire for a socialism that was closer to the New Deal. In 2019, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who inspired a global climate strike, told the United Nations, “Change is coming, whether you like it or not.”

When I asked Obama about the tensions in the party, he cast them as features of “the traditional Democratic idea.” He said, “You have a big-tent party. And that means that you tolerate, listen to, and embrace folks who are different than you, and try to get them in the fold. And so you work with not just liberal Democrats, but you work with conservative Democrats—and you are willing to compromise on issues.” That was a gentle jab at Democrats who see compromise as a failing. In comments the previous year, Obama bemoaned the emergence of a “circular firing squad” in the party. “This idea of purity, and you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically woke, and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly,” he said.

Before he was a candidate, Biden expressed frustration with young people’s tepid participation in elections. In 2019, he griped that, when Trump ran against Hillary Clinton, “they sat home, didn’t get involved.” Yet, when we spoke during his campaign, he took pains to sound more conciliatory. “This generation has really been screwed,” he said. “These were really the most open, the least prejudiced, the brightest, the best-educated generation in American history. And what’s happening? They end up with 9/11, they end up with a war, they end up with the Great Recession, and then they end up with this. This generation deserves help in the middle of this crisis.” He understood elements of their predicament. “I’m paying off Beau Biden’s college loans,” he said, referring to his firstborn son, who died in 2015. “He never missed a payment, but when he graduated from undergraduate school and law school, it was $124,000 he owed.”

In the spring of 2020, Biden began describing himself as a “transition candidate,” explaining, “We have not given a bench to younger people in the party, the opportunity to have the focus and be in focus for the rest of the country. There’s an incredible group of talented, newer, younger people.” Ben Rhodes, an adviser to Obama in the White House, told me, “It’s actually a really powerful idea. It says, ‘I’m a seventy-seven-year-old white man, who was a senator for thirty years, and I understand both those limitations and the nature of this country.’ Because, no matter what he does, he cannot completely understand the frustration of people in the streets. That’s not a criticism. It’s just a reality.” A senior Obama administration official observed that Biden’s acknowledgment also contained a subtler message: “This country needs to just chill the fuck out and have a boring president.”

To Varshini Prakash, a twenty-seven-year-old co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-driven organization that presses for action on climate change, Biden recognized the urgency of showing more than rhetorical interest in the young le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Annus Horribilis
• Chapter 2: What It Took
• Chapter 3: “Grow Up”
• Chapter 4: Veep
• Chapter 5: Envoy
• Chapter 6: The Lucky and the Unlucky
• Chapter 7: Battle for the Soul
• Chapter 8: Planning a Presidency
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Note on Sources
• Copyright