The Last Politician

PROLOGUE 

Joe Biden’s inauguration was an image in his mind. It took hold there decades earlier, and it looked something like a brisk winter’s day, when the nation’s establishment huddled around him, wrapping its arms around the kid from Scranton. It was a triumphalist scene, but also a revenge fantasy, since Washington’s liberal elite had long rolled its eyes at him—for his loquaciousness, for his stories that were too folksy by half, for his blaring insecurities—and he knew it.

The consistent underestimation of Joe Biden was his diesel. It propelled him to keep chasing the image, over the course of three presidential runs. He pursued it into his late seventies, even though diminishingly few of his peers considered it plausible—and even though his inability to surrender his ambitions occasionally verged on the undignified.

He believed that fate—a word strewn across his monologues—sometimes required him to travel the ugly path to success. At every station in his adult life, joy marched in lockstep with trauma. And when the image in his head transposed itself into reality on January 20, 2022, it seemed entirely fitting that the inauguration, which he had so long desired, deviated so wildly from his expectations, and was stalked by death. In the dream version of the day, he solemnly strides onto the stage erected on the west front of the Capitol, through doors held open by marines.

But when that day arrived, the glass in those doors was shattered. Two weeks earlier, right-wing paramilitaries battered them with flag poles and purloined police shields in a violent quest to prevent him from ever taking office. The inaugural dais looked down onto steps, where police officers trying to fight off the surging mob had slipped in pools of blood.

Instead of a democratic extravaganza, his inauguration was surrounded by wire fences and Jersey barriers, guarded by armored vehicles and twenty-six thousand members of the National Guard who descended on Washington for the event, determined to prevent a reprise of the violence of the sixth of January.

Even if the public had been permitted to pass through the checkpoints surrounding the city center, it wouldn’t have come. Through the winter, it sheltered at home, worried that it might die by inhaling particles of disease wafting in the air. A global pandemic was at its lethal peak. On January 19,the eve of his inaugural, COVID’s death toll surpassed four hundred thousand. Despite the development of effective vaccines, the government had scant doses—and no effective plan for distributing them. To fill the expanse of the unoccupied Mall, inaugural planners planted two hundred thousand flags across the lawn, representing the absentees. Biden couldn’t address an adoring crowd, just sheets fluttering in the wind.

This was not the image in his head. It was a postapocalyptic tableau—and the nation that he inherited.

The electorate turned to Joe Biden as a balm. Postmortems of his victory ascribed his success to the fact that voters hoped the kindly grandfather might impose calm and decency, a bit of boredom, and a dose of competence, after four erratic, enervating years of Trump.

But voters’ expectations for Biden didn’t line up with his own.

Born in the middle of World War II, raised in the tense early days of the Cold War, he viewed himself as thrust by events into a successor struggle to preserve democracy. To stave off the authoritarian enemy, he would need to contain the rising force of China and ward off the revanchist ambitions of Russia. It required him to tangibly demonstrate that the American system wasn’t the antiquated relic its rivals portrayed. He said that he would prove that democracy could still deliver for its citizens, that it hadn’t lost its capacity to accomplish big things.

This was a much steeper, much riskier task than helping the country muddle through its tangle of immediate crises, which was job enough. But it suited Biden’s heroic self-conception,his belief that he would prove the establishment naysayers wrong by proving himself great. He believed that he could save American democracy by transforming the country—passing monumental legislation, breaking with economic orthodoxy, redirecting its foreign policy to the challenges of the future.

For Biden the process and the substance were intertwined. Although he liked to brag about being a constitutional scholar—on the basis of seventeen years Biden had spent as an adjunct professor at Widener University Delaware Law School—he really had one primary profession in his career: he was a politician. His expertise was nose counting, horse trading, and spreading a thick layer of flattery over his audiences.

Over the decades, his profession, never truly respected, had fallen deeply out of favor. The nation elected consecutive presidents (Barack Obama,Donald Trump) who posed as antipoliticians, figures who emerged from outside the system, without much experience in Washington and with an abiding disdain for it. Both Obama and Trump came to office with the belief that they led mass movements, independent of political parties. In very different ways, both men profited from and intensified the old moan that politicians were the problem, corrupt, unresponsive, lacking in necessary boldness.

But the public wasn’t just rejecting a profession; it simultaneously discarded a set of practices. Politics is the means by which a society mediates its difference of opinion, allowing for peaceful coexistence. It’s an ethos that requires tolerance of competing truths—and permits the possibility of social change. It’s a set of rules where by the side that fails to prevail in democratic decision-making accepts its defeat.

The insurrection—stoked by Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 vote—was the most worrying evidence of the demise of politics. Witnessing such horrific behavior, it felt reasonable to ask, Was it possible to cooperate with the political party that coddled Trump, let alone coexist in the same society as the people who voted for him?

Biden set out to prove the eternal relevance of politics. In fact, it was the way out of this mess. He wanted to show that deal making, coalition building,and persuading the other side were still effective ways to get things done. But on certain days of his presidency, it seemed like nobody else in the country sincerely believed in his faith. It felt as if he naively assumed the good faith of malevolent adversaries, that he believed in salvaging institutions beyond repair. His faith in his profession looked like it might doom him to become a historic failure, at the moment when America could least afford for him to falter.

But in the story of Joe Biden, a pattern keeps reasserting itself. Just after he is dismissed as past his time, written off because of his doddering detachment from the zeitgeist, he pulls off his greatest successes. He shocks those who only think they know him.

I first pondered this book in the summer of 2020, when it seemed likely that Joe Biden might become president. I wanted to chronicle his administration’s first hundred days as it sought to tame the pandemic and undo the legacy of Donald Trump. But that milestone came—and went. I struggled to grab hold of an assessment of the Biden presidency that I trusted. Each time I pondered stopping my project, it felt like a premature terminus. I worried the book’s judgments would be stale by its publication date.

But after two years, I knew that I had my story and faith in my conclusions. In the modern presidency, the first two years of administration are the narrow window in which presidents can realize their highest ambitions. It’s nearly an iron rule of politics that incumbents are punished by the electorate in their first midterm election, losing their congressional majorities, thus ending the possibilities for grand legislative achievements.

At the beginning of 2022, it seemed as if Joe Biden’s window might close without much to show for his efforts. Despite the success of the vaccine roll out and the passage of a massive stimulus bill, his messy presidency looked like it would be best remembered for its failures—a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the humiliating collapse of his Build Back Better legislation,and the rise of inflation. Comparisons to Jimmy Carter, the benchmark for a presidency stuck in a ditch, felt reasonable, if not yet fully deserved.

But then redemption—anda profound legacy—cameunexpectedly, splayed across the second half of his second year, as he orchestrated the most fertile season of legislation in memory and rallied the world to Ukraine’s defense.

During Biden’s long period of flailing, I had feared that he had missed his chance to avert the worst consequence of climate change—and that another opportunity to protect the planet wouldn’t come around for years, after it was far too late. But then in the summer of 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a banally named bill that will transform American life. Its investments in alternative energy will ignite the growth of industries that will wean the economy from its dependence on fossil fuels.

That achievement was of a piece with the new economics that his presidency had begun to enshrine. Where the past generation of Democratic presidents was deferential to markets, reluctant to challenge monopoly, in different to unions, and generally encouraging of globalization, Biden went in a different direction. Through a series of bills—not just his investments in alternative energy, but also the CHIPS Act and his infrastructure bill—he erected a state that will function as an investment bank, spending money to catalyze favored industries to realize his vision, where the United States controls the commanding heights of the economy of the future.

The critique of gerontocracy is that once politicians become senior citizens,they will only focus on the short term, because they will only in habit the short term. But Biden, the oldest president in history, pushed for spending money on projects that might not come to fruition in his lifetime. His theory of the case—that democracy will succeed only if it delivers for its citizens—compelled him to push for expenditures on unglamorous but essential items such as electric vehicle charging systems, crumbling ports,and semiconductor plants, which will decarbonize the economy, employ the next generation of workers, and prevent national decline.

With Ukraine, his creative diplomacy mobilized an alliance—and an American public—that not so long ago exuded in difference to autocracy. He persuaded them to engage in selfless acts of solidarity, paying higher prices to sanction Russian aggression. By quietly arming the Ukrainians, he helped them fend off invasion, while avoiding the worst dangers of fighting a proxy war against a nuclear power. It was a bravura display of statesmanship.

It seems only right to admit that I began this project sharing the Washingtonestablishment’s skepticism of the man. I viewed him as a bloviator who dangerously fetishized bipartisanship.

But as I reported on him at close distance—through several hundred interviews with his White House inner circle, his cabinet, his oldest friends ,and members of Congress—my respect for him grew. I came to appreciate his ability to shelve his ego and empathically understand the psychology of the foreign leaders he sparred with and the senators he wooed. In negotiations with these figures, he could be shrewdly self-effacing, accepting the fact that sometimes it was better if he wasn’t the center of attention. He forced himself to sit back and let proxies do his bidding.

I found myself especially surprised by his capacity for absorbing criticism in the short term to achieve the objectives he considered most important. There was a patience, born of experience, that I never knew he possessed. It helped guide him to his greatest successes, and it carried him through his lowest moments. Despite the fiasco of the Afghan withdrawal, he never apologized or deflected blame onto his aides. He stubbornly owned the decision that scarred his legacy.

None of this healed the nation’s divide, although after two years of the Biden presidency, the political scientists predicting civil war began to sound more alarmist than prophetic. With a slight cooling of the political climate,bipartisan-minded senators passed a raft of legislation, confirming Biden’s instincts that creaky institutions could be rendered functional, that consensus was still possible in America. And in the midterm election, despite Biden’s inability to tame inflation, Trumpist election deniers largely failed in their attempt to seize control of state governments. Biden hadn’t defeated authoritarianism once and for all, but he pushed back the threat for the time being. It was hard to imagine any president doing much better under the circumstances.

Above all, watching Joe Biden at work renewed my respect for a profession, and its craft, unloved and in some ways unlovable, “the strong and slow boring of hard boards,” as Max Weber famously described it. That, in the end, might be his profound achievement, providing an instructive example of the tedious nobility of the political vocation. Unheroic but honorably human, he will be remembered as the old hack who could.