https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/us/politics/biden-obama-history.html
Obama and Biden’s Relationship Looks Rosy. It Wasn’t Always That Simple.
Image
In Joseph R. Biden Jr., Barack Obama found a running mate who would conjure the comforting past and lessen the sense of change. But it was a rocky road to his selection.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
By Glenn Thrush
“I want somebody with gray in his hair,” Mr. Obama, then 46, told one of them. He was thinking about an “older guy,” he told another.
That older guy, people around the candidate would soon learn, was Joseph R. Biden Jr., 65, a has-been to pundits but to Mr. Obama a sweet-spot pick — a policy heavyweight with limited political horizons, assuming that would ensure loyalty and minimal drama. Mr. Obama was already phoning Mr. Biden two or three times a week to solicit advice, and to decide whether the Delaware senator’s many positive attributes outweighed his singular liability, a notoriously self-tangling tongue.
Over the next several months, Mr. Obama’s top advisers would present 30 alternatives, all of whom he respectfully considered. But his preference was clear from the start. When it came time to decide in August, Mr. Obama chose Mr. Biden over two younger finalists — Tim Kaine, the governor of Virginia, and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, peers in the mold of Bill Clinton’s choice of Al Gore in 1992.
most recent Democratic debate.
The Obama-Biden origin story has been often told, and often sentimentalized. But a re-examination at this crystallizing moment of the primary campaign, based on more than two dozen interviews with Obama and Biden aides and others with knowledge of the relationship, reveals a more complicated dynamic between the two men, and one that is still evolving.
how Joe Biden’s ’88 campaign fell apart.]
Mr. Biden drove his 2008 campaign from the lot directly into a pothole. On the eve of its rollout, in January 2007, he told a reporter for The New York Observer that Mr. Obama was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Mr. Biden did not bother to tell any of his aides that the interview had gone catastrophically wrong.
Mr. Obama laughed it off. But it did little to improve his overall impression of Mr. Biden as condescending to him, forged when Mr. Obama was assigned to the Foreign Relations Committee shortly after being elected to the Senate in 2004. During their first private meeting, Mr. Biden suggested the two men have dinner, and offered to pick up the bill.
The freshman senator, who was earning millions from his memoirs, shot back that he could afford to pay, according to Mr. Biden’s retelling of the episode in his own autobiography.
Joe Biden has a long history of verbal flubs and gaffes. And he knows it.]
Mr. Biden was candid about his struggle to maintain verbal discipline, and he repeatedly interrupted himself to ask, “Am I making sense?” But the quantity of his advice was offset by its quality. Mr. Obama’s political magi were especially impressed with his insights into the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain.
The former Navy pilot valued unpredictability, Mr. Biden said, anticipating Mr. McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate and Mr. McCain’s disastrous decision to suspend his campaign that fall to focus on the global financial crisis.
What most impressed Mr. Obama’s advisers, however, was Mr. Biden’s ease with his family; he was comfortable expressing affection to his wife and grown children in a way that most politicians, including Mr. Obama, were not.
The intensity of those bonds would become apparent after Mr. Obama picked Mr. Biden, and campaign researchers uncovered potential public relations problems stemming from Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, including complications from his lobbying work and indications of marital, legal and substance-abuse problems. (Those issues were examined in detail by The New Yorker earlier this year.)
When an Obama campaign official flagged the issue, Mr. Biden grew angry and warned, “Keep my family out of this.” The issue was dropped, according to a person involved in the vetting process.
Image
Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and Mr. Obama in July 2008. Mr. Obama was warned that picking Mr. Bayh would guarantee his Senate seat would flip Republican.CreditMichael Conroy/Associated Press
The talk later in the day with Mr. Bayh, who was vacationing at the tony Greenbrier resort in West Virginia with his wife and young children, did not go well. The visitors caught him barefoot, emerging from a shower — and assumed it was an attempt to appear Kennedyesque. In reality, Mr. Bayh was less diffident than disoriented by being thrust into the national spotlight.
Mr. Bayh had another major liability. Mr. Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, had advised Mr. Obama that picking Mr. Bayh would guarantee his Senate seat would flip Republican — which could imperil the new president’s legislative agenda. Mr. Biden’s seat in Democratic Delaware was much safer.
The meeting with Mr. Kaine in Richmond was respectful, friendly and a bit bittersweet. (Eight years later, Mr. Kaine would be Mrs. Clinton’s running mate in the losing campaign against Mr. Trump.)
In early August, Mr. Obama arranged to have Mr. Biden quietly shuttled to his suite at the Graves 601 Hotel in Minneapolis, where he was campaigning. The conversation lasted well into the night.
Mr. Obama agreed that Mr. Biden would be the final person he spoke to before making a big decision, and the two men would have weekly lunches. Mr. Biden also made a loyalty pledge that would become the basis of their deeper personal bond. “You make a decision, and I will follow it to my death,” Mr. Biden said, according to Mr. Kaufman.
At some point, Mr. Biden also told Obama aides that “Barack would never have to worry” about him positioning himself for another presidential run. He was too old, he told them, and he viewed his new job as a capstone, not a catapult. But while both sides assumed that vow covered the duration of Mr. Obama’s presidency, what might happen after that was never explicitly stated.
Mr. Biden was the only one of the finalists to make such a promise. “That was helpful,” Mr. Plouffe said.
Before parting, Mr. Obama popped a surprise, intended to test Mr. Biden’s commitment to being a wingman: “Would you prefer being secretary of state to vice president?” he asked.
Mr. Biden chose the latter. Mr. Obama formally offered him the job after he flew back to Washington. Neither man has ever spoken publicly about exactly what was said, but one Biden aide who was watching the little red switchboard light for the senator’s private line said it stayed on too long for it to have simply been a perfunctory call of congratulations.
Image
In discussions about the 2020 campaign, Mr. Obama has expressed frustration to Mr. Biden that his closest advisers are too old and out of touch with the current political climate.CreditAl Drago/The New York Times
A Protective Partner
The next eight years are the stuff of buddy-movie lore — “a shotgun marriage that gradually turned into a love story,” in Mr. Axelrod’s telling.
Still, Mr. Biden’s simmering ambition was a source of unease for both men. Mr. Plouffe shut down an early move made by Mr. Biden as vice president to assemble a presidential team-in-waiting, blocking Mr. Biden’s attempts to court the party’s West Coast fund-raising elite and rejecting an attempt to hire Kevin Sheekey, a veteran Democratic operative.
In 2016, Mr. Obama quietly pressured Mr. Biden to sit out the race, partly because he believed Mrs. Clinton had a better chance of building on his agenda, and partly because he thought Mr. Biden was in no shape emotionally following the illness and death of his son Beau in May 2015.
By now, the line between heart and head, between the personal and political, so clear a decade ago, has blurred completely.
The two men spoke at least a half dozen times before Mr. Biden decided to run, and Mr. Obama took pains to cast his doubts about the campaign in personal terms.
“You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Biden earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
Mr. Biden — who thinks he could have defeated Donald Trump four years ago — responded by telling Mr. Obama he could never forgive himself if he turned down a second shot at Mr. Trump.
Mr. Obama has said he will not make an endorsement in the primary, and has offered every candidate his counsel. But he has taken an active interest in the inner workings of his friend’s campaign, to an extent beyond anything offered to other candidates.
In his interactions with Mr. Biden — the pair had a quiet lunch in Washington last month — Mr. Obama has hammered away at the need for his campaign to expand his aging inner circle.
He has communicated his frustration that Mr. Biden’s closest advisers are too old and out of touch with the current political climate — urging him to include more younger aides, according to three Democrats with direct knowledge of the discussion.
In March, Mr. Obama took the unusual step of summoning Mr. Biden’s top campaign advisers, including the former White House communications director Anita Dunn and Mr. Biden’s longtime spokeswoman, Kate Bedingfield, to his Washington office for a briefing on the campaign’s digital and communications strategy with members of his own staff, including his senior adviser, Eric Schultz.
When they were done, Mr. Obama offered a pointed reminder, according to two people with knowledge of his comments:
Win or lose, they needed to make sure Mr. Biden did not “embarrass himself” or “damage his legacy” during the campaign.
Correction: Aug. 16, 2019
An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of Ted Kaufman and incorrectly described Mark Warner’s role in government in 2008. Mr. Warner was running for Senate that year; he was not a senator.
Correction: Aug. 19, 2019
An earlier version of this article misstated John McCain’s role as a pilot in Vietnam. He flew bombing missions as an attack aircraft pilot, but he was not a “fighter pilot.”
Obama and Biden’s Relationship Looks Rosy. It Wasn’t Always That Simple.
Image
In Joseph R. Biden Jr., Barack Obama found a running mate who would conjure the comforting past and lessen the sense of change. But it was a rocky road to his selection.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
By Glenn Thrush
- Aug. 16, 2019
“I want somebody with gray in his hair,” Mr. Obama, then 46, told one of them. He was thinking about an “older guy,” he told another.
That older guy, people around the candidate would soon learn, was Joseph R. Biden Jr., 65, a has-been to pundits but to Mr. Obama a sweet-spot pick — a policy heavyweight with limited political horizons, assuming that would ensure loyalty and minimal drama. Mr. Obama was already phoning Mr. Biden two or three times a week to solicit advice, and to decide whether the Delaware senator’s many positive attributes outweighed his singular liability, a notoriously self-tangling tongue.
Over the next several months, Mr. Obama’s top advisers would present 30 alternatives, all of whom he respectfully considered. But his preference was clear from the start. When it came time to decide in August, Mr. Obama chose Mr. Biden over two younger finalists — Tim Kaine, the governor of Virginia, and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, peers in the mold of Bill Clinton’s choice of Al Gore in 1992.
most recent Democratic debate.
The Obama-Biden origin story has been often told, and often sentimentalized. But a re-examination at this crystallizing moment of the primary campaign, based on more than two dozen interviews with Obama and Biden aides and others with knowledge of the relationship, reveals a more complicated dynamic between the two men, and one that is still evolving.
how Joe Biden’s ’88 campaign fell apart.]
Mr. Biden drove his 2008 campaign from the lot directly into a pothole. On the eve of its rollout, in January 2007, he told a reporter for The New York Observer that Mr. Obama was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Mr. Biden did not bother to tell any of his aides that the interview had gone catastrophically wrong.
Mr. Obama laughed it off. But it did little to improve his overall impression of Mr. Biden as condescending to him, forged when Mr. Obama was assigned to the Foreign Relations Committee shortly after being elected to the Senate in 2004. During their first private meeting, Mr. Biden suggested the two men have dinner, and offered to pick up the bill.
The freshman senator, who was earning millions from his memoirs, shot back that he could afford to pay, according to Mr. Biden’s retelling of the episode in his own autobiography.
Joe Biden has a long history of verbal flubs and gaffes. And he knows it.]
Mr. Biden was candid about his struggle to maintain verbal discipline, and he repeatedly interrupted himself to ask, “Am I making sense?” But the quantity of his advice was offset by its quality. Mr. Obama’s political magi were especially impressed with his insights into the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain.
The former Navy pilot valued unpredictability, Mr. Biden said, anticipating Mr. McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate and Mr. McCain’s disastrous decision to suspend his campaign that fall to focus on the global financial crisis.
What most impressed Mr. Obama’s advisers, however, was Mr. Biden’s ease with his family; he was comfortable expressing affection to his wife and grown children in a way that most politicians, including Mr. Obama, were not.
The intensity of those bonds would become apparent after Mr. Obama picked Mr. Biden, and campaign researchers uncovered potential public relations problems stemming from Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, including complications from his lobbying work and indications of marital, legal and substance-abuse problems. (Those issues were examined in detail by The New Yorker earlier this year.)
When an Obama campaign official flagged the issue, Mr. Biden grew angry and warned, “Keep my family out of this.” The issue was dropped, according to a person involved in the vetting process.
Image
Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and Mr. Obama in July 2008. Mr. Obama was warned that picking Mr. Bayh would guarantee his Senate seat would flip Republican.CreditMichael Conroy/Associated Press
The talk later in the day with Mr. Bayh, who was vacationing at the tony Greenbrier resort in West Virginia with his wife and young children, did not go well. The visitors caught him barefoot, emerging from a shower — and assumed it was an attempt to appear Kennedyesque. In reality, Mr. Bayh was less diffident than disoriented by being thrust into the national spotlight.
Mr. Bayh had another major liability. Mr. Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, had advised Mr. Obama that picking Mr. Bayh would guarantee his Senate seat would flip Republican — which could imperil the new president’s legislative agenda. Mr. Biden’s seat in Democratic Delaware was much safer.
The meeting with Mr. Kaine in Richmond was respectful, friendly and a bit bittersweet. (Eight years later, Mr. Kaine would be Mrs. Clinton’s running mate in the losing campaign against Mr. Trump.)
In early August, Mr. Obama arranged to have Mr. Biden quietly shuttled to his suite at the Graves 601 Hotel in Minneapolis, where he was campaigning. The conversation lasted well into the night.
Mr. Obama agreed that Mr. Biden would be the final person he spoke to before making a big decision, and the two men would have weekly lunches. Mr. Biden also made a loyalty pledge that would become the basis of their deeper personal bond. “You make a decision, and I will follow it to my death,” Mr. Biden said, according to Mr. Kaufman.
At some point, Mr. Biden also told Obama aides that “Barack would never have to worry” about him positioning himself for another presidential run. He was too old, he told them, and he viewed his new job as a capstone, not a catapult. But while both sides assumed that vow covered the duration of Mr. Obama’s presidency, what might happen after that was never explicitly stated.
Mr. Biden was the only one of the finalists to make such a promise. “That was helpful,” Mr. Plouffe said.
Before parting, Mr. Obama popped a surprise, intended to test Mr. Biden’s commitment to being a wingman: “Would you prefer being secretary of state to vice president?” he asked.
Mr. Biden chose the latter. Mr. Obama formally offered him the job after he flew back to Washington. Neither man has ever spoken publicly about exactly what was said, but one Biden aide who was watching the little red switchboard light for the senator’s private line said it stayed on too long for it to have simply been a perfunctory call of congratulations.
Image
In discussions about the 2020 campaign, Mr. Obama has expressed frustration to Mr. Biden that his closest advisers are too old and out of touch with the current political climate.CreditAl Drago/The New York Times
A Protective Partner
The next eight years are the stuff of buddy-movie lore — “a shotgun marriage that gradually turned into a love story,” in Mr. Axelrod’s telling.
Still, Mr. Biden’s simmering ambition was a source of unease for both men. Mr. Plouffe shut down an early move made by Mr. Biden as vice president to assemble a presidential team-in-waiting, blocking Mr. Biden’s attempts to court the party’s West Coast fund-raising elite and rejecting an attempt to hire Kevin Sheekey, a veteran Democratic operative.
In 2016, Mr. Obama quietly pressured Mr. Biden to sit out the race, partly because he believed Mrs. Clinton had a better chance of building on his agenda, and partly because he thought Mr. Biden was in no shape emotionally following the illness and death of his son Beau in May 2015.
By now, the line between heart and head, between the personal and political, so clear a decade ago, has blurred completely.
The two men spoke at least a half dozen times before Mr. Biden decided to run, and Mr. Obama took pains to cast his doubts about the campaign in personal terms.
“You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Biden earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
Mr. Biden — who thinks he could have defeated Donald Trump four years ago — responded by telling Mr. Obama he could never forgive himself if he turned down a second shot at Mr. Trump.
Mr. Obama has said he will not make an endorsement in the primary, and has offered every candidate his counsel. But he has taken an active interest in the inner workings of his friend’s campaign, to an extent beyond anything offered to other candidates.
In his interactions with Mr. Biden — the pair had a quiet lunch in Washington last month — Mr. Obama has hammered away at the need for his campaign to expand his aging inner circle.
He has communicated his frustration that Mr. Biden’s closest advisers are too old and out of touch with the current political climate — urging him to include more younger aides, according to three Democrats with direct knowledge of the discussion.
In March, Mr. Obama took the unusual step of summoning Mr. Biden’s top campaign advisers, including the former White House communications director Anita Dunn and Mr. Biden’s longtime spokeswoman, Kate Bedingfield, to his Washington office for a briefing on the campaign’s digital and communications strategy with members of his own staff, including his senior adviser, Eric Schultz.
When they were done, Mr. Obama offered a pointed reminder, according to two people with knowledge of his comments:
Win or lose, they needed to make sure Mr. Biden did not “embarrass himself” or “damage his legacy” during the campaign.
Correction: Aug. 16, 2019
An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of Ted Kaufman and incorrectly described Mark Warner’s role in government in 2008. Mr. Warner was running for Senate that year; he was not a senator.
Correction: Aug. 19, 2019
An earlier version of this article misstated John McCain’s role as a pilot in Vietnam. He flew bombing missions as an attack aircraft pilot, but he was not a “fighter pilot.”
