The long news conference wasn’t a success, though it was daring (almost two hours, live) and probably worth the dare (nothing else is working). President Biden came out swinging, pushed back on critics, made big claims—it’s been “a year of enormous progress.” The White House seemed to want to show him thinking aloud, being reflective, at ease. He gave it his best, but it didn’t work. Unfinished sentences, non sequiturs; sometimes his thoughts seem like bumper cars crashing and forcing each other off course. I still don’t understand his defense of his comment equating opponents of his voting bill with historic Southern racists. Angrily: “No, I didn’t say that. Look what I said. Go back and read what I said and tell me if you think I called anyone who voted on the side of the position taken by Bull Connor that they were Bull Connor. That is an interesting reading of English. I assume you got into journalism because you liked to write.” A lot of things simply couldn’t be parsed. After the Afghanistan debacle he was defiant and defensive. You could see some of that on Wednesday also.
Asked what he will do different in the second year of his presidency he spoke of a “change in tactic.” He will get out of Washington more and speak to the people—“on the road a lot making the case around the country.”
He is misdiagnosing his problem. It isn’t that his stands and decisions haven’t been fully understood and will be embraced if comprehended more fully. It’s that his stands and decisions the past year were basically understood and disliked. It’s not a communications problem, it’s a substance problem. It would be better if he spent his second year readjusting his positions. But politicians always think it’s a communications problem. Because that means the back office is blowing it, not you.
I’ve written of how the non-left experiences Joe Biden. The past week I’ve been thinking about Mr. Biden himself, whom we’ve gotten to know in a new way the past year. I turned back again—for the third time, actually—to “What It Takes: The Way to the White House,” the great classic of presidential politics by the late Richard Ben Cramer. Before I give it its due I’ll note its flaws. It is casually sexist—Cramer didn’t seem to think a lot of the women entering national politics and journalism in the late 1980s—and bitchily score-settling, especially against his journalistic competitors. Most seriously, what keeps it from being a masterpiece is that he failed to deal with or account for his political biases and predilections. Democrats are rather good, Republicans rather bad; Dems are serious about policy, Reps use policy as a tool for advantage, or ignorantly. Their stands are spoofed, often with a Southern accent—“sosh’lahzed medicine.”
And yet. It is for all that a very great work of political reporting, telling the tale of the 1988 campaign with real breadth and depth—with sprawl. His mastery of detail is simply stupendous. As for his prose, he wrote with a zest that was almost a kind of love, about the great game and those who choose to be part of it. He makes you see what he’s telling you.
Cramer focused on six candidates, but the one he most loved, the one in whom he seemed most invested, was Mr. Biden, who flamed out in his first presidential race after charges of plagiarism and lying about his record.
It’s a wonderful portrait. Cramer’s Biden is from childhood scrappy and proud, “with a grace born of cocky self-possession.” By college he knew he would go into politics. He was voluble, a talker who’d talk until you loved him. He was sensitive about his intelligence—in law school if someone said he wouldn’t make the cut, “well, Joe was ready to step outside and settle who was smarter.” All this caused him problems when he ran in ’88—he’d made inflated claims along the way that he’d graduated with three degrees, on a scholarship—and reporters found out.
In his first debate Tom Shales, television critic of the Washington Post, zeroed in on something that still pertains. “He comes across on TV as someone whose fuse is always lit.”
From the beginning of his political career Mr. Biden had deep faith in his own judgment. It wasn’t always well placed. Cramer: “Joe Biden had balls. Lot of times, more balls than sense.” He also had deep faith in his ability to persuade—anyone at any time, just get him in the room with them. He could make any deal once he had made what he called the “connect”—a mystical moment between him and the audience when he knew he had them, when some magic of emotion happened and they realized: He’s the one. He was good at it in that first presidential run. He brought union members to their feet.
But his gurus tore their hair out because he was “speech driven.” He didn’t know what he thought until he had to say it. He rode them to come up with the message of the campaign, its meaning. When they tried he was in response both irresolute and stubborn: Major speeches were torn apart and rewritten with only minutes to go. He had a high tolerance for chaos and created it. He usually ran an hour late. In the end he didn’t really have a message; what he had was hunger and a sense of destiny.
His national political career began exactly 50 years ago, in early 1972. He was an obscure Delaware county councilman, 29 years old, a dashing, charismatic nobody. Republican J. Caleb Boggs was running for his third term in the Senate. Boggs was beloved in Delaware, a former governor, a Republican moderate who voted for the 1964 and ’68 Civil Rights Acts and helped put Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Senate Democrats loved him too: His good nature and common touch helped make the place run.
No one would challenge Boggs, but young Joe Biden looked at him and thought: “He’s tired.” By which he meant: He’s old. Boggs turned 63 that year, which seemed older then than now. Mr. Biden ran against him vowing to be an “activist” senator, who’d put energy in the state, which needed “change.” At one point Boggs was ahead 30 points. Mr. Biden had no money or name recognition, but he had “a great radio voice,” and he ran not so much on policies as on a mood—fresh, vital youth must take its place. It was the first federal election in which 18-year-olds could vote.
In the biggest congressional upset of 1972, Mr. Biden beat Cale Boggs by 1.5 points, and his great career began.
Now he is the target of the kind of critique he used against Boggs, coming from his natural opposition but also from within his own party: he’s lost his bite, he’s not quite with it, he’s . . . old.
Themes repeat themselves in life. What goes around, comes around, and politics is a rough old business.