Joe Biden: The old-school politician in a new-school era

Biden called Schumer to chide him. That was not helpful, the president said, according to an official informed about the call, which came late in Biden’s first year in office. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, had backed down to help avoid a fiscal crisis. They should not rub his nose in it. Schumer pushed back. “You don’t know how much he’s been beating up on me,” he told the president.

The Joe Biden who will defend his presidency at a nationally televised debate on Thursday night remains a practitioner of old-school politics in a new-school era. The hostility, the anger, the polarization, the “beating up” that define today’s national debate, yes, he knows all about that.

But after more than half a century in Washington, he still has the instincts of a backslapping cloakroom pol, eager to make deals and work across the aisle where possible at a time when that rarely seems rewarded anymore.

In some ways, it has been a formula for success that upended expectations, resulting in a raft of landmark liberal programs that will mark Biden in the history books as one of the most prolific legislative masters since Lyndon B. Johnson. And yet it has not been a formula for executing the most essential mission that he assigned himself when he took office: healing a broken country riven by profound economic, ideological, cultural, political and geographic divisions.

No president in American history took the oath with more experience in public office than Biden, 81, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, when two-thirds of today’s Americans were not even born. But the politics of 2024 are a far cry from those of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s or even 2010s. While building a new bridge or lowering the cost of insulin still matter, they only penetrate so far with the electorate in an era of tribal animosity, populist unrest and social media disinformation.

“These days, people like to belittle experience, but his experience was just vital to getting as much done as we did,” Schumer said in an interview.

Mr. Biden speaking with members of the news media at the White House in January. He has become far more cautious in his public remarks. (representational image) (AP photo)

Biden can travel the country, cutting ribbons from the most ambitious infrastructure package since the 1950s; he can trumpet the biggest investment in fighting climate change in history; and he can boast of job creation, unemployment and stock market figures that Ronald Reagan would have coveted in 1984’s morning in America. But polls show a majority of voters are not impressed or not paying attention.

Among many Americans, he is blamed for wars started by other countries that national security veterans nonetheless credit him with navigating maturely despite their own criticisms. He has not found a message on the economy that resonates more than the price of milk and eggs. Neither his persona nor his vision travel on today’s hyperactive, hypersonic, hyper-sensational social media the way that former President Donald Trump’s do.

“It doesn’t mean a lot now because we’re in such a performative age,” said former Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, who was a main Republican negotiator with Biden when he was vice president. “He’s just not equipped in this era we’re in of social media and constant scrutiny. The tools and attributes and talents that he may have had just don’t quite fit or lend themselves to the era we’re in.”

It was not supposed to be quite this hard. To be sure, Biden understood the enormous tests he faced coming into office — a global pandemic still killing thousands every week, an economy in collapse, schools and businesses shuttered, racial turmoil in the streets and troops deployed around Washington after an attack on the Capitol meant to overturn an election.

Somehow, though, Biden expected the fever to break as his twice-impeached and seemingly discredited predecessor faded away. The trick was that Trump refused to go away and has spent nearly four years stirring the pot, fueling resentment and trying to tear down the system that Biden represents.

And now, saddled with the lingering effects of inflation and images of migrants streaming over the border, Biden feels the weight of an election like no other. At stake in his mind are not just health care and tax policies or support for Ukraine and Israel. Grandiose as it sounds, he believes it is nothing short of democracy. It is America, as he sees it.

Beau Biden, before deploying with the Delaware National Guard to Iraq in 2008. His father once envisioned him as the heir apparent of a new political dynasty. (File Photo)

“It’s a huge burden,” said Jon Meacham, the historian and informal adviser to the president, “but Biden is a stand-in, the embodiment, pick your image, for the politics that we grew up with and that have shaped us since the New Deal.”

After 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president, Biden thought he understood the presidency as well as anyone. But being a senator or even a vice president is nothing like being president, as Biden has come to learn, according to interviews with dozens of his friends, aides, Cabinet officers and congressional allies.

“Even with all of that extraordinary experience, particularly being vice president for eight years,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview, “there is something unique about being president. The way I’ve heard him express it to me on a couple of occasions in the Oval Office was standing behind the desk and sort of tapping the desk and saying, ‘The buck really does stop here.’”

When it came time to sit behind the Resolute Desk himself, Biden brought lessons from Barack Obama’s tenure. He would not lowball the size of his economic stimulus plan to jolt the country out of its COVID-induced recession, as he believed Obama had done 12 years earlier. Nor would he let the generals talk him out of withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan, as they did Obama.

Never mind the experts who warned against overstimulating the economy for fear of unleashing inflation or pulling out of Afghanistan too abruptly at the risk of abandoning allies to the Taliban. Biden’s mind was made up. And so there he was, sitting in the Situation Room, his head shaking no, his eyes closed in prayer, as Gen. Mark Milley kept updating reports of U.S. troops killed by a suicide bomber at Abbey Gate at the Kabul airport.

In the end, Biden showed up the doubters who told him not to bother trying to reach across the aisle. “People said this is so quaint, he actually believes we can legislate,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. “He got bill after bill that he signed into law that were bipartisan, that really pulled us together.”

But after a long career marked by insecurity, Biden still has a chip on his shoulder, insisting he knows the issues better than anyone around the table. “None of you have been elected,” he tells aides.

Age is the radioactive nuclear rod of the Biden presidency that no one wants to touch despite the danger of leaving it unaddressed. That flows from the top. Defensive and testy, Biden deeply resents discussion of his age, and his closest aides have taken their cue from him. Rather than acknowledge the obvious issues while still highlighting the advantages of a seasoned president, some advisers argue that he has not slipped at all.

His shuffling walk, low voice and occasional confusion are hard to deny, even though Republicans exaggerate and distort them. In a recent Time magazine interview, Biden said “Europe” when he meant Russia, “Russia” when he meant Ukraine and “Putin” when he meant Xi Jinping. At times, he catches such mistakes right away and corrects himself, as many people of all ages do; at others, he does not seem to notice, much like Trump on occasion.

But looking past the verbal miscues and painful elocution, Biden does not wander into unreality the way that Trump, 78, often does and his substantive points are for the most part as conversant and informed as in the past. He exhibits a grasp of his policy choices and no one has cited a decision that he would have made differently if he were a decade younger.

Whether he has the energy for another four years to finish out a presidency at age 86 remains a central issue for the election. But while Biden talked during the 2020 election of being a transitional figure, he is not ready to transition yet.

Mr. Biden speaking about gun violence in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. Although proud of his legislative accomplishments, he knows his legacy will turn largely on whether he keeps Mr. Trump out of the Oval Office. (Representational Image) (Photo: AP)

To Biden, his predecessor represents a singular threat to American democracy. One aide said Trump’s decision to run again “hardened his resolve” to run, too. “I fully take him at his word that in the absence of the threats to democratic norms, he would have let the torch pass,” Meacham said.

Coons said two factors drove Biden’s decision — Trump’s apparent sympathy for Russia over Ukraine and his promise to consider pardoning everyone who stormed the Capitol. “All you need to know is the guy wants to abandon Ukraine and empower the Jan. 6 insurrectionists,” Coons said, “and you have your reason why Joe Biden decided to run again.”

But he insists on doing it on his own terms. After five decades, he cannot suddenly become a practitioner of the kind of politics that Trump practices — the “beating up,” the vitriolic rhetoric, the toxic politics.

“I know there are people who think he needs to be more bombastic and he needs to be calling people names,” said Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C. “I don’t think so. I don’t think we ought to conduct ourselves running for office the way we don’t want our children to conduct themselves on the playground.”

That’s a debate Biden thinks is worth having.