by Jeff Wilser
“We knew Biden could be somewhat long-winded and had a history of coloring outside the lines a bit,” said Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, in an interview with Biden biographer Witcover. “But honestly, that was very appealing to Obama, because he wanted someone to give him the unvarnished truth. What do you need in a vice president? He knows and understands Congress, has great foreign policy and domestic experience. He had the whole package from a VP standpoint.”
So in something of a secret meeting, Plouffe and top strategist David Axelrod met Biden at Val’s home. Before the Obama team could say anything, Biden started a “nearly twenty-minute monologue.” As Plouffe remembers, Biden said, “I literally wouldn’t have run if I knew the steamroller you guys would put together,” and, “The last thing I should do is VP; after thirty-six years of being the top dog, it will be hard to be No. 2.” Still talking and talking and talking, Biden said that he “would be a good soldier and could provide real value, domestically and internationally.”
Plouffe wrote of that twenty-minute monologue, amused, “Ax and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.” Yet he walked away satisfied, as he liked that while Biden “would accept the VP slot if offered, he was not pining for it.” This trait had served Biden well before. Let’s not forget that in 1972, before supporting Biden in his race for Senate, that Democratic bigwig had tested him, almost taunting him, wanting to see if Biden had a backbone. He did then. He did now.
So finally Obama and Biden had their tête-á-tête.
“Will this job be too small for you?” Obama asked.
“No, not as long as I would really be a confidant,” Biden said. “The good news is, I’m sixty-five and you’re not going to have to worry about my positioning myself to be president. The bad news is, I want to be part of the deal.”
WISDOM OF JOE
Know your worth.
Biden had leverage. He was happy to walk away. If he wasn’t VP? Then he’d be delighted to return to his old stomping grounds on the Foreign Relations Committee. By this point he had become, arguably, the most powerful force in the Senate. So like any good negotiator, he asked for a few additional conditions:
He wanted a weekly meeting with the president. Done.
He wanted a seat at the table. Done.
“One of the things I asked was, I said I don’t want to be picked unless you’re picking me for my judgment,” Biden said later. “I said I want a commitment from you that in every important decision you’ll make, every critical decision, economic and political as well as foreign policy, I’ll get to be in the room.”
Done.
BIDEN AND MUSCLE CARS
As Biden joined Team Obama, he would soon appear in an outlet even more prestigious than the Times or the Post: the pages of The Onion. “Taking advantage of the warm spring weather Monday, Vice President Joe Biden parked his 1981 Trans Am in the White House driveway, removed his undershirt, and spent a leisurely afternoon washing the muscle car and drinking beer,” reports America’s finest news source. An accompanying (fake) photo had Biden, bare-chested, wiping down his ’81 beauty.
“ ‘This baby just needs a little scrub down,’” he said in the satirical piece, “addressing a tour group as he tucked the sweat-covered top into the belt loop of his cutoff jean shorts. ‘Gotta get her looking good so I can impress the chicks when I’m cruising down Pennsylvania [Avenue].’ ”
The Onion’s piece might be an exaggeration, but it’s only a slight distortion of Biden’s lifelong passion for wheels. This is the son of Joe Sr., after all, who managed car dealerships in Delaware for thirty-four years. Hot Young Biden got to take them out for a spin, use them on dates, impress girls. For senior prom? He borrowed a 7,000-mile Chrysler 300D.
“I bought a ’51 Studebaker,” he told Car and Driver. “My dad thought it was nice and calm, but it had that overdrive, and it was fast. Then I bought a 1952 Plymouth convertible, candy-apple red with a split windshield. I think that was my favorite. I had a ’56 Chevy, then in college I bought a 100,000-mile Mercedes 190SL with those Solex carburetors that never functioned. And I still have my 1967 Goodwood-green Corvette, 327, 350-horse, with a rear-axle ratio that really gets up and goes. The Secret Service won’t let me drive it. I’m not allowed to drive anything. It’s the one thing I hate about this job. I’m serious.”
Oh, and about The Onion’s caricature? Biden called them out. “You think I’d drive a Trans Am?” he said, laughing. “I have been in my bathing suit in my driveway and not only washed my Goodwood-green 1967 Corvette but also simonized it. At least The Onion should have had me washing a Trans Am convertible. I love convertibles.”
And once again, the humor cloaks a deeper pathos. “My fondest memory of that Corvette,” he told Popular Mechanics, is when Hunter was three years old. “[He was] sitting on my lap while I was driving—I know it’s bizarre now to say that. We lived out in a rural area, and we came to a stop sign on a country road. A beautiful day like today, and he’s sitting on my lap, and he turns around and puts his hand on my face and he says, ‘Daddy? Daddy? I love you more than the whole sky.’ ”
On August 23, 2008, in Springfield, Illinois, Obama and Biden appeared together as a team, as buddies, for the very first time. Biden seemed reborn. Rejuvenated. Grinning and pointing and doing Biden-y things. Obama was fired up and ready to go, making the case for why Biden was the perfect choice for VP:
Biden has “brought change to Washington, but Washington hasn’t changed him.”
Accurate.
“He’s an expert on foreign policy whose heart and values are firmly rooted in the middle class.”
Yep.
“He is uniquely suited to be my partner.”
Yep, that too, more than he would know.
Soon Joe would be introduced, in Denver, at the Democratic National Convention. With his thirty-six years of experience in the Senate—and with that Rolodex of world leaders—he could have asked anyone to give his introduction. Who would he pick? A presidential heavyweight, like Bill Clinton? A senatorial comrade, like John Kerry?
He chose the man he respected more than anyone in the world. He chose someone who had been at his side since the 1960s.
He chose his son. Beau Biden.
“I know [Joe] as an incredible father and a loving grandfather,” Beau began. He had his father’s jaw and those earnest eyes. The Denver crowd was mesmerized. “A man who hustled home to Delaware after the last vote so he wouldn’t miss me and my brother’s games. Who, after returning from some war-torn region of the world, would tiptoe into our room and kiss us good night. Who turns down some fancy cocktail party in Washington so he won’t miss my daughter, Natalie’s, birthday party.”
And in just a few captivating minutes, with his father looking on, tears welling, Beau gave us all a hint of what makes Joe Biden such an endearing figure.
“Now, some people poke fun at my dad talking too much,” Beau said as the crowd chuckled. “What a lot of people don’t know is that, when he was young, he had a severe stutter. The kids called him Dash—not because he was fast on the football field, which he was, but like a dash at the end of a sentence you can’t finish. But now he speaks with a clear and strong voice. He says what needs to be said. And he does what needs to be done.”
Jill looked on, fighting back emotion. Michelle Obama wiped her eyes.
Beau mentioned that “because of other duties, it won’t be possible for me to be here this fall to stand by him the way he stood by me,” leaving unspoken that his “other duties” were to serve the country in Iraq—he had volunteered for the National Guard. He finished up: “So I have something to ask of you. Be there for my dad like he was for me. Please join me in welcoming my friend, my father, my hero, and the next vice president of the United States: Joe Biden.”
He and Beau shared a tight, fierce hug that lasted for several seconds. Beau gave his father a kiss on the cheek. Behind them was a backdrop of red signs: BIDEN! BIDEN! BIDEN!
Many of us ca
n remember watching this speech in 2008, but at the time we didn’t really know Joe Biden. We didn’t know about his loss. And none of us, of course, could know the tragedy that loomed ahead. Now we do. Looking back, these words have newfound weight. Joe looked at his son. “Beau, I love you. I am so proud of you. Proud of the son you are. Proud of the father you’ve become….And I’m so proud of my son Hunter, my daughter, Ashley, and my wife, Jill, the only one who leaves me breathless and speechless at the same time.”
Biden introduced America to his mother, Jean, ninety-one years young, the one who had the guts to challenge the nuns, and the one who told him: “Nobody is better than you. You’re not better than anybody else, but nobody is any better than you.”
Then he told us what his father had told him, all those many years ago: “Champ, when you’re knocked down, get up! Get up!”
8
From Gaffes to Glory (2008–2016)
“The number one issue facing the middle class [is] a three-letter word: Jobs.
J-O-B-S.”
JOE.
JOE.
How many times did Barack Obama say that to himself?
At times, the gaffes seemed endless. On the campaign trail, Biden reminded us that “when the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television,” yet the stock market crashed in 1929, or about three years before FDR became president.
Then he gave an omen: “Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. Watch, we’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis to test the mettle of this guy.” Republicans smacked their lips, weaponizing this line against Obama.
In a classic moment of Biden-y bluntness, he said that Hillary Clinton was “as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of America, and quite frankly, it might have been a better pick.” Okay, Joe. And Republicans gleefully pounced on a careless comment from earlier in the election, when he said that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” He was trying to make the point that the demographics had changed and there was now a larger Indian population in Delaware, but still. Joe.
But wait, there’s more! At a campaign rally, feeding off the energy of the room, Biden raised his voice, joyful, and urged a man named Chuck Graham, a state senator, to stand up and show himself to the crowd. “Stand up, Chuck! Let ’em see ya! Stand up, Chuck!”
Only one hiccup.
Chuck was in a wheelchair.
“Oh, God love ya, what am I talking about?” Biden said, scrambling to recover. “I tell you what, you’re making everyone else stand up though, pal. Thank you very, very much.” He turned back to the crowd. “I tell you what, stand up for Chuck!” The crowd stood, cheered, clapped, and Biden left the podium to go meet Chuck and shake his hand, smiling. “You can tell I’m new.”
Thanks to goofs like this, reports later surfaced of friction between Obama and his No. 2. At one point “a chill set in between [Obama headquarters] and the Biden plane,” according to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, authors of Game Change, and “Joe and Obama barely spoke by phone, barely campaigned together.” They report that Obama became “increasingly frustrated with his running mate after Biden let loose with a string of gaffes,” and when Biden “made the prediction that Obama would be tested with an international crisis, the Illinois senator had had enough. ‘How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?’ he demanded of his advisers on a conference call.”
Yet even on the bumpy road of the campaign, Biden started to put these miscues behind him and show Team Obama, as he said years ago, “the essence of Joe Biden.” Videographer Arun Chaudhary’s team was split in two—most on Obama’s plane, then some on Biden’s. “At first, people would complain when they had to do Biden duty, because it felt like you were getting kicked off the grown-up plane and put on the junior plane,” says Chaudhary. “And then, one by one, Joe Biden just won them over. Every one of them would come back to me with some story like, ‘It was late at night, and we were just talking, and he wanted to know about my family, and he had really good questions.’ All of a sudden, the prized job was to be on the Biden plane.”
The team soon found that the Biden energy was nonstop. At a random hotel in Ohio, to blow off some steam, Herbie Ziskend hit the gym and did some abs work. He then saw this guy in the corner going full-speed, hyperintense, wearing a ball cap. Is that Joe frickin’ Biden? “He’s doing endless pushups and biceps curls,” says Ziskend. “He’s obviously working harder than anybody. And he’s forty-five years older than me.”
Sometimes the best Biden moments are the small ones, the tiny gestures, the lift of an eyebrow or the squeeze of a bicep. Chaudhary remembers following both Obama and Biden to a biodiesel factory that takes chicken waste and converts it into energy. Obama, true to form, made some comments about the importance of biodiesel fuel and how it relates to energy policy. Biden? “He just kept holding up vials of liquid and saying, ‘Chicken manure,’ in this really satisfied tone of voice,” says Chaudhary. You can visualize the solemn nod, the squinted eyes, the hint of a smile. Chicken manure. Heh.
Given the backdrop of all the prior gaffes, Biden probably doesn’t get enough credit for the trickiest job he had in the 2008 campaign: the debate against Sarah Palin. This could have so easily gone sideways. Biden had thirty-six years of senatorial experience, he had met every world leader, and, boy, did he love telling you how much he knew. Sarah Palin, well, was Sarah Palin. If Biden said anything that could be perceived as belittling, condescending, sexist, or mansplaining, then suddenly Palin would emerge with a bounce, and God knows how that might wound the campaign.
He took the debate seriously. Unlike that fateful debate in ’87 where he winged it and flubbed the Neil Kinnock quote, this time he knuckled down. Practiced. And when he finished his prep sessions, the last two people in the room were his sons, Hunter and Beau. He had always given them that privilege to ease their minds: wild card. Now they had the chance to return the favor. To comfort him and to give him calm, Beau looked at Joe and said, “Look at me, Dad. Look at me. Remember, remember home base. Remember.”
WISDOM OF JOE
Remember home base.
Biden remembered. Against Palin he struck just the right note of competence, statesmanship, and humility. Saturday Night Live had a field day with what Biden presumably wanted to say. “My goal tonight was a simple one,” said SNL-Biden, as played by Jason Sudeikis. “To come up here, and at no point seem like a condescending, egomaniacal bully. And I’m gonna be honest, I think I nailed it. Sure, there are moments when I wanted to say, Hey, this lady’s a dummy!, but I didn’t. Because Joe Biden is better than that. I repeat. Joe Biden is better than that.” SNL took one more swing that’s worth revisiting. You know how Biden always talks about his working-class roots of Scranton? SNL-Biden takes it up a notch: “I come from Scranton, Pennsylvania. And that’s as hardscrabbled a place as you’re going to find. I’ll show you around sometime, and you’ll see. It’s a hellhole! An absolute jerk-water of a town…It’s just an awful, awful sad place. So don’t be telling me that I’m part of the Washington elite, because I come from the absolute worst place on earth, Scranton, Pennsylvania,” He flashes a Biden-smile. “And Wilmington, Delaware’s, not much better.”
Boosted, at least in part, by Biden’s strong performance, Obama won both the electoral college (365–173) and the popular vote, which is something that used to happen in American history. And in January of 2009, Joe Biden took two different Oaths of Office. One was for VP, the other for senator. In what must have been a bittersweet departure, after thirty-six years of fighting for his beloved Delaware constituents, he had won his old Senate seat for the seventh—seventh!—straight time. (Biden’s vacant seat would be filled by the guy who had supported him, faithfully, since that very first Hail Mary in ’72: Ted Kaufman.) After officially becoming the United States’ forty-seventh vice president, Biden joined in the cele
bratory parade, did a little jog, and smiled as well-wishers shouted “Joe! Joe! Joe!” The Secret Service gave him a code name: Celtic.
Biden immediately made himself useful, helping to persuade Hillary Clinton to accept secretary of state. (The two were close from their years in the Senate, and on the phone he’d tell her, “I love you, darling.” Before you think that he’s flirting, remember that Joe Biden loves everyone.)
And if people thought that Joe Biden was going to keep his mouth shut when he became vice president, people didn’t know Joe Biden. He kept saying what he saw as the God’s honest truth…even when it hurt him. In the early days he acknowledged that “If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, if we stand up there and we really make the tough decisions, there’s still a thirty percent chance we’re going to get it wrong.”
The press drooled over this one: 30 percent chance you’re going to get it wrong? And get what wrong, precisely?
At Obama’s very first prime-time press briefing (remember those?), he was asked about this mysterious 30 percent. “What were you talking about?” the reporter asked. “In general [do] you agree with that ratio of success, 30 percent failure, 70 percent success?”
Obama laughed. “You know, I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to, not surprisingly.”
The reporters chuckled.
“But let me try this out.” Obama then gave a lengthy, measured response about how their decisions might have uncertain consequences, and how the country needed a recovery package, and yada yada yada; then he admitted, finally, “I have no idea. I really don’t.”