Joe had not meant his remark the way it sounded, and he immediately called Barack Obama to apologize. Obama didn’t take it personally, but it did make him think twice about Biden’s judgment.
Biden and his campaign pressed on through 2007, but they had a hard time raising money. In November, in a Democratic debate on CNN, he was almost ignored by the moderator. However, Joe was sincerely enjoying campaigning. More than any other time he’d run for office, he felt he was being his authentic self.
As always, he had the full support of his family. Hunter was by his side, a “security blanket,” as Hunter put it later, as Joe drove to Iowa for the caucuses. Joe and his team pinned their hopes on this first event of the primary contest. If Biden came in third, he’d have a solid footing to continue.
But the Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2008, wiped out Joe Biden’s 2008 campaign for the presidency. He came in fifth. His chance at the Oval Office in the White House was gone—at least for this cycle.
Ashley Biden admired her father for the way he comforted his family. After all, he told them, he still had a job that he loved. He was going back to the Senate, where he could accomplish a lot for the country as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Some people wondered if, when the Democratic primary elections were over, Biden might be picked for vice president. Biden had already answered that question, telling an interviewer in August 2007, “I can absolutely say with certainty I would not be anybody’s vice president, period. End of story. I guarantee I will not do it.”
The Vice Presidency
Many presidents have chosen a vice president purely because they thought that person would help bring in voters on Election Day. As a result, many presidents did not even like the vice president they felt they had to choose. And some vice presidents have not been qualified for their main duty: to take over leadership of the country if the president dies or is disabled.
In the history of the United States, it has happened nine times that the vice president became president because the sitting president was unable to serve. Eight vice presidents have stepped into the Oval Office after the president’s death. Gerald Ford became president when Richard Nixon resigned.
The Constitution gives the vice president only two other duties: to preside over the Senate, and to cast the deciding vote in the Senate in the case of a tie. “The most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived” was the disgusted way that John Adams, vice president to George Washington, described his position in 1789. And John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s first vice president, in 1933, had similar feelings, although he expressed them less eloquently: “The vice presidency isn’t worth a bucket of warm piss.”
However, during the twentieth century the vice presidency grew to include advising the president, representing the president, and helping the president govern. Lyndon Johnson was invaluable to President Kennedy in working with Congress, and Walter Mondale brought foreign relations experience to President Jimmy Carter’s team. George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, was criticized for taking on too much importance. He was accused of making policy decisions on his own, without the president’s knowledge.
From January to June 2008, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and Senator Hillary Clinton of New York fought for the Democratic nomination for president. Joe Biden would not endorse either one until the choice was final. But he promised to work hard, campaigning for the primary winner in the fall.
Barack Obama was already thinking carefully about who he’d want on his team if he were elected. Joe Biden would certainly be a good choice to balance the ticket. While Obama was a younger African American man from the middle class, Biden was an older white man with working-class roots.
Obama had been elected to the Senate only a few years before. Biden, serving in the Senate for thirty-six years, had many connections in Congress and in foreign countries. And his outgoing, passionate style of campaigning complemented Obama’s cool, reserved style.
Obama did want a candidate for vice president who could help him win the election. But he also wanted a person highly qualified for the job—and he wanted someone who would work well with him. He respected Joe Biden’s achievements in the Senate, including his ability to get along with Republicans as well as Democrats. Obama also thought Biden’s years of experience in foreign relations would be valuable.
In June, when Obama was sure of winning the Democratic nomination, he called Biden and asked if Joe wanted to be considered for vice president. Biden said no. He enjoyed his respected position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to trade that to become the president’s sidekick. Obama insisted that he think some more about it. “Go home and talk it over with the family first.”
To Joe’s surprise, Jill thought that he should say yes. For one thing, she said, if the Bidens were living in the vice president’s residence in Washington, they’d be right near Hunter and his family. And on weekends and vacations, they’d still have their house in Wilmington, right near Beau and his family.
Jean Biden, Joe’s mother, agreed with Jill. Hadn’t Joe always believed in the cause of civil rights? This was his chance to do something really important for civil rights. He could help elect the first African American president of the United States.
In the summer weeks leading up to the Democratic Convention, Barack Obama became pretty sure that Joe Biden was his first choice for vice president. One factor that impressed Obama was Biden’s devotion to his family. Obama’s aide David Axelrod noticed the Bidens’ open affection for each other too. “There’s something really special about that family,” he told Obama.
Before Obama made his choice, Joe Biden met him privately, in a hotel in Minneapolis, for a final three-hour discussion. Biden explained that if he were Obama’s vice president, he would want to be his chief advisor. “If you’re going to ask me to do this, please don’t ask me for any reason other than that you respect my judgment. If you’re asking me to join you to help govern, and not just help you get elected, then I’m interested.”
That meant that Biden would want to meet with the president in private at least once a week and be included in all important group meetings. Of course, final decisions would always be for the president to make, but Biden wanted to be consulted.
Obama, for his part, sincerely wanted a vice president who would tell him the truth, rather than what the vice president thought the president wanted to hear. Obama was convinced that Joe Biden would do just that. In fact, Biden was famous for saying what he thought, even when he should have kept his mouth shut.
The two men were on the same page.
Mr. Vice President
On August 7, 2008, only weeks before the Democratic National Convention, Russian troops invaded the neighboring country of Georgia. The Bush administration condemned Russia’s action. A cease-fire was brokered, but Russia still threatened the smaller, weaker country.
As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden flew to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. He met with the Georgian president, and he returned home recommending that the United States should send Georgia $1 billion in aid. Barack Obama recognized this moment as great publicity for Biden—and for his own campaign, if he chose Biden as vice president.
Two days before the Democratic Convention, Obama called Biden to officially offer him the job. Biden took the call at a dentist’s office, where Jill was undergoing a root canal procedure. Joe was so happy and excited that he started talking a mile a minute.
As Obama and Biden began campaigning together, the two men discovered things they had in common. They both loved sports, and they both understood how to be team players. They were both devoted to their families.
Their families hit it off too. “I liked Jill, Joe’s wife, right away,” Michelle Obama wrote later in her memoir, Becoming. Jill, like Michelle, had hesitated to commit to her husband’s political career. Jill had also pursued a car
eer while raising children.
“And then there were the Biden grandkids, five altogether, all of them as outgoing and unassuming as Joe and Jill themselves,” Michelle remembered. Beau’s Natalie and Robert, plus Hunter’s Naomi, Finnegan, and Maisy, absorbed the Obamas’ daughters into their noisy, excited bunch.
During the Democratic National Convention in late August, the Biden family was showcased. Beau, attorney general of Delaware, soon to be sent to Iraq with the National Guard, proudly introduced his father.
Joe Biden in turn proudly introduced Hunter, Ashley, and Jill, joking that his wife was “the only one who leaves me breathless and speechless at the same time.” And as he talked to the audience about his family background, he introduced Jean Finnegan Biden, his ninety-one-year-old mother. Sadly, his father had not lived to see this moment.
That night at the convention, Joe’s granddaughter Finnegan, ten years old, asked Joe if Malia and Sasha Obama, ten and seven, could sleep over with the Biden kids. Later that night, Biden checked the children’s room in the Bidens’ hotel suite. He was touched to see them all in their sleeping bags, “cuddled together.” He felt sure he’d made the right decision in joining forces with the young senator from Illinois.
* * *
As they plunged into the final two months of the 2008 race, Obama appreciated Joe Biden’s experience with political campaigns. Biden might have a reputation as a motormouth, but he was a skilled campaigner. Obama’s staff were impressed that Biden could campaign in a disciplined way, keeping the spotlight on the candidate for president rather than on himself.
Biden launched his race for vice president with a trip to his childhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania. On Labor Day, Joe and his mother visited the old Finnegan house on North Washington Avenue, where a woman named Anne Kearns lived with her family. They were thrilled to welcome Senator and Jean Biden to a backyard picnic. As Joe toured the house, they urged him to sign the wall of the attic room where he used to sleep.
I Am Home, Biden wrote with a Sharpie. Joe Biden, 9-1-08. Then he joked, “If my father was here, he’d smack me for writing on the wall.”
* * *
The Republican candidate for president was Senator John McCain of Arizona, a force on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a war hero to boot. He had served in the Senate with Joe Biden for more than twenty years. They were close friends, in spite of their political differences.
But that didn’t mean that Biden would go easy on McCain. On the campaign trail, he hammered at the idea that a President McCain would be four more years of the unpopular George W. Bush. Under President Bush, the country was suffering the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. People were losing their homes to risky mortgages, and as unemployment soared, people also lost their health insurance. But the government bailed out big banks, which enraged ordinary citizens.
McCain had chosen Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, as his vice presidential candidate. At first this announcement gave McCain a bump upward in the polls. But by late September the Obama-Biden team had pulled ahead.
Obama and his campaign team had known from the beginning that Joe Biden talked too much. Back in 2005, when Obama attended his first Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting, that was his main impression of Senator Biden. “Man, that guy can just talk and talk.” Worse, maybe as a side effect of talking so much, Biden made gaffes—like the one about Obama being “clean” and “articulate.”
So Obama expected that Joe would make some gaffes during the campaign, and that the media would be waiting to pounce on each one. That was part of the package of Joe Biden. As the campaign went on and Biden did put his foot into his mouth, and the media did jump on it, Obama treated each occasion as no big deal.
Until a fundraising event in October, when Joe, going off script, told the audience, “Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama.” This remark seemed to echo what Biden had said during the Democratic primary debates, suggesting that Obama wasn’t “ready” to be president. (Of course, back in 1972, people in Delaware had wondered if a twenty-nine-year-old county councilman named Joe Biden was “ready” to be their senator.)
Biden was only speaking from his experience in foreign relations, where some crisis or other was always coming along. He meant that there was bound to be an international crisis at the beginning of Obama’s presidency, and that the crisis would prove the new president’s leadership.
However, the McCain campaign was delighted to quote—and misinterpret—Biden’s unnecessary remark. They were already making the point that Obama was inexperienced in foreign policy, and Biden’s words seemed to show that even Obama’s running mate thought so. “How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?” wondered Obama to his aides.
But by that time, Obama was ahead of McCain in the polls, and he stayed ahead up through Election Day, November 4. That historic evening, the Obamas and the Bidens were staying in the same hotel in Chicago, watching the election returns. At ten o’clock the TV networks announced the winner: Barack Obama. The Bidens burst into the Obamas’ room, everyone yelling and hugging each other.
On the bright, cold day of January 20, 2009, Joe Biden stood on the steps of the Capitol. The crowds for the inauguration of Barack Obama, the first African American president, were the biggest ever, for any event in Washington, DC. Jill held the Biden family Bible while Joe took the oath of office as vice president of the United States. Hunter and Ashley stood by, beaming. So did Beau, on special leave from his National Guard assignment in Iraq.
* * *
Now Barack Obama was the forty-fourth president, the office Joe Biden had set out to win two years before. Biden was just as ambitious and confident as Obama, and he knew it would be hard for him, after his years of leadership in the Senate, to call someone else boss. But he didn’t intend to be a vice president like the one before him.
During the 2008 campaign, Biden had called George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history.” He meant that Cheney had taken too big and too independent a role in the Bush administration. Cheney had urged the president into aggressive military actions, ignored Congress, and brushed aside human rights concerns.
Joe Biden knew how to play on a team, and he surprised many people by putting his own ego aside to work with the new president. Just as when Coach Walsh at Archmere had chosen Mike Fay, instead of Joe, to be football captain, Biden accepted his position in second place. There was a lot to be done, and it could only be done with teamwork.
Between the election in November 2008 and the inauguration in January 2009, Obama had consulted with Biden about choosing his cabinet. One of the most important posts was secretary of state, and Barack and Joe agreed that he should ask Hillary Clinton. Obama agreed, in fact, with most of Biden’s recommendations for members of the cabinet. “Not because I made them,” Biden explained on ABC News, “but because we think a lot alike.” The two men shared certain values, and they were also both practical thinkers.
* * *
The most urgent task for the new president and his team was to rescue the US economy from the Great Recession. In February 2009, Congress passed, and President Obama signed into law, a bill for $787 billion to stimulate the national economy. Obama gave Biden the responsibility of overseeing the handout of the money to states and cities, to infrastructure projects such as repairing bridges, and for direct assistance to individuals. Biden’s special focus was to look after the middle class, which was not as well off as it used to be.
Also urgent was the war in Iraq. There were still 150,000 US troops in Iraq, and the war had already cost US taxpayers over $600 billion. President Obama had campaigned on the idea that the Iraq War, launched by President George W. Bush in 2003, was a “dumb war.”
As the Obama administration got underway in 2009, the president asked Joe Biden to oversee his policy of withdrawing US troops from Iraq. Vice Presi
dent Biden flew to Iraq in July 2009 to help with this transition, by meeting with Iraqi leaders and urging cooperation among the hostile factions in Iraq. On that same trip, Joe Biden also had a chance to hug Delaware National Guard captain Beau Biden, stationed in Iraq.
High on Obama and Biden’s to-do list was a national health plan. Joe Biden had believed in the need for a national health care program since he first ran for senator in 1972. President Bill Clinton had attempted to reform US health care during his first term, but in 1994 the proposed plan had died in Congress.
National Health Care
In 2009, almost all industrialized countries of the world had a national health insurance plan that guaranteed a basic level of care for the whole population. But the US had a patchwork system in which some Americans received health insurance through their employers and some bought private insurance. Some were covered by government programs such as Medicare, for those over sixty-five, or Medicaid, a state-run program for low-income people.
However, more than forty million Americans had no health insurance at all. Many of them had to decide between buying lifesaving medications, such as insulin for diabetes, and paying the rent. In 2013, the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine showed that US citizens had a shorter life expectancy than people in most other wealthy nations, in spite of the fact that the US spent more on health care than any other nation in the world.
For years there had been efforts in the US, including the Clinton administration’s failed plan, to set up a national health insurance system for all Americans. The main problem in achieving health care for everyone was that politicians disagreed about how much control the federal government should have. Some wanted the government to run the program, as it did Medicare. Others felt that private insurance companies could offer better services. And pharmaceutical companies fought any attempts to control the high prices of medications.
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