• • •
ONE WEEKDAY THAT NOVEMBER, Biden summoned his inner circle to his Washington residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory, on Massachusetts Avenue. The Biden Strategy Group, as it was dubbed by one of its members, consisted of a handful of outside advisers who’d been with Joe forever, a few folks from his vice-presidential staff, his sons, Beau and Hunter, and his sister, Valerie. The group had convened sporadically over the past three years, neither exactly in secret nor entirely in the open. But never before had they gathered to discuss what was on today’s agenda: the campaign that lay ahead—and the one that might come after that.
There were coffee and rolls on the dining room table and a lot on Biden’s mind. The stories in the press about the possibility of his being replaced on the ticket by Hillary Clinton were heating up again, making Joe slightly mental. But what was eating at him even more was the way he was being neglected by the Obamans. The new year was just around the corner, and no one had bothered to lay out his campaign role and responsibilities. Biden was raring to hit the hustings, rile up the base, hassle the Republicans. He knew that the president would be the star of the reelect, but he wanted it to be a joint production: Obama-Biden 2012. The way things were shaping up, however, Biden worried that it was going to be a solo act: The Barack Obama Show.
That was how it had been four years earlier, as Biden well remembered. By historical standards, he had been selected as Obama’s running mate very late, at the end of August. With his working-class appeal, foreign policy credentials, and thirty-six years in the Senate, Biden was a smart pick for Obama. But the truth was that the Davids would have preferred their boss not to have an understudy at all. On a glide path to history, they quailed at having to introduce an unpredictable variable. For the next two months, Biden and Obama rarely stumped together and barely spoke by phone, with the former shut out of Chicago’s nightly conference calls with the latter. Apart from his debate with Sarah Palin, Biden’s part in the 2008 fall campaign was less that of a supporting actor than of a lowly extra.
All this had an effect on Biden as he stepped into the vice presidency. Unlike Gore, who had joined the 1992 Democratic ticket when Clinton was in third place and spent much of the summer bus-touring and bonding with his new buddy, Biden felt little political complicity in Obama’s victory or human connection between them. He had nurtured plenty of doubts about accepting the number-two slot, and they had not abated by Inauguration Day. “This is what I should be doing,” he told his chief of staff, Ron Klain. “But I’m not sure I’m going to be as happy as vice president as I was in the Senate.”
Things were rocky between him and Obama right out of the chute. During the campaign, the nominee had been frustrated by his running mate’s routine gaffes. (“How many times is Biden going to say something stupid,” Obama growled.) The day after the inauguration, when Biden ribbed Chief Justice John Roberts for botching the oath of office, Obama threw a sharp STFU look at the VP. At a House Democratic Caucus retreat that February, Biden remarked about the implementation of the stimulus, “If we do everything right . . . there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re gonna get it wrong.” Asked about the comment later by a reporter, Obama replied snidely, “I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to. Not surprisingly.”
The crack upset Biden more than he let on. Joe was perfectly aware of the widespread caricature of him as a clownish gasbag. He understood that the image was largely self-inflicted but hated it all the same, and he was intensely concerned that being vice president would only exacerbate the problem. Biden even had a name for the trap that he was determined to avoid: the Uncle Joe Syndrome, which would leave him looking not only buffoonish but irrelevant.
Days later, at one of the first of what would be their weekly private lunches, Biden dove right in and raised the issue with his boss. Mr. President, I’ve got your back and you gotta have my back, he said. I’m in this with you. And it doesn’t do you any good for the world to be laughing at me. I can get a lot of work done for you. But people have to know that you have confidence in me.
Obama apologized, told Biden that what he’d said had come out wrong, that there would be no mistaking his degree of faith in Joe—considering the heaping pile of responsibilities he was about to put on the vice-presidential plate.
The substantive portfolio mattered a great deal to Biden; it was another way of warding off Uncle Joe. In signing on with Obama, Biden had insisted on an agreement that he would be the last person with the president’s ear on every major policy decision. Not only did Obama honor that, but he offered Biden carte blanche to attend any Oval Office meeting and assigned him two crucial pieces of business in that first year: the stimulus and the drawdown of American forces in Iraq.
Obama valued Biden’s advice, especially on foreign policy, and his deal-making savvy on the Hill. And Biden was blown away by Obama’s brainpower and backbone. Before they took office, Biden had considered himself more qualified to be president than Obama. Soon he no longer did. After one economic conference call led by the president, a flabbergasted Biden told an aide, “The kind of decisions he made, the way he absorbed this stuff—I couldn’t have done that.”
Biden wasn’t surprised about the mutual professional esteem. What he hadn’t anticipated was the personal chemistry that flowered between them. Biden liked to tell the story of how, on election night, after he and Obama climbed down from the stage in Grant Park, they had shared a moment with Biden’s ninety-one-year-old mother, Jean. Taking Obama’s hand, Jean cooed, “Honey, come here, it’s going to be okay,” and then grabbed her son’s and offered him reassurance, too: “Joey, he’s going to be your friend.” Biden smiled—Love you, Mom—but wasn’t remotely sure she was right. Stylistically and temperamentally, after all, he and Obama were chalk and Camembert.
It was the family thing that made the flavors rhyme. Family meant the world to Joe, and also to Barack. Their wives hit it off, with Jill Biden teaming up with Michelle on her military-families work. Sasha Obama went to school at Sidwell Friends with Biden’s granddaughter Maisy, where they both played basketball—and the president delighted in coaching them and hanging out with his VP at their games. And then there was Beau’s stroke, which drew Biden and Obama closer than before.
When Biden learned that his eldest son, the forty-one-year-old attorney general of Delaware, had been rushed to the hospital in the spring of 2010, he was panicked and disconsolate. Since the death of his first wife and infant daughter in a 1972 car crash, Biden had maintained a close bond with his two sons, who survived the accident, and always lived in fear of the next mortal phone call. The stroke was publicly described as minor, but in fact was life-threatening. There were initial questions about how full his recovery would be. (He suffered partial paralysis for months.) When the shaken vice president returned to the White House once Beau was out of the woods, Obama came sprinting down the hall to embrace him. Biden would tell this story to anyone who would listen, always stressing the same takeaway: “People say this guy Obama is lacking in emotion—don’t buy it.”
The truth was, Biden discerned a lot of Beau in Obama. They’re cool, they’re cerebral, they keep their passions in check—they’re the modern politician, he thought. And while Biden père was none of those things, he did see one similarity between himself and the president: He doesn’t pretend to be what he’s not, and I don’t pretend to be what I’m not.
Obama prized Biden’s lack of phoniness, for sure. But he was even more impressed by Biden’s loyalty—the fact that, as promised, he always had Obama’s back. During the lame-duck session, when Joe was on the Hill selling the tax-cut deal to a roomful of House Democrats, New York congressman Anthony Weiner took a shot at Obama. The VP upbraided him so forcefully and profanely that he earned a standing ovation. A few months later, Biden did something similar in the White House to Netanyahu. The stories always got back to Obama, who relished them.
Not that Obama ever stopped cringing at Biden’s persistent indi
scipline or sporadic outright blunders. But he came to accept them as part and parcel of Joe being Joe. When Biden would rabbit on for too long in a meeting, Obama no longer got agitated the way he used to—and instead would just reach over and put his hand on Biden’s shoulder. Obama even found himself adopting some of Joe’s (countless) folksy aphorisms. During the debt-ceiling brouhaha, Obama said that his guiding principle was a Biden mantra: “Don’t die on a small cross.”
Obama was as gobsmacked as Biden was at the way their comradeship had blossomed. At one of their weekly lunches in 2011, Obama announced, “You know, I’m surprised—we’ve become friends.”
To which Biden cheekily replied: “You’re fucking surprised?!”
• • •
AND YET FOR ALL the personal peachiness between them, Biden’s insecurities about 2012 continued to fester. In Joe’s mind, it shouldn’t have been so. For him, the personal and the political were inextricably entwined—but for Obama they were at once separable and separate. And in the political arena, the president was guided by the members of his brain trust, who liked Biden fine but still viewed him as a sideshow.
For the first two years, the situation was manageable. Axelrod and Emanuel had soft spots for Biden. Klain, who had solid West Wing relationships, served as an easement for Biden into Obamaworld and an emollient when his feelings were bruised. But even then, Biden often felt ignored when it came to the White House’s political strategy and tactics.
Biden fancied himself a natural politician, on the order of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, with a fingertip feel for voters and what swayed them. In the run-up to the midterms, Biden argued that it was foolish to try to frame the election as anything but what it plainly was: a referendum on the administration’s performance. What was needed, therefore, was a full-throated defense of Obama’s record—of the stimulus, the Detroit bailout, and even health care.
What Biden wanted was to draft a pamphlet (yes, a pamphlet) laying out the case, print up millions (yes, millions) of copies, and have them sent to targeted voters across the country. In this cause, he enlisted a potent ally: Bill Clinton. Soon enough, the two of them were talking daily by phone, faxing drafts back and forth, refining the argument, marshaling the data. Here’s the latest version from Clinton, Biden would tell Klain. You think it’s good? I think it’s good. Well, maybe one more tweak.
When Biden was finally satisfied, he raised the concept with Obama, who told him, “Work with Axe.” But Axelrod’s affection for Biden did not extend to this cockamamie plan. (A brochure is gonna change the election? he thought. Right.) But Biden wouldn’t desist, pressing the matter until Axelrod snapped, “We’re not printing a couple million of anything and dropping it at people’s houses—okay?”
The fall of 2010 also brought the first flotation of the rumor that Hillary might take Biden’s job, with him assuming hers at Foggy Bottom in the bargain. Giving the gossip a dash of credibility and a hefty dose of buzz was that it was first conveyed by Bob Woodward, who declared flatly on CNN that the idea was “on the table.”
The White House immediately denied that any such notion was on any table (or any bench, bureau, or buffet). And Biden didn’t credit the speculation for a minute. But as the JRB-HRC swap rumor popped up again and again all through 2011, it preyed on him nonetheless. Biden and his people all believed that the hearsay was emanating from Hillary’s orbit—not from her personally, but from her staff, outside advisers, or the denizens of Greater Clintonia. It was clearly designed to undermine the president (Obama is failing), undercut Biden (he isn’t helping), and elevate Hillary (only she can save the day). But Biden also found the White House’s reaction annoying. Sure, they denied the story, but they never took the extra step and explained that no swap was needed because the vice president was, well, so awesome. And by not doing so, Biden believed, they were feeding the Uncle Joe Syndrome.
By then, Axelrod, Emanuel, and Klain had all left the White House. And while Axe was still a big player in Chicago, Biden increasingly was left to the less tender mercies of Plouffe and Messina, who cast a gimlet eye and imposed a heavy hand on his maneuvers.
Midway through the year, Biden decided he wanted to hire a new counselor to be his de facto campaign chief of staff. His choice for the job was Kevin Sheekey, a raffish New York operative who had helped turn Mike Bloomberg into a political force—and had been the maestro orchestrating the mayor’s 2008 dabblings with an independent presidential bid. Though Biden had run for president twice, in 1988 and 2008, the first effort had ended with a plagiarism scandal before any ballots were cast and the second after he claimed just 1 percent of the vote in Iowa. Biden’s only experience with a national campaign were those two months as Obama’s running mate, when he basically did what he was told and nothing more. The challenge in 2012 would be greater, and with Sheekey on board, Biden believed, he would be prepared to meet it.
The Obamans objected strongly to Sheekey, however. They considered him a leaker, a self-promoter, not a team player. Which is to say they were threatened by his mojo and the prospect that he would vivify Biden’s shop. When the vice president told Obama what he was planning to do, the president shut him down. I’ve heard some things that make me think that Kevin is not the right fit, he said—and that ended the matter.
Thus did Biden find himself in limbo that November morning when his outside strategy group assembled at NAVOBS around his dining table. The primary goal, of course, was to help Obama win reelection. But Biden also wanted to think about how, in that context, he could enhance his own political standing.
The question of 2016 hovered over the discussion. When Biden became Obama’s number two, the premise had been that he was a pick in the mold of Dick Cheney: he would serve Obama free of ulterior motives or longer-range ambitions. Biden was then already sixty-six years old, seven years older than Cheney had been when he signed on with Bush. But almost as soon as he assumed office, his people put out the word that “we’re not ruling anything in or out” about 2016, as Jay Carney, then Biden’s flack, told The New York Times. And from that moment forward, Bidenland had kept on subtly stoking the embers.
In part, the 2016 whispers were merely an attempt to maintain Biden’s currency and leverage—a home cure for the Uncle Joe Syndrome. But Biden also genuinely wanted to keep the option open, he told the strategy group. I haven’t made any decision, he said. Who knows how I’ll feel four years from now? But right now I feel great. In better shape than ever. People want me to say I’m not gonna run. I’m not gonna say that—and maybe I will run.
Behind Biden’s bravado, there was massive insecurity. He had been a national figure for four decades: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. But, at bottom, he remained a parochial politician: Regular Joe, Amtrak Joe, Delaware Joe. He had no political organization. He had no fund-raising operation. Hailing from a puny state and having presided over two Senate committees with no taxing or spending authority (and thus lacking lobbyists or corporations swarming around them and currying his favor), he had no donor base. Standing in the shadow of the most prodigious political and fund-raising apparatus the Democratic Party had ever seen, he felt like a stranger to it, as if he’d walked into an opulent wedding where he knew no one.
Biden wanted to expand his network. Needed to, really. While he was campaigning for Obama, he thought he should meet some new people, stroke some donors, strike up some fresh relationships. Biden had a trip scheduled in January out to San Francisco and Los Angeles, where he would be talking about policy with some executives and raising money for Obama. Maybe they ought to tack on a meal or two with Silicon Valley and Hollywood bigwigs so Biden could broaden his horizons. He’d be out there anyway. It was, in a phrase Biden often used, a “collision of conscience and convenience.”
But Plouffe and Messina had ears everywhere, and when they heard about the strategy-group meeting and the California plan, they hit the ceiling. To them,
there was only one relevant question about any political activity: Did it benefit Barack Obama? And the answers regarding Biden scheming around 2016 and holding separate meetings with donors were both emphatically no.
Plouffe went to Biden and applied a polite but forceful dressing-down. “If you want to have meetings about your stump speech and how to help the president, great,” Plouffe told him. But you can’t be out there talking about some future election. And you can’t be running bootleg meetings with donors. “We can’t have side deals,” he said.
Biden, chastened, apologized to Plouffe, then got all defensive with Daley.
What are they upset about? Biden wailed. This is crazy! I’m doing everything they ask. I’m with the program. I’ve been loyal—I’ve been the most loyal. Jesus Christ!
Daley tried to calm Joe down. He hated to see him all worked up, which was why he didn’t tell Biden about the other things. In the aftermath of the leaking of the list and the refusal of the leaker (or leakers) to come forward, Obama had decided to go along with Plouffe’s recommendation that they shrink the reelection strategy meetings down to a handful of people—and Biden wasn’t one of them.
But that was the least of what Daley was keeping from Biden. The more explosive details—nuclear, actually—were that the top echelon of Obamaworld had in fact been discussing the wisdom of replacing Biden with Hillary; that, more than discussing it, they had been exploring it, furtively and obliquely, in the campaign’s polling and focus groups; and that Daley himself had been the most vocal exponent of looking into the merits of the idea.
Daley had no innate desire to see his friend dumped from the ticket, nor did the Davids and Messina—the tiny coterie of Obamans involved in the discussions. And all of them suspected that even the notion of a swap might be a nonstarter with Obama. But the president’s political difficulties were severe, and plenty of sensible Democrats were arguing that switching in Hillary could be a game changer. To not perform due diligence on the option, the Obamans believed, would be a dereliction of duty. They polled and focus-grouped every topic under the sun. Testing this one might have seemed hard-hearted, but refusing to do so out of affection for Joe would have been soft-headed—which in Obamaworld was the far more grievous crime.
Double Down: Game Change 2012 Page 9