Many Democrats and members of the media have a clear vision of what a Joe Biden presidency could have and should have been: Good old Joe, the last of the old-school back-slapping dealmakers, shoving Donald Trump aside to the ash heap of history, and then presiding over a paler version of an Obama third term. It’s a happy, romanticized, West Wing TV series vision that was always unlikely, but Biden probably would have come closer to that vision if he had run and won in 2016.
But when Biden reemerged on the political scene in 2019, he appeared considerably older, more tired, and less energetic than the guy people remembered as vice president. His stories meandered, his voice often grew soft and muffled, and when pressed, he reflexively reverted to his trademark “come on, man!” as if whoever was questioning him was being ridiculous. Maybe the Biden in his sixties or closer to seventy could have played the role of president better than the current foot-shuffling octogenarian who can’t do early morning or late evening events, and whose voice is reduced to a barely-audible mumble in meetings with foreign leaders.
That vision of what a Biden presidency could and should have been with a younger man runs through Franklin Foer’s new book, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future. It’s the rare book where the anecdotes and reporting are fascinating, in large part because they contradict and undermine the book’s thesis, that Biden is a successful president because of “old fashioned politics, deal-making and compromise.”
The negotiating maestro Biden that Foer wants to showcase rarely shows up in these anecdotes. Instead, Biden comes across as condescending, prickly, insulting, and his negotiating methods often prove counterproductive. For example, here’s Foer’s account of Biden’s call with former congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida, trying to persuade moderates to support the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better proposal in August 2021, as the Afghanistan withdrawal is going badly.
But Murphy knew that [Biden] didn’t have the votes. Kyrsten Sinema was one of her closest friends, and Murphy knew that she would never accept the $3.5 trillion price tag of Build Back Better. And as the cochair of the Blue Dog caucus, Murphy knew the mind of the moderates of the House.
…“We must be as bold as the votes will bear,” [Murphy] told him. She wanted Biden to know that he wasn’t on the path to victory unless he scaled back the legislation. Her warning triggered the president.
“If you’re not with me, you’re with the opposition,” he told her.
Murphy couldn’t believe the call was sliding into rancor.
“Sir, I’m not the opposition,” she pleaded. “I’m trying to help you achieve your agenda.”
“You are the opposition.”
“I think we’re just going to have to live with a difference of opinion then. Have a good evening.”
With that, Biden was left alone on the line.
The call was supposed to be the beginning of a charm offense. Biden was going to call a slew of wavering moderates in the House. But his aides decided to postpone that initiative, waiting for a moment when he was in a better frame of mind.
Here’s Biden in a September 2021 White House meeting with key senators, absent-mindedly blurting out information that Kyrsten Sinema had told him in confidence:
“Is there anyone who has a ceiling for what they would be willing to accept?”
The room went silent. Biden felt like a teacher waiting for his class to answer a question. After a beat of waiting, he decided to call on a student.
He turned to Kyrsten Sinema. Over the weeks, she and Biden had plenty of conversations on the phone.
“Your real number is $1.1 trillion,” he told the group.
The room turned to Sinema and watched her stare at the president. Another moment of painful silence.
“That number was meant to be private,” she said. “And now you’ve just made it public. If that number gets out, I’ll know it’s one of you.”
Biden began to haltingly apologize. “I didn’t know it was a secret.”
As he tried to make amends, Sinema stood up. “Well, it sounds like if I’m not willing to go up to an infinite number, then I should just leave the room.”
And for a brief moment, the president seemed torn over whether to argue with Sinema or to placate her. But Sinema couldn’t contain herself. She snapped, “You asked if anyone has a cap. Of course I have a cap. So I should just leave.”
“No, no, no, no,” Biden told her. “You shouldn’t leave the room.”
She returned to her seat, but the awkwardness lingered both in the meeting and beyond. When Biden aides tried to call Sinema, she simply didn’t answer. At the moment the White House needed to nail down her support, she went AWOL. They desperately wanted a deal but had no choice but to hope her anger would eventually subside.
There’s no denying Biden’s January 2022 speech in Atlanta, denouncing the state’s recently-passed voting reform laws was incendiary by presidential standards. Biden denounced the law as “Jim Crow 2.0” and he asked lawmakers, “do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor?”As Foer puts it, “its implications were clear enough. He was arguably accusing Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of siding with the man who had fired water cannons at black children.” But what’s fascinating is that apparently Biden was genuinely surprised that accusing everyone who disagreed with him on the filibuster of being the moral equivalent of segregationists had damaged his relationship with Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell.
While he was in the Capitol, Biden made his way across the building to Mitch McConnell’s office for an impromptu visit with his old adversary and friend. His speech in Atlanta had irked McConnell, who didn’t especially like being lumped in with Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis. A day earlier, McConnell denounced Biden’s speech as “profoundly – profoundly unpresidential.” Then, in his most disappointed voice, he moaned, “I’ve known, liked and respected Joe Biden for many years. I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday.”
Rather than accepting the fact of McConnell’s enmity, Biden wanted to patch things up with him. He needed McConnell to know that he hadn’t actually intended to compare him with one of the great villains of American history. But when Biden arrived at McConnell’s door, the minority leader wasn’t there. The possibility for a cathartic moment evaporated. As he turned around, Biden found himself walking the halls he had haunted as a senator, a president futilely wandering.
Remember, the theme of this book is that Joe Biden is an exceptionally talented politician and negotiator, who knows how to treat people in order to get the results he wants.
Nor does Biden come across as a better negotiator or dealmaker on the foreign front. For starters, it seems Biden is convinced he’s the smartest man in the room and isn’t shy about saying so, nor expressing how poorly he thinks of everyone else.
When it came to foreign policy, Joe Biden believed he was the business. For decades, in casual conversations, he would knock the strategists, diplomats, and pundits who pontificated on panels in places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Munich Security Conference. He called them risk averse, beholden to institutions, lazy in their thinking. Listening to these complaints, a friend once posed the obvious question to him; If you have such negative things to say about these confabs, then why attend so many of them? Biden replied, “if I don’t go, they’re going to get stale as hell.”
Other stories of Biden the diplomat:
On his first trip [to Afghanistan] in 2002, Biden met with interior minister Yunus Qanuni in his Kabul office, a hollow shell of a building. Qanuni, an old mujahadeen fighter, told him, “we really appreciate that you have come here, but you should know that Americans have a long history of making promises and then breaking them. And if that happens again, the Afghan people are going to be disappointed.”
Biden was jet lagged and irritable. Qanuni’s comments set him off: “Let me tell you, if you even think of threatening us…” Biden was worked up, and his aides struggled to calm him down. The meeting went so badly that the American envoy Zalmay Khalizad had to persuade Biden to return to the Interior Ministry later that evening to apologize…
On two separate visits, in 2008 and 2009, he had dinners with President Hamid Karzai that went disastrously off the rails.
The anecdotes keep painting Biden as cloddish, needlessly abrasive, condescending, hypersensitive to anything that could be remotely perceived as a slight, temperamental, and utterly oblivious to how he’s being perceived by others. It’s a fascinating story, in part, because it’s the opposite of the story that Foer wants to tell. And while Biden always had a loose cannon for a mouth, a tendency to BS and exaggerate, way too much self-regard and a habit of demagoguing — “gonna put y’all back in chains!” — octogenarian Biden is considerably worse than sexagenarian or septuagenarian Biden.
In the next-to-last paragraph, Foer (and Biden) finally acknowledge what anybody with eyes can see:
His advanced years were a hindrance, depriving him of the energy to cast a robust public presence or the ability to easily conjure a name. It was striking that he took so few morning meetings or presided over so few public events before 1o a.m. His public persona reflected physical decline and time’s dulling of mental faculties that no pill or exercise regimen can resist. In private, he would occasionally admit to friends that he felt tired.
No kidding!