The big chip on Joe Biden’s shoulder

Washington likes nothing better than to celebrate the arrival of a Major Political Best-Seller by parsing its pages for signs of who co-operated (and who didn’t) with the tome’s author. And the clearest sign the Beltway has reawakened from its summer slumber is the enthusiasm with which it is picking apart the first serious book on the Biden presidency, which hit the shelves this week: The Last Politician, by the brainy, veteran political scribe Franklin Foer.

Rather than engage in that parlour game — or the other favourite Washington pastime of turning to the book’s index and seeing if you’re mentioned anywhere — I wanted to flag something a bit more substantive that I took away from Foer’s tale: a mostly overlooked leitmotif that I think is essential to understanding Joe Biden, and particularly his decision to seek re-election at an age most Americans are expected to be working on their golf handicap. 

That characteristic is what my British colleagues call “chippiness” — a working-class resentment of so-called Ivy League elites who not only tend to populate Washington’s corridors of power, but (in the view of Bidenworld) condescend to those who went to lesser schools or failed to start their DC climbs on the correct rungs of the achievement ladder: federal court clerkships, White House fellowships, Capitol Hill legislative gopherships. 

Whether the Ivy Leaguers do condescend in this way is not really the issue. Biden has always believed they do, and long borne a chip on his shoulder about eking out his start at the University of Delaware and Syracuse Law School, where he barely made the cut after the bottom third of his first-year class was dropped from the programme. 

No-one has provided a better window into that side of Biden than Richard Ben Cramer, the late Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote what is widely regarded as his generation’s greatest campaign book, What it Takes, about the 1988 presidential race. In one representative section, Cramer tells the story of Biden, then a newly elected Delaware senator, sitting in the backyard of a friend’s house in Wilmington, where a group of parents were discussing their children’s future:

Joe said: “Where’s your kid going to college?”

One friend said: “Christ, Joe! He’s eight years old!”

Another said: “Ahh, there’s a lot of good schools now.”

“Lemme tell you something,” Joe said. And he wasn’t just shooting the shit. He had the clench in his jaw.

“There’s a river of power that flows through this country . . .”

His buddies rolled their eyes, but Joe acted like he didn’t see.

“Some people — most people — don’t even know the river is there. But it’s there.

“Some people know about the river, but they can’t get in . . . they only stand at the edge.

“And some people, a few, get to swim in the river. All the time. They get to swim their whole lives — anywhere they want to go — always in the river of power.

“And that river,” Joe said, “flows from the Ivy League.”

It is a chippiness that has marked Biden almost since he first arrived in Washington as a 30-year-old senator. Although he is now known for his regular malapropisms, the young Biden was then viewed — and often viewed himself — as a Kennedyesque “new generation” Democrat who rolled out soaring rhetoric and a common touch to connect with average voters. Unfortunately for Biden, that self-regard quickly labelled him a “showhorse” rather than a “workhorse”, in the Capitol’s overused shorthand.

It famously came crashing down in that 1988 race, when in an effort to shore up his working-class credentials, he appropriated the life story of former UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who had waxed poetic about being the first Kinnock in “a thousand generations” to go to university, after most of his ancestors worked in coal mines. No Biden, it turned out, worked in a coal mine.

But for me, the more telling incident from that campaign occurred months earlier, during the primary hustings in New Hampshire, when a potential voter — clad like something out of New England elitist central casting, in a beige jumper and wire-rimmed glasses — challenged Biden by asking: “What law school did you attend, and where did you place in that class?”

Biden interrupted with a finger-jabbing tirade: “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” he growled, before ticking off a litany of dubious academic achievements — some of which, it turned out, were not actually true. It was Biden at his chippiest, and when the video resurfaced amid the Kinnock scandal, it helped sink his candidacy.

In the aftermath of the disastrous 1988 campaign, Biden cast aside his Kennedyesque tics and turned himself into the prototypical “workhorse”, eventually graduating to become one of the giants of the Senate. He took over as the top Democrat on the foreign affairs committee in 1997, and through the next decade became a respected voice on American diplomacy and international affairs.

The reason all this is newly relevant is because of more recent history. Biden was able to change perceptions among many in Washington in the 30 years following the 1988 campaign. But among the Ivy Leaguers to whom Bidenworld still felt condescended was Barack Obama — or at least Obama’s White House team. They fitted all of Biden’s elitist stereotypes and, Foer informs us, would regularly dismiss his views, including on foreign policy. “Back in the last Democratic administration, the inner circle around Barack Obama undervalued [Biden’s team], as they did [their] boss, for lacking the qualities that the in-crowd prized,” Foer writes.

Foer is unsparing. He writes that Larry Summers, Obama’s Harvard-educated Treasury secretary, was “an elite whose respect Biden craved”; that longtime aide Ron Klain — Harvard Law, Supreme Court clerk, Capitol Hill legislative director — was one of Biden’s “meritocratic trophies” that he liked to collect: “While Biden proudly touted the fact that he went to a state school, he took pride in the Ivy Leaguers, like Klain, on his rosters.” And then there was Obama himself:

There was the tinge of class rivalry to their gibes. The lunch-pail cornball and the effete professor culturally chafing each other. Biden told a friend that Obama didn’t even know how to say fuck you properly, with the right elongation of vowels and the necessary hardness of his consonants; it was how they must curse in the ivory tower.

That rivalry — that chippiness — is relevant today as the Democratic political class once again goes through what veteran operative Jim Messina calls their regular quadrennial “bedwetting” over whether their man is the right one to run in November. Speculation (or at least wishful thinking) that Biden will stand aside for a younger, more energetic candidate remains rife. Profiles of Gretchen Whitmer, the highly popular Democratic governor of Michigan, are passed around at lightning speed. Even Foer himself has added to the navel gazing, saying in a recent interview that it “wouldn’t be a total surprise” if Biden dropped out.

But anyone who knows of Biden’s very large chip, particularly when it comes to Obama, knows what is motivating him: he wants to show the world that Amtrak Joe of Scranton, Wilmington and Syracuse can have a presidency just as successful — if not more so — than constitutional law professor Obama, late of the University of Chicago and the Harvard Law Review. That would require eight years, not four. He won’t drop out, for the same reason that those who predicted he would not seek re-election were wrong.

Rana, my question to you is whether I’m making too much of my “biography is destiny” case. The more widely received narrative about Biden’s re-election campaign is that he’s running because he thinks he’s the only Democrat who can beat Donald Trump — that his working-class roots resonate with the marginal Trump voter in a way that no other putative candidate can. But I don’t buy it. I think he’s driven by a life-long ambition to be president, coupled by (created by?) that big ol’ chip on his shoulder. 

Recommended reads

• Any discussion about age and politics this week can’t ignore Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader who suffered a second case of freezing, speechless, while answering reporters’ questions. Paul Kane at the Washington Post has a deep dive into McConnell’s long history of health problems, and his equally long history of refusing to answer questions about them. 

• Few people have shaped the face of modern New York City more than Dan Doctoroff, who served as Michael Bloomberg’s hard-charging deputy mayor in the years after September 11. “He wasn’t, as some have claimed, the 21st-century Robert Moses; he was Moses in a hurry,” argues a recent profile in New York magazine — a lovely read, which also passed on the heartbreaking news that Doctoroff is now suffering from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. 

• And to round out this Note that inadvertently focuses on age and mortality, I’d like to mark the sad passing of Jimmy Buffett by recommending a wonderful story the New Yorker ran last year about Latitude Margaritaville, a Florida retirement village. I’m not really a Parrothead, but I’m a huge admirer of how Buffett parlayed his music success into restaurants, merchandising and even a literary career. Nick Paumgarten’s piece serves as an window into how the late rocker achieved it all. 

Rana Foroohar responds

Peter, I’m so glad you have taken on The Last Politician, which is terrific, as the topic of this Note. I’ve also read it, and while I agree that Biden (like anyone who makes it to the top office) has a healthy ego, I’ve taken very different conclusions from Foer’s reporting about what this president — and this presidency — are all about.

Biden may not have worked in a coal mine, but Rich Trumka, the late AFL-CIO leader (who was a former coal miner) was a close friend. I’d bet my life that Biden cared a hell of a lot more about his opinion than Larry Summers’s. Indeed, one of the reasons that Biden decided not to run against Hillary Clinton in 2015 was because of a conversation in labour circles about what a Biden presidency would be all about. Not just “could he win” but “why would he run?” What’s needed at this moment in time that Biden alone could deliver?

Back then, it wasn’t yet clear that Donald Trump would pull the greatest political con job of all time by self-interestedly leveraging a true felt experience among most Americans that there is, in fact, a smoky back room in Washington where powerful people make decisions for their own benefit. Unlike any other politician before him, Trump actually said this One True Thing aloud (embedding a single truth in a welter of lies is the gift of the conman). But then, being who he is, he took a whole host of metaphorical cigars into the Oval Office and stank it up to high heaven. 

Biden was the guy who could neutralise this, for all the reasons we know. But as Foer shows us, he became something much more. He became the president that would move the country past the doctrine of Reaganomics, past trickle-down, past neoliberalism, into a new era. “Where the past generation of Democratic presidents was deferential to markets, reluctant to challenge monopoly, indifferent to unions, and generally encouraging of globalisation,” writes Foer, “Biden went in a different direction.” His Covid stimulus bailed out people, not banks. His domestic economic policy was about work, not wealth. His infrastructure bills invested in America in a way not seen since FDR’s era. He took trade policy back to an earlier era in which it was broadly understood that it needed to serve domestic interests and workers first and foremost, and that if it didn’t do that, the politics of the country simply couldn’t hang together. 

And in doing all this, he was supported by a new group of policymakers (from national security adviser Jake Sullivan, to NEC economist Heather Boushey, to Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan) who realised that Democrats need to move on from neoliberalism, not to not only survive politically, but also to fix what is fundamentally broken at home and abroad (Sullivan’s own mea culpa on this score is a worthy read.)

That work is far from over. There’s still plenty to be done in terms of connecting the dots of domestic economic policy and foreign policy. Post-neoliberal trade policy is still a work in process. But this president knows that the last half century of growth for its own sake is over. Done. Finished. We need a new paradigm that protects both labour and the environment at the domestic and global level. And this White House is leading that effort. That’s why Biden is running again. Not because of a chip on his shoulder. But because he’s the only leader right now that truly sees the big picture.