The highest calling, p.48
The Highest Calling, page 48
As of this writing, some of that has happened, though he was not able to eliminate the divisiveness that has taken over Washington in recent decades. And President Biden’s approval ratings, like President Trump’s, tended to stay below 50 percent. As a result, he had a difficult time getting his initial agenda through Congress. That was made even more difficult when Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives following the 2022 midterm elections.
But President Biden was able to get through some of his domestic agenda, at times much scaled back from the initial goals. For instance, his signature Build Back Better, a multitrillion-dollar Democratic wish list of enhanced economic, social, and environmental programs—containing many pent-up Democratic objectives—could not gain enough support in the Senate to pass, but a revised bill, largely crafted by West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, did pass, renamed as the Inflation Reduction Act. President Biden was able to get two signature programs approved with a good deal of bipartisan support: an infrastructure bill and a bill to support semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S.
Outside the U.S., President Biden improved relationships with our traditional European allies, though the relationships had started poorly when he decided to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan without consulting or notifying the allies. (Also, the deaths of thirteen U.S. soldiers, due to a suicide bomb, during the withdrawal was clearly an early misstep in his foreign policy.) But the Biden team regained its footing when Russia invaded Ukraine. The president was able to convince European allies and the U.S. Congress to strongly support Ukraine, including significant financial and military resources; this undertaking became Biden’s signature foreign policy achievement, for he was able to gain U.S. and European military and economic support of the Ukrainian effort to repel the Russian invasion (and that effort far exceeded early predictions of a quick Russian victory). However, as of this writing, support for Ukraine in the U.S. has waned, and the outcome of that war is unclear.
Other traditional allies actually did not see an improvement in their relationships with the U.S. Relations with Israel and the Persian Gulf countries were arguably stronger during the Trump years and deteriorated somewhat during the Biden years. President Biden was strongly critical of the Israeli government’s desire to enact legislation that would weaken the authority of the judiciary, and later he came to disagree with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence on continued bombing of Gaza in order to destroy Hamas’s capabilities and control over Gaza. The split with Netanyahu’s decision to proceed with an invasion of southern Gaza placed the U.S.-Israel relationship in a troubled state, despite President Biden’s strong, lifelong support of Israel.
Also, early in the administration, Biden did not think he should be engaging directly with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, believing that the prince had been responsible for the murder in 2018 of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi; that view moderated in time as Saudi Arabia’s influence on Gulf matters of interest seemed to strengthen. But generally relations with the leading Arab countries in the Gulf were not as warm as President Biden would have preferred.
The challenges in the Middle East were not the only ones that weakened U.S. ties in certain areas. The war in Ukraine led Biden to essentially end any relations with Russia, imposing enormous sanctions on it and on prominent Russian oligarchs. The relationship with China certainly did not improve, and perhaps actually worsened, as the Biden administration (more than the Trump administration) continued to be quite supportive of Taiwan, which upset China. President Biden objected to practices in China that he sees as violating human rights norms, and that was not a major concern of President Trump.
The biggest economic challenge that President Biden has had to handle was the high rate of inflation—the U.S. inflation rate for the prior 25 years was essentially 2 percent. But because, in part, of the enormous amount of fiscal stimulus put into the economy by legislation passed under President Trump and President Biden to deal with the effects of COVID, inflation spiked to 8 percent. For a while, the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve thought the high inflation was “transitory,” and few countersteps were taken at the outset of the rising inflation. But, in time, the Fed recognized the inflation in the economy was more enduring than once thought and began to raise interest rates steadily in 2022 and 2023, resulting in slower growth in the stock and real estate markets than might have been desired. But the economy did not dip into a recession in 2023 or 2024, despite many economists’ predictions to the contrary, as consumer spending fueled economic growth and a tight market drove unemployment to near-record lows.
Any real assessment of the Biden administration, though, will depend on events subsequent to this writing. It does seem fair to say that presidents who get reelected tend to have more favorable reputations than those who do not, even though second terms are often quite troubled. So if President Biden ultimately wins reelection, it is likely history will treat him more kindly than if he were to lose.
I requested an interview with President Biden for this book, though not so much to review the events of his life and presidency, but more to hear his thoughts on the job of being president. And I was able to do such an interview in the Oval Office alone with him on April 2, 2024. That interview follows this introductory section.
As with President Trump, I did not want this book’s assessment of the Biden presidency to be dependent just on my own observations and interview. So I also interviewed Franklin Foer, a journalist at The Atlantic magazine, about his very detailed book on the first two years of the Biden administration. That interview occurred at the New-York Historical Society on February 20, 2024.
* * *
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): From the time you were elected to the Senate, people have said “This man should be president.” You were first elected to office when you were 29. You became president when you were 78. So for a longer period of time than anybody in our country’s history, you’ve been talked about as a future president. Now that you are president, is it as much fun as you thought it would be when people told you should be president all those years?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN (JB): “Fun” maybe is not the right word. First of all, it’s an incredible honor. I love these biographies which say “I knew I was going to be president since whatever.” I didn’t even know I was going to run for the Senate.
There are certain inflection points in world history where things change in a relatively short period of time, the outcome of which, how you deal with it, dictates what the next four, five, six decades are going to look like. The postwar period is over. The world is changing—everything from global warming to leadership to shifts in allegiances around the world.
I wasn’t going to run this time around in. I just lost my son Beau in 2015, and they’re talking about the presidency. I was a professor at Penn. It was a good job, and I actually enjoyed it. They gave me a couple million dollars to hire staff to set up the Penn Biden Center up there.
But what happened was when those folks came out of the fields, carrying torches, down in Charlottesville, with Nazi banners, and that young woman was killed, and the president was asked what he thought, and he said he thought there are good people on both sides—that’s when I decided that I was going to run. Because I really do think, speaking of inflection points, that democracy is at stake—literally our democracy. It’s not just here in the United States, it’s happening around the world as well. But Donald Trump comes along, with his America First policy, undermining our foreign policy agreements around the world. His economic policy I felt was a disaster. The guy uses phrases like now he’s going be a dictator in the second term, the first act if he’s re-elected, etc.
What I did was, I went out and I made the speech on democracy. Because he didn’t do a thing. He just sat there. He didn’t do a goddamn thing. I shouldn’t say that, but he didn’t. The whole idea of what happened down in Charlottesville, all that occurring, and he had been asked what he thought of what was happening and he said, “There are good people on both sides”—I thought to myself, what the hell is going on? That’s when I decided to run. I meant to reestablish the value system that was consistent with who the hell we are.
DR: You were vice president for eight years. Is the presidency a different job than it was under Barack Obama or other presidents because social media is different now, or because bipartisanship is completely gone? When you were in the Senate, there was bipartisanship, to some extent. It seems like it’s gone now. Has the presidency changed a lot over the last couple of years, or is it pretty much the way it was when you were vice president?
JB: I think it’s changed. It’s changed for a couple of reasons. One is that Trump has, to the surprise of most people, taken over the heart and soul of the Republican Party. This is not your father’s Republican Party, for God’s sake. I’ve had five—and I promised I’d never say their names, so I won’t—five Republicans that I served with when I was a senator, personally saying, “I agree with you, but I can’t be with you, because if I am, I’ll get defeated in the primary.” It amazes me, his hold on otherwise decent, honorable men that I’ve worked with. I don’t know what the hold is. They believe, when he threatens retribution, that he means it.
But I think what’s changed is the notion that the Republican Party has disintegrated. There’s no center to it anymore. When I got elected, remember I said I ran for three reasons: to restore the middle class, to bring back a sense of honor and decency to the office, and to unite the country. They said, “That was the old days, Biden. You used to be really good at doing that with the Senate. You can’t do it anymore.” But I still was optimistic. Look, we got a hell of a lot done.
DR: What would you say you’re most proud of what you’ve done as president?
JB: What I would say I am most proud of was dealing with the Inflation Reduction Act, which was really about being able to take on prescription drugs, take on pharma, take on these interests. There was a debate back in the’30s with regard to whether unions were legit or not legit; an element of that said that when the president is given money by the Congress to do something, to spend that money for the U.S. interest, he should hire American workers and use American products. I didn’t know that existed. So I decided that in order to get stuff done that we needed to get done, we should invest in America, with American products—not unfair trade practices, but just invest in America. You may remember the criticism, understandably, that I got when I went to South Korea to try to get the chip manufacturers to come here. Well, guess what, they couldn’t. $50 billion worth—it would have created thousands of jobs. I just don’t want to be the end of the supply chain again. As long as we have a beginning of the supply chain, other countries can as well, but I don’t want to be at the end.
The other thing I’m really proud of, I’m really proud we were able to move in the direction of getting the infrastructure bill passed. Infrastructure was weak for four years. We got $1.2 trillion, and there’s a lot being built, a lot happening, a lot moving. I’m also proud of the fact that we were able to focus on a policy that focused on building the economy from the middle out, bottom up. There’s so much more to do, though. There’s so much more to do.
DR: It’s said to be the loneliest position in the world, and the most responsibility. Is it enjoyable? Or is it just something you feel you need to do, but you don’t jump up every morning and say, I can’t wait to get in the office?
JB: It’s a little of both. It’s not like I can hardly wait to get over there and make those decisions about what I’m going to do about the fact that the Israelis just killed innocent civilians who were trying to bring food to the Gaza Strip. But part of it is I get a chance to change things. You can kind of taste it—if we do the following, we can make it better, we can move. Even the staff, as they’ll tell you, sometimes will say to me, I’m not sure we can do that.
But for example, when I went to South Korea to get the chips act moving forward and semiconductor manufacturing, how the hell can we be the leading nation in the world while being a second rate chip manufacturer? My going to South Korea to meet with President Yoon and Samsung and saying, why don’t you invest in America? We invented those damn chips—the end result was he decided to do it, and I said why? He says, You’ve got the best workers in the world, and it’s the safest place to invest.
So I get an overwhelming sense of satisfaction when what we’re trying to do begins to work. The frustrating part—and I knew it would be—is that it’s hard as hell for this to trickle down to the American public, to understand how it’s working for them. I knew this would take time.
DR: The Founding Fathers came up with a system, and they invented the presidency. If you could speak to one of them and say, “Look, you should have done this differently, or you should have gotten rid of the Electoral College, or you should have done something different,” is there something you would say that would make the presidency even better for the country than the way it is now? Or basically it’s okay, the way it’s structured now?
JB: One of the best things they did that has been taken advantage of is the amendment process to add provisions of the Constitution. I’m not a big fan of the filibuster. I’m not a big fan of some of the things that the Congress has done to limit the ability of the majority to speak, and so I think the most important thing I would do is put us in a position where the Congress does not require supermajorities to get basic things done, like a budget, or supermajorities to be able to get decent things done, like civil rights, civil liberties.
DR: The Founding Fathers didn’t require that.
JB: No, the Congress did it. They gave us the option. I think we’ve chosen some of the wrong options.
DR: As you look forward, what are you most interested in doing in a second term? More of the kind of things you’ve done in the first term? Is there any one thing you would love to do in a second term?
JB: There’s several things that I would love to do. The reason why we have to win is that if Trump wins, he’s going to wipe out everything we’ve done. I mean it—everything. For example, for all the talk about the big-spending Democrats, we’ve actually lowered the deficit. We’ve actually lowered it, the money we spent on what we brought in. I think we need a fairer tax system. Look, I know you’re a very successful man, but the tax system is not fair the way it’s running now. For example, we’ve got nearly a thousand billionaires in America. I’m a capitalist. That’s wonderful. Just pay a frigging fair share of tax. If they just paid 25 percent, that generates $400 billion over 10 years. Imagine what we can do.
One of the things I’m proudest of having done is I met with the Business Roundtable about 18 months ago, and they were criticizing me about why I talk about labor. And I said, you know, when I was vice president, the secretary of commerce and I interviewed close to 350 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and said, what do you most need? They said a better-educated workforce. And I said, but you aren’t educating your workforce anymore. I said, the DuPont company used to be one of the largest companies in the United States. I said, what happened was, when they bought a new enterprise, they trained their own workers to run it. You guys don’t do that anymore. And at the end of the conversation, I said, so why are you opposed to me providing for better education and more training and apprenticeships? The end result was they sort of backed off and said, yes, we need that. What I’m saying is that it takes a while, when the world changes in terms of technology, when the way in which you communicate changes, to grasp hold of what it is you really want to do with what you have.
DR: Do you have any regret that your parents didn’t live to see you be president of the United States? Just imagine what it would be like to say to your parents, “I’ve been elected president of the United States.”
JB: Yes, I do, especially my dad. My mom lived to see me be vice president. I’m going to tell a quick story. When I got my ass kicked in the primary by Barack, my mother called me and asked me, what kind of guy is he? I said, he’s honest, he’s bright as hell, I think he’s an honorable man. Growing up, my mother was everybody’s mother confessor. My friends would always come to my mom for advice. She never let us know who she was advising, never violated anything. She wouldn’t.
I was riding home on the train, I guess it was in early August, when Barack became the de facto nominee. And he said, I want to do a background check on you. I’m on the phone, on the train. And I said, background check? I said, Barack, I don’t want to be vice president. I can help you more as a senior senator. I can really help you. He said, do me a favor. Go home and talk it over here with your family and get back to me in maximum 48 hours. I said okay, all right, but I don’t want to be vice president. Next thing, I’m on the phone, between Baltimore and Wilmington. I call and I say, let’s have a family meeting. I get home, and my wife, my three children, Ted Kaufman—he’s the only non-Biden—and my mother, they all started off, and they all thought I should be vice president. Jill said, Joe, you should be vice president. If you don’t do that, they’re going to ask you to be the secretary of state, you’ll be away all the time. I’ll never forget that. We go through the whole thing. My mother was living with us. My dad had just passed away.
She was sitting against the railing on the front porch. And I said, Mom, you haven’t said anything.
She said, let me get this straight. The first Black man that has a chance to be president says he needs you to get elected, and you told him, No? I said, Son of a bitch. That’s exactly what happened.
