DISCLAIMER: I claim no ownership of any images or writings posted here unless otherwise stated. i.e. [placed in brackets] All images and writings are owned/copyrighted by others. I make no income from their use and I am sharing them for the newsworthiness and/or cultural value they represent as well as for educational purposes. No infringement is intended and any media used is not for commercial purposes. If you are the person responsible for an image or writing that I have posted, please contact me in "comments," showing proper documentation and I will remove it immediately.
Democrats have to be very happy with what they were able to accomplish this week with their convention.
Their production of the first all-virtual convention went off mostly without a hitch. At times, the last night seemed like whiplash with a serious segment on faith and forgiveness followed by snark from emcee Julia Louis-Dreyfus, for example.
But none of that will be remembered. What will be, and perhaps for a very long time, was the speech Joe Biden was able to deliver. Biden gave a lot of thunderous speeches on the floor of the U.S. Senate when he was a senator and he has appeared at conventions before, but no speech he has ever made was as important, and perhaps as well-delivered, as this one.
With that, here are seven takeaways from a consequential week:
1. Biden may have delivered the best speech of his career
It was more fireside chat than convention barn burner, and he has never been an arena orator like the man he worked for, Barack Obama. But, frankly, it worked for Biden.
He delivered a sober and urgent speech directly to the American people with a clarity of message, one of light versus dark. Biden, a devout Irish Catholic, seemingly channeled years of homilies about good versus evil, right versus wrong. If he wins, it will be a speech for the ages.
“Here and now, I give you my word: If you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us, not the worst,” he said. “I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness.”
The Trump campaign might regret setting the bar so low to the point where as long as Biden got through the speech, he would dispel questions of his mental acuity. But he did far more than that. For the first time, perhaps even since he began this campaign, Biden showed why he should be president for reasons other than simply being not Trump.
2. Democrats offered a different choice
Even before Biden’s speech, Democrats were able to lay out a different choice, a different version of what the country could be, for those disaffected by Trump.
Look, Trump’s supporters are locked in. But Democrats took aim at that sliver of truly persuadable voters and tried to win them over. Democrats’ vision for America is one that celebrates diversity, adheres to norms and will change direction.
Change is one of the most powerful motivators in politics, and it particularly sticks when things aren’t going well in the country. Think Ronald Reagan following Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton after George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama after George W. Bush. If Americans are looking for change again, Democrats presented it.
It’s up to Trump and Republicans next week to try to sell steadiness to right the course. That’s something that can work for presidents seeking reelection, though it’s made tougher by Trump’s volatility.
Jill and Joe Biden, wearing face masks, watch fireworks outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., after Biden’s acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination.
3. A unified Democratic Party was on display
One advantage of a virtual convention is the boos aren’t magnified. Past conventions have featured at least some unrest within the base.
That was certainly true in 2016 with Bernie Sanders supporters who did not go gently into that good night. And it was true of Sen. Ted Cruz supporters at the Republican National Convention the same year.
But it wasn’t just the lack of in-person delegates, it was the clear and present threat of Donald Trump for progressives. Sanders spoke strongly on Biden’s behalf; and single-payer advocate Ady Barkan, who has ALS, praised Biden and promoted progress over purity.
Sure, there was some grumbling about who got time, who didn’t and who got more, but this is a far more unified Democratic Party coming out of this convention than the one taking on Trump the last time.
4. It wasn’t all about Trump
For as much as this election is all about Trump and as much as Biden’s supporters are mostly motivated by antipathy for Trump, the convention did buoy Biden personally and made an affirmative case for Biden’s vision for the country.
It became pretty clear, if it wasn’t going in, that a message Democrats wanted to get across was: The Bidens are decent people, people you can trust and who care about people like you.
But as his speech showed, don’t mistake kindness for weakness. It’s almost as if one message was — he’ll fightfor kindness.
5. Kamala Harris is the heir apparent
Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris speaks during the third day of the Democratic National Convention. Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images
If you had any doubt that Harris was the right pick, she proved she’s ready for prime time. She delivered a solid speech and has hit all the right notes since being announced as Biden’s running mate.
Being a Black and South Asian woman, she highlights the diversity of the Democratic Party and of America. Her simply being on the ballot is a statement against Trump. But she has shown, throughout her career and highlighted this week, she is far more than that.
She’s sharp, can deliver a punch and has provided some needed energy to the Biden candidacy. At the end of the day, Biden won the Democratic primary, in part, because he was seen as the most likely to beat Trump. But it’s clear, given that he has said he would be a transitional president that he is a bridge and Harris is on the other side.
Biden has led Trump in almost every issue area consistently and by a lot, except when it comes to the economy. Democrats didn’t seem to do anything to break through with an economic message, beyond saying that the pandemic had to be solved and other boilerplate Democratic points, like securing the social safety net and having the rich pay their “fair share.”
Biden was involved in one segment Thursday dealing with the economy, where he talked with workers. At one point, he said that he believed the auto industry could be revitalized back to its peak in the 1940s and 1950s. But no economist thinks that’s possible.
He also said he wants to invest $2 trillion in infrastructure, something every president says he wants to invest in but has been unable to get the parties to agree on how to pay for it.
It sounded as if Harris was on track to pivoting to a new emphasis on the economy when she was picked to be Biden’s running mate when she talked about Trump spoiling the economy he inherited from Obama. But that was not something much talked about during these four days.
7. It’s about voting, voting, voting
Former first lady Michelle Obama, and her necklace, urged viewers to vote on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention. Chris Delmas /AFP via Getty Images
If there was one message Democrats hope people take away from this week it was that people need to go vote.
While wearing a V-O-T-E necklace, former first lady Michelle Obama implored people get on their “comfortable shoes” and bring their dinners, maybe even breakfasts and wait for as long as it takes.
Her husband, former President Barack Obama, ended his speech with a similar urgency:
“We have to get busy building it up by pouring all our efforts into these 76 days and by voting like never before for Joe and Kamala and candidates up and down the ticket,” he said, “so that we leave no doubt about what this country that we love stands for today and for all our days to come.”
Democrats really feel if everyone votes, and if all their votes are counted, they win.
And now it’s on to the Republican convention starting Monday, where it will be interesting to see whether there are any new ways that Trump frames the argument for why he feels he deserves four more years.
— Several national pollsters conducted surveys on the eve of the convention season in both 2016 and 2020. We compared them to see how the race was different from four years ago.
— Compared to four years ago, the parties are more unified; Biden is leading with independents after Clinton and Trump were tied with them at this point; and more poll respondents support the major party candidates overall.
— In other words, there are fewer undecideds and fewer voters saying they will vote third party.
— Overall, this is probably good for Joe Biden given that he is leading, but Trump still has time to catch up, and unlike Biden, Trump doesn’t really need to win the popular vote to win the election.
2016 vs. 2020 in the national polls
As we enter the final day of the Democratic National Convention, it remains to be seen whether either of these virtual conventions will change the presidential race all that much. Joe Biden, the current polling leader, probably wouldn’t mind maintaining the status quo. Donald Trump, who has been behind, needs the race to change.
Overall, though, the contest has been relatively stable. As Alan Abramowitz pointed out in the Crystal Ball earlier this summer, the national polls have been more stable than they were four years ago. And as we headed into the conventions, it appeared that there were fewer voters up for grabs than four years ago. Given that Biden has been leading – just like Hillary Clinton was – we thought we’d look at some of polls from the pre-convention period and point out some differences between the state of the race last time before the conventions compared to now.
Table 1 shows a comparison between four major national pollsters that 1) Conducted polls before the start of the 2016 and 2020 conventions and 2) Made crosstab information about how both partisans and independents were supporting.
For details on the polls, see the notes and sources under the table. The “other” category in Table 1 combines respondents who were undecided or indicated they were not voting for a major-party candidate.
Table 1: 2016 and 2020 pre-convention polls
Notes: All polls are of registered voters. CNN’s poll was conducted by ORC in 2016 and SSRS in 2020. Marist’s 2016 media partner was McClatchy, and its partners are NPR and PBS NewsHour in 2020. CNN, Marist, and Pew polls used here in both 2016 and 2020 only named the major party candidates. The Monmouth polls in both 2016 and 2020 included the Libertarian and Green Party nominees by name. Columns may not add up to 100% because of rounding.
Sources: CNN 2016 poll of registered voters conducted by ORC, July 13-16; CNN 2020 poll of registered voters conducted by SSRS, Aug. 12-15. Marist 2016 poll of registered voters conducted in partnership with McClatchy, July 5-9; Marist 2020 poll of registered voters conducted in partnership with NPR and PBS NewsHour, Aug. 3-11; Monmouth 2016 poll of registered voters, July 14-16; Monmouth 2020 poll of registered voters, Aug. 6-10; Pew 2016 poll of registered voters, June 15-26; Pew 2020 poll of registered voters, July 27-Aug. 2.
There’s a lot to digest here, but there are three key takeaways that we see:
1. The parties are more unified: Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump saw their command of their parties questioned at their respective nominating conventions. In Cleveland, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was booed off the stage after telling delegates to vote their conscience, a pointed non-endorsement of Trump. In Philadelphia, rambunctious Bernie Sanders backers made it clear that there was bad blood from the primary — and a WikiLeaks dump of internal Democratic National Committee emails days before the convention only fueled their discontent.
Still, the convention drama probably overstated party unity problems on both sides. As the average of the four national polls make clear, both Trump and Clinton were in the high 80s in party support. However, that is surpassed by the 95% support Biden is receiving among Democrats and the 93% support that Trump is receiving among Republicans. Convention polling bounces can sometimes reflect a party coming out more united than they were going in; by that standard, perhaps we shouldn’t expect much of a bounce for either candidate, because the parties are so unified already. Trump may have a little more room to grow if he can claw back a point or two of the self-identified Republicans who currently indicate they back Biden.
2. Biden is doing better with independents than Clinton: Independents in American politics can be a little deceiving, in that while they often make up a third or more of respondents in a national poll, many of them are hidden partisans who just happen to call themselves independents. Winning independents is also not necessarily decisive: Barack Obama was reelected in 2012, for instance, despite losing independents, at least according to the national exit poll. That said, independents can decide elections, and Donald Trump’s four-point advantage with them was one of the ingredients in his narrow victory.
In the 2016 polls, the independent vote was mixed: Clinton led, but only by a small two-point margin in aggregate, and more than a fifth of independents in these polls were not voting for Trump or Clinton. In the 2020 polls, Biden has a clear edge with independents in three of the four polls, and the fourth — CNN — is basically tied (it should be no shock, then, that CNN is also the closest of the four 2020 polls overall, with Biden leading by just four points). Note as well that the number of independents in the “other” category, just 10%, is about half that of 2016. And that leads to the final observation.
3. The major party candidates are attracting more support overall: Heading into the conventions, the electorate just seems more comfortable with their choices this time than in 2016, which is reflected in the smaller number of undecideds, third-party voters, and others that we’ve lumped into the “others” category. Overall, in the four 2020 surveys, just 6% of the voters are in the others category, and that might be even smaller had we not included Monmouth, which listed minor-party candidates as an option for voters (the other three polls did not in either year). Meanwhile, on average 13% of voters in the 2016 surveys were in the other category. Trump’s performance among late-deciding voters and voters who held an unfavorable view of each candidate helped him win the election. In general, there seem to be fewer of these kinds of voters this time.
One thing to watch: Does the number of “others” – essentially undecideds or third-party voters – go up, stay the same, or decrease? If Biden maintains the same lead, but the number of “others” rise, that could hypothetically mean that Trump is shaking lose some of his support and could capture it later. Likewise, if the number of undecideds stays the same or even falls, without a corresponding tightening of the race, Trump has an even smaller pool of non-Biden voters to convert.
Conclusion
If you’ve seen analysts — including us — assert that Biden’s lead going into the conventions was more solid than Clinton’s was four years ago, the data presented above illustrate why. Biden’s lead, at least in these polls, was bigger than Clinton’s, and there are a smaller pool of “others” for the two major party candidates to bring into the fold.
That said, the polls are still not at the point where we consider them strongly predictive of the eventual result, and there are all sorts of confounding factors, including turnout and the trajectory of the public health crisis.
We also know that national polls don’t tell the whole story. In 2016, the decisive state in the Electoral College — Wisconsin, a state we analyze in depth in this week’s Crystal Ball — voted about three points to the right of the nation. Trump doesn’t need to be leading national polls, or the eventual national popular vote, to win. But in all likelihood, he does need to get closer than the polls show right now, and the electorate may not be quite as fluid as it was in 2016. We will get a better sense of this after the dust settles from the conventions.
In California, record heat, rolling blackouts and now wildfires test a state already besieged.
On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California called for an investigation into what he described as a major utility failure that was even more alarming set against the backdrop of the pandemic, when people, many largely confined inside, may be more dependent than ever on electricity: rolling blackouts over the weekend, caused by a record-shattering heat wave.
And a wave of wildfires are also posing particular challenges in the pandemic, Mr. Newsom said, as officials struggle to shelter residents forced to flee, and the state’s firefighting force has been depleted thanks to outbreaks in the state’s prisons.
The power issues and wildfires could also have impact on education. A reporter asked, for instance, about how the state would address the loss of remote learning time, if students lose power. “In extenuating circumstances, we have to be flexible,” he said.
The blackouts came not long after California leaders scrambled to address problems with the state’s virus data reporting system, which clouded case counts and threw into question the list of counties where virus transmission is particularly troubling.
Mr. Newsom said on Monday that the backlog of cases arising from the data glitch had been cleared, and that the state’s seven-day average reflected that.
The state’s positivity rate and other measures, such as hospitalizations, he said, were moving in the right direction.
Death Valley Just Recorded the Hottest Temperature on Earth
In the popular imagination, Death Valley in Southern California is the hottest place on earth. At 3:41 p.m. on Sunday, it lived up to that reputation when the temperature at the aptly named Furnace Creek reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the NOAA Weather Prediction center.
If that reading — the equivalent of 54 degrees Celsius — is verified by climate scientists, a process that could take months, it would be the highest temperature ever reliably recorded on earth.
Death Valley is no stranger to heat. Sitting 282 feet below sea level in the Mojave Desert in southeastern California near the Nevada border, it is the lowest, driest and hottest location in the United States. It is sparsely populated, with just 576 residents, according to the most recent census.
Brandi Stewart, the spokeswoman for Death Valley National Park, said that the valley is so hot because of the configuration of its lower-than-sea-level basin and surrounding mountains. The superheated air gets trapped in a pocket and just circulates. “It’s like stepping into a convection oven every day in July and August,” she said. So how does 130 degrees, which she walked out into on Sunday, feel? “It doesn’t feel that different from 125 degrees,” she said. “The feeling of that heat on my face, it can almost take your breath away.”
She added that “People say, ‘Oh, but it’s a dry heat!’ I want to do a little bit of an eye roll there,” she said. “Humidity has its downsides too, but dry heat is also not fun.”
The heat rises through the afternoon, generally reaching the peak from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. The high on Monday was 127.
The previous record for highest temperature was also observed in Death Valley on June 30, 2013, at 129 degrees. The same temperature was also recorded in Kuwait and Pakistan several years later.
And that is also important to understand: There may be hotter places than Death Valley, such as parts of the Sahara, but they are too remote for reliable monitoring, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
As the greenhouse gases that humans generate continue heating the planet, more records are expected, and not just in Death Valley.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who has come under fire for financial ties to a company that does business with the United States Postal Service, received between $1.2 million and $7 million in income last year from that firm, according to financial disclosure forms reviewed by The New York Times.
But documents filed with the Office of Government Ethics show that Mr. DeJoy also receives millions of dollars in rental payments from XPO through leasing agreements at buildings that he owns. The revelations are likely to fuel further scrutiny of Mr. DeJoy, a major donor to President Trump who has made cost-cutting moves and other changes at the Postal Service that Democrats warn are aimed at undermining the 2020 election.
Mr. DeJoy agreed on Monday to testify next week before the House Oversight Committee, where Democrats are expected to press him on the justification for his policies and question his potential conflicts of interest.
Mr. DeJoy has maintained that he has fully complied with federal ethics rules and that the measures he has implemented are necessary to modernize the Postal Service. “I take my ethical obligations seriously, and I have done what is necessary to ensure that I am and will remain in compliance with those obligations,” Mr. DeJoy said in a statement.
Elsewhere on the postal front:
Two Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee urged the F.B.I. to open a criminal investigation into actions by Mr. DeJoy and the Postal Service’s Board of Governors that may have caused mail delays. “Multiple media investigations show that Postmaster DeJoy and the Board of Governors have retarded the passage of mail,” Representatives Ted W. Lieu of California and Hakeem Jeffries of New York wrote in a letter to the F.B.I. director. “If their intent in doing so was to affect mail-in balloting or was motivated by personal financial reasons, then they likely committed crimes.”
Mail-in voters from six states filed a lawsuit against Mr. Trump and Mr. DeJoy, seeking to block cuts to the Postal Service ahead of the election.
Senator Mitch McConnell, pushed back on Monday on concerns that the Postal Service would not be able to handle as many as 80 million ballots come November, telling reporters in his home state that “the Postal Service is going to be just fine” and that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had already signaled a willingness to spend more on it.
The House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said Sunday that she would call the House back from its annual summer recess almost a month early to vote this week on legislation to block changes at the Postal Service.
Postal slowdowns and warnings of delayed mail-in ballots are causing election officials to rethink vote-by-mail strategies, with some states seeking to bypass the post office with ballot drop boxes, drive-through drop-offs or expanded in-person voting options, despite the coronavirus pandemic.
The 2020 election was supposed to be the largest-ever experiment in voting by mail, but the Trump administration’s late cost-cutting push at the Postal Service has shaken the confidence of voters and Democratic officials alike. The images of sorting machines being removed from postal facilities, mailboxes uprooted or bolted shut on city streets, and packages piling up at mail facilities have sparked anger and deep worry.
Even if, as the Postal Service says, it has plenty of capacity to process mail-in ballots, the fear is that the psychological damage is already done. So as Democrats in Washington fight to restore Postal Service funding, election officials around the country are looking for a Plan B.
The newest front in the battle over voting in 2020 is the drop box, where ballots mailed out to voters can be returned without fear of Postal Service backlogs or coronavirus infection. Once voters deposit their ballots in such boxes, they are collected by election officials and brought to polling places for tabulation.
Election officials in Connecticut, Virginia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere are seeking to expand drop-off locations for absentee and mail-in ballots, but they have met vehement opposition from President Trump and his campaign.
U.S. college campuses grapple with coronavirus fears, outbreaks and protests.
The university, with 30,000 students, was one of the largest in the country to open its campus during the pandemic. Officials said 177 students had been isolated after testing as of Monday, and another 349 students were in quarantine because of possible exposure.
The university said it would help students leave campus housing without financial penalty. It was not immediately clear how the university’s decision would affect its athletic programs, though North Carolina said that student-athletes could remain in their dormitories.
The university’s athletic department said in a statement that it still expected its students would be able to play fall sports, but that it would “continue to evaluate the situation.”
Earlier this month, dozens of students protested plans to reopen by staging a “die-in” on campus. A similar protest erupted on Monday at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, the first day of fall classes. The school had said that majority of courses would have some in-person attendance this fall, but dozens of students and faculty members staged a “die-in” on campus to push for more options for staff and students to teach or learn remotely.
Some of the concerns about reopening college campuses have been directed at students who have gathered at bars or house parties. Video footage appearing to show University of North Georgia students attending a crowded off-campus party garnered online attention over the weekend
N.Y. Gyms and Fitness Studios Can Reopen as Soon as Aug. 24, Cuomo Says.
Health clubs will be limited to a third of their total capacity and must meet state requirements before reopening.
Mr. Cuomo’s announcement came with several caveats: Gyms would be limited to a third of their total capacity, and people would be required to wear masks at all times. The state would also require air filters that help prevent airborne transmission of viral particles and sign-in forms to assist with contact-tracing efforts.
Local governments will also need to inspect gyms to make sure they meet the state’s requirements before they open or within two weeks of their opening.
Local elected officials can stop gyms from holding indoor classes, Mr. Cuomo said. New York City has decided not to initially allow indoor fitness classes or indoor pools to operate when gyms reopen, a spokesman for the mayor said.
Mr. Cuomo’s announcement came with several caveats: Gyms would be limited to a third of their total capacity, and people would be required to wear masks at all times. The state would also require air filters that help prevent airborne transmission of viral particles and sign-in forms to assist with contact-tracing efforts.
Local governments will also need to inspect gyms to make sure they meet the state’s requirements before they open or within two weeks of their opening. Local elected officials can stop gyms from holding indoor classes, Mr. Cuomo said. New York City has decided not to initially allow indoor fitness classes or indoor pools to operate when gyms reopen, a spokesman for the mayor said.
Mr. Cuomo said on Monday that gyms would be allowed to reopen because New York has successfully kept its rate of positive coronavirus test rates hovering around 1 percent since June.
Still, Mr. Cuomo said that he remained worried that reopening gyms might accelerate the virus’s spread. He said his main concern was that local governments would not adequately enforce the state’s restrictions, noting, as he has before, how many cities and towns have not aggressively cracked down on bars and restaurants ignoring social distancing measures.
It was not clear on what day New York City would clear gyms for reopening, or which agency would be responsible for conducting the necessary inspections or enforcing regulations.
Last week, Mr. Cuomo announced that museums and other cultural institutions in New York City, which stayed closed even as their counterparts reopened in the rest of state, would be allowed to reopen on Aug. 24, at 25 percent capacity and with timed ticketing.
Also last week, Mr. Cuomo gave bowling alleys statewide the green light to reopen with strict protocols in place: Every other lane is supposed to be blocked off because of social distancing, and bowling equipment must be properly sanitized.
Democrats opened the most extraordinary presidential nominating convention in recent history on Monday night with a program that spanned the gamut from democratic socialists to Republicans, from the relatives of George Floyd to family members of those killed by the coronavirus, in a two-hour event that was a striking departure from the traditional summer pageant of American democracy.
Capping the evening was an urgent plea from Michelle Obama. Breaking through the stilted online format, Mrs. Obama provided the emotional high point of the night as she confronted the president directly. “Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country,” she said. “He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment.” In her withering assessment, she accused Trump of creating “chaos,” sowing “division” and governing “with a total and utter lack of empathy.”
Mrs. Obama, the former first lady, spoke emphatically into the camera and gave a scathing, point-by-point analysis of Mr. Trump’s presidency in an urgent summons for Democratic voters to cast ballots in any way they could, even if it meant waiting in long lines to do so.
She began by questioning the very legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, pointing out that he had lost the popular tally by “three million votes.”
She went on to attack the president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and said that the strong economy Mr. Trump inherited from her husband four years ago was “in shambles.” She also said Mr. Trump’s divisive approach on race relations had emboldened “torch-bearing white supremacists,” and ripped him for a lack of “leadership or consolation or any semblance of steadiness.”
Mrs. Obama’s speech, which aired in the final hour, has been in the can for at least a week, according to people familiar with the matter. The speech was prerecorded because event planners did not want to risk running it live, in anticipation of opening-night technical glitches.
Mrs. Obama, reaching the end of her 20-minute time slot, cast the race not as merely the most important election of her lifetime, but as a last chance, of sorts, to redeem the nation from the steep moral, political and economic decline precipitated by Mr. Trump.
“So, if you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: If you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election,” Mrs. Obama said. “If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.”
With no arena, and no loudspeaker to introduce the presenters, Democrats turned to an M.C. of sorts, the actress Eva Longoria, who kept the evening moving between prerecorded and live video presentations. A lineup of political luminaries delivered remarks in rapid-fire format and only a few of them — Mrs. Obama, for one, and Mr. Sanders — possessed the sheer star power to linger in the perception of the audience.
Perhaps the most searing critique of Mr. Trump came not from an elected official but from Kristin Urquiza, a young woman whose father, a Trump supporter, died of the coronavirus. Speaking briefly and in raw terms about her loss, Ms. Urquiza said of her father, “His only pre-existing condition was trusting Donald Trump, and for that he paid with his life.”
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Monday portrayed it as an imperative to defeat President Trump, offering a call for unity to progressive voters who supported him during the primary.
“Many of the ideas we fought for that just a few years ago were considered radical are now mainstream,” he said. “But let us be clear. If Donald Trump is re-elected, all the progress we have made will be in jeopardy….At its most basic,” he added, “this election is about preserving our democracy.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York unloaded on President Trump for his response to the coronavirus that savaged his state this spring, accusing the White House of first trying to “ignore” the crisis then fumbling the response by “trying to politicize it.”
New Yorkers, and viewers of cable news, have seen this performance before: His daily news briefings became must-see television, suddenly making Mr. Cuomo one of the most prominent Democrats in the country.
Cuomo, whose initial actions during the pandemic have come under criticism, accused Mr. Trump of “learning absolutely nothing” from the lessons of the outbreak, and said Democrats wear masks “because we are smart.”
“Americans learned a critical lesson, how vulnerable we are when we are divided,” he said. “And how many lives can be lost when our government is incompetent. Donald Trump didn’t create the initial division. The division created Trump. He only made it worse,” he added.
Mr. Clyburn, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, recalled that endorsement in brief remarks from Charleston. Mr. Biden, he declared, “will always be an adopted son of South Carolina.”
“Joe Biden is as good a man as he is a leader,” Mr. Clyburn said. “I have said before and wish to reiterate tonight, we know Joe. But more importantly, Joe knows us.”
The Floyds’ presence underscored the message behind the protests — one of equality and the need to fight systemic racism, something Mr. Biden emphasized during a follow-up discussion with the parents of victims of police violence. The intensity of emotion evoked by the moment of silence, the speeches and the testimonials by parents heightened the sense of urgency in an online event that began in a smooth but somewhat antiseptic fashion.
While discussing police reform in a virtual round table, Biden himself echoed a police chief who said there are more good police than bad ones. “Most cops are good,” Biden said. “But the fact is the bad ones have to be identified and prosecuted and out, period.” While not perhaps a groundbreaking or terribly controversial statement, it was an interesting inclusion, given that it may not be a sentiment some on the left would like to see emphasized at this particular moment.
Despite claims by Mayor Bill de Blasio that “more and more” NYPD officers live in the city they serve, new figures provided by the NYPD show that a majority of uniformed officers actually live outside of New York City. The numbers reflect a shift from four years ago, when a majority of cops lived in the five boroughs.
According to the police department, 51 percent of uniformed officers—which works out to 18,360 cops—currently live outside the city, with the rest having addresses in one of the five boroughs. The NYPD did not provide a breakdown by county.
Several weeks ago, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea claimed that “well over 50 percent” of the police department live in the city, but that percentage includes the NYPD’s 19,000 civilian employees, who unlike uniformed officers, are required by law to live in the city.
Data provided to Gothamist in 2016 showed that 58 percent of officers lived in New York City. The NYPD’s Patrol Guide states that officers can reside in Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, Suffolk, and Nassau counties.
A residency requirement for NYPD officers has been debated over the years, with state Senator Kevin Parker [above] introducing the most recent legislation calling for such a requirement for new officers hired after December 31st, 2020.
Last month, Mayor de Blasio expressed skepticism about residency requirements for police officers. “A lot of NYPD officers who happen to be people of color are living in the suburbs for purely economic reasons, because they can’t find enough affordable housing here,” the mayor said. “We should have a real public debate about it. But we should be mindful that it’s not as easy an equation in New York city as it is in a lot of other places because of the pure cost of housing.”
HATEMONGER: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda
By Jean Guerrero. William Morrow. 323 pp. $28.99
One of the few White House aides who has lasted the full term, Stephen Miller still wields influence over a policy arena that President Trump considers vital to his legacy. He is the “architect” of Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, and his “mind meld” with the president has produced executive orders and rhetoric heavy on exclusion, cruelty and “prejudicial white patriotism,” journalist Jean Guerrero argues in “Hatemonger,” her timely study of this White House survivor.
She makes clear how right-wing and nationalistic media personalities provided Miller the platform and tactics to hone his political vision — and theirs — and continued shaping his views during his time as a Senate aide and as a Trump adviser.
ATLANTIC Growing up in the so-called People’s Republic of Santa Monica as the son of well-off Jewish Democrats—his father was a lawyer and real-estate investor, his mother a homemaker—Miller was uninitiated in conservative thought. [Until he inadvertently came upon Guns & Ammo, which] led him to Wayne LaPierre’s book Guns, Crime, and Freedom, which he devoured, enraptured by the blunt force of the author’s prose. (“Clearly, the Warsaw ghetto stands in history as a shining example of the dangers of gun control.”)
Guerrero dwells on [these] years in Santa Monica, Calif., where he grew up crossing the Mexican border for family vacations, eating meals cooked by Latin American housekeepers and attending school with Mexican American children. His confrontations started early. “As a boy, Miller waged an ideological war on his dark-skinned classmates,” Guerrero writes.
ATLANTIC Miller’s youthful political reinvention was also a puckish reaction to his surroundings. In the beachside bubble of liberal affluence where he was raised, people saw themselves as proud citizens of a progressive utopia. There were festivals celebrating multiculturalism, and “racial-harmony retreats” for students. Yet there were also tensions around racial and class inequality. Jason Islas, a progressive activist who was friends with Miller when they were kids, says it was the kind of place where wealthy white liberals would “conspicuously celebrate diversity in very self-congratulatory ways”—and then avert their eyes from the problems in their own community.
In the summer after middle school, he informed a classmate that they could no longer be friends because of the boy’s Latino heritage. At his liberal high school, Miller admonished Mexican American students to “speak only English.” He worried that a Chicano student group wanted to reclaim California. “Racism does not exist,” he told school district committee on equality. “It’s in your imagination.” He fought against bilingual education, Spanish-language school announcements and Cinco de Mayo celebrations. In his most infamous early moment, he argued at an assembly that students should not have to pick up after themselves “when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us.”
Miller was, in essence, a troll, triggering the libs long before anyone called it that. “He was born with an ability to bring out anger from people,” a former counselor at the high school tells Guerrero, “and he rejoiced in that, it made him powerful.”
Guerrero drops tantalizing suggestions about Miller’s motivations. For instance, he complained to a childhood friend that one of his Latina housekeepers was “kind of emotionally abusive,” and he fretted about being dropped off at school in a housekeeper’s “junky” car, which made him “look poor.” Guerrero is persuasive when she notes that Miller’s childhood was a time of right-wing, anti-immigrant ferment in California.
When Miller was in elementary school, Proposition 187 passed, prohibiting undocumented immigrants from accessing non-emergency state services, including public school. (It was later declared unconstitutional.) A teenage Miller, a fan of Rush Limbaugh’s 1992 book, “The Way Things Ought to Be,” started making radio appearances on the conservative “Larry Elder Show,” complaining about his high school. There he caught the attention of right-wing activist David Horowitz, [below] an ex-Marxist seeking to subvert the old lefty counterculture by teaching its tools to young right-wingers: how to attract media attention, stage controversial events and shame administrators who refused to “increase the scope of intellectual diversity” with conservative perspectives.
“In the 1970s, students started a political revolution on campus,” Miller wrote in an essay on Horowitz’s website, while still in high school. “Now is the time for a counter-revolution — one characterized by a devotion to this nation and its ideals.” He would become a Horowitz protege, and years later, Guerrero writes, the provocateur “would play a significant role in Trump’s campaign, with Miller as his vehicle.”
ATLANTIC : After 9/11, he emerged as a vociferous defender of the Bush administration, writing op-eds that compared students who opposed U.S. military actions to terrorists and concluding, “Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.” During his junior year, he agitated for the school to lead regular recitals of the Pledge of Allegiance—and when his demand wasn’t met, he went on local talk radio to kick up some controversy. The tactic worked, and the school eventually acquiesced.
As an undergraduate at Duke University, Miller invited Horowitz to speak on campus, and he organized an immigration debate featuring Peter Brimelow, author of “Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster.” The event was a “life-changing” experience for Miller, Guerrero writes, making him think more broadly about immigration, creating a framework for his initial instincts. In the 1995 book, Brimelow argued that the Statue of Liberty is not a symbol of immigration because the Emma Lazarus poem was only added to the pedestal years later; Miller would make the same argument in the White House press room in 2017.
After Miller graduated from Duke, Horowitz helped him get a job as press aide for Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and later Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), whose restrictive views on immigration dovetailed with Miller’s. On Capitol Hill, Miller gained a reputation as “vindictive” and a “street fighter,” but he also immersed himself in the details of immigration policy, absorbing statistics from prominent restrictionist think tanks. It was through Sessions that Miller met Bannon, and the three discussed the possibilities of a populist nationalist movement built on White voters — the opposite of the lesson the GOP establishment had drawn from Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential defeat.
Horowitz lurked behind the scenes, encouraging Sessions and Miller to counter the Democrats’ emotional social-justice appeals with “an equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive; that attacks them in the same moral language.” Fear, he argued, beats hope. Then Trump appeared, spouting crude versions of Miller’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Fear was in the air, and soon, thanks to Bannon’s intercession, Miller was in the Trump campaign.
Miller’s backstory has been well reported (Guerrero often cites McKay Coppins’s 2018 Atlantic profile), as has his role in developing Trump’s immigration policies (the 2019 book “Border Wars” by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear details his efforts to exert total control over immigration policy by intimidating career Homeland Security officials). Guerrero’s contribution centers on how Miller’s early patrons retained their [influence.]
In May 2016, Miller emailed Horowitz, asking, “What are some ways the government and the oligarchs who rely on the government have ‘rigged’ the system against poor young blacks and hispanics?” Horowitz replied with multiple links, explaining that “the inner cities are war zones. . . . BLM [Black Lives Matter] makes criminals into martyrs.” The ideas soon appeared in a Trump campaign speech: “You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it is safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats,” the candidate declared.
Later, Miller asked for help again: “The boss is doing a speech on radical Islam. What would you say about Sharia Law?” Horowitz responded that Islamic law is incompatible with the Constitution, adding that “referring to it as ‘Radical Islam’ — though inaccurate — is a good and necessary idea.” When Trump gave a speech attacking Hillary Clinton for not criticizing “radical Islamic terrorism,” Horowitz noticed. “Great f—ing ground-breaking speech,” he emailed Miller. “I spent the last twenty years waiting for this.”
At times, even his mentors worried that Miller and Trump were overdoing things. Horowitz suggested that accusing Barack Obama of founding the Islamic State was a distraction to the campaign. And Elder, [above] who encouraged his old radio guest to emphasize the national security risks of immigration — “we lack the ability to vet Muslim immigrants,” he wrote Miller during the campaign — argued that Trump’s attack on the loyalties of an American judge of Mexican descent went too far. (Both Horowitz and Elder shared these email exchanges with Guerrero.)
In the White House, Miller has gravitated toward his own preferred messages, usually revolving around brutal, fearmongering imagery of dangerous, criminal immigrants. That “gut-punching emotion,” Guerrero writes, “spiraling up from the underbelly of conservative media and a shared obsession with violent fantasies,” is a signature element of Trump and Miller’s worldview.
The mutual reinforcement between Trump World and conservative media is a constant refrain in coverage of this presidency. In “Hatemonger,” Guerrero makes such connections plain. And so does Miller. After Horowitz congratulated him on Trump’s “ground-breaking” campaign speech, Miller responded: “Thanks! Keep sending ideas.”
The way Joe Biden explained it on the campaign trail in Iowa, he and his friend Barack Obama had long talked of Biden succeeding him in the White House, continuing the work of their administration. It was only tragic fate, in the form of the loss of his son Beau, that intervened. Now, after four years, the plan could finally go forward, with Biden running as the administration’s true heir.
Barack Obama, Biden solemnly declared in his campaign announcement in Philadelphia, is “an extraordinary man, an extraordinary president.” On the social media-generated #BestFriendsDay, the campaign posted a picture of “Joe” and “Barack” friendship bracelets. Biden relabeled himself an “Obama-Biden Democrat.”
But behind all the BFF bonhomie is a much more complicated story—one fueled by the misgivings the 44th president had about the would-be 46th, the deep hurt still felt among Biden’s allies over how Obama embraced Hillary Clinton as his successor, and a powerful sense of pride that is driving Biden to prove that the former president and many of his aides underestimated the very real strengths of his partner.
“He was loyal, I think, to Obama in every way in terms of defending and standing by him, even probably when he disagreed with what Obama was doing,” recalled Leon Panetta, Obama’s secretary of Defense. “To some extent, [he] oftentimes felt that that loyalty was not being rewarded.”
Next week, Barack and Michelle Obama are each headlining different days of Biden’s convention, a lineup meant to display party unity and a smooth succession from its most popular figure to its current nominee. But past tensions between Obama’s camp and Biden’s camp have endured, forming some hairline fractures in the Democratic foundation. Some Biden aides boast that they wrapped up the nomination faster than Obama did in 2008. They tout that Biden’s abilities at retail, one-on-one politics are superior to those of the aloof former president. And they don’t easily forget the mocking or belittling of their campaign during the primary and revel in having proven the Obama brainiacs wrong.
Some have gotten caught in this crossfire—including Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, who has been working to regain Biden’s trust after having ditched the VP for Hillary Clinton’s campaign back when Biden still hoped to contend for the 2016 nomination.
Interviews with dozens of senior officials of the Obama-Biden administration painted a picture of eight years during which the president and vice president enjoyed a genuinely close personal relationship, built particularly around devotion to family, while at the same time many senior aides, sometimes tacitly encouraged by the president’s behavior, dismissed Biden as eccentric and a practitioner of an old, outmoded style of politics.
“You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” said Jen Psaki, the former White House communications director. Young White House aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in comparison to the almost clerical Obama. They would chortle at how Biden, like an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, would launch into extended monologues that everyone had heard before.
Former administration officials treated Biden dismissively in their memoirs.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, who was known for his mind-meld with the president, wrote in his memoir that “in the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.”
Former FBI Director James Comey recalled in his book that “Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, ‘Can I ask something, Mr. President?’”
Comey continued: “Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10 minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.”
Meanwhile, Biden loyalists stewed, aware that the vice president, who had gotten himself elected to the Senate at age 29 in the year of President Richard M. Nixon’s landslide reelection and served 36 years, had a range of Washington political skills Obama lacked. The president and his closest allies seemed unaware of how he would alienate potential allies with his preachy tone, particularly in Congress, where Biden excelled.
Biden, for his part, felt Obama too often let his head get in the way. “Sometimes I thought he was deliberate to a fault,” he wrote in his 2017 book Promise Me, Dad.
But, as is sometimes the case in a troubled marriage, there were three people in the Obama-Biden relationship.
And the person who ultimately came between Obama and Biden was Hillary Clinton.
Back in 2008, when Obama was struggling to close the deal on the Democratic nomination, he engaged in a legendary duel with then-Sen. Clinton, sparring with her for months in one-on-one debates in which the two matched wits like law professors in a mock courtroom.
Despite the exhaustive battle, Obama admired how she made him earn it (“backwards and in heels,” he said at her convention in 2016). Clinton and her husband’s enthusiastic campaigning for Obama that fall helped seal the respect between the former rivals: Obama wanted Clinton to be secretary of State and handle world affairs while he tackled the tumbling economy. Biden’s own 2008 presidential campaign, meanwhile, had barely made a mark and fizzled after he won less than 1 percent in Iowa.
From the start, Obama’s personal style meshed better with Clinton’s—in the sense that they were both very disciplined and cerebral—than with Biden’s much more free-wheeling approach. Even if Obama sensed that Biden provided a much-needed complement and contrast, he naturally gravitated toward Clinton.
Obama and Clinton both viewed themselves as pioneers who worked their way through America’s elite colleges. Obama went to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he headed the law review; Clinton went from Wellesley to Yale Law School. They shared a work style as well, always sure to do their homework and arrive at a meeting prepared to get to the crux of an issue. “They do the reading,” said one former Clinton aide. “In Situation Room meetings, she had the thickest binder and had read it three times.”
Biden’s own academic career was unimpressive—he repeated the third grade, earned all Cs and Ds in his first three semesters at the University of Delaware except for As in P.E., a B in “Great English Writers” and an F in ROTC, and graduated 76th in his Syracuse Law School class of 85 students. He’s the first Democratic nominee since Walter Mondale in 1984 not to have an Ivy League degree. He was not a binder person, Clinton and Obama aides said.
Biden admitted as much in his 2007 memoir Promises to Keep, writing “It’s important to read reports and listen to the experts; more important is being able to read people in power.”
Biden’s tendency to blurt out whatever was on his mind rankled Obama, who wasn’t afraid to needle him for it. In his first press conference in 2009, the young president quipped “I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to—not surprisingly,” when asked about Biden’s assessment that there was a 30 percent chance they could get the economic stimulus package wrong.
The gaffes were only one side of the story, though. Obama warmed both to Biden’s effusive personality and his skill in implementing the administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package, which the president had delegated to him.
Aides recall that Obama and Biden took almost polar-opposite approaches to policymaking, Obama always seeking data for the most logical or efficient outcome, while Biden told stories about how a bill would affect the working-class guy in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. When a deal was finally made, Obama would bemoan the compromises, while Biden would celebrate the points of agreement.
“Biden doesn’t come from the wonky angle of leadership,” said a senior Obama administration official. “It’s different than the last two Democratic presidents. Biden is from a different style. It’s an older style, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson of ‘Let’s meet, let’s negotiate, let’s talk, let’s have a deal.’”
Republicans who negotiated with the administration often came away finding Obama condescending and relying on Biden to understand their concerns.
“Negotiating with President Obama was all about the fact that he felt that he knew the world better than you,” said Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader from 2011 to 2014. “And he felt that he thought about it so much, that he figured it all out, and no matter what conclusion you had come to with the same set of facts, his way was right.” Biden, he said, understood that “you’re gonna have to agree to disagree about some things.”
A former Republican leadership aide described Obama’s style as “mansplaining, basically.” The person added that Biden “may not be sitting down talking about Thucydides but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a high level of political intelligence.”
Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s close adviser and family friend, bristled at any suggestion that Obama’s negotiating style was responsible for tensions with members of Congress: “Obama was younger than many of them. He was the first Black president. He wasn’t a part of that club,” Jarrett said.
But Obama would often convey a weariness with the traditional obligations of political leadership: the glad-handing, the massaging of egos. Sometimes he couldn’t hide his disdain for part of the job he signed up for.
At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2013, in front of a roomful of journalists, Obama joked, “Some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress. ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they ask. Really? ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ I’m sorry, I get frustrated sometimes.”
Biden, former aides say, didn’t get why that was funny. Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir that likely “the single most important piece of advice I got in my career” came from the late Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) who told him, “Your job here is to find the good things in your colleagues—the things their state saw—and not focus on the bad.”
Mansfield added: “And, Joe, never attack another man’s motive, because you don’t know his motive.”
Thus, Biden invested time in developing those relationships that Obama never did.
Denis McDonough, Obama’s former chief of staff, said Biden “always wanted to have had two conversations with someone before he would ask that person for something. … Once in a while you’re like, ‘Hey, can we get through those two touches so you can make the ask here,’ but he just wouldn’t do it. That’s the kind of operation he runs.”
Advance staffers recall that Obama’s speeches were arranged to be delivered alone on the stage with voters behind him, while Biden would push to include every local elected official up there with him, knowing they would love the exposure to the vice president—a chit to cash in later.
Psaki, for one, recalled that the president often saw photo lines as obligations while they might be the best part of the vice president’s day.
“His background is much more retail politics kind of person, and the president was very much sort of a wholesale kind of president,” said former Sen. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden adviser who is now heading up his presidential transition effort.
Immediately after Obama’s reelection in 2012, Biden’s team started thinking about his own 2016 run. His mind wasn’t entirely made up, but he wanted to focus on a few areas—particularly infrastructure—that could form the basis of a forward-looking campaign agenda, according to former Biden officials and Democrats they consulted.
One former Biden aide described the vice president’s thinking as “I want to find the ways to stay viable to make the decision on my own terms.”
From early on, however, it became increasingly clear that Obama and many of his closest aides were helping along a Hillary Clinton succession.
In the past few years, the story of how that happened has taken on a particular shape. After Clinton’s 2016 loss and a certain amount of Monday-morning quarterbacking about her weakness as a candidate, many Obama aides tried to cast the president’s snub of Biden as purely an act of compassion: Biden was grieving for his son Beau, who died of cancer in 2015, and didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to handle a campaign.
Biden himself has offered this explanation in public, and Jarrett, the ultimate Obama loyalist, insists that was largely the case: “Vice President Biden was devastated, as any parent would be, by the loss of Beau. It was excruciating to watch him suffer the way he did,” she said.
But numerous administration veterans, including loyalists to both Obama and Biden, remember it differently: Obama had begun embracing Clinton as a possible successor years before Biden lost his son, while the vice president was laying the groundwork for his own campaign.
Just after Obama’s second inauguration in 2013, Democrats turned on their TVs to see Obama singing Clinton’s praises in a joint “60 Minutes” interview on the occasion of Clinton’s departure from the State Department—one that two Clinton aides say was suggested by Obama’s team, albeit as a print interview.
“Why have them sit together for two hours and have 200 of their words used?,” recalled Philippe Reines, Clinton’s press aide at the time. “I always just prefer TV. And I’m like, ‘Let’s go for gold. Let’s do ‘60 Minutes.’ And Ben [Rhodes] said, ‘I love it.’”
“I was a big admirer of Hillary’s before our primary battles and the general election,” Obama enthused. “You know, her discipline, her stamina, her thoughtfulness, her ability to project, I think, and make clear issues that are important to the American people, I thought made her an extraordinary talent. … [P]art of our bond is we’ve been through a lot of the same stuff.”
To which Clinton gushed, “I think there’s a sense of understanding that, you know, sometimes doesn’t even take words because we have similar views.”
When interviewer Steve Kroft raised the prospect of a Clinton presidential run, both Obama and Clinton played it coy, saying it was way too early for such thinking, but doing nothing to discourage the idea.
Then Obama’s political sage, David Plouffe—the man who had dedicated a year and a half to taking down Clinton in 2008—offered his help in mid-2013 and met with Clinton, according to a Democrat familiar with the overture. (Plouffe maintains that Clinton’s team approached him first.) Obama’s pollster, Joel Benenson, later hopped on board. In early 2015, so did top Obama aides John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri. Clinton’s campaign even began interviewing and picking off people from Biden’s office, including Alex Hornbrook, who became Clinton’s director of scheduling and advance.
“It certainly felt like Obama’s world was behind us,” said one former Clinton campaign aide. “It wasn’t just Plouffe, Palmieri and Benenson. From the beginning, a lot of key Obama aides came over and helped stand up our campaign.” It was so blatant that some Clinton aides wondered whether Obama had just wrongly assumed that Biden wasn’t interested in running because of his age.
On January 5, 2015, Biden and Obama privately discussed a White House run at their weekly lunch. Obama “had been subtly weighing in against,” Biden recalled in Promise Me, Dad, his 2017 book.
“I also believe he had concluded that Hillary Clinton was almost certain to be the nominee, which was good by him,” Biden wrote. A campaign spokesperson added that in the meeting, Obama also said, “If I could appoint anyone to be president over the next eight years, Joe, it would be you.”
Panetta, who had known Clinton from his days as her husband’s White House chief of staff, recalled that “Both she and her staff worked at that a great deal in trying to build that support.” Among Obama and his aides, Panetta said, “I think there was a certain attraction to someone that would certainly break ceilings and kind of create the same kind of precedent that he created when he became president … as opposed to supporting somebody who’s kind of your more traditional politician and, you know, a white Irish Catholic guy.”
There was also dismissiveness of Biden in Clinton’s orbit that echoed Obama aides. “The good thing about a Biden run,” Neera Tanden, Clinton’s close aide who also advised the Obama administration on health policy, wrote to Podesta in 2015, in an email later exposed by WikiLeaks, “is that he would make Hillary look so much better.”
Obama tried to remain above the fray, even as his closest staffers largely rallied around Clinton—which they likely would not have done if there was a chance he would support Biden. “I knew a number of the president’s former staffers, and even a few current ones, were putting a finger on the scale for Clinton,” Biden wrote.
Pressed on whether Obama ever expressed a preference between Clinton and Biden, Jarrett demurred, saying, “that’s a conversation you’ll have to have with him.”
Obama declined to be interviewed through his spokesperson. “President Obama has been unequivocal in his respect for Joe’s wisdom, experience, empathy and integrity,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Even if he did express preference for Clinton, some Obama officials characterized it more as an acknowledgment of her strength than an attempt to undercut Biden.
“There was a feeling of inevitability about Hillary Clinton in every aspect,” recalled Psaki. “So it never felt to me like it was Obama choosing Hillary Clinton over Joe Biden. It was a feeling like it’s inevitable after Hillary Clinton left the State Department that she will be the Democratic nominee, and she will become the next president. So Obama … was trying to play a part in being helpful.”
Reines said Obama “was always very encouraging” of Clinton and that after serving as president, “he believed there was no one better prepared to do it.”
It was in the midst of the handoff to Clinton that Beau Biden’s health began deteriorating. Joe Biden had had an especially deep bond with his eldest son since Beau’s mother and sister died in a car accident that seriously injured Beau and his brother Hunter. Before the 46-year-old Beau passed away that May from an aggressive form of brain cancer, he had been a firm advocate for his Dad to run and, even in intense grief, Biden made serious preparations in the summer and fall of 2015 to jump into the race.
The Clinton camp took Biden’s deliberations seriously. Podesta told people he believed Biden would go for it. The Clinton team assembled an oppo-research book on him with the code name “Project Acela,” according to one former Clinton official. Negative stories began popping up. The Clinton campaign denied having had any role, but Biden was skeptical.
Obama pressed the issue in another private meeting. “The president was not encouraging,” Biden recalled.
A more direct kind of brushback occurred that fall. Plouffe—the Obama strategist who had been quietly advising Clinton since 2013—met with Biden and told him not to end his career in embarrassment with a third place finish in Iowa, according to multiple accounts of the meeting.
“There just wasn’t an opening,” Plouffe said, explaining why he advised Biden against the run. “He started asking the question in the 4th quarter of the contest.” Plouffe argued that Biden hadn’t done the necessary legwork before 2015 that previous vice presidents had done before their runs.
Clinton’s campaign conducted a survey around the same time showing Biden in third in Iowa. In a foreshadowing of Biden’s 2020 performance, the analysis also showed his tremendous strength among African American voters.
“With Biden in the race, our support among African Americans drops by 23 points,” an internal Clinton memo noted ominously. “While we still lead, it is not the overwhelming, commanding lead we hold in a one-on-one race with [Bernie] Sanders.”
The most stinging rebuke, however, came when Klain—Biden’s former chief of staff who went back decades with him to when he was chief counsel on Biden’s Judiciary Committee in 1989—defected to Clinton.
Ebola Response Coordinator Ron Klain, Vice President Joe Biden and White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett at a November 2014 meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
“It’s been a little hard for me to play such a role in the Biden demise,” Klain wrote to Podesta in October 2015, a week before Biden gave in and announced he would not run. “I am definitely dead to them—but I’m glad to be on Team HRC.”
According to the email, which was released by WikiLeaks in what American intelligence officials have concluded was a Russian-backed effort to hurt the Clinton campaign, Klain added: “Thanks for inviting me into the campaign, and for sticking with me during the Biden anxiety.”
In the years since Clinton’s loss, Democrat operatives have chuckled at Klain’s attempts to earn his way back into Biden’s good graces, including lots of Twitter praise for the former vice president. Klain is not on the campaign’s payroll but remains an adviser, and observers assume he’s hoping to be chief of staff in a Biden White House. Klain refused to elaborate on the situation: “I’m not going to comment on a story that uses Russian intelligence measures.”
In a sign of the raw feelings, Biden’s aides declined to comment on the fallout from Klain’s defection but said they are happy he is on board in 2020.
Lingering tensions between the Biden and Obama camps were subtly visible in the 2020 primary campaign, in which Obama declined to endorse any candidate.
Many top Obama administration and campaign officials sat on the sidelines or worked for candidates other than Biden. Top former aides including strategist David Axelrod and the young hosts of Pod Save America—Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer—at times ridiculed the former vice president’s campaign. Biden is one of the few candidates to have not gone on either of their popular podcasts during the campaign, despite having been invited: “I can’t speak for his campaign’s scheduling decisions,” said Vietor, “but the Zoom is always open.”
Biden aides acknowledge that Obama didn’t do nearly as much for Biden in 2020 as he did for Clinton in 2016.
The lack of public enthusiasm for Biden was noticeable enough that former Obama senior adviser Pete Rouse—who was one of the aides who helped Biden organize his potential 2016 run—addressed it at a fundraiser of Obama alumni for Biden last November that he helped organize.
“I think the turnout tonight demonstrates the high regard in which the vice president is held in the extended Obama family,” Rouse told the crowd of about 50 people. “And I think that that message is not out as far as it should be.”
Yet searing, anonymously sourced quotes from Obama kept appearing through the race. One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Speaking of his own waning understanding of today’s Democratic electorate, especially in Iowa, Obama told one 2020 candidate: “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”
Biden’s weaknesses were such that even Clinton reconsidered her decision not to get into the race last fall, according to Reines.
“There were a number of people who decided not to run and then around, October, before Thanksgiving said to themselves, ‘You know, did I make the right decision?,’ he said, name-checking Mike Bloomberg and Deval Patrick who did make late entries. “She went through that exercise.”
But Biden proved them all wrong.
His focus on electability along with a sentimental message about saving the soul of the nation—“character is on the ballot”—was dismissed by many pundits and reporters as hokey and uninspiring, but ended up being the winning one.
One former Clinton aide noted that Biden’s ability to cultivate personal relationships paid dividends at the primary’s end: Bernie Sanders saw Biden as one of the few people in Washington who took him seriously before his 2016 run for president. After it was clear Biden had an insurmountable delegate lead, Sanders decided not to drag out the fight the way he did against Clinton in 2016.
“That relationship is why Bernie got out in March,” said the former Clinton aide.
“I don’t know who saw him sailing to the nomination,” said Psaki. Biden’s old-fashioned style of politics, she reasoned, “still taps into something in the American electorate. And maybe we’re not seeing that because I live in a suburb of Washington, D.C., with a bunch of upper middle-class white people.”
Or, as one former Biden official put it: “I don’t think he really cares about what a 30-something Pod Save America host thinks about him, and that honestly might be why he’s the nominee.”
But even in victory, Biden and his aides often act like they have something to prove to the Obama team that doubted them. Some Biden allies noted that Obama’s endorsement of Biden, when it finally arrived, lacked the effusiveness of his endorsement of Clinton. “I don’t think there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office,” he said of Clinton in his video message in 2016. Four years later, in his endorsement video for Biden, he said: “I believe Joe has all of the qualities we need in a president right now … and I know he will surround himself with good people.”
Biden aides also fumed at Axelrod and Plouffe penning a New York Times op-ed that instructed them on “What Joe Biden Needs to Do to Beat Trump,” according to Democrats who talked with them.
Meanwhile, some senior Democrats credited Obama for Biden’s comeback given his strength among Black voters, while Biden has emphasized he did it on his own.
After the South Carolina primary win, he told aides that Obama hadn’t “lifted a finger” to help him. Anita Dunn, an Obama administration aide and top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign, said “[Biden] did feel that he needed to go out and earn it himself, as opposed to having people see it as an extension of a third Obama term or having it be any kind of referendum directly on Obama.”
Now, as Reines put it, Biden “might have the last laugh of everybody.”
Biden has long been defensive about suggestions of being dumb or a lightweight—a narrative that took hold during in his first campaign for the presidency, in 1988. As a kid, a teacher mocked him for his stutter (“Bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden,” she went, according to his 2007 memoir). “Other kids looked at me like I was stupid,” Biden wrote.
Or, as Richard Ben Cramer wrote in his classic about the 1988 race: “Joe Biden had balls. Lot of times, more balls than sense.” Biden didn’t seem to mind that assessment, as he brought on Cramer’s researcher, Mark Zwonitzer, to help write his books in 2007 and 2017.
“I had to convince the Big Feet [his euphemism for national reporters] that I had depth,” he recalled about that 1988 race. Striving to answer his critics, he puffed up his academic credentials on the trail (“I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he later tried to explain). In a heated exchange in New Hampshire during the 1988 campaign, he uncharacteristically snapped at a voter who asked him which law school he attended and his class rank that “I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect.”
Sen. Joe Biden, pictured with his wife Jill, holds a news conference in Washington on Sept. 23, 1987, to announce he is withdrawing from the Democratic race for the presidential nomination.
In the less-remembered part of that encounter, however, Biden also decried the snobby intelligentsia that had taken over the Democratic Party. “It seems to me you’ve all become heartless technocrats,” he said. “We have never as a party moved this nation by 14-point position papers and nine-point programs.”
That sensibility is part of what separates him from Obama. “It really is the difference between street smarts and, you know, Harvard smart,” Panetta said.
That’s why even some Republicans believe Biden may be better poised to fulfill Obama’s promises of restoring unity and civility in Washington than the “change we can believe in” 44th president was. If Biden wins, many Democrats and Republicans believe that at least relations between the White House and Congress will be better than in any other recent administration, including Obama’s.
“Obama, clearly he was smart, he was bright, he would come up with proposals, but that second part of then taking those proposals and working and lobbying members and listening to them and doing all of the things that need to be done when you’re dealing with the egos on Capitol Hill was not something that came easily to him,” Panetta said. “He was impatient with that process. I think Biden understands that process and understands what it takes.”
Even with Biden as the Democratic nominee, Republican leadership and their aides can’t help but feel more animosity toward Obama than Biden. In negotiations, Biden asked them what they could sell to their caucus while Obama would trenchantly but unproductively lecture leadership about why their caucus’ worldview was wrong, the aides said.
“Frankly, I came to dread those Oval Office meetings because they were lost time,” said one such former aide. “Those were hours of your life you were never getting back.”
Vice President Joe Biden is emotional as President Barack Obama presents him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during a ceremony at the White House, Jan. 12, 2017.
Axelrod echoed this view in his memoir. “Few practiced politicians appreciate being lectured on where their political self-interest lies,” he wrote of Obama’s style. “That hint of moral superiority and disdain for politicians who put elections first has hurt Obama as negotiator, and it’s why Biden, a politician’s politician, has often had better luck.”
The other advantage Biden brings, according to his advisers, is his nearly unrivaled Rolodex.
“Obama knew some of these people, but it wasn’t like a deep relationship,” said Kaufman. “He knows mayors and governors, he knows the members of Congress much better than Obama did.”
Biden once wrote, “A person’s epitaph was written when his or her last battle was fought.”
Is this battle in part a way to show that Obama favored the wrong successor?
“I think Joe’s the type that victory makes all the difference,” said Panetta. “And if he can win the presidency, I think that will say an awful lot to a lot of people about who Joe Biden really is.”
Democrats Question Whether Postmaster General’s Hiring Skirted Background Checks
Notes: All polls are of registered voters. CNN’s poll was conducted by ORC in 2016 and SSRS in 2020. Marist’s 2016 media partner was McClatchy, and its partners are NPR and PBS NewsHour in 2020. CNN, Marist, and Pew polls used here in both 2016 and 2020 only named the major party candidates. The Monmouth polls in both 2016 and 2020 included the Libertarian and Green Party nominees by name. Columns may not add up to 100% because of rounding.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67218186/AP_20231068243361.0.jpg)
A residency requirement for NYPD officers has been debated over the years, with state Senator Kevin Parker [above] 
5 STAR FINAL 