Double Down: Game Change 2012 (12 page)

The signal that the White House was considering widening the exemption touched off a tizzy. With Obama having left on a trip to Asia, congressional Democrats burned up the phone lines on conference calls with Rouse and Jarrett, telling them it was crazy for a pro-choice president to be wavering this way. In a tense meeting with Daley, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards threatened that the group would run ads against Obama if he abandoned Sebelius’s original plan.

When the president returned from abroad just before Thanksgiving, he found the issue front and center, and temperatures running hot. The women’s caucus, led by Jarrett, accused Biden and Daley of sandbagging Obama with the Dolan meeting, and argued that women’s health should be the only priority regarding the exemption. Daley, Biden, and Biden’s staff pushed
back hard. We’ll lose Ohio, Pennsylvania, the Catholic vote, and the election, they blustered. Axelrod, Messina, and Plouffe thought that the old-timers were out of their minds. Biden and Daley had no data to back up the scare talk—just instinct, pure gut. And in their obsession with the Catholic vote, they were ignoring the constituency that really mattered to Obama’s prospects: unmarried women, of whom the vast majority, including Catholics, favored the idea of contraceptives being included in health care plans.

Obama was comprehensively pissed off about being put in a no-win position. If he broadened the exemption now, the women’s groups would accuse him of caving to the bishops, providing fresh fuel for the weakness meme. If he stuck with the narrow exemption, Catholic leaders would believe, with justification, that he misled Dolan—and there were few things the president liked less than having his veracity challenged. Obama pressed his people to find a middle path, something like the rule in effect in Hawaii, where the cost of contraceptives was shifted to insurance companies. But Sebelius and HHS maintained that the federal government didn’t have the authority to impose an Aloha State–style compromise.

Biden didn’t like where this was headed. Daley, who insisted he’d had nothing to do with the Dolan meeting, liked it even less. The long knives were out for the chief of staff, and he knew it.

In almost every way, Daley’s tenure had been a bust. When he took the job, Obama had informed him that his hiring and firing authority would be limited. (“Oh, you’re fucked,” Panetta assured Daley.) One of Daley’s main roles was supposed to have been that of economic spokesman on the Sunday shows. But after he did a couple, Plouffe and Pfeiffer halted his bookings. (He tested poorly with their focus groups.) When Daley reduced the size of meetings with Obama and limited their access, the staff circumvented his roadblocks. Behind his back, they derided him as an officious dinosaur, mocking him for wanting to be called “chief.” In late October, his frustrations swelling, Daley gave a cringe-inducing interview to Politico, in which he referred to Obama’s time in office as “ungodly” and said that the president couldn’t fathom why his approval ratings were as high as 44 percent. Not long after that, he was effectively demoted, with Rouse taking over day-to-day management of the White House and Daley left to handle . . . what?

We need to be more streamlined, Obama explained. You’ll be the chairman and Pete will be the chief operating officer.

Fine,
Daley thought.
You’re the boss. Do what you want
.

From the day that Daley took the chief of staff job, one fear ran through his mind:
What if the wedding cake is already baked, and I’m just the little plastic groom being put on top?
Now, nearly a year later, there was no avoiding the fact that he was knee-deep in icing.

Biden had warned Daley from the outset about the ferocious insularity of Obamaworld. He felt sorry for his pal Bill. “You’re either on the way up or you’re on the way down” was a favorite Biden adage, and Daley was clearly not ascendant. But the truth was, the VP had his own status anxieties in the autumn of 2011—not least that he too was little more than an ornament on a fancy piece of pastry.

•   •   •

O
NE WEEKDAY THAT NOVEMBER,
Biden summoned his inner circle to his Washington residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory, on Massachusetts Avenue. The Biden Strategy Group, as it was dubbed by one of its members, consisted of a handful of outside advisers who’d been with Joe forever, a few folks from his vice-presidential staff, his sons, Beau and Hunter, and his sister, Valerie. The group had convened sporadically over the past three years, neither exactly in secret nor entirely in the open. But never before had they gathered to discuss what was on today’s agenda: the campaign that lay ahead—and the one that might come after that.

There were coffee and rolls on the dining room table and a lot on Biden’s mind. The stories in the press about the possibility of his being replaced on the ticket by Hillary Clinton were heating up again, making Joe slightly mental. But what was eating at him even more was the way he was being neglected by the Obamans. The new year was just around the corner, and no one had bothered to lay out his campaign role and responsibilities. Biden was raring to hit the hustings, rile up the base, hassle the Republicans. He knew that the president would be the star of the reelect, but he wanted it to be a joint production: Obama-Biden 2012. The way things were shaping up, however, Biden worried that it was going to be a solo act: The Barack Obama Show.

That was how it had been four years earlier, as Biden well remembered. By historical standards, he had been selected as Obama’s running mate very late, at the end of August. With his working-class appeal, foreign policy credentials, and thirty-six years in the Senate, Biden was a smart pick for Obama. But the truth was that the Davids would have preferred their boss not to have an understudy at all. On a glide path to history, they quailed at having to introduce an unpredictable variable. For the next two months, Biden and Obama rarely stumped together and barely spoke by phone, with the former shut out of Chicago’s nightly conference calls with the latter. Apart from his debate with Sarah Palin, Biden’s part in the 2008 fall campaign was less that of a supporting actor than of a lowly extra.

All this had an effect on Biden as he stepped into the vice presidency. Unlike Gore, who had joined the 1992 Democratic ticket when Clinton was in third place and spent much of the summer bus-touring and bonding with his new buddy, Biden felt little political complicity in Obama’s victory or human connection between them. He had nurtured plenty of doubts about accepting the number-two slot, and they had not abated by Inauguration Day. “This is what I should be doing,” he told his chief of staff, Ron Klain. “But I’m not sure I’m going to be as happy as vice president as I was in the Senate.”

Things were rocky between him and Obama right out of the chute. During the campaign, the nominee had been frustrated by his running mate’s routine gaffes. (“How many times is Biden going to say something stupid,” Obama growled.) The day after the inauguration, when Biden ribbed Chief Justice John Roberts for botching the oath of office, Obama threw a sharp STFU look at the VP. At a House Democratic Caucus retreat that February, Biden remarked about the implementation of the stimulus, “If we do everything right . . . there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re gonna get it wrong.” Asked about the comment later by a reporter, Obama replied snidely, “I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to. Not surprisingly.”

The crack upset Biden more than he let on. Joe was perfectly aware of the widespread caricature of him as a clownish gasbag. He understood that the image was largely self-inflicted but hated it all the same, and he was intensely concerned that being vice president would only exacerbate the problem. Biden even had a name for the trap that he was determined to avoid:
the Uncle Joe Syndrome, which would leave him looking not only buffoonish but irrelevant.

Days later, at one of the first of what would be their weekly private lunches, Biden dove right in and raised the issue with his boss. Mr. President, I’ve got your back and you gotta have my back, he said. I’m in this with you. And it doesn’t do you any good for the world to be laughing at me. I can get a lot of work done for you. But people have to know that you have confidence in me.

Obama apologized, told Biden that what he’d said had come out wrong, that there would be no mistaking his degree of faith in Joe—considering the heaping pile of responsibilities he was about to put on the vice-presidential plate.

The substantive portfolio mattered a great deal to Biden; it was another way of warding off Uncle Joe. In signing on with Obama, Biden had insisted on an agreement that he would be the last person with the president’s ear on every major policy decision. Not only did Obama honor that, but he offered Biden carte blanche to attend any Oval Office meeting and assigned him two crucial pieces of business in that first year: the stimulus and the drawdown of American forces in Iraq.

Obama valued Biden’s advice, especially on foreign policy, and his deal-making savvy on the Hill. And Biden was blown away by Obama’s brainpower and backbone. Before they took office, Biden had considered himself more qualified to be president than Obama. Soon he no longer did. After one economic conference call led by the president, a flabbergasted Biden told an aide, “The kind of decisions he made, the way he absorbed this stuff—I couldn’t have done that.”

Biden wasn’t surprised about the mutual professional esteem. What he hadn’t anticipated was the personal chemistry that flowered between them. Biden liked to tell the story of how, on election night, after he and Obama climbed down from the stage in Grant Park, they had shared a moment with Biden’s ninety-one-year-old mother, Jean. Taking Obama’s hand, Jean cooed, “Honey, come here, it’s going to be okay,” and then grabbed her son’s and offered him reassurance, too: “Joey, he’s going to be your friend.” Biden smiled—
Love you, Mom—
but wasn’t remotely sure she was right.
Stylistically and temperamentally, after all, he and Obama were chalk and Camembert.

It was the family thing that made the flavors rhyme. Family meant the world to Joe, and also to Barack. Their wives hit it off, with Jill Biden teaming up with Michelle on her military-families work. Sasha Obama went to school at Sidwell Friends with Biden’s granddaughter Maisy, where they both played basketball—and the president delighted in coaching them and hanging out with his VP at their games. And then there was Beau’s stroke, which drew Biden and Obama closer than before.

When Biden learned that his eldest son, the forty-one-year-old attorney general of Delaware, had been rushed to the hospital in the spring of 2010, he was panicked and disconsolate. Since the death of his first wife and infant daughter in a 1972 car crash, Biden had maintained a close bond with his two sons, who survived the accident, and always lived in fear of the next mortal phone call. The stroke was publicly described as minor, but in fact was life-threatening. There were initial questions about how full his recovery would be. (He suffered partial paralysis for months.) When the shaken vice president returned to the White House once Beau was out of the woods, Obama came sprinting down the hall to embrace him. Biden would tell this story to anyone who would listen, always stressing the same takeaway: “People say this guy Obama is lacking in emotion—don’t buy it.”

The truth was, Biden discerned a lot of Beau in Obama.
They’re cool, they’re cerebral, they keep their passions in check—they’re the modern politician,
he thought. And while Biden père was none of those things, he did see one similarity between himself and the president:
He doesn’t pretend to be what he’s not, and I don’t pretend to be what I’m not.

Obama prized Biden’s lack of phoniness, for sure. But he was even more impressed by Biden’s loyalty—the fact that, as promised, he always had Obama’s back. During the lame-duck session, when Joe was on the Hill selling the tax-cut deal to a roomful of House Democrats, New York congressman Anthony Weiner took a shot at Obama. The VP upbraided him so forcefully and profanely that he earned a standing ovation. A few months later, Biden did something similar in the White House to Netanyahu. The stories always got back to Obama, who relished them.

Not that Obama ever stopped cringing at Biden’s persistent indiscipline or sporadic outright blunders. But he came to accept them as part and parcel of Joe being Joe. When Biden would rabbit on for too long in a meeting, Obama no longer got agitated the way he used to—and instead would just reach over and put his hand on Biden’s shoulder. Obama even found himself adopting some of Joe’s (countless) folksy aphorisms. During the debt-ceiling brouhaha, Obama said that his guiding principle was a Biden mantra: “Don’t die on a small cross.”

Obama was as gobsmacked as Biden was at the way their comradeship had blossomed. At one of their weekly lunches in 2011, Obama announced, “You know, I’m surprised—we’ve become friends.”

To which Biden cheekily replied: “
You’re
fucking surprised?!”

•   •   •

A
ND YET FOR ALL
the personal peachiness between them, Biden’s insecurities about 2012 continued to fester. In Joe’s mind, it shouldn’t have been so. For him, the personal and the political were inextricably entwined—but for Obama they were at once separable and separate. And in the political arena, the president was guided by the members of his brain trust, who liked Biden fine but still viewed him as a sideshow.

For the first two years, the situation was manageable. Axelrod and Emanuel had soft spots for Biden. Klain, who had solid West Wing relationships, served as an easement for Biden into Obamaworld and an emollient when his feelings were bruised. But even then, Biden often felt ignored when it came to the White House’s political strategy and tactics.

Biden fancied himself a natural politician, on the order of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, with a fingertip feel for voters and what swayed them. In the run-up to the midterms, Biden argued that it was foolish to try to frame the election as anything but what it plainly was: a referendum on the administration’s performance. What was needed, therefore, was a full-throated defense of Obama’s record—of the stimulus, the Detroit bailout, and even health care.