Podcast: What You Still May Not Know About Joe: Insights From Biden Biographer Evan Osnos

TRANSCRIPT: What You Still May Not Know About Joe: Insights From Biden Biographer Evan Osnos

Evan Osnos:

Biden actually is the precise combination of qualities that we need now, which is experience and a fundamental belief that unity is not an impossibility.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. Here you'll find extended versions of the interviews from my show on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today I'm asking how much do you really know about Joe? Joe Biden has had one of the longest political careers in US history, and on his third try, he was elected the nation's 46th President. And there are plenty of challenges ahead for him. I'm talking to a man who has spent nearly a decade covering Biden. It's Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, who has just penned an important new biography offering insight into how he'll govern a deeply divided America. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

The book is called Joe Biden, The Life, The Run, And What Matters Now. Evan Osnos, staff writer for The New Yorker, and someone I've known for a very long time. So nice to have you back on GZERO World.

Evan Osnos:

My pleasure. Thanks for having me in.

Ian Bremmer:

Timely topic. You got that started. It was not in any way presumed that Biden was even getting the nomination, nevermind becoming the President.

Evan Osnos:

It was the kind of thing that came together as it became clear that he was a stronger candidate than we might have assumed at the very beginning, but I've had this slightly weird fascination with him for a long time. Going back to 2014, I started interviewing him because he was involved in foreign affairs. And the honest answer is, Ian, that part of the reason I was going to interview Joe Biden was that that actually wasn't a very sophisticated thing to be doing in Washington. Joe Biden was not the center of the action. Not a lot of people really paid that much attention to him, partly because he was in the Vice Presidency, which is a maligned office, and partly because people just took him as part of the political furniture here. He'd been at it for so long, it was easy to look right past him.

Ian Bremmer:

Did he know all the way through that he really was a favorite, that he had lots of structural advantages, or was it as much of a surprise to him?

Evan Osnos:

No, I think he came into this believing that he was the strongest candidate and that was rooted in one basic piece of data, which is that the campaign, he and the people around him, meaning importantly people like Ron Klain now been named as Chief of Staff, and also Mike Donilon, his Chief Strategist, believed that most Democrats still describe themselves as moderate or conservative Democrats, and that really was the center of gravity of the party. Even though people in my profession and elsewhere tend to focus so much on the progressive end, that is not actually where most Democrats are. And so that was their core belief. That wasn't necessarily going to carry them to the finish line.

They were at one point so low on cash, they were just running out of money, that as Anita Dunn remembers, she really ran the campaign, Anita called Joe Biden on the train one day when he was going between New York and Washington, and she said, "Look, we may be out of money in a week and you're going to have to figure out how to pay. You just need to hold on to just a little bit of money to be able to pay people their severance if they're laid off," so that's how close it was to the end. And I asked, Ian, I was curious, how did he handle that? How did he take that piece of information? Because different kinds of political figures respond differently to the notion of failure. And she said his view has always been more or less the same, which is that he has suffered bigger losses in his life than this, and if he lost it, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Ian Bremmer:

How energized was he running all this way through? Because we know how deep the emotional tragedy has been. We know how much that threw him off his game. We also know how old the guy is, and some people are incredibly motivated by the rallies more than governing, like our present President. Others are not. And this guy has been an institution for a very long time. How did he gear up for this third presidential run at the age of 77?

Evan Osnos:

Well, he had more or less accepted the idea that his political career was probably over in 2015 when he gave that speech in the Rose Garden. And yet then there was this moment when of course, and he's talked about this publicly, the sight of those marchers in Charlottesville for him really was a call to arms where he felt like there was this moral emergency confronting the United States. Nothing short of something as serious as that. And I think that was galvanizing to him. The idea that there was not just this radical danger facing the United States in the presidency of Donald Trump and in what he was generating in the population at large, but then also the political side of Joe Biden looked at the field of contenders and he thought, I don't think they're going to beat him. And so for that reason, it was energizing.

But I think we also have to be realistic here. Joe Biden was helped very much by the fact that this campaign went virtual in the spring of 2020 because it kept him off the road. He was sleeping in his bed every night. He was working out. He was giving the speeches to his fundraisers. They were disciplined. He wasn't going off prompter, to use the expression of what his aides sometimes say. So the circumstances conspired to help him at a moment when it would help fill in whatever flagging energy he might have had.

Ian Bremmer:

Obama in the last few weeks of the campaign was absolutely critical for Joe Biden. Obama was virtually nowhere in the early stages of the campaign. How challenging was that for Biden?

Evan Osnos:

I think there is a pretty multi-layered relationship there. It's not a simple one. The nice version of it, and it's a real version, is these are two guys who never thought they were going to be particularly close. They ended up as a shotgun marriage on the ticket in 2008. And they, to their mutual astonishment, ended up being quite friendly with each other in a deep way. When Beau Biden got sick, Barack Obama told Joe, "Do not take out a loan to pay for these medical treatments. If you need help or to keep the family actually really afloat, I'm going to give you the money." And Biden didn't end up needing it, but there was a real relationship there.

And then there was the problem, which is Barack Obama believed that Hillary Clinton was in many ways the natural heir to the Obama administration, and he made that his choice in 2016. Obviously, Biden didn't run, and then you get to 2020. And I think there was to some degree a feeling that Obama had, how would I put it? I guess I would say that Obama understood that the best chance to secure his legacy and to secure the future of the Democratic Party was to make sure that Joe Biden won this race. But he also looks at the field and he sees that there are contending voices that look more like the future of the country than the past, and he wasn't going to come out too early and signal that he didn't think there should be a legitimate discussion within the party about who is the face of the Democratic Party. Once it became clear it was Joe Biden, he gave him his full support.

Ian Bremmer:

So if that relationship, that personal relationship in the midst of the two Obama terms, was a 10, what is it now?

Evan Osnos:

It's a 10. Let's be clear. This is a moment in which the Vice President who helped Barack Obama succeed in very specific ways... We forget this, but in 2009, Joe Biden was the one who lobbied Arlen Specter to change parties and become a Democrat, which then helped Barack Obama succeed. He was the one who called six members of the Senate to try to get votes on the Stimulus Bill. Biden got three votes and the bill passed by three votes. So there is actually real, strategic collaboration there that is the basis of this. And I think if you really pressed President Obama on it and had a frank conversation about whether or not it was a mistake to side with Hillary Clinton early in the 2015, 2016 cycle, that would be an interesting one.

That's not a conversation I've had, but what I have had is a conversation with President Obama where I said, "In what way do you think Biden is fit for this moment?" And what he says is that he thinks that Biden actually is the precise combination of qualities that we need now, which is experience, also a political awareness of how to work with Congress, and a fundamental belief that unity is not an impossibility.

Ian Bremmer:

So having now spent a lot of time with a professional career politician, an unusual thing in any circumstance, what has surprised you most about the man, about what drives him, about how your personality is molded, is shaped by that kind of thing you choose to do with your life?

Evan Osnos:

What surprised me, Ian, was that when we hear about Joe Biden, the image that we usually get is, as a British diplomat put it to me, the spigot that you can turn on but you can't turn off. The guy who will speak to fill whatever space is available. And what you actually find is that at this stage in his life, here he is in his eighth decade when a lot of people are frankly in more of a broadcasting mode than a listening mode, he's actually become a more attentive listener, a person that is actually more inclined to want to pick up information that he doesn't already have, than he was 20 years ago. That's the surprise, that some of that bumptious ambition that was so much a part of his profile for years and years, it finally settled down.

And I think getting as close as he has now, of course, being at the center of history, he comes to it at a time in his life that it's a mature season and he is not anymore the guy who will just speak to try to muscle his way through a setting. He's very often looking around for that thing he can pick up that he doesn't quite know and that he thinks you know. I came to think of it as a productive insecurity, and it's something that might serve us well at the top of the US government right now.

Ian Bremmer:

Is that where climate, for example, is coming from? Because obviously a very different profile for him than it was when he was Vice President. And indeed, in a campaign where he was taking virtually no risks, he made a number of statements that obviously were planned, that led to a fair amount of blow back in terms of this transition away from oil and gas.

Evan Osnos:

I think climate is an area in which he sees a clear opportunity to be progressive. And part of the problem who we've all been contending with is how do you make sense of the fact that he seems like a total centrist on Monday, and then sometimes he talks about being the most transformative president since FDR? The way he squares these is by saying there are issues on which I think we are in agreement and able to make substantial progress, and then there are areas where we can't. He is not going to wake up tomorrow as being the Medicare For All president. That's not where he thinks the American public is. He doesn't have a plan for that, to borrow the expression. But where he does think we can be aggressive is on climate. But it is a true statement.

He's not lying when he says to the state of Pennsylvania and elsewhere that he's not going to ban fracking. But he is also serious when he sees where the future is going and he's going to use what he can, even in the constrained circumstances of potentially a Republican Congress, to use the power of the pen and see what he can get done on climate. I think it's worth pointing out, Ian, he also sees climate as part of the foreign agenda here, part of America's overall standing in the world. There is no way to be an exceptional country, an indispensable country, if you are in fact not participating in modern climate science, and that's part of the project.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, most of what President Trump tried to use to beat on Biden bounced off, because there weren't the obvious negatives that there were with Hillary Clinton, for example. But the one that did stick was Sleepy Joe, the one that did stick was the incoherence, so you've spent a lot of time with him. Talk about that.

Evan Osnos:

What I find interesting, and I was hearing some of the same reflections from people, also particularly around the world. I think in other foreign capitals, I was often getting that question from people, which is how sharp is he? And there's a couple of important details I think that are worth pointing out. For one thing, he came into this race in the beginning, in beginning of 2019, out of shape. He wasn't tuned up as a political figure. He'd spent what can be the most destructive period for a candidate, which is to say he'd spent it in semi-retirement as the boss of bosses, nobody ever cutting him off, nobody ever debating him, nobody ever criticizing him. All of a sudden, he's back into the trenches and he has to get tuned up.

Ian Bremmer:

And he lacked discipline in the best of times around that kind of thing.

Evan Osnos:

And that's the second piece. That's the key piece of this is that I think, for people who are tuning into Joe Biden now, what they see is a man who, to borrow James Comey's expression, will start a conversation in direction A and end it at direction Z. But what we also know is that if you've been looking at Biden over the long term, 10, 20, 25 years, he has been accused of versions of that forever. That's partly how his mind works. It's partly because he doesn't use a prompter. He doesn't feel comfortable. It goes back to having the stutter. He moves more slowly across the stage. His voice is clearly raspier. But if you listen to his interviews, real interviews, in-depth interviews, what you find is that his mind is unchanged from where it was a few years ago.

Ian Bremmer:

Is your sense, this is a guy who's thinking this is a one-term thing?

Evan Osnos:

I don't get that sense actually. And I think part of that is his political nerve endings tell him that the moment that he signals that this is a one-term thing, that cuts his legs out from under him. All we'll be talking about is who's next. And so, in some sense, it's political malpractice 101 for him to do that. But I also think there's another piece of this. I've talked to him about the decision about when do you retire, when do you hang it up? And his belief is partly rooted in the idea that he looks back on his own father and he had lobbied his dad to retire, and he thinks that was a mistake, so he pushed him out of it before he should have.

And what he says is, "Look, take a look at me, and if I look like I'm losing a step, then it'll be time to be done." But there was a point when I was reporting this book, when I made it clear to the campaign that I said, "Look, if he's going to be a one-term President and he knows it now, I need to know that, because that's going to be an important piece of how people evaluate him." And they said, "This is not a charade here. We are not actually hiding something. That is not how he thinks about it." So I came away reasonably convinced on the political merits that he has not made that choice.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, let's go to foreign policy for a little bit, which you and I spent a lot of time on. Your previous life was in Beijing, and I remember when Biden was first announcing his run, and one of the things he said was that China wasn't really a threat, that Russia is a threat. And China's, I mean, come on, they don't have any capabilities with the United States. Where is Joe on China right now and has there been a lot of inconsistency there?

Evan Osnos:

I think the language that we heard in the beginning, and you framed it correctly where he said, "We don't have to worry about China, it's not a competitive threat." I think that was a misguided form of American chest-thumping. It was essentially, "Hey, we've still got all of the innovative vigor and they don't have it because they don't have the culture." That's bit of an old standard that he was pulling off the shelf, but that's not an up-to-date view, and it's not actually how he and his China team talk about it now.

Ian Bremmer:

But even as Vice President, in 2016, I was stunned that he could have a view like that in 2019.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. He's not the first person in Washington to get locked into a conception of a complex issue like China and then more or less dine out on it ever since. I don't think that's the view that he holds now. I think what you hear from him, and I've talked to him about China, is that he looks at it and he basically believes that China has made mistakes in its own foreign policy, in its relationship with its neighbors. The United States is not the only relationship that China has problems with right now. If you look around the G7, you look around the neighborhood, it has some serious problems. And I think that's a hint about how he sees the United States leveraging that moment to refortify our own relationships and to isolate China.

Ian Bremmer:

If we were coming back to this conversation in six months' time, where do you think we would see the most significant early stage differences in the foreign policy arena?

Evan Osnos:

Well, to begin with, I think if you take trade, the United States is not going to be fighting a trade war with Europe at the same time that it's trying to reimagine its relationship with China. So to state the obvious, and you know this as well as I do, this is going to be a period of reintroducing ourselves to our allies, going out and saying, what can Germany and the United States do together that they can't do independently when it comes to forcing China's hands on market access issues, intellectual property issues?

But what I also think is significant to point out is they're not going to roll back tariffs on day one of the Biden administration. The Trump administration, for all of the chaos and improvisation that went into its China policy. And I use those words advisedly, actually has given the Biden administration something of leverage to be able to deploy on its own schedule. They can come in and decide when and where they want to relieve the pressure, and that gives them a hand to play. They don't have to roll back tariffs. They can wait until they get some serious concessions out of the Chinese side.

Ian Bremmer:

And when I look more broadly at the fact that the United States has damaged its credibility internationally, leaving the Iranian nuclear deal and leaving the Paris climate accord, do you think that's something he feels like he needs to address in a proactive way? And if so, how might he do it?

Evan Osnos:

I don't think you're going to hear him going out and saying that the philosophy of the Obama administration, "Don't do stupid stuff," was a mistake. He draws energy from that period. He believes that they were fundamentally facing in the right direction. But he also looks at the world now, and if you pay close attention to what he's saying and what some of his advisors are saying, they recognize that the world has changed since they left office and they can't imagine going in and just trying to wave the flag of American exceptionalism again. That's not going to work. You have to recognize where you are, the diminished position the United States is in, and they don't want to be complacent and say, "All right, we're going to slink back into the pack and accept the idea that there's no longer any leadership role for us." But they also can't go in and simply say, "We're back and we're as strong as ever."

The world has changed as a result of the last, call it, more than four years. Really the last eight years. And I think that what you find is a humbled sense not only of what the US democracy looks like to the rest of the world, but also what the United States has to say and what it has to offer. I often, Ian, find myself identifying this fusion between Biden's personal story and his political ideas. He is a humbled man at this point in his life. Humbled by the fates, to be perfectly blunt about it. The death of his son Beau, the ups and downs of losing presidential races along the way. And he comes to it at a moment when the United States should frankly be humbled too. Here we are flat on our backs with the COVID epidemic, incapable of bringing even basic public health resources to bear. And he has to go out into the world and say, "Yes, we have made terrible mistakes in our recent past, but there is things that we can do and things we want to do, and we plan to return to the world community."

Ian Bremmer:

Leaving aside climate, if he was going to surprise us in domestic orientation as a President, it would be where?

Evan Osnos:

I think if he's going to surprise you, it may be on his recognition of the scale of the crisis around income inequality. Because in so many ways, the various things that beset this country come back to that basic failure to provide opportunity to people. And that doesn't mean he's going to come in tomorrow and introduce a wealth tax, but he cannot have a successful presidency without acknowledging the full scale of the ways in which the economic system is simply not working for people across the board. And it's not him saying it. As you and I both know, it's now CEOs who are looking down the runway and seeing where the future of the American economy is, so he's going to have to contend with that.

I will tell you one of the most interesting conversations I ever had with him was before Bernie Sanders was on the scene, before Donald Trump was on the scene. In 2014, I was talking to Biden about politics and he said, "Look, I think the economic picture in this country is really rough for working people, and the Democratic Party is failing them. We're not doing enough." And at the time, I honestly, Ian, didn't understand enough about what he was talking about to realize that he was onto something, and I didn't quote it at the time. I didn't get it. Of course, what he anticipated was what Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders later picked up on. So that is core to who Biden is, and I would expect him to be fairly active when it comes to trying to reform this economy to make it more productive for a wider swath of Americans.

Ian Bremmer:

How do you think he is going to deal with the fact that he's going to put a nationwide mask mandate in place and a whole bunch of governors in the worst-hit states are going to say, "No más?" How does he deal with the fact that the biggest crisis of our lifetimes, and he said the President doesn't have a plan, but the reality is the President doesn't have all that much power. How does he deal with that?

Evan Osnos:

I think he's relying on what would be described as the reality-based community. That's the term that we remember from the Bush administration that was used with contempt. And what the COVID epidemic has shown us is there is only so far that you can try to outrun the facts, the cold, hard, blunt reality of science. And at a certain point it comes back and it kills people in your state. And if there are governors who are going to continue to reject the basic legitimacy of masks, at a certain point, there's only so much Joe Biden can do. He give them the science, he can empower his federal resources to make smart, impartial, apolitical decisions. But if people are incapable of following them, that's the limits of his power. And he'll move on and he'll talk to the people who are willing to be saved.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, he becomes President. Trump is there. He's going to be throwing fusillades with a media reach that is well beyond anything that we have experienced from a former president in our lifetimes. The right thing for Biden to do is to ignore it. Hard to do that. Hard to do that in lots of ways. How do you think he's going to deal with ex-president Trump? How's he going to deal with the extraordinary calls for cases to be opened, for trials to proceed, for us to litigate so many calls of illegality all the way through, and at the same time, you have Biden reaching out and saying, "I want Trump supporters to be part of the same country and we all have to come together?"

Evan Osnos:

I think that to begin with, when it comes to Trump himself, Biden's approach is becoming visible to us now. If you look at the way he has contended with Trump in this strange interregnum of refusing the reality of the results of the election, his approach has been what I would describe as pitying disregard, in effect saying it's embarrassing, it's bizarre, my word not his, but not allowing himself to get drawn into the invention of a dispute. Trump thrives on the creation of conflict. And for there to be a conflict, you have to participate in it. And the truth is, the law is on Biden's side, and that gives him the insulation of being able to say of Donald Trump, "Good luck to you." Now, I think the reality is that in the world that Biden will be dealing with, there's going to be a pretty heavy demand for some kind of reckoning, some kind of accountability with this process.

But Biden has also made clear, and this is a deeply felt view, that if Biden allows himself to become personally involved in talking about prosecutions of former presidents or even members of the administration, that you're falling into precisely the kind of degrading indignity that was such a hallmark of the Trump years, in which you had a president talking about locking people up. Biden's view is we've got prosecutors to do that, but what he has said is we're going to appoint an Inspector General who is going to be responsible for probing the use of stimulus funds, and that is the beginning of a process. And if those lead to prosecutions, so be it. But he's trying to be, in so many ways, the opposite of Trump, and that requires him to use the institutions available rather than dipping into the emotional reservoir that Trump uses so effectively.

Ian Bremmer:

Does that also mean personally staying away from considering a pardon?

Evan Osnos:

I would be surprised if he pardons Donald Trump. I don't think that's in the cards.

Ian Bremmer:

What about Mr. McConnell? What about a country that is so incredibly divided that is likely to still have a Republican Senate, though we won't know that until early January? Joe Biden certainly knows the Senate and knows McConnell better than almost any other living politician, but while Biden was Vice President, these same cast of characters did everything possible to stop them from governing. Should our baseline expectation be it's the same thing?

Evan Osnos:

I think that should be our baseline expectation. Look, the GOP has indicated no interest in meeting Biden in some arena of cooperation. At the moment, they're participating in the fiction, by and large, that there is still a pathway for Donald Trump. But I think if you get past the theater for a second, you see that there is something deeply different in the relationship that Biden has with McConnell that Obama never had with McConnell. And I don't want to disregard completely the fact, for instance, Mitch McConnell was the only Republican senator who showed up at the funeral for Beau Biden in 2015.

Ian Bremmer:

That's right. I remember that. Absolutely.

Evan Osnos:

Mitch McConnell once called Joe Biden's office in the West Wing, got Biden on the phone and said, "Is there anybody over there who knows how to make a deal?" And these two guys then got into a negotiation. They ended up coming up with the deal to avert the fiscal cliff, a deal that was unpopular, I should point out, with a lot of Democrats. But the point was that they did find some basis for at least a negotiation and ultimately a deal. Those kinds of connections, that background to the relationship, is at the core of Biden's governing philosophy.

Ian Bremmer:

Evan Osnos, the book is Joe Biden, The Life, The Run, And What Matters Now. Thanks a lot for being here.

Evan Osnos:

My pleasure, Ian. Great to be with you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it. For today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Like what you've heard? Come check us out at gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, Signal.

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