The Highest Calling, page 51
DR: Who are his advisors? At the beginning, it was Ron Klain, who had been his chief of staff when he was vice president, with him for over 20 years. He left at the end of two years. Who replaced him?
FF: Jeff Zients.
DR: Who are the other senior people in the White House now, the most influential people?
FF: There are several other people who had been Biden’s chief of staff during the vice presidency. There’s Steve Ricchetti, who had worked with Clinton before then, who has this legislative responsibility. Bruce Reed had also worked in the Clinton White House, and had been Biden’s chief of staff. There’s Anita Dunn, his communications guru. Then there’s a guy named Mike Donilon, who’s worked with him since the 1980s. He’s kind of Biden’s alter ego, writes his big speeches.
DR: Two other people are very influential—two women. One of them is his wife. How influential is she on political matters?
FF: My sense is that she’s extremely influential. Everybody will assert her influence, but then struggles to come up with examples. I think that’s because she wields her power in the quiet of a family dinner or the bedroom. She’s not vocal about asserting herself in public.
DR: What about his sister? She managed all of his campaigns until the most recent presidential campaign. Is she still influential?
FF: She’ll play a role, especially in the construction of big speeches. But she’s not a day-to-day policy advisor.
DR: You write about the first two years, but we’re now past that. Is he enjoying the job?
FF: I think so. That’s a complicated question to pose to anybody, let alone somebody who has the vast portfolio that he does. I think one of the things that he dislikes about his job is that he feels some sense of responsibility for the way in which his son Hunter has had his reputation tarnished, his career opened up by Republicans.
DR: Biden is the oldest person ever elected president of the United States. He was elected when he was 78. He has served as president at the age of 82. Do you have any insights about why at that age he would say, “Yes, I want to do this for four more years”?
FF: He comes from this other generation, and a lot of his techniques and theories of politics are antiquated by the standards of today. That’s the thing that makes him interesting, and to an extent it makes him successful. The flip side of the age conversations we’re having now is that there’s wisdom that comes in.
But we need to disaggregate the age question into two separate questions. The first is a question of governance. Does he have the mental acuity to do the job now? The fact that in a press conference he confuses Egypt and Mexico, that’s not shaping American policy in any sort of meaningful sort of way. When it comes to the way in which he governs, there are a lot of people who are very motivated to walk out of the Oval Office and say, “He’s out to lunch.” But you never heard Kevin McCarthy or Benjamin Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin saying, “This guy isn’t up to the task.”
There’s a separate question of the energy and the stamina and the oratorical skills that are required to be a commanding political figure. That’s the place where I see age taking the greatest toll on him. He doesn’t have the ability to barnstorm across the country giving speeches. These big set speeches take a lot of concentration and effort for him, in part because of age, in part because of the stammer. In the last two years that has become a really big deal, because American voters say it’s a really big deal.
DR: There’s a great tradition of White House leaking. But in this administration, unlike the Trump administration, you don’t see much leaking. Why?
FF: Because you have a group of people who’ve worked with him for so long, and they understand the way that he processes information. They don’t react to anything that he says in a meeting with him because they’ve heard it all before from him. They know how he thinks. He needs to think aloud, and they’re not going to punish him for that. He’s a father figure to them in many respects. They feel this intense loyalty to the man.
DR: Today there are very few fresh faces working for him. Is that fair to say?
FF: Yes. Even the fresh faces, somebody like Jake Sullivan, his national security advisor, actually worked with him in the Obama White House. Brian Deese, the economic advisor who played a significant role in the first two years, was somebody Biden also knew from the Obama White House.
DR: Let’s talk about his environmental policy. He appointed John Kerry to serve as a special ambassador for climate change. How has that effort worked, and why did he pick Kerry for that job?
FF: He and Kerry have the senatorial bond. They’re also both liberal Catholics who have taken a lot of heat from their church because of their positions on abortion. And there was this real camaraderie. Kerry is one of the people Biden can go to as an outside advisor on many things. His job was to revive American climate diplomacy, which has been modestly successful. But the biggest reason that there’s any hope for it is because we passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which for the first time takes significant steps to reduce our reliance on carbon.
DR: What would you say is Biden’s major accomplishment during his first term as president?
FF: That he’s presided over America’s entry into a new age of political economy. It’s not disconnected from the Trump administration. You had an orthodoxy that prevailed for 30 or 40 years, you could argue going back to Jimmy Carter, who began the process of deregulation, through the Reagan Revolution, through the Clinton and Obama administrations, which in different ways ratified the Reagan approach to the political economy.
Then Trump and Biden start to go in a different direction, with the tariffs on China, a more aggressive position on monopoly. Biden helps to revive trade unions. And then, primarily, there’s this changing role for the American government in the management of the market. The government has become an investment banker that’s made big bets on the economic future of the country through the CHIPS Act, through the Inflation Reduction Act, through the infrastructure bill. The state is shifting the trajectory of the economy in a way that I think will define economics for the next generation.
DR: What does President Biden like to do most?
FF: He enjoys negotiation. Joe Biden’s strength is his empathy. It’s something he tries to apply to senators and to foreign leaders. He really loves the process of sitting down beforehand and saying, “Okay, what is this person’s self-interest? How am I going to be able to get them to yes?” Then he loves being able to talk about how he got that person to yes, after the fact, with his advisors.
DR: If President Trump decided not to run for election again, do you think Joe Biden would still run for reelection?
FF: It would complicate his decision. In a way, Trump’s running made it easier for Biden to tell himself this story that he was the person who stopped Trump the last time, and a bet on any other Democratic politician was going to be risky. It wasn’t worth it, given the stakes of this election.
DR: Sometimes he curses privately. Does he have a big temper? Or is he always even-keeled?
FF: He likes to talk about his Irish temper. The thing about Joe Biden is that the moments of grace with him are more intense than with your normal politician. When he’s able to look into your eyes, or to call you when you’ve lost a parent, those are intense moments.
Then he has these flashes of anger. Some of them occur when he feels like people are talking down to him. If an aide comes in and starts talking to him as if he’s a junior member of the House of Representatives, he’ll get his back up.
DR: In your book, you never actually quote an interview you’ve had with Joe Biden. Is that because you can’t talk about whether you got an interview with him or because you didn’t get an interview with him?
FF: Joe Biden is not a fan in general of books about the presidency. He didn’t cooperate with Bob Woodward. But I was able to talk to him off the record on two occasions with groups of other journalists. Which for me was helpful, because you hear all the stories about the guy. The difference between the public Joe Biden and the private Joe Biden, the Joe Biden that people describe to you and the Joe Biden that actually exists, is very narrow. He kind of is “what you see is what you get.”
DR: What do you think most people don’t know about Joe Biden?
FF: In the context of this debate about his age, you hear people talk about Joe Biden as if he’s this guy who can’t find his way around the White House and needs aides to steer him this way or that. But the Joe Biden who I saw, especially in those first two years, is somebody who is deeply engaged in the weeds of policy. Almost too engaged. Obama hated to prepare for a press conference or an interview. Joe Biden, who’s been described as the gaffe machine, certainly feels like he has this need to prepare, and he tends to overprepare. The insecurity that grew out of the Neil Kinnock speech and all the stuff that we described earlier is very real, and it’s still with him.
It’s almost a conspiracy theory that people have where they assume somebody else is running this presidency. But so far as I can tell, from what I have reported and what I’ve heard from everybody who’s deeply involved, it’s unmistakably Joe Biden’s presidency.
DR: Sometimes people say you have to wait 40 years after a president’s term to know if he did a good job. But let’s suppose 10 years from today, if Biden just has the one term, what do you think historians would say he did that was really impressive?
FF: The problem with writing history is that the endpoint for your narrative dictates everything that comes before. For Joe Biden, his legacy suddenly hinges on one event, which is the result of the 2024 elections. Everything that he’s done to this point becomes irrelevant if he loses to Donald Trump.
CONCLUSION
The United States has been fortunate to have had a number of extraordinary individuals serve the country in its “Highest Calling.” After World War II and through the end of the twentieth century, we became the undisputed economic, financial, military, geopolitical, technological, and cultural global force, and that is likely to continue to a large extent well into the twenty-first century. Of course, the many strengths of the U.S. during this period cannot be attributed solely to the quality and effectiveness of a number of those who served their country as president of the U.S., but surely a number of them had a real impact in strengthening the country.
Stated differently, the country (and in my view the world) is surely better off when strong, competent, honest individuals attain the presidency and work their will on behalf of the American people.
How, though, do we get these kinds of people to want to serve, want to sacrifice a bit of their financial and physical well-being, their privacy, their reputations, and potentially their lives for the good of the country? How do we attract the country’s most talented individuals, with some of the requisite political skills needed to get and do the job? In attracting top-tier talent, political parties should try to encourage individuals with broad experience in business, philanthropy, education, or nonelective government positions to consider becoming presidential candidates. Unfortunately, in attracting these individuals, the political parties are limited to native-born Americans, which is a requirement of the Constitution. While constitutional amendments are time-consuming and hard to achieve—as noted below—an amendment in this area would be a welcome change.
There are, to be sure, several proposed changes to the current campaign and election process that would help encourage more people to run, though these changes would no doubt be difficult to achieve. First perhaps is changing the way we elect presidents. The Electoral College, the result of a secret deliberation during the Constitutional Convention, was designed to ensure that reasonably informed citizens—the electors—selected the president rather than the presumably less-informed and less-educated masses (which, then, included only white Christian property-owning men, for only they could vote). In virtually every other election in the United States, the majority popular vote prevails. That is, presumably, the essence of a representative democracy. Unfortunately, the Electoral College runs counter to that notion. In five elections, the candidate with the second-most popular votes had the most Electoral College votes and became president. (These were John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald J. Trump in 2016.)
The Electoral College is part of the Constitution, and an amendment to abolish it would require two-thirds approval by the Senate and the House and a ratification by three-quarters of the states. That is unlikely to occur. The smaller-population states have more influence in the Electoral College system than they would under a direct election system, and it is inconceivable that enough of the smaller states would approve of any change to the Electoral College. Indeed, more than seven hundred bills to change or abolish the Electoral College have been introduced in Congress since its inception in 1788, and none have won the approval of the Senate or the House.
However, a modified change to the Electoral College system has gained some momentum recently. Under the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, each state agrees to have its electors vote for the popular-vote winner in the country. Sixteen states (and Washington, D.C.) with 205 Electoral College votes have approved such a plan, which would go into effect when states with 270 Electoral College votes approve of the plan. But the states that have approved this tend to be “blue” (Democratic) states, and the prospect of “red” (Republican) states joining it seems highly remote.
Another major obstacle to attracting the country’s most talented individuals for presidential elections is the enormous, unrelenting time it takes to campaign. Through the early days of the twentieth century, presidential candidates did not personally campaign for the position. In recent decades, though, personal and constant campaigning has become a necessity. It has expanded from about a year before the general election to two years. President Trump announced his campaign for 2024 in November of 2022. No other country in the world has campaigns of this duration, and it is hard to believe that such long campaigns are an inducement to talented individuals to want to run and spend two years or so on the road campaigning, much less having to also raise the funds to do so. And the money now needed to run is staggering.
Today, no real limits exist on what an individual or corporation can give to a campaign. Prior to the campaign finance legislation reforms of 1971 (and the additional post-Watergate reforms of 1974), there were no federal limits on what could be given to a presidential general election campaign. With those reforms, a $1,000-per-person limit was established for individual donations. But in 1976 the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo effectively overturned that limit. And in 2010, in the Citizens United case, the court allowed corporations to make contributions as well, which previously had been more or less prohibited, and also eliminated limits on “independent” campaign contributions. As a result, it is tempting for campaigns to seek large million-dollar-plus contributions, and they typically come from those who want something from the federal government—access, favorable legislation, contracts, appointments, and more. While that is hardly a new phenomenon in politics, or in presidential elections, today the sums involved are so large as to make the appearance of favoritism for large donors unavoidable, resulting inevitably in perceptions of less than a desired “clean” or wholly honest government. In 2020, the various entities supporting President Trump and then former vice president Biden spent more than $5 billion on the campaign. And few, if any, individuals who would like to run for president really want to spend time asking friends and strangers for the money currently needed to run.
In short, the biggest problems with the current presidential election system—in having a truly “democratic” election and in attracting talented individuals to run for president—are the method of voting, the length of the campaign, and the unlimited amount of money which can be given and which is spent. Unfortunately, as noted, none of these problems can really be changed without constitutional amendments, and in these areas, those amendments are all but impossible. Thus in the near term the meaningful changes that can be made to the way we elect presidents or pay for their campaigns will not occur.
But there are some lesser changes, which do not require constitutional amendments, that around the margin might be a way to improve some aspects of the presidency.
Disclosure. Presidential candidates (or presidents) are not required to make meaningful financial or health disclosures. The public would be served better, in my view, if presidential candidates were required to make public their income tax returns. Today no such requirement exists, though many candidates in recent years, and many presidents, have voluntarily made such disclosures. The Federal Election Commission does require candidates to file financial disclosure forms, but these forms are far short of what might be disclosed in an income tax filing.
Presidential candidates, or presidents, also do not need to disclose their health—physical or mental—and the disclosures that are routinely supplied by candidates do not contain any independent assessments, presumably due to the desire to protect the privacy of a candidate. But it seems reasonable that a certain level of privacy about the state of their health should be waived by someone seeking the highest office in the land, and some independent assessment would thus seem desirable. That seems particularly true for an incumbent president, although they routinely use government doctors to assess their health, and that assessment is likely to be slightly more balanced than a candidate’s personal doctor’s assessment. Of course, government doctors do seem, in time, to bond with their presidential patients, and rarely provide any information not favorable to their president.
