Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
President Biden, in contrast to his predecessor, has deliberately stayed out of the way, wanting to bring government-as-sideshow to an end.
This article appears in the October 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future
By Franklin Foer
Penguin
“I’ve never done anything like this, where everything you write gets mined and turned into clickbait,” Frank Foer told me about his new book The Last Politician, a detailed study of the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency. “Fox News and the New York Post pull something out and act like it’s a critique of Biden. And their audience buys the book and writes Amazon reviews that trash it, saying it’s a puff piece.”
I wouldn’t call The Last Politician puff piece or critique. It’s an attempt to understand a White House that has conducted much of its business outside the spotlight, perhaps to its detriment. It’s a chronicle of a presidency at a time of transformation, while it drives some of that transformation itself. It offers the opposite of lazy narratives about an old president, disconnected from events shaping the nation. But it also shows how the White House reinforces that narrative through its theory of politics.
The dichotomy between the book, released September 5, and a new Wall Street Journal poll, released September 4, can create whiplash. “By an 11-point margin, more voters see Trump rather than Biden as having a record of accomplishments as president—some 40% said Biden has such a record, while 51% said so of Trump,” the Journal writes. Yet Foer recounts a lot of, well, accomplishments.
There’s the American Rescue Plan, which fueled a rapid economic recovery and achieved full employment only a year later; the decision to defy the military establishment and withdraw from Afghanistan; the spate of industrial-policy bills that signal hope for the planet; restoration of domestic manufacturing in critical sectors; a new role for American government (“a state that will function as an investment bank”); and the construction of a large diplomatic and military alliance backing Ukraine in its war with Russia.
But more than bullet points, Foer weaves in an undercurrent of transition: the burying of a market-dependent, globalization-adoring, diffident liberalism in favor of Bidenomics, with its interventionist public sector that stands with workers and the middle class, and fights concentrations of power that have pooled for the past 40 years. As I have written, this has been a somewhat uneven transition, because administrations contain multitudes. There’s practically no mention in the book of the struggles to rein in corporate agriculture, or wield the administration’s tools on drug and hospital prices, or manage the freight rail strike, or tackle immigration, one of the areas with the most continuity with the policies of the past.
But there is a trajectory to pick through. Foer unearths how Biden asked an aide to compile an oral history of the Obama stimulus to learn how to avoid its inadequacies. He spends time on the revival of antitrust and the reinvention of a foreign trade agenda that actually accounts for how it impacts the average American. And he writes with clarity, for example, about the nearly forgotten, monumental logistical task of mass public vaccination, from a standing start because the Trump administration had no plan.
Foer weaves in an undercurrent of transition: the burying of a market-dependent, globalization-adoring, diffident liberalism in favor of Bidenomics.
“The fact that you were within six months able to walk into a pharmacy and get a lifesaving shot is incredible,” Foer said, adding that it was a demonstration project of sorts for how government interventions can outperform private enterprises in critical areas. “It’s interesting to connect it to industrial policy writ large. They managed a complicated supply chain and were able to acquire a God’s-eye view to eliminate bottlenecks and allow for limited resources to be allocated.”
Yet attention to the vaccine rollout was quickly bulldozed in the 24-hour news cycle, as was the shipping of hundreds of millions of COVID tests through the mail, or the freeing up of the supply chain backlog at the ports. There was always some other flaring crisis, hyped by partisan media and giving the impression of an administration chasing from behind. Biden’s “theory of the case [is] that democracy will succeed only if it delivers for its citizens,” Foer writes. So why do so few think he has delivered?
PART OF THE ANSWER IS THAT THE PROBLEMS are as present as the solutions. Inflation scarred the country in ways that continue to be felt. Also, a lot of Biden’s accomplishments don’t pay off until the future; factories under construction don’t yet create permanent jobs on assembly lines, mass student debt relief has been just out of reach, and drug price negotiations won’t show up in seniors’ wallets until 2026. Some were even taken away, like the pandemic-era welfare state expansions that have all been wound down.
A telling moment in the book finds Brian Deese looking at a chart showing improvements to economic stability—higher employment, greater enrollment in health insurance, fewer bankruptcies, increased household net worth—and knowing he couldn’t use that as a platform, because given inflation it would look completely out of touch. Now that inflation has moderated, the White House is rolling out these numbers, and compared to the demands from the austerity crowd, they have the better argument.
But this risk of sounding tone-deaf, while real, also keeps the administration in a kind of shell. While White House officials exhibit a lot of self-pity for not getting credit for tangible successes, they also might be responsible for some of that.
Trump was a performative president, with that performance standing in for and even becoming his record. Biden, by contrast, has deliberately stayed out of the way, wanting to bring government-as-sideshow to an end. Shunning the spotlight, however, means losing touch with one’s audience. It reinforces an enfeebling image that Foer says does not accurately capture the politician or the man.
“I’ve been invited to go into off-the-record sessions with Biden,” Foer told me. “If the public could see him talk they would think about him so differently. He has a mastery of policy. And yes, his stories are stale. But when he talks big-picture about strategy or getting things done, there’s a unique political intelligence on display.”
Foer attempts to pierce this veil by dramatizing principals briefings, not all of which make Biden look good (Foer gets at Biden’s infamous procrastination in decision-making, in particular with regard to how to respond to the Dobbs decision). But the depiction of him directing these meetings is so far from the public caricature that it almost called to mind the old Saturday Night Live sketch about Ronald Reagan as a secret mastermind. It’s incongruous because of the black hole of public evidence that would suggest this vibrancy.
While White House officials exhibit a lot of self-pity for not getting credit for tangible successes, they also might be responsible for some of that.
Anytime the White House has “let Biden be Biden,” as it were, putting him up for press conferences or speeches, there’s always one stray comment that has to be walked back and becomes the headline. This isn’t a function of age but of Biden’s historic loquaciousness, his penchant for gaffes that express what would be better left unsaid. Saying that Putin “cannot remain in power” at a speech in Poland sounded too much like a policy of regime change; removing strategic ambiguity on U.S. military support for Taiwan risked an international incident.
Biden is clearly rankled about being managed so tightly. Foer writes that after the Putin incident, the president fumed to friends about whether John Kennedy was ever “babied” that way. But it’s possible, even probable, that the tight management is hurting more than it’s helping. Maybe a stray bad headline is the price of presence in a 24-hour news cycle. Lord knows Trump had his share of those. Maybe the administration’s constant handling of Biden is reinforcing the image they want to combat.
IT’S ALSO TRUE THAT SOMETIMES AN ABSENTEE PRESIDENT is the right move. The between-the-lines tragedy of The Last Politician is this: A key theme of the book presents Biden as the inveterate deal-maker, someone who loves the give-and-take of compromise and sees it as a path back to restoring democratic norms. But he spends the last section of the book’s legislative wrangling over what would become the Inflation Reduction Act completely on the sidelines. Immersing himself in the weeds of the legislative scrum made things worse, creating irreconcilable tensions with Joe Manchin. The last politician had to remove himself from politics to get the win he can then tout.
Maybe it’s to his credit that the old senator recognized the baggage of the presidency makes it impossible to play on that field. “There is a nobility to shelving your ego so somebody else can come in and cut the deal,” Foer told me. “Narcissism is not knowing to get out of the way.” But it’s notable that a story about Biden really gets moving when digging into the play-by-play of getting the infrastructure and climate bills over the line, with the president out of the picture.
At times, the book reaches to find some pathos in a presidency dedicated to minimizing drama. An extended section on the Afghanistan withdrawal generally hews to the media-led narrative of an incompetent and chaotic scene marked by tragedy. The data point of 124,000 people airlifted out of the country in an improvised mission arrives as an afterthought. And there isn’t enough room given for what Foer stated bluntly to me was the right decision.
If America reneged on its explicit 2021 deadline for withdrawal, the result would have been yet another indefinite extension of the Afghan war, with more dead American troops and civilian casualties alike. The war, in fact, had already been lost for at least a decade—proved by the ease with which the Taliban overran a ghost army and a venal leadership. (What’s more, those U.S. troops would have been an inviting target for Russian meddling during the Ukraine fight.) This was the one moment where Biden was let out of the West Wing to share his viewpoint, one in complete variance with the foreign-policy and military establishment. It was the right view, which made that establishment furious. And that played into the media’s pouncing on elements of the withdrawal, missing the forest for the trees.
Quietly, Foer lines up a brutal anecdote that reifies the shortcomings of Biden’s predecessors. Afghan helicopters were equipped with high-tech avionic systems that detected enemy fire. But the private contract for the equipment said only the U.S. government could use them. So when the Pentagon withdrew, they ripped the systems out of the choppers, destroying the Afghan army’s only tactical advantage of air cover. It doesn’t explain the entire Afghan army’s abandonment of its mission. But the inanities of a private, for-profit contract did contribute to the army’s inability to defend itself.
“I hadn’t realized how interesting [Biden] was as a foreign-policy thinker,” Foer said. “His contrarianism and his relationship to foreign-policy elites is fascinating.” In my view, that’s not necessarily true of Ukraine, where however valid they are, the old Cold War beliefs of creating a beachhead for democracy predominate. Still, Foer finds something novel here: Biden’s mild detestation of Volodymyr Zelensky, someone too eager to force the West into uncomfortable circumstances. At one point, CIA director Bill Burns had to give Zelensky “relationship-management tips” for dealing with Biden.
It fits, in a way: Biden is the ultimate politician, and Zelensky won office in Ukraine by running against politics. The Biden campaign is now running an ad of the two together, as the narrator talks of “the quiet strength of a true leader.” Maybe a bit too quiet.
