What was behind Joe Biden’s biggest presidential decisions?

This is The Guardian.

In Norway, a woman's boyfriend forgets who she is. Overnight in Detroit, a man is arrested, but he was never at the crime scene. In Spain, disturbing pictures of young girls have appeared and no one knows who's behind them. Something strange is happening.

I. Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

When Joe Biden put his left hand on the Bible to take the oath of office on January 20, 2021. Things were not quite as the 46th president would have wanted when he first dreamed of making it to the White House.

Few people in our nation's history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we're in now.

The COVID-19 pandemic was still killing thousands of Americans a day. And the Capitol, where he stood, was still reeling from the attack two weeks earlier by militant supporters of Donald Trump, who wanted to see the 2020 election overturned.

And so today, at this time, in this place, let's start afresh.

Biden had big plans to bring calm to Washington once more and to prove wrong those who had always doubted him. This week, I spoke to the man who embedded himself deep inside the White House for two years. Speaking to members of the president's inner circle as they dealt with the toughest moments of his presidency. He told me how he came away with a much clearer picture of how Joe Biden saw himself and how the world now sees Joe Biden. I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.

I know that Joe Biden is not an especially big fan of these sorts of books about the presidency that get written as a presidency is in progress.

Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. An author of a book out this week called The Last Politician Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future.

So as a politician, he has his own share of insecurities, and he's acutely aware of those insecurities and other politicians. And so when he had his first meeting with Putin in June 2021 in Geneva, I said, Outside, I think it's always better to meet face to face. He was all about showing Putin ostensible signs of respect, which he hoped would minimize the damage that Putin might do during his presidency. So he instructed his staff not to say anything that might make Putin worry that he was stepping into an ambush.

And with some of these books, part of the process is regular interviews with the principal. Did you do that for this book?

I was able to go in and see him off the record with a group of other journalists on two occasions. Which? Something that is interesting about him also is that there's this boredom that the political press in the United States has with Joe Biden. Because so many, so many years on the stage that they don't really treat him as an object of fascination. And a lot of what's happened in his presidency has just unfolded in such a way. In which it's been greeted with a yawn, when it's actually totally, totally fascinating. And I ascribe a lot of that to the ways in which Trump has broken our political brain. Where if a president isn't doing something like suggesting his populace ingest bleach or isn't flushing documents down the toilet, they seem dull by comparison.

Related to that, what about this title? The last politician? why the last? and why politician? In that, in the way you're using it?

I was just struck by how both Obama and Trump, in their different ways, were anti-politicians. They bemoaned the existence of the system itself, which they deemed to be corrupt and that needed to be transcended by leaders of mass movements. Biden is not just the last politician in the way in which the last suggests somebody who's kind of antique or who comes from another age. He's also this guy who is just defined by the fact that he is a politician. One of the reasons why Joe Biden is so has constantly been underestimated and treated with a measure of disrespect by media elites. In the United States is because one of the qualities of a politician is a certain theatricality, a certain artificiality. That the sense that they'll tell you one thing on the stump and then they'll tell you another thing in private in order to get the deal done.

And it's partly because you've had a look at the alternative, I suspect. I mean, I think a lot of people have an image of Biden, as you say, he's been around forever. A lot of Americans have a clear and fixed view of him. That isn't going to shift. You've now had the chance to watch him up close in a way, through the people who work for him, observing it, reporting it, interviewing them.

I think everybody assumes that he is this permanent member of the American ruling class and the American elite, which he is. But he's also existed as kind of an insider outsider figure. That because of his stories, because of the way that he talks, he culturally self-identifies as a blue collar type of guy. The meritocrats who populate my profession, who populate the administrations, democratic administrations, tend to roll their eyes at him. And this tension that he has between being an insider and an outsider is one of the things. That means that he's capable of occasionally being contrarian. In the case of Afghanistan, say, where everybody who is part of, I think, to use the term of art that Obama's national security aide, Ben Rhodes, called the blob. Biden would love the respect of the blob, but at the same time he considers the blob to be lazy and high bound.

And is that partly driven by sort of class A chip on his shoulder, an inferiority complex? He feels they're mockery because he is just Joe from Scranton and didn't go to an Ivy League college like them. What's that about?

Yeah, no, it's all of those things. It's also he's been in the situation room when Obama advisors would roll their eyes at him when he was engaging in one of his soliloquies. Or he would give these soaring speeches in the 1980s that aspired to Kennedy-esque lyricism and lushness.

But this standard is not a measure of how we can evaluate the condition of our society. It cannot measure the health of our children, the quality of our education.

And what he got in return were accusations of plagiarism. The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children.

The quality of their education.

All of that stings for Joe Biden. I mean, he's a hell of a nice guy, but he's also a guy who doesn't let go of resentments.

And well, this goes to the point about, in a way, the whole business of him being president because he wanted it so badly. He'd run twice before. I think, even when he was in the Senate age 29, straight away, people were talking of him as a presidential aspirant. But he got to the point where he was striving for it, even when others thought he shouldn't and thought he was not up to it. What impact has that had on the plan or the vision he had for this presidency?

He wasn't sitting around waiting for this job his entire life, just to be the caretaker manager. I think that he had these aspirations. He thinks of himself as a great man, and I think he wants to assert his place in history as a great man. So when he arrives in office, he's confronting this tangle of crises.

Some people do think it has been a transformative presidency that does deserve its place along, you know? I mean, obviously the big one is always FDR Franklin Roosevelt, but has it been a transformational presidency? Rather than him just simply keeping the seat warm?

I think it has been, but but at a lower, in a lower key sort of way than, say, a Johnson presidency. Because he has, with both domestic policy and with foreign policy, redirected the paradigm with domestic economics. He's taken a lot of what Donald Trump proposed in his populist message, and he's taken it, and he's directed it in a much more progressive sort of direction.

The bill I'm about to sign along is proof that, despite the cynics, Democrats and Republicans can come together and deliver results.

So we now have industrial policy on a pretty big scale, where the state is acting as kind of an investment bank to bring all of this private sector money into the clean energy markets. And the transition to clean energy in the United States is now happening much more quickly than than had been anticipated.

So we passed a significant climate legislation not only moves us away from fossil fuels to cleaner technologies like wind. But it means we're going to make things and new technology here in America. And there's no reason, there's no reason why we can't do.

We have a president who has reversed attitudes towards unions. If you look at the public polling, there's a lot more sympathy towards unions now than several years back. Not all of that has to do with Joe Biden, but it doesn't hurt to have a president who cares about the prestige of unions. And has made pretty big gestures of solidarity to.

Unions When unions win, workers across the board win, that's a fact, families win, community wins.

All of that reverses not just neoliberal economic policy in the broadest sense, but it reverses it within the Democratic Party, where you had both Clinton and Obama being much more deferential to markets and much closer to a consensus opinion with their Republican adversaries about the role of the state, I think we will be living within the framework and within the parameters, within the paradigms that have emerged during this presidency for a generation.

I'm just thinking again about the title of your book, Last Politician and wondering if it also, in a way, could be the last Democrat of a particular kind. The sort of, you know, he classically labeled moderate. I mean, you've explained why. In some ways, he's a very different kind of Democrat, but he is sometimes out of step with his party, often perhaps on social questions. In fact, we can hear now a clip of an interview my colleague David Smith did with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's the kind of emblematic figure from the squad. A newer generation of younger politicians talking about the gap between her and the president, and how actually she plans to bridge it.

It's to say, listen, I am not defined by, nor do I agree with all of the stances.

Of this president, and I'm sure neither does he with mine. But that does not mean that we are not in this together, against the greater forces and questions of our time. So what about this difference between Joe Biden and a lot of congressional Democrats and actually Democratic Party activists? Is that generational, or is it ideological? I'm thinking, for example, of questions like abortion, where there is a criticism of him, that he's been actually very indecisive or sort of vacillating on that question.

I think that they're almost the same thing, and it's not just ideology, I think it has to do with a certain style of politics. As it relates to the Republican Party and the rise of the MAGA right that Biden is not prepared to dismiss the Republican Party wholesale. And I think you take something like abortion. I think one of the reasons why the Dobbs decision was so difficult for him to assimilate, and I describe this in the book, that he was caught flatfooted by it. Even though everybody knew it would come. And he resisted the impulse to respond straight away, with aggressive measures to restore choice.

Because he still believes in reaching across the aisle and bipartisanship, and those things have gone hugely out of style. And yet, in a way, what comes through your book, and particularly your assessment of how much he's achieved, is that? In that argument, he's kind of been right. Because he has managed to build the majorities to get these things passed.

That's true, and it's even true on the issue of abortion, where there was all this pressure on him to respond instantaneously to Dobbs.

We should say that. Dobbs, of course. The Supreme Court decision that overturned the longstanding Roe v. Wade protection of a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

Right, and so, the truth was that he was kind of wringing his hands and he was reluctant to move quickly. For all sorts of personal reasons. Having to do with his own catholicism and his own conflicted feelings about the issue. But I would say the other thing is is that he correctly did not want to become the issue himself, he said. If this is really that radical a decision, let's have the public focused on the radicalism of the Republican Party, the radicalism of the Supreme Court.

It's a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court. In my view, the court has done what it has never done before. Expressly take away a constitutional right that is so fundamental to so many Americans that had already been recognized.

And I would say at the end of the day, his political instincts on those culture war issues feel to me like they prove more right than the AOC style.

Which is funny because obviously people assume he's out of touch, partly because of his age, which we will come on to. But before we do. I just want to talk again about something everyone feels they know about Joe Biden, and which your book makes us think again about. And that is the notion of him as the designated mourner, the empath in chief, this notion that he has preached a natural gift for empathy, for consoling. For just human connection. Especially with those in a state of grief, and partly comes out of his own deep and serial experience with grief. And yet your book presents to us somebody who's pretty icy, I think, is a word used as a kind of steel there. Particularly when confronted with the death toll in Afghanistan, when he comes into that very hasty. Some would say shambolic, others make a different view withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021..

Now some say we should have started mass evacuation sooner, and couldn't this have been done in a more orderly manner? I respectfully disagree. Imagine if we've begun evacuations in June or July, bringing in thousands of American troops and evacuating more than 120,000 people in the middle of a civil war. To those asking for a third decade of war in Afghanistan, I ask, What is the vital national interest?

And there are sort of a couple of other episodes in the book as well like that. And it did make me wonder whether the empathy persona, how we should now think about it, if behind closed doors he is a bit more icy. Does that make the much vaunted sort of fabled Biden empathy fake in some way?

It's not, but I think that there's a way in which he has deeper connections with some people than other people. Is the way that I would put it. And so when he thought about something like the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he just didn't have a universal conception of human rights, and he wasn't especially worried about the fate of the Afghan people. In his own head, he was thinking much more about the American soldier who was being sent over there year after year. And I think, in a global sense, one of the things that I find most troubling about the Biden administration is that human rights is really not a concern of his.

We shouldn't leave aside the topic of his deputy because he was in the job of vice president. Kamala Harris is in that job now. You report how Joe Biden has been at pains to respect her formally, for example, referring to her as the vice president, not my vice president. Which, when Barack Obama said that about him, it kind of grated on him a bit. Nevertheless, she does emerge as a kind of pretty marginal figure in your account. There's this moment where she has to come back from having left the White House to celebrate the passing of the infrastructure bill. Huge bit of legislation.

In the lineup, Vice President Kamala Harris. Of note there just slipping in to be at the front of the photographs as well.

Because when she'd left, she didn't know that that huge breakthrough was about to happen. And you say it was the humiliation of the vice presidency in a microcosm. But why has it worked out this way? And does that tell us something about him, or does it tell us rather something about her?

Barack Obama needed Joe Biden to fill certain gaps in his resume when it came to foreign policy or dealing with Capitol Hill. Joe Biden, because of his self-confidence, because of his experience, doesn't see similar gaps in his own resume. So it's hard for Kamala Harris to find the space to flourish in the Biden administration. And there's also questions that she has in her own mind about her own political identity. I think there's a lot of push-pull about being a Black woman and to what extent she wants herself to be defined politically as a Black woman.

And now we've got to ask you about this because it's your book. Politico ran a piece this week saying that books on Joe Biden have sold a fraction of the number sold by books about Donald Trump. Your book is doing very well. But, you know, I mean,....

You're baiting me to check my Amazon rating in the middle of an interview, that's not fair.

I'm not at all because I know you'll have been checking it two dozen times in the last 20 minutes anyway. So you don't need any prompting from me. Because that is the obsession of the newly published author. But what explains that pattern, do you think?

I'm a political journalist of a certain age, which meant that one of the great political books of my youth was Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes, which has this spectacular human portrait of all of the contenders in the 1988 presidential election. And Joe Biden was a character who jumped off the page to me because he was so larger than life, with his status, anxieties, with his resentments. That book was kind of the Rosetta stone for me. I mean, it was really the interpretation that I couldn't help but bring to my reporting. And people age, but they don't often fundamentally change.

Yeah, they're not banal, but there are tons of little details. I saw that, one reviewer said. There's basically a sort of scoop or mini scoop on every page, and it is a riveting read. Frank We do always ask, or like to ask our guests on the show a what else? question? Something completely different. We've talked a lot about Joe Biden.

One of the major accomplishments of the Garland Justice Department, which is often so maligned, is that it's dismantled the right wing paramilitaries. That had the most direct role in January 6.

The book is the last politician inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's future. The author is Franklin Fore Frank. Thank you so much for talking with me for Politics Weekly America.

It's been my great pleasure, thank you.

And that is all from me for this week. For anyone who wants to read David Smith's full interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there'll be links on today's episode description on the Guardian website. Also, our sister podcast, Today in Focus, has produced a brilliant series, all about an international adoption scandal that goes back decades. Rosie Swash and Taslima Begum traveled to Bangladesh to investigate what happened to babies given up for adoption there in the 1970s. And they speak to the mothers who say their children were in fact taken from them.

This is The Guardian.

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