The New Yorker Radio Hour - Will This Be Joe Biden’s F.D.R. Moment?

Episode Date: August 23, 2020

Joe Biden has been playing it safe during the coronavirus pandemic, but Evan Osnos got the chance to sit down with the nominee in person. It was too hot to sit outside, but the campaign staff didn’t want an outsider in Biden’s home, so the interview took place in a small house on the property that Biden’s late mother stayed in. In a wide-ranging conversation, Biden compares his position—should he win—to that of Franklin Roosevelt: taking office during a disaster, he argues, he would have an opportunity to effect a hugely ambitious agenda, but driven by pragmatism rather than ideology. (He was not comparing himself to Roosevelt, he hastened to add.) While the country is ever more partisan, Biden describes his centrism and his propensity for off-the-cuff remarks as an advantage. “The good news is the bad news,” he told Osnos. “Everybody knows me, and you guys know me, the good and bad. . . . It’s kind of hard to pin a label on someone that’s inconsistent with who they are. To make me out to be a revolutionary, it’s awful hard to do. Conversely, it’s awful hard to make me out to be a right-wing, very conservative Democrat.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm sitting here, sort of, virtually, with my colleague Evan Osnose, who's been covering politics for us since 2008, hard to believe. Now, Evan, you've been working on a profile of Joe Biden for quite some time, and at the end of July, you went to meet him at his home in Delaware. What were the circumstances? What was it like to talk to him in person at that moment? Well, as you can imagine, frankly, he was sort of glad to see another human being because they have him under very tight restrictions. There's basically two aides that go in and out of the house, one of his assistants and one of Jill Biden's assistants. And then there's this secret service detail. But other than that, they really don't have a lot of people coming in and out.

And so they said, first of all, you've got to wear a mask. and they said, we're not going to be in the main house because we don't want you potentially contaminating where he lives. So they put us in a kind of carriage house at the foot of the property and we sat across from each other in a room. It was too hot to sit outside. It was somewhere in the mid-90s. And they said, so we're going to sit across from each other and don't touch and wear masks. It's kind of amazing. So he's not having any meetings at all. not in person. It's all on Zoom.

It's all on Zoom. I mean, they really, to be honest about it, they are very concerned that a 77-year-old man who's had a complicated medical history would be very vulnerable to the virus, and they don't want to take any risks. Doesn't at least some of the public see that as a vulnerability? It's a vulnerability. I suppose certainly it's also, in a way, they're trying to turn it into a strength by saying, We take doctors seriously. We take medical advice seriously, unlike our opponent.

So how did you handle the social distancing? Give me the, you know, the scene where you're sitting, how far apart? Could you hear him? So I was sitting in a chair waiting for him to arrive. And first thing I hear is his voice, actually, before I saw him. Welcome to my mom's house. How are you? He said, welcome to my mom's house. And that's because the little house that we were in had, had been built for his mom shortly after his dad died. I'd walk in and she'd be in that chair downstairs, facing the fireplace, watching the television. She had a hasick there.

And he then, without me asking a question, this was kind of, you know, the Biden at his most Biden-like, where he just launched into a store. This used to be a little tiny barn. Telling me about the history of the house and why he built it and what it meant to him and his parents and so on. She said, Joey, if you'd be a little bit of, build me a house, I'll move in here. I said, honey, I don't have money to build the house.

And in some ways, you know, I was struck by the fact, David, that we've all been listening in one form or another to Joe Biden since the Nixon administration. I mean, he's been a feature of public life for so long. And there is a very recognizable Joe Biden way of thinking out loud where he kind of wanders around occasionally. And then right at the moment where you think we have really lost our way, he lands on something. and he lands on something meaningful. And there was an example of that that really struck me, which was... What was that? I asked him, what did you learn from the protests after the killing of George Floyd? What did you learn, actually? And he said, at first he started talking about his history of sort of thinking about civil rights and the black freedom struggle.

And we were veering off into history for a moment. And then he said, you know, I got to be honest, I was embarrassed to discover that one of the myths that I have believed in for a long time was not true. And that myth was that we were marching forward slowly, but inexorably in the direction of greater recognition of the existence of discrimination and systemic racism in our society. But we were moving in the right direction. And he said, what I was wrong about was that I thought we could actually eliminate hate. What I didn't realize of, listen, I'm embarrassed to say. I thought you could defeat. hate, hate. It can't. It only hides. It crawls under the rocks. And when given oxygen by any

person in authority, it comes to roaring back out. And what I realized is the words of a president, even a lousy president, matter. They can take you to war. They can bring peace. They can the market rise, they can hold it fall, but they can also give hate oxygen. What Biden is basically saying is, I'm going to bring back something that looks more recognizable to you as a presidency, my fellow American, meaning some position of some modesty, some decency, some basic aspiration towards a more perfect union to be grand about it. Where Trump not running, I probably wouldn't be running. But he's so contrary to everything that I believe about government

and that's sort of the antithesis of what I think we should be doing. We have always talked about, we've thought about, we've never lived up to it. We, the people, hold these truths to be self-evident. Every kid learns it. I think most of us thought, even those with a lot of experience, thought that that it's always going to be. be that way to me. We've never, we've never met it, but we constantly move closer and closer and closer to more inclusion. And all of a sudden, you're thinking yourself, holy God, look at these guys, look what's happening. Look what's being done. Look what's being said, not just by him, but by his followers and some of his, some of his elected colleagues. Evan, we saw very clearly

at the Democratic Convention that Biden is running on the idea that his presidency would be a kind of restoration, that it would restore the country to an extent spiritually as well as politically, that he'd bring a sense of non-emergency back to American public life. What are the risks of running such a campaign? That can sound at times like something really unappealing, which is a return to status quo ante, which was all of the conditions that. it led to Donald Trump, like radical inequality, completely untended issues around race, around the basic structure of American capitalism. And that's what worries people, is they say that in his zeal to say, well, I'm going to bring us back to normalcy, that that becomes actually an excuse for

not taking on the hard problems. Well, a return to normalcy would include a, and it already includes environmental disasters that make this pandemic look look like wiffleball. And that's actually an issue that he is showing himself to be more movable on. I mean, one of the things, if you look at what's happened to Joe Biden over the course of the last few months since he secured the nomination, is that he has done the opposite thing that usually Democratic candidates do. Usually they get to the general election and they start marching to the right because they have to win over all these general election voters. Actually, he's gone the other way, which is a reflection of how much he realizes that they need to bring in the left.

They have become more progressive on issues, and one of them is on the environment. I talked to a number of people who have been at the sort of leading edge of progressive climate politics. And they said, look, we did not expect that Joe Biden was going to move to the left. He's ended up coming to a position that's much more aggressive, much more ambitious than they thought he would. And I think that's because he didn't come into this race with a fully baked climate policy. It's one in which he sees that as something where he can move, and they've pushed him. I think what people found out, and maybe you already knew, I don't know, is my record on the environment was way ahead of everybody else's. I mean, for real, that sounds like, you know, but for God's sake, that's how I got engaged

in the first place. So what happened was they'd say, oh, yeah, well, you're the guy back in 86 who said global warming is a big problem. Or you're the guy that did the Coastal Zone Act and made sure it was like, oh my God, didn't realize that. How does that happen? They put together these task forces that combine some Bernie Sanders people with some Joe Biden people on issues like climate change, the economy, and so on. And a lot of the Bernie Sanders folks were pretty dubious at the outset. And they said, is this going to be real? And I talked to them afterwards and they said, we actually were surprised at how much they were willing to talk to us and how much it came it came through in the platform.

And when people look at these task forces and they see the work, that that was a really ecumenical group you brought in a lot of people. It really was. It was a difficult decision. Yeah. Risk.

No, for real. I know, I think you fully appreciate it because I had to be sure that Bernie was serious. Wasn't going to make this an ideological jihad here. I said, Bernie, if you want these set up in order for me to try to insist that I'd be for Medicare for all if I insist on and go down the list.

I said, this is not where it's going to go. But I said, I'm open. I hear you. I'm ready to listen. And I'm involved. And so let me know. Two things happened. One, I was convinced that I had to move further on some things that I hadn't focused on.

For example, it's going to be very hard, but it makes. some sense to move the Social Security age to 60. That's going to be hard to do, but it makes sense to do it. Secondly, I realize that, you know, I am paying off Bo Biden's college loans. He never missed a payment, but when he graduated from undergraduate school and law school, it was $124,000, you know. My generic point is when you look at it, all of a sudden it becomes clear and clear that this generation has really been screwed. These were really the most open, the most least prejudice, the brightest, the best educated generation of American history. They're beginning to graduate the relatively young millennials to the Zs. What's happening?

They end up with 9-11. They end up with a war. They end up with the Great Recession. And then they end up with this. And so this generation deserves help in the middle of this crisis. Evan, it sounds as if Joe Biden, at the tender age of 77, is making an argument for generational change. Now, how is that supposed to work? Well, part of this is his own self-image.

Remember, he came into office when he was the, pushy young guy. He was so young when he was elected to the Senate that he wasn't even old enough to take his seat on the day he was elected. He had to wait until after the, you know, until he was actually sworn in when he was old enough. He has this very sort of small circle of AIDS who've been with him for a long time. They're going to be in the government. These are people like Ron Clayne, who was Barack Obama's Ebola czar. Those guys, and most of them are guys, will be around Joe Biden, no question. But he said to me at one point, Look, I get that my government has to look much, much more like America.

It just has to. It really needs to. But if he is able to create room in the administration to give people meaningful, prominent roles on the left and particularly young people, then he's actually making good on that promise. But that's what it will take to make it meaningful. Evan, all in all, do you feel like the tensions between Biden and the left have been largely resolved? because those tensions were really pronounced, and were there still hints of those tensions at the nominating convention? Yeah, there were moments where it felt as if the tensions within the party had been suppressed for the moment. I mean, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was given a specific task,

which was to formally nominate Bernie Sanders, and it was a brief speaking slot, and some people would have liked to hear more from her. But the larger effect was that they decided that, for the moment. They really did try to have a fragile piece of a certain kind. And there will be time for those fights to resume if they're lucky enough to win the presidency. With Biden is the past prolog. In other words, he has on his record certain things that would speak of his right-mindedness or virtues. But he's also got, he voted for the deregulation of Wall Street, the Defense of Marriage Act, NAFTA, the war in Iraq, and more that certainly don't count on the progressive side of the ledger. Does that history give us any hint as to what his priorities as president might be?

Well, I think they tell you a lot about how he conducted himself in the Senate. And those are the elements that really do haunt him now as a presidential candidate. And, you know, that is the record of a, of a traditionalist, of somebody who was, you know, more or less willing to go along with the Washington establishment. If people thought that it seemed like a war in Iraq was an inevitable or necessary fact, that's ended up where he lined up. But I think there's something that is important to think about in assessing that record. And that's the degree to which he is willing or not willing to reflect on the mistakes that he made. And on some of these things, you hear that from him. And on some of them, you don't.

So, for instance, when we talk about the crime bill of 1994, which is perhaps the most glaring example of ways in which he has a legislative record that has made damaging results in American society, what he will say about that is, I was wrong to support the distinction between crack cocaine and powder cocaine, that that which ended up visiting terrible harm on communities of color, that that was a mistake and that I was wrong about that. And what he doesn't say is I was wrong to vote for the crime bill. He says because Bernie Sanders and the, you know, the Congressional Black Caucus was with me on that. And so in a way, he's asked him being, he's saying, judge me partly, yes, by how I look now, but also judge me in the moment in which it happened. I mean, the good news is the bad news. Everybody knows me.

And you guys know me, the good and bad. I'm not making it out. I'm just this wonderful person. But it's kind of hard to pin a label on someone that's inconsistent with who they are. Do you know what I mean? So to make me out to be a revolutionary, it's awful hard to do. Conversely, it's awful hard to make me out to be a right-wing, you know, a very conservative Democrat, because I've never been either of those. So there's a benefit about, you know, do I, have I lost my mind?

temper and they think I shouldn't that old joke, you know, about no one ever doubts I mean what I say. Sometimes just say, oh, what I mean. I'm David Remnick, and I'm here with staff writer Evan Osnows, who's profiled Joe Biden for the New Yorker. More in a moment. Now, in what ways, Evan, has the COVID crisis reshaped the electoral map for Biden? Well, it's transformed the electoral process. I mean, there is none of the state-to-state marathon. He is not doing a dozen speeches a day, which is what a candidate usually does. And for a candidate like Joe Biden, to be blunt about it, that's actually been a great benefit because he has a history of making mistakes when he talks, of saying things that get him into

trouble. And he's under a much more controlled environment. I mean, he's sleeping in his own bed every night. He's exercising in his house. He's giving very controlled speeches to audiences that are essentially handpicked. So from that perspective, it has been a completely unpredictable benefit to his candidacy. I feel good about where we are nationally. And I feel good we are in key states. But I know that it's going to get really, really ugly. He is very, going to continue to lie. And what I do worry about, to tell you, Evan, for real, as they worry about them screwing around with their electoral outcome.

And, you know, when the hell have you ever heard of president say, I'm not sure to accept the outcome, you know, I'm not committing to that. And he is really violated basically every democratic norm. And the consequence of that is that the American people are beginning to see. see it. And I pray to God for the sake of the country, not me, that they don't buy his appeal to racism and his appeal to this overall division and just split in the country. Yeah, we're talking in the latter days of August. You basically have September and October left to go. Where are the Biden people going to focus their energy from now until election day?

Well, there are more or less half a dozen states, which they consider to be the essential swing states. Some of these we all know. It's Florida and Pennsylvania. They are actually looking, though, at places that we don't ordinarily think of as democratic prospects like Georgia and Texas. And what they believe is that every candidate would like a landslide. But in this year, they are even more determined that that's going to be vital for them because that may be one of the factors that determines whether or not or how much Donald Trump contests the result. Do the Biden people think they're going to wake up on November 4th knowing who won or lost? They are, no, they're digging in for what could be a really messy result. I mean, as Joe Biden put

it to me, this thing's going to get ugly. And one of the things that Democrats have learned since 2000, is that in the year 2000, when Al Gore and George Bush had this contested result where it wasn't clear on the morning after the election, who the winner was, Democrats made a terrible mistake, they now say, which was they were not as fast to move. They were flat-footed. And this time, you see that Democrats have set up a variety of kind of legal SWAT teams who are prepared to go into states and begin to file all of the legal procedures necessary to try to contest this thing. 40% of the electorate seems on board for Trump being reelected. What does Biden make of those voters? Are they changeable? And what does it say about the country in his view?

I was, I really was struck by the fact that Biden doesn't characterize them as deplorable. to use the famous term that Hillary Clinton regrets she ever used. And I think that's partly tactical. He's trying to win them over in the election, and he's not going to make a moral indictment. There are a portion of that between 32 and 40 it varies percent or a favorable opinion of him who have it because they think that they will be materially better off if he's president because I still think there's a lot of he has gotten through

I think to some degree of that 40% saying the Democrats are socialist they're here to take away everything you have they want to do away with the capitalism they want to do away with the the whole notion that you know you can make it on your own kind of thing but I think I think as things continue to deteriorate, and unfortunately, I'm honest to God, wish they wouldn't, because people say to me, well, what are you going to do if you get elected, the day you get elected? Well, it depends on what the hell I'm left with. Not a joke. I'm not being a wise guy. Things could be a lot worse in the next three months, four months, but between now and January 20th. And so I think that it's really important.

I continue to focus on what I am going to do. What can be done. And why I believe it can be done. Well, what can he do? How can he reach those people? His argument is that those are the people who we hear described by academics as the deaths of despair. You know, those are the people who are the part of America where life expectancy is dropping. You know, it's not the New York City.

It's not Silicon Valley. It's not Chicago. It's parts of the country, large swathes of the country that are, in a sense, marooned at the part of the economy that is not growing. And he basically believes that that's the part of the country that can be called back to a higher moral standard and that they have fallen away from the pace of the progress that the rest of the country enjoys. The way I feel about it is I'm kind of in a position that FDR was. I'm not comparing myself to FDR, for real. So it's not like Biden says you're like FDR. but it is not require an ideological answer.

If you think about it, what in fact FDR did was not ideological. It was completely practical. How do we keep America from going totally in the tank and staying in the tank? And what he did was he focused on the things that would create jobs and include more people and generate more security. physical as well as personal security from social security straight through to what he did relative to you know, World War II. And so the idea is just, you know, you just don't take the downside.

You know, corporate America has now been bailed out twice. And we got to say, hey, guys, we got to let's look at what works. The plans that they've laid out, for instance, use things. like rolling back Donald Trump's tax breaks for high earners, for real estate investors, to pay for things like care for the elderly, things that right now are progressive priorities that are part of coming up with a new compact. This is where the sort of practical meets the ideal. And the ideal is to come up with a government that is actually meeting the day-to-day needs of people. When I ran the Recovery Act, Evan, that was over eight years.

billion dollars, I mean, $800 billion. Yeah. Less than two-tenths of one percent waste or fraud, I did it every damn day for 18 months. You think I'm joking. I mean, it was constant. I'd have a governor or mayor say, well, I'm going to use the money to do the following. I'm going to build a polar bear park. I'm going to, I said, no, you're not.

And so it says I can. I said, yeah, you can. If you go ahead and do an I'm going to hold a press conference saying you're wasting money. All right, all right, all right, all right. Well, I don't want to foot in iridescent light bulbs in my streetlights. I said, well, you're not going to get the money then. It didn't say I have to do that. I said, go ahead and do it.

I'm going to call a press conference and say. Biden came out of an old-fashioned Senate that had aspects of bipartisanship to it, at least on the surface, and at least in Biden's imagination of the past. As part of the Obama administration, you faced just pure obstructionism from Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate. if he's facing a Republican Senate this time around, if he's president and if the Republicans prevail in the Senate, as well they might, how does he go about overcoming that any better than Barack Obama did? Well, the biggest risk that he's facing, I think, is that he gets into office and he says, you know, I can sweet talk these guys. I can encourage them, as he sometimes says to have an epiphany to, you know, Donald Trump's gone and let them actually begin to

govern again. Let's drill down on what you reasonably anticipate the Republican opposition to be like. So what do you reasonably anticipate they are going to do to try to impede your ability to get things? Well, first of all, I think it depends on assuming I were to win, how well I do. Yeah. If we win and we pick it. up five or six Senate seats, I think there'll be an epiphany. I think there'll be a very different view because all you need then is three or four or five Republicans who have seen the light a little bit. Number one. Number two, I don't think you can underestimate the impact of Trump not being there. the vindictiveness, the pettiness, the, the willingness to, at his own expense, go after people with vendettis, like you saw with Sessions.

That brings a lot of people up short, number one. Number two, I, look, I never expect a foreign leader I'm dealing with or a colleague, senator, congressperson to volunteer. a period of second edition for profiles and courage. So you got to think of what is in their interest. He also believes, and I think there may be a kernel of reality in here, that removing Donald Trump from the scene, could unlock a few votes around the edges. Now, whether it changes the fundamental chemistry of Congress,

that's a fantasy. I don't think there's a way in which the Republican Party of today suddenly decides tomorrow that it wants to help Democrats win. But whether they can begin to do some things that are possible, I'll be blunt about one piece of this, David, which is, you know, as somebody said to me who worked in the Obama administration, there may be things that Joe Biden's going to be, in a sense, allowed to do by Republicans because he's not black. That's a really ugly fact of American politics right now. But Obama's identity, the fact that he was a history-making president also engendered this, what we now recognize is this very ugly racist element within

Republican politics. Let's call it what it is. And whether Joe Biden is going to encounter that or not, we don't know. Evan, a big part of his appeal is said to be his deep acquaintance with personal tragedy. The first one being the loss of a child and his first wife in a car accident and then much more recently in 2015 the loss of his son Beau to brain cancer. Now, you know, I don't know many lives

certainly after a certain number of years on this earth that don't get acquainted with personal tragedy. It seems like an almost an inevitability of life why is that so deeply a part of his appeal as opposed to many other politicians? I think there's two ways that it matters in this race. One is in contrast to Donald Trump, who all of us by now are aware of the strange way in which he has experienced the COVID epidemic. He has not talked much about the loss of life, about the impact on people's lives,

either individually or as a society. He's just not a particularly emperor. He's just not a particularly empathetic person. I mean, that is a grand understatement, but that's just who Donald Trump is. Joe Biden lives a very different life when it comes to experiencing other people's tragedies. I mean, it's it's tempting to write this off as political cliche, but you cannot spend time around him without running into people who have had these unusual moments with him, where something bad happened in their lives. And he gives him his self-recentry. He gives him his self-revelling, phone number and starts having phone conversations with them. I mean, these are people who are not public people. I talk to a guy up in Dearborn, Michigan, who runs a coffee roaster business. And

Biden's campaign tries to get Biden on the phone with one regular person a day. And they happen to get him on the phone with this guy, Muhammad Kazaz. And when he called him, Muhammad Kazaz happened to be quarantined in his house on the third floor away from his kids with. COVID. And they ended up having this phone conversation, which Muhammad Kazaz recorded and played for me. But, you know, at the end of it, I asked Kazaz, I said, yeah, what did you take from this? And he's like, frankly, I just needed somebody to let me vent. I just needed somebody to talk to him. And it's a, it's an odd role to expect of our president to be anything like solace. But Joe Biden may not be the one who gives us these bold pronouncements or grand rhetorical moments,

but he might be the person who can have some individual connection, some meaning with people who are hurting. And frankly, as a people, we are hurting. The New Yorkers Evanos knows. He spoke with Joe Biden at the end of July and his profile of the candidate, man in the middle, is at new yorker.com.