Joe Biden is delivering breakthroughs that long eluded Barack Obama. Who understands the presidency best? gdebenedetti reports
has kept a vanishingly small circle of trust in his post-presidency, and for much of this summer, any visitors who got a moment with him and dared to ask about Joe Biden’s tanking administration tended to get no substantive answer.
If Biden’s abrupt turnaround can be attributed to a style of governance that is still emerging, that style is decidedly un-Obaman. The crown-jewel victory — the Inflation Reduction Act, containing the climate provisions — was painstakingly lashed together in secret by a crew of senators, including longtime denizens of Biden’s old stomping ground.
Both Obama and Biden recognized the precariousness of the moment, but where the younger man saw opportunity for dramatic change that might yet shift the cynical culture of Washington and, more important, help Americans, the other feared his boss was missing a dire political reality. Biden came around once he saw that Obama wouldn’t be dissuaded.
Obama rarely drank in office, and Biden didn’t drink at all, but after the bill passed, the president gathered his VP and a small group of senior aides to celebrate over martinis in late March 2010. Obama was exhausted, and his outlook on the condition of Washington was calcifying, but that night his confidence was radiating and his glee was evident. Biden was downright impressed it had actually worked.
McConnell had a comically similar story about Biden. But he at least could stand Biden, whereas he plainly disdained Obama, describing his negotiation sessions with the president as visits to the principal where he’d get a condescending lecture about how wrong he was before he could say a word. The dislike went both ways. Obama understood, correctly, that McConnell would never negotiate in good faith. There was little Obama hated more than the common D.C.
Later that year, he listened, aghast, as Biden spoke up at an Oval Office negotiation that was intended to avert a government shutdown being forced by Senator Ted Cruz. “We don’t want you to lose; we want you to win,” the vice-president said to McConnell. He’d meant he wanted it all to be resolved in a way that was acceptable to the part of the GOP he could still deal with, but Reid called Obama after the session for some blunt talk.
He excitedly viewed the American Rescue Plan Act — his nearly $2 trillion COVID-targeted relief bill — as an opportunity to test the proposition. Biden welcomed the obvious comparisons to Obama’s stimulus, and he made sure the legislation was packed with purposely easy-to-understand and popular provisions designed to make an immediate impact.
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