Is Joe Biden the Last Politician? With Franklin Foer

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:47Whatever people might think or like to say about President Joe Biden, there could be no doubt that he has been one of the most successful politicians of his generation. My guest today, Franklin Foer, has written a brilliant book looking inside the Biden White House considering the struggles it faced in the fight for America's future. From Biden's real relationship with Vice President Harris to his character and legacy from here. Is Joe Biden really the last politician? Can Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump? Let's find out.

1:26I'd like to take a second to recommend my friend Andy Ostroy's great podcast, The Back Room. Every episode is a fun, incredibly honest take on our society and the political situation, along with some brilliant guests. I've been honored to join Andy on the show, and you know anywhere that accepts me with no filter deserves a shout out.

1:53So joining us now on Open Book is Frank Ford. He's a bestselling author and writer at The Atlantic. He's written an incredible book, The Last Politician Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future. And I have to tell you, I read the book about eight weeks ago, Frank, and my producer read the book as well. And we were both blown away about the detail, the reporting, the reveal. I learned a lot from your book, not only about Joe Biden, but about their White House and what they feel they're up against as it relates to planet Earth and what's going on here in the United States.

2:30So I want to address as much of that as I can in the next 30 minutes. But I want to go to your background first, if you don't mind. How did you end up writing the book? And I know you write for them, but what do you report on there? So I'm in a very privileged position. I'm kind of something closer to an old school magazine writer where I don't have a beat per se. I get to flit about. And so I do spend, I'm based in Washington, so I spend a lot of my time writing about politics, but I also get to write about politics in a very broad sort of way. So my last big story for cover story for the Atlantic was about American Jews and the surge of anti Semitism that's happened in this country.

3:13I wrote a book about soccer called How Soccer Explains the world. So with this book in particular, my editor at Penguin called me up in August of 2020, just after Joe Biden had won, secured the Democratic nomination at his convention officially. And she said, you know, this administration is going to be walking into the middle of this pandemic. There's going to be an economic crisis. The institutions of government have been run down by the last administration. What if you tried to kind of embed within the administration or write a report, a book about the first hundred days of the Biden administration.

3:49And I thought, you know, that's interesting. It's not what I've done before. I don't especially like Joe Biden as he's not a politician I've ever connected with in any sort of meaningful way. I always thought he was a bit of a blowhard. And so I was a bit skeptical. But then the more I thought about it, I thought, okay, this is going to be a big deal. It'd be fun to try to do the best that I could to secure a front row seat at what was about to happen. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to write a book about the first 100 days. And I was also pretty sure that the first 100 days are a cliche.

4:22So that's the genesis of the project. Okay. So I have this. I mean, I read your book. I said, okay, I'm going to think about this book and see if I'm going to summarize some things for you. In my mind, tell me what I got right or wrong. Okay. So we have a 50-year classic old school politician, hence the title, the last politician. He's a back slapper. He's a good guy. People like him. You can tell that he likes people. He prided himself in foreign policy because of his work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and prided himself on the Supreme Court because the Judiciary Committee always wanted to be president, right?

4:58He dropped out of the presidency in 1988. He tried a few more times. He was back in there in 2008. and then he meets Barack Obama. Barack Obama elevates him. He makes him vice president, but it turns out he's a very good vice president. He understands the Senate. He's coaching Barack Obama on certain things to do politically. He watches Obama's six. They're way closer than people think they are based on your reporting and based on some of the things that I know. And then he rises to the presidency, surprisingly, because of the rise of Donald Trump. He says, okay, I'm going to take a shot at the presidency.

5:31But now this is where the stuff gets very dark for me. We have some dark things going on on the planet. I didn't see them at the time that I was supporting Donald Trump, but the darkness is there's a group of people are adversaries, American adversaries that are working inside of social media. They're trying to influence our elections. They're trying to make America distrust its democracy, distrust its political leaders. And here's Joe Biden up against all of that, trying to reestablish the bona fides of what good political leaders do. What did I miss? Okay. So I think that's a good summary of the history.

6:09I think that Joe Biden is somebody, as you point out, who came in with a strong theory of how democracy could be repaired, which was that he needed to show that politics could still work. And what is politics? Politics is this kind of technology that we have for mediating the fact that we live in a society where you can't always get what you want. So that means that sometimes we have to compromise. Sometimes we have to accept that we can't move the system in the way that we'd want to move the system because they're winners and losers in a political system. And so he wanted to prove that politics was still possible, which meant that he had to prove that it was still possible to pass big pieces of legislation.

6:50And sometimes those legislations would have to be passed in bipartisan fashion. I think among the things that you missed is that Joe Biden is somebody who's almost become part of the political furniture in Washington. He's somebody who's been around so long that he seems familiar. And only in the aftermath of the debate with Donald Trump, where his age caught up with him, and he spent weeks kind of twisting where there was all this pressure building on him to drop out of the race. What you saw was that he's a guy who's very proud, who, you know, he suffered all these humiliations in his life, starting with the stutter and getting bullied for that.

7:25He's somebody who grew up in a Democratic Party where you had guys who went to Ivy League law schools ruling the roost. And he was always self-conscious about the fact that he went to a state school. And so he's somebody who had a chip on his shoulder. And there are two parts of Joe Biden. There is the Joe Biden who displays enormous amounts of grace to people who is this human being who is able to empathize in ways that you don't see very often in politics. And then there's this other part of Joe Biden that is resentful, that is very self-conscious, that is very insecure. And those two things coexisted within the same guy.

8:03And I think a lot of those insecurities, which are not attractive when you're sitting twisting in the wind like he was for a couple of weeks in summer, also drove him to do things that were confounded expectations. He aimed a lot higher than I think people thought that he would aim in his presidency. He started with a one vote margin in the Senate. He was pushing through some of the biggest social legislation that we've seen since the 1960s. And that's something people didn't expect. Yeah. I mean, let's say he had a great record. I mean, his record stands with Lyndon Johnson for this back half of this political, you know, the last 50 to 60 years.

8:41But I guess what I got, you know, you're right. You know, you weren't super fond of him in the beginning, but you seem very fond of him now. What is it about Joe Biden that the average person wouldn't know that you would like them to know? Yeah, I came to respect him the more that I observed him. And there's a joke. I learned this joke about politicians when I was a kid, about a guy walks into a used brain store and he looks and he's looking at the various models of used brains and the show, the salesperson takes them and he says, this is the most expensive one we have on sale. And it's the brain of a politician.

9:20He goes, why is this the most expensive one that you've got? And they say, well, because it's hardly ever used. And I think, you know, politicians are figures who we tend to culturally discount that we say, okay, somebody like Joe Biden seems to be telling us what we want to hear. We suspect that politicians tell us one thing in public and then turn around and do another thing in private. And so as I watched him kind of move through the Senate, deal with foreign leaders, I think I came to respect not just Joe Biden, but came to respect the skills of an old fashioned politician even more. Because sometimes you do have to tell.

9:57You're sitting with the Turkish President Erdogan. There's a story where he Biden is dealing with a very delicate moment in the relationship. And he tells him, you know, go out there, say whatever you need to say about me, and then come back into the room. And let's cut a deal. Or in dealing with some of these Republicans on Capitol Hill, everybody in the Democratic Party was saying, these guys are toadies. They spent all this time refusing to denounce Donald Trump. Why would you want to deal with them? And Joe Biden's like, okay, I understand the world that they exist in. Therefore, I'm going to continue to try to woo these people and try to work with them.

10:35And we dismiss that. It's out of touch. It's not the way that the party system works now. But I think, and the country didn't really reward him with this because his approval ratings always remained in the toilet, but he was able to get things done. And I think that unto itself is an accomplishment. He was able to prove, at least in theory, that our institutions are still capable of functioning. Very well said. But up against that, you know, I'm going to use the word that the Democrats like using because I actually think it's the right word. You got some weird, weird, weird shit going on. OK, weird.

11:11OK, you got an orange guy who obviously I made a mistake on. But once I had data points as a smart human being and a patriot, I said, OK, this guy's wrong for America. He's going to do very damaging things to America. I was part of this study in 2012. We had lost the election to Barack Obama. I mean, he was the sitting president. And we sat down at the Republican National Committee and said, OK, what are we going to do to bring more people, more demographies, more groups into the Republican Party? We talked about opening up ideas to better immigration policies. We talked about more of an outreach, some modification of some views.

11:51and that got thrown out by the wayside. And we've got this anarcho-ultra-Christian organization. They went in the opposite direction from the one that you suggested. They did, yeah. But it was not just me, by the way. It was a committee of people and it was like - Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember. Old school Republicans. And so, but the group of people, by the way, I talk to senators and you can find me on people's donors lists, okay? I still give money to my Republican friends in the Senate. Most of them despise Trump privately. You know this. You're a good journalist. Yeah, yeah, of course. And then they say good things about him publicly.

12:25So what do you think that is about? And how do you think America post-Joe Biden, because Joe Biden beat Donald Trump fair and square. Joe Biden reset the table for American institutions. Joe Biden prosecuted his ideas and promulgated a legislative agenda that's second only to Lyndon Johnson. How do we address this issue going forward? What do you think happens? I mean, I think one of the failures of the Biden presidency is that he wanted to turn us back to a normal country. There was a status quo that predated Donald Trump that he felt like if he demonstrated institutions work that you could pass legislation that did meaningful things for people's lives, then we could all get back to normal.

13:08And the truth is, we're not a normal country anymore. The country itself has changed. And it is interesting to me to compare the two parties as institutions, because we just watched this stretch where the Democratic Party saw that there was a problem, that Joe Biden was too old to govern for another four years, and that he was going to be a bad candidate headed into this November's election. Maybe belatedly, because they probably should have done this a year ago, they went to him and they said, you know what, you got to step aside. And so the party acted like a responsible institution at the end of the day.

13:43And you saw the way in which constituencies and leaders all got together and they made a decision and then they made it happen. In the Republican Party, there was the same sense that Donald Trump was a crisis for the Republican Party that old-fashioned Republicans like yourself had. And they did make efforts. They did make efforts to try to turn him aside at various moments, but they weren't strong enough as an institution in order to do that. And what you have instead is you have a leader and his movement that have captured the Republican Party as an institution. So that means that the moderate, the center-right guys and gals that you like are stuck, where they've become the alien bodies in the institution.

14:26And so they have a choice. They can either leave the party, which is a very hard thing to do, because it means it strips you of any sort of power, or you can try to coexist within the party, which means that you have to kowtow to a leader that you don't believe in. And that's where we're at. Yeah. So that I mean, that's literally that's the Ted Cruz rationale. Right. He called him a sniveling coward. Trump blasted his wife, said his wife was ugly, said his father was linked to the Kennedy assassination. Ted Cruz bent over and said, I can take it because I want to stay in power. Is that not right?

15:00What am I missing? Or the J.D. Vance, as it turns out, predicament as well. I'm in love with J.D. Vance. I just have to tell you personally, okay, I put out on Twitter last week that I want to thank J.D. Vance for replacing him as the worst Donald Trump hire in Donald Trump history. I cannot be happier, Frank, about this guy. I mean, I just think it's fantastic. Okay, forget about his love affair with couches and the fact that he hates the cat ladies. I just think this is one of the more fantastic hires. And I predict he will be gone before long because Trump's polls are going to slip and Trump's going to panic and do all the shit that Trump is capable of.

15:38Let's talk about Biden for a second, though. Did he really want to stay in the race based on your reporting after the debate? Was that a, it looked like a slug fight from the outside. Was it a slug fight or was it, you know, he was ready to go, but he was just trying to figure out the timing? He was not ready to go. I mean, the thing that you need to remember about Joe Biden, I talked about this earlier, is that he's a very proud guy. Right. And, you know, through his life. It's not just the stutter when he was a young kid and being bullied for that. When he ran for president in 1988, he got slapped with this charge of plagiarism and he had to drop out of the race.

16:14That was a great humiliation for him. When he ran for president in 2008, we all remember how he described Barack Obama as clean and articulate. And that was a humiliation for him because people said that he was racist and he had to kind of slink out of that race too. And so his life is he's experienced all these tragedies that have made him a very resilient person, but he's also experienced all these humiliations that have also made him an even more resilient person. And if you looked at Joe Biden in the abstract, you say, this is a guy who's actually psychologically very healthy. He's got grit.

16:46He's got resilience. He can face down adversity and it doesn't destroy him. He always manages to find a way to get back up. And in his head, I think you looked at the debate and he was like, OK, this is another episode of adversity for me. I screwed up. I was humiliated, but I'm going to do what I've always done in my life and I'm going to muscle through. The problem being, you know, the thing that he was trying to muscle through is the fact that he's old and there's nothing that you can do. There's no amount of will that you can summon to get past the fast that biology is like counting your clock down.

17:18Right. Yeah. And there's a sadness to that. I mean, this is, I think, the mistake that these Fox News anchors are making. They're blasting his geriatric status. And the meantime, the only people that are watching Fox News are geriatric, right? I mean, they're buying like catheters and like walkers in commercial interruptions. I just think he's a - That's delicious. But for the grace of God go I. So why are you doing that? So, all right. So let's talk about his relationship with Vice President Harris for a second. Yeah. So you talked about his relationship. In order to talk about his relationship with Harris, I mean, you should talk about his relationship with Obama.

17:51Because Joe Biden was a very loyal vice president to Barack Obama, But he was a very unhappy vice president for long stretches of the administration. Barack Obama actually needed Joe Biden to fill in gaps in his resume. So Joe Biden had this expertise in foreign policy. He had this expertise in dealing with the Senate. Barack Obama hated dealing with the Senate. So he was happy to outsource that to Biden. And he gave Biden some really hard jobs like ending the war in Iraq or dealing with the migration crisis in Central America. And Biden felt he knew that he was always the punchline of Barack Obama's jokes or the circle around Barack Obama.

18:35Joe Biden would give these long monologues about his grandpa Finnegan. And it was like it would become a punchline for Obama. And they would roll their eyes. And Obama liked to make fun of Joe Biden in public and just needle him because it was good material for him. And so when Biden comes into the presidency, he's determined to have a different relationship with Kamala Harris. On a formal level, it makes sense because he's able to say, you know, he hated how Barack Obama would refer to him as my vice president. So Kamala Harris is going to be described as the vice president. And we're always going to do our, you know, we're always going to, as a matter of process, loop her into decisions, loop her staff into decisions.

19:18That was all the most formal means of expressing respect that he could think of. But as a practical matter, because Joe Biden is so self-confident, because Joe Biden has been around the block so many times, he feels like he doesn't have gaps in his resume. So he didn't actually need Kamala Harris in any meaningful sort of way. And because he was dealing with crisis after crisis, he just never developed a relationship with her where he became, it was a mentor, pupil relationship, sorry, teacher, pupil relationship, mentor, mentee relationship that just never happened. And so she drifted. And look, the vice presidency is funny.

20:00It's the basis for a TV show on HBO. You can get a lot of laughs out of telling jokes about the vice president. But the one thing being harder being vice president is to be a former vice president's vice president. And so I think there was like a measure of hazing that happened in the job. And I just don't think that all the difficulties of the job earned her any sympathy with him, which they probably should have. You know, it's just, I mean, look, I mean, everybody's had a problem with it. Richard Nixon, you know, I mean, Eisenhower said a month into, you know, before the election day, they asked him, oh, can you think of something that Nixon contributed to the eight years of your presidency?

20:38Give me a week, I'll think of something. I mean, I mean, these people have never gotten treated well. Right. And so I get all that. But where are we now? He immediately endorsed her. Was he trying to big was he trying to bigfoot Obama or he was like, this is the right person for the job? I think that what happened was you had a lot of people within the Democratic establishment come to him and basically say, this has been chaos for the last month. And the only solution to chaos is order. So we need an orderly process here. We can't have another month of chaos. If we have any chance of beating Donald Trump, we just need to pass the torch on to her.

21:19She may not be our favorite candidate, but she is the candidate who's there and available. And I think she ended up, she's ended up surprising even the people who were calling for her to get the nomination with her performance in the first couple weeks out. What's so interesting to me is that when I was reporting on her vice presidency, she just didn't have a sense. The problem was she didn't know who she was. She didn't know who she was as vice president. She didn't know how she would relate to him. She didn't know politically what type of persona she wanted to embrace. You know, there were moments where she would be like, OK, I'm going to be the administration's emissary to the white working class.

21:58And because she was doing this work on union and Biden's political people are like, what, really? That's what you want to be like. You don't realize like that's not going to be that's not it's not going to be a battle that you're going to win. You're not going to you're not going to that constituent is never going to be your base. Why don't you spend a lot of time talking to women voters or black voters? Because that's more opportune, politically opportune for you. And we could use your support there. And she was reluctant to do that at various points in the administration. It was only after the Dobbs decision when Biden, as a Catholic, really struggled to talk about the abortion issue.

22:30And everybody in the Democratic Party knew that this was their best shot at winning the midterm elections, that she started to go out on the stump and she started to talk. I think people who were watching her carefully could see that she was actually getting better as the administration went on. But she was stuck in that Lester Holt interview where she said, I've been to the border. She was stuck with the impression everybody had of her as a candidate in 2019. So people didn't actually know that she was getting better over time. Can she beat Trump? I think it's going to be so hard. But, you know, I think things have lined up in such a way that what seems like it would be a pretty impossible task when Joe Biden passed the torch now feels to me like it's plausible.

23:15There is the fact of the map where it felt like Georgia and Arizona had slipped away from Trump. And now because she mobilizes different sets of voters, those states look like they're more plausibly in play. We haven't actually seen polling from those states yet. So we don't know for sure. But I think the interesting thing that I've seen in the polling is that there was this sense that her support among white, that she would have less support among white voters than Biden did because of some sort of latent racism or the like. And that doesn't feel like that's been the case in the polling so far.

23:56So she's been able to hang on to the Biden voters and she's been able to expand them by winning back black and young voters and some Latino voters. And if she's able to continue that and build on that, then, yeah, she's got a shot. I want to talk about, if you don't mind, I want to talk about a couple more things. The first thing is the Dobbs decision, because I think if she does have a shot, one of the reasons why she will have a shot is women's reproductive freedom in the United States. Of course, 14 states now have different types of restrictions on that freedom. Why do you think Biden was slow on this?