The Press Box - Gabe Debenedetti on ‘The Long Alliance’

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

Bryan and David look back at 'Thursday Night Football' on Amazon Prime, President Biden on ‘60 Minutes,’ and more (02:00). Later, the guys sit down with New York Magazine’s Gabe Debenedetti to discuss his book ‘The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama,’ the relationship between Biden and Obama, and media coverage of Biden's presidency in comparison to the previous two (23:00). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Gabe Debenedetti Associate Producer: Jonathan Kermah Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Talk the Thrones. The Ringers Instant Reaction show for all things, Ice and Fire is back. Now as a pod. To cover the new Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon. Every Sunday night, the Ringerverse, Chris Ryan, that's B. Joanna Robinson and I, Mallory Rubin, will be breaking down the latest episode.

Sharing our thoughts on all the schemes and plots. Skems and plots are the same thing. Dragons. And incest. Hey, it's a Game of Thrones show. So boot up your favorite podcast player and head to the Dragon Pit. because fire and pods will rain. Fellow media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker,

and producer Jonathan Kerma, sitting in for Erica today. David, I'd love to start with some TV notes. Because last week we had the first edition of the new show, My Aging Relative Wonders, whether they can watch this football game, a.k.a. Thursday night football on Amazon Prime. The NFL sent Amazon a good package, in both senses of the word,

Chiefs versus Chargers, which was an exciting football game. Here's the biggest compliment I can give Amazon on the coverage last week. It worked. It was on. Yeah. Having talked to the Fox people from 1994,

the single biggest fear when you're starting a sports division from scratch is, will the game be on? And minus a few complaints about, you know, reception and Wi-Fi the game was on. Yeah, I think it's doubly complicated, or at least it's double the anxiety for a streaming platform.

Not just because it's harder, I don't know any of the technical stuff. I would assume that there's some kinks that haven't been executed before in the real world to this level. But I think more than anything, it's the perception that you just mentioned it. You know, every time, it's like I would joke we started the ringer. Every year during the Super Bowl, there was a new. wave of people who were watching over the top for the first time. And, and, you know, four percent of them had issues of lag or whatever else that probably had everything to do

with their home setup. But they were just screaming online about how the NFL and Hulu or YouTube TV, whoever was letting them down, and, you know, it'd ruin the Super Bowl. And you hear that and it's sort of compelling. Even if your streaming platform is working, you're just sort of like, yeah, man, they really screwed this one up. You know, we're not. But, uh, but, but, you. But, Yeah, I mean, so there's a lot of, there's a lot of very obvious anxiety here. And you're right, it's not strictly faint praise to say it worked. You know, I mean, that's, that's a big hurdle to get over, especially, too, when you bounce it out against the fact that there's going to be other criticism, too. You know, it's, it's just having, the fact that it worked is not going to make

everybody happy, even though it not working, I think, would make everybody plenty unhappy. There was some limited screaming on Twitter on Thursday, and it's exactly what you said. I was like, are we sure this is an Amazon problem or is this your Wi-Fi problem? Yeah, which is fundamentally different than Fox 94 ESPN 87, where it's like, no, no, I know this channel. This channel works. So it's on their end or my end, but I thought that introduced a little uncertainty in an interesting way. The game itself looked really good. No surprise when you hire Fred Godelli from Sunday night football and you watch.

you're like, oh, this looks like Sunday night football. Just about the highest production compliment we can give them. I think they were smart in deciding we're not going to try to change the vocabulary of how you show football. On this new streaming platform, we're going to give you a game like you are used to seeing a game. The bells and whistles are off here to the side. If you want that, go over to the dude perfect alternate stream, which I don't know about you, but I did it for about 60 seconds. And I was like, I'm all good.

Yep. I've seen the dude perfect alternate stream back to Al and Kirk calling the football game. Just enough to confirm that it exists, that it's not a joke someone's playing on ring or slack or something. The one complaint I heard was that the crowd noise was a little low, which I think was probably true, at least in the first half, because I couldn't hear the Chiefs fans doing their annoying chant over and over again. Yeah. But they seem to have mostly fixed that. by the second half. And again,

if that's the technical snafu here, that's a pretty minor one. I was less enthused about the pregame show. Okay. I feel there is this tractor beam, David, that whenever you try to do something interesting in a pregame show, it drags you back toward generic NFL pregame show.

And Amazon did something interesting, which is they went out and got Richard Sherman, former cornerback with the Seahawks and other teams, And Ryan Fitzpatrick, former quarterback was seemingly half the NFL. Those guys are interesting. Yeah. Ryan Fitzpatrick came out with the best beard on television that does not belong to Spencer Hall. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt kind of cruise wear style thing, which we don't see on TV very much.

Every time they talked, I was like, oh, this just sounds different than what I'm used to hearing on TV. And then Tony Gonzalez would make a point. Tony Gonzalez formerly of both Fox and CBS. And I was like, oh, that sounds like pregame show. Yeah. There was this one moment where I guess they were teed up about, will Patrick Mahomes be as good with new receivers? No Tyreek Hill.

He's in Miami. So they could be good. And Richard Sherman's like, none of these guys would scare me if I was a cornerback. Like I'm not worried about any of these guys getting over the top. Ryan Fitzpatrick said, yeah, yeah, let's talk about that. And then it went to Tony and he was like, you know, I think that Patrick Mahomes is going to look for Travis Kelsey in this game. Like, yeah, okay.

Brought us back to pregame show. Yeah, it brings us back to pregame show. The tractor beam does exist, right? But, you know, there's also, the more you try to innovate, and I, you know, I use innovate very, kind of the lowest possible iteration of the word. But when you try to innovate, especially on something like a halftime show, If you don't seem like a traditional halftime show, then you run the risk of seeming like the halftime show that exists on a movie about football or something. You know, just something that's like identifiable but sort of unmoored from history and tradition and reality, you know. But I agree.

I mean, I think that they could have, I probably would have gone, you know, full Fitzpatrick or full Sherman rather than have Tony Gonzalez on there. But, you know, I think Tony Gonzalez is a line directly to the announcers and everything else. And like you said, the fact that it felt like a normal football game. I mean, the gambit here, this isn't the second screen on Monday night football, this whatever. The gambit for Amazon is to get football fans to subscribe to Amazon Prime, right? It's not to convince football viewers that another future is possible or imminent or anything else. It's to take this giant chunk of people who may not already be Amazon Prime. subscribers and get them to sign up, you know? And that's, that making them feel comfortable is

certainly going to be the top priority here. Also, giving us, giving people, I guess, something to talk about as part of the ecosystem, right? And so you have new voices and everything else. But, I mean, it's just a numbers game. It's absolutely the tension here. It's like, how much of it do you want it to be the warm blanket of NFL football, the single most popular TV product on earth? And how much do you want it to be like, ooh, Amazon, innovating? changing the way we watch it. And if I were them, I'd go warm blanket too. That's the play, right?

Don't piss anybody off, especially people that may never have or may not have watched a ton of stuff on streaming. If I have a plea, it's just we don't need five people on the pregame show set. It's just maybe like three, maybe four. Yeah. We don't need that many voices. This is the mistake everybody's made for 20 years. you saw that ESPN is doing the double Monday night football tonight, right? Or ESPN and ABC are doing a double.

And there's a lot of stuff. I mean, obviously, we can, we'll break this down the next time we talk, I'm sure. But there's a lot of kind of stuff in the margins of their plans, right? We get two different announced teams. There's going to be more double headers, I think, next season. But this is the sort of trial run. And you have Scott Van Pelt, who's kind of doing the red zone option for them. He's going to jump in with big things that happen in the other games.

are going to have both games scores are going to be constantly on the screen. And they, you know, there's distinct halftime show. No, there's one half time show team doing two different halftime shows, if I remember correctly. The Van Pelt option is sort of interesting, though, because everything does sort of seem to be, you know,

evolving into a sort of red zone concept, right? I mean, it used to be when you turned on red zone, it felt like something so weird and different, right? And now it feels like half the stuff on ESPN, you know, whatever. I mean, it's just, it's sort of the, we, everything's gotten faster and more urgent and constantly, you know, I mean, it's not like the innovated highlights, but the real time highlights. I wonder if, I wonder if you even need two people at halftime. I mean, don't you, I mean, isn't it just, in some ways it's a throw, it's a throwback to prime to NFL prime time on ESPN. But it's just, I mean, do you really need people saying empty stuff?

Or do you just want to like see all the touchdowns again with somebody, you? you know, making commentary over the top. David, you've carried the rock right into our next topic, which is consuming a baseball home run chase in the age of Twitter. Because we're in the middle of a good old fashioned chase right now. This was Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge yesterday against Milwaukee. And the pitch. Keep to left.

There it goes. And it's 10 for Yankees. Judgey is one home run away from Babe Ruth's 60, as you heard Michael Kaysay on that clip, and two away from Roger Maris's 61. Now, speaking of being served up highlights when you want them, I was interested in how watching a home run chase in 2022 is different from the last times we did this, 98 with McGuire and Sosa, 2001 with Barry Bonds.

because if you just exist in the universe and you have a Twitter account, that next Aaron Judge Home Run is going to be on Twitter. So it's funny, right? It's almost like there is no need for me to watch a baseball game or very little need for me to watch a baseball game and wait for this climactic moment because I'm going to get it seconds later. and I don't even have to have the television on. Yeah. I'm going to know about it immediately.

What do you think about that? It's true. I mean, baseball home run races were probably the last, the last, you know, aspect of sports where you did feel like you were kind of gathering around the crackling radio with your family to be there in real time and experience things like that because it's not predictable. You know, I mean, you kind of had to, you did almost have to engage with the entire game, the whole thing to make sure you were there for the moment.

And if you lost it, I guess you could wait for a sports center. But reading about it the next day in the paper is certainly not the same thing. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, this is what all, this is like what every media companies has to wrestle with in the social media era, you know, in microcosm, right? I mean, it's just the coolest thing possible about baseball is the easiest thing to replicate or to, you know, to work around in terms of spreading it out and the social media. So I guess you just sort of have to embrace it if you're MLB, right? I mean, just give those

tweets out there faster than everybody else because it's not like you can really just do a blackout or, you know, expect everybody else just to agree to whatever terms that you want to set up. I remember 1998. We were in college. I was living with our mutual high school friend Brett. And of course, back then I felt we had the TV on just as background noise a lot more than I do today because pre-social media, that's what you did. That was Twitter. That was the constant voice in the room. And Fox would break in for Mark McGuire at Bats. Oh, yeah. Which was itself really fascinating and different for the time. It's not like, you know, I was sitting down like, oh man, time to tuck in for an entire St. Louis Cardinals game tonight. They were serving you the at-bats

Twitter style, but you kind of had to be watching TV. And if you weren't, you might have to wait a couple of hours for SportsCenter to actually see what Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa did that night. And now we're getting something that's fairly similar, except it just doesn't involve the TV partners of baseball at all. I'm sure their ratings are up. I'm sure people that's more interest in flipping on yes and watching a Yankees game now. I know some of those games are going to be national coming up this week. But yeah, it's like, oh, I get the piece of content I want, which. is the home run.

And again, the impetus for me to watch anything more than that, it's pretty low. Don't want to shut out baseball fans, but it's pretty low. David, we talked about the news site Semaphore. It's going to be run by Ben Smith. This is his post media columnist media project. They released a list of writers that was kind of interesting the other day. Lots of people from all over. the biggest name I saw on there was David Weigel,

comma reporter, comma Washington, formerly of the, or soon to be formally of the Washington Post, newsletter writer, he is now going to be over at Semaphore. Yeah. It was an interesting list too, because it wasn't like,

let's go steal the boldest, boldest face names, maybe other than Dave. It was, let's go, get the people we want, the people we think are really good at all these various websites and newspapers. It was interesting. Daily callers on the list. The Hill is on the list. BuzzFeed News, Axios. Interesting thing is we see that being put together. It looks BuzzFeed Newsy to me.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting calculus, right? I mean, this is, you know, when Bill started the ringer, he brought over some people. You and I. who had been with him at Grantland, but, you know, there's a lot of places like, you know, basketball coverage, you know, where they had to sort of find the people that fit the ideal without bringing over the biggest name or two from the previous shop, you know. And I think in some sense, if you're Ben Smith, I mean, you could, there's a very, very small number of reporters that would, that I think will really move the needle in terms of name recognition. Now, quality, you could, you could, you know, make the case, I guess, but there's a lot of

talented writers out there, too, you know, and I think on some level, picking the best is probably the best decision, especially if you have the venture capital or whatever is supporting this thing to have some runway, you know, to get people used to your tone, your voice and the writers that are going to be working for you. You can't just put out the best product that you can and, you know, name recognition will take care of itself to a certain extent. Joe Biden was on 60 Minutes last night. Much like the home run chase, I did not consume it on 60 Minutes, but at least on 60 Minutes' YouTube channel this morning.

That was a very, very satisfying old school piece of television. Yeah, it was. The crisp questions, the whole grammar of TV news where there has to be a scene where the correspondent, Scott Pelly and Joe Biden are walking together at the Detroit Auto Show. Because we have to be walking if we're on television. We can't have 60 minutes at least for sure. Yeah, we've got to do the walk and talk.

Also, just the way Pelly in this very understated way just is leaning into the performative aspects of TV news, there's this one moment. I think they were about to talk about Biden's comments about potential Chinese aggression in Taiwan. And Pelly put on this kind of disappointed correspondent voice where he's like, and this was one of the moments where Joe Biden said something controversial. Of course, if you're Scott Pelley, you're like, yes, this is it. Boom, we got it.

We got the sound bite we want right here. But you have to, again, it's 60 minutes. We just want you to know that we are treating this newsmaking moment with the utmost solemnity. I loved it. I loved it. That's what we grew up with. Also, I love Scott Pelly's questions. Here is the aforementioned series of questions about Chinese aggression in Taiwan. Just listen to the Christmas, listen to Scott Pelly hitting all of his marks right here.

What should Chinese President Xi know about your commitment to Taiwan? We agree with what we signed on to a long time ago and that there's a one China policy, that Taiwan makes their own judgments about their independence. We are not moving, we're not encouraging their being independent. We're not, that's their decision. But would U.S. forces defend the island? Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack. After our interview, a White House official told us U.S. policy has not changed.

Officially, the U.S. will not say whether American forces would defend Taiwan. But the commander-in-chief had a view of his own. zone. So unlike Ukraine, to be clear, sir, U.S. forces, U.S. men and women would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. Yes. I love it. Concise. To the point. Boom. Get some news. Finally, David, listener Matthew Moore, notifies us that we may need to invoke one of my favorite press box rules, the Tad Friend Rule of Celebrity profiles. Oh, yeah.

Here's the rule. If you read a celebrity profile that's suspiciously good, then the movie that profile is pegged to is likely to suck. Profile good. Movie or TV show, sucky. Yeah, it's almost always true. So we were alerted because Kyle Buchanan had a piece in the New York Times about George Clooney and Julia Roberts

and their upcoming movie ticket to Paradise, which opens next month. It's less a piece than a long interview with an introduction. And by the way, featured some of my favorite aspects of celebrity profile journalism. Clooney calling into the interview from his home in Provence. I love that. Amazing. Asked about Roberts and Clooney in the way they tease each other.

Julia Roberts says, It's our natural rhythm of joyful noise. That quote would appear nowhere else in human existence. except a celebrity profile, our natural rhythm of joyful noise. And then they go back and forth. I also want to alert you to the plot of this movie, as summed up by Kyle Buchanan, warring exes who reunite to stop the surprise wedding of their daughter to a seaweed farmer, she met during a graduation trip to Bali.

As her divorced parents team up, their old spark is rekindled. Sounds great. I'm just saying, be careful out there. The Tad Friend rule, very, very rarely wrong. All right, David, coming up in 30 seconds, Gabriel de Benadetti stops by to talk Biden, Obama, and how the media covers both of them. But first, let us do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time.

Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always great. gratefully received. The runner up today comes from Johnny Harvey and Arjun. Thursday night football, that game we just talked about, featured Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert getting popped and getting diagnosed with

fractured rib cartilage. It was a very overworked Twitter joke to show x-rays of Herbert's ribs with the pictures of a dog because he's got some dog in him. But this week's winner, was the jokes made about how weird it was to hear Kirk Herbstreet, normally a college football announcer,

calling an NFL game. Would you like to hear some of those jokes, too? Yes, please. Hearing Kirk Herb Street on an NFL game is strange, like when your gym teacher had to sub in English class. Kirk Herb Street calling an NFL game is like Jason Alexander playing a character not named George Costanza. Kirk Herb Street doing NFL is like having Colonel Sanders feeding you hamburgers.

This one might be close to your heart, David. Hearing Kirk Herb Street call an NFL game is like running into your pastor at an R-rated movie. If Herbie calling the NFL blows your mind, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, in the notebook dump, let us bring on what on sports radio they call a first time long time. Gabriel de Benedetti is national correspondent for New York Magazine, and he is the author of a brand new hunk of political intrigue called The Long Alliance, the Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Gabe, thanks for coming on to our warm bucket of spit, and welcome to the press box.

Yeah, good reference there. It is great to be here. On this side of the press box, after being a, as you said, a longtime listener. All right, let's pick there a few bits from the book, and then we'll get to some questions about the media. 2008, Barack Obama picks Joe Biden as his running mate. What was their relationship like in the White House? Well, you know, but they had known each other in the Senate a little bit. And Biden had been a, you know, longtime senator.

He'd been in the Senate for 36 years. And Obama had just gotten there when they decided to run for president, you know, against each other. They knew each other a bit in the Senate, but they didn't have much of a good relationship because they didn't really need to. You know, the Senate's a big place if you wanted to be. And they had some overlaps, but. mostly it was just Obama not being particularly impressed with Biden for being, you know, overly talkative and whatnot.

And then Biden essentially just thinking of Obama as this, you know, fleeting hot shot. Because from his perspective, he'd seen, you know, celebrity senators come and go. He was impressed with him, but didn't think he was going to be the next president. So, you know, on the campaign, they didn't really interact much either because Obama was the front, one of the frontrunners from the start and Biden flamed out pretty quickly. But Biden and Obama had, you know, interacted a little bit more than people knew behind the scenes around some of the debates. Obama was listening to the conventional wisdom saying that he should pay attention to Biden as a running-mate possibility. Ultimately, he chooses him and, you know, we can talk about that process. But it feels like Arcana now.

It's not that interesting, except for the fact that he almost didn't choose Biden. He almost went with Tim Kane, told Tim Kane, you're the choice of my heart. Biden's the choice of my head. Went with his head, obviously. And they didn't get along really all that much in the campaign trail either because they didn't interact that much. You know, Biden felt sort of overlooked by a lot of Obama's aides, but they all understood that they needed each other. And it took a while in the White House for them to really start to get to, you know, have a working routine where they were going to be useful for each other. And, you know, they thought a lot about previous examples of this.

But to make a long story short, Biden comes in and tells his aides, you know, I got to make sure I can figure out how to work with this guy without groveling to him. And they end up in a world where Obama agrees, listen, there's a lot going on. I'm going to need your help. And that's how we got this relationship where they spent so much time together over so many years. So a lot happened. And obviously now the public image of them is that it's this bromance. But it's a lot more complicated than that. They've disagreed a lot over the years.

So related media question. As you read the clippings when you were putting together this book, how close did reporters get to understanding the nature of that relationship in real time? Well, there were some moments where it got. close. You know, one of the things that Obama asked Biden to promise him from day one was that, you know, you can disagree with me all you want, but don't ever let our disagreements, you know, leak out into the press. And that was sort of an important thing for both of them. They both understood the, you know, D.C. political media, but neither of them really liked it all that much.

And so Biden was a little bit more adept at playing that game at times. And there were times when there would be stories about how Biden disagreed with Obama on X, Y, and Z. But for the most part, they kept that pretty quiet because they hated the behind the scenes intrigue stories. You know, they would talk about cable. They would talk about Politico where I used to work, you know, very dismissively. But for the most part, you know, what you're alluding to, obviously, is the fact that all the coverage was about how these two are best friends and this is the greatest relationship ever. And, you know, it is true that it's the closest relationship between a president and a vice president

that we've seen in modern history, but it's a pretty low bar. And it's a very complicated relationship. They disagreed a lot. And the time when this really started to come out, though the full extent of it is still coming out. And I think the book helps with that is the 2016 election. And that's when, you know, obviously Biden's going through a lot personally because his son is very sick and then dies. But also Obama is trying to dissuade him from running for president. And they had pretty, you know, months and months of real disagreements there over what the future of the country was and what their role together was.

And so there were some stories at the time that got to it. But that was one of the rare examples because for the most part, they did a pretty good. good job of telling the world, look, we're best friends, nothing to see here, let's move on. And that, of course, wasn't really the case for eight years. We're sort of in a heyday of quick turnaround publishing for books such as this. We joke around the podcast about how the Trump books just keep coming out. But a lot of those Trump books are still very urgent, you know, and cover things in real time. And certainly during his presidency, there was a lot of books that were coming out that seemed

to be citing, you know, I mean, citing sources from mere days before publication. your book obviously goes, you know, well into the past. How much of the material from the Obama presidency is a sort of hindsight as 2020 situation? How much of it, how much of it required the distance and the new reporting that you did to look back on it with clear eyes? Totally. A lot. I think that people who followed political inside the room reporting very closely during this time will recognize a lot of the broad strokes of what I write about, But a lot of it is, so like the backstory here is I spent basically all of 2021, you know, while doing the day job covering the Biden administration, you know, for New York Magazine. I was interviewing hundreds of people who worked in that administration were close to it, know these guys pretty well.

And so while some of the broad strokes of these stories are well known, hindsight was crucial, you know, because these people were telling me their reflections of how these events played out in real time, but also, you know, what lessons they've learned since then, what they wish they could have done differently. And that's why I think, you know, to the Trump question or the Trump matter, like I think stories about the Trump administration will continue to come out for a very long time, not just because there's so much there, but because hindsight really crystallizes for a lot of these people the way that they think about a lot of this stuff. And that's not just, you know, they're close friends of Biden and Obama, but also some people who negotiated with them or who saw them from afar. You know, the book covers, it starts in 2003. So there's a lot of stuff where people can have perfectly convenient memories.

So I had to do a lot of work to make sure I was telling, you know, not the clean-up story of it. But it goes up to early 2022. So, you know, there's a lot of material there. But I try to get as much inside the room to understand what the two presidents were thinking, but also what the people around them were thinking and what they think about it since then to try and give a little bit of a step-back version of the just, you know, I wasn't just trying to do a play-by-play. Give us some small strokes here. what was Obama's attitude toward a Biden candidacy by the time the 2020 presidential election rolled

around? Yeah, pretty complicated because he, of course, liked Biden. They weren't talking a ton in 2018 and 19, but they had a good rapport because they were friendly with each other, so they would talk once in a while. But Obama made pretty clear from the start that he thought it was important for him to be pretty neutral. So he took meetings with dozens of other people who were thinking about running. I mean, it's easy to forget this now, but there were like 50 people who were talking about running for president at that time, you know, like the Michael Avanadis of the world, you know, not that he sat down with Obama, but, you know, times have changed. So anyway, to make a long story short, Obama was, you know, out there and he told Biden and he told the people

around Biden, I'm not going to endorse you, I'm going to be neutral here. That was because he thought it was the most useful place for him to be, but it was also because there was this question in his mind, is Joe really the right person for this time? But it was hard for him to try and make that case to him because of the 2016 experience when he had really worked hard to dissuade Biden from running. And it was a really difficult moment for both of them that they still don't like to talk about to this day. So he didn't feel like he could go into 2020 then pushing Biden away from a race. So at one point there was a meeting where Obama says, listen, Joe, and he makes this a purely personal appeal, not a political one. But he says, you really don't have to do this.

You know, the world doesn't, we don't need you. You know, but not in a negative way, more in a You don't have to do this for yourself. He's worried about Biden's age. He's worried about whether Biden is in step with the political times. But he does that he cannot right to sway him. And Biden essentially says, listen, you know, if I have a chance, if I think I'm the person who's going to take Trump out of office, I'm not going to turn this chance away. And then Obama briefly gets pretty excited about the prospect of Biden running and, you know,

talks to some of Biden's aides pretty regularly, then backs off again. But only, you know, towards the end of the 2020 primary, when it's clear it's either going to be Biden or Bernie. does Obama buy all the way back in? And there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that he does that is really underappreciated in public at the time that I hope this book will help explain in showing, you know, Obama was actually very useful for Biden.

Not totally clear that Biden, to this day, really, sees it that way, but it's definitely true. Well, without giving everything away, would you say that Obama's role in the primaries at that point were structural in the sense that he has a lot of influence over the party? Or was it directly, was it more about his relationship with Joe Biden? Totally. In the primary in 2020, he tried to just be as much of an advisor to people as possible.

He didn't want to actually weigh in and shape the conversation at all, partially because he hates being, as he calls it, a political football. He doesn't like it when people are debating him. And if you recall, during the 2020 primary, a lot of those debates were about what a failed presidency Obama had. He didn't go far enough on X, Y, and Z. Obamacare was a failure. You know, Biden was sort of outraged by this.

Obama was like, these guys are idiots, you know, why are they talking about this? This isn't how we're going to beat Trump. But he never said that to anyone. So until late in the primary, he sort of took a step back. He would take people's calls, you know, people who had just called him a few times for advice, things like that. But it wasn't like people were saying, you know, what should my strategy be in Iowa? It was more like, how do I handle these broad terms? And he sort of wasn't impressed with any of these questions at all. But so then, you know, South Carolina comes around, and it's pretty obvious that it's either going to be Bernie or Biden. And Obama, has at this point tried to make clear to people that he's skeptical of the idea that Bernie can

beat Trump, but he doesn't want to say it out loud because he doesn't want the race to be about him. He calls Biden up the morning of the debate in South Carolina and says, Joe, just go out there and be president. And that's the kind of thing that, you know, to you or I, it's like, what does that mean? But of course, for Biden, that's sort of this incredible buckup statement from his longtime partner who's been on the sidelines for all this time. You know, Biden doesn't do all that well in that debate anyway, but it really gives him a lot of confidence. He wins South Carolina by a mile. And then here's the real thing. You know, Obama then sees going into Super Tuesday. The pandemic is, looming. It's obviously going to be Bernie's nomination, unless it's going to be Biden's nomination.

And Obama calls Pete Buttigieg and says, you know, you got to think about your legacy here. You got to think about your future here. He doesn't say outright. You got to drop out and endorse Joe. Does the same thing with Klobuchar. Before too long, the two of them are on stage with Biden. all of their voters go to Biden. So, you know, no one has ever outright credited Obama with Biden winning the primary, but it's also no coincidence that, you know, shortly after he made those calls, those two people were on his side, on Biden's side. Such a wonderfully freighted political conversation in the book. Yeah, you know, I'm not telling you what to do, but you got to think about your legacy here. Exactly. And coming from Obama,

someone who had made it very clear that he didn't like being in this situation, because, of course, he likes to think of himself as above day-to-day politics to this day. It was a clear moment that if you're Pete Buttigieg who, you know, Obama had been impressed by, but also thought he was too young, thought he was too short, thought he, you know, couldn't win over anyone who wasn't a highly educated white guy. You know, he knows that Obama feels this way about him. And he's like, okay, I get the picture. All right. Biden wins the election. He's in the White House now. Did the way that Biden was treated by Obama when he was vice president, affect the way that Biden treats Kamala Harris now? Totally.

When Biden was looking for a running mate back in the summer of 2020, he used to say, I want my Biden. I want to find Biden's Biden. And Obama actually had to call him and say, stop saying that because you have to remember that this is not what our relationship was like. It took us a long time for us to get, you know, this really strong working relationship. But Biden does try really hard to replicate it in the early days. You know, he brings Paris in on all of the early conversations about building the cabinet. They actually have a pretty good rapport during the campaign because they weren't traveling all that much because of COVID. So they got to spend a lot more time together than Obama and Biden had.

So things were looking up. But the reality of the situation was that, you know, Biden from day one offered Obama a lot of things that no one could possibly have offered him. Because he in 2009 had way more experience in the Senate, had way more experience. in foreign policy than Obama ever did. And that really, you know, fit the roles that he was given early in the Obama Biden White House. You know, that wasn't true for Kamala Harris. She certainly had a lot of things that he didn't have in terms of experience, in terms of identity, in terms of political excitement at that time. But that wasn't what the administration needed as far as they thought. So he didn't rely on her in the same ways. She wasn't out, you know, twisting arms

in Capitol Hill or anything like that. And, you know, there's no better way to quantify their relationship then their lunches because Biden and Obama talk about those weekly lunches that they had all the time. And they did have them basically once a week throughout their eight years in office. But you know what? Like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have had those lunches, I think five times this year. And this year has been a lot longer than five weeks long. Yeah, you write about those Biden Obama lunches and how they served an important role in sort of grounding Obama and almost the extent that Biden was sort of his lifeline to the real world while Obama was sort of, you know, stuck in the White House and stuck on the job. What is the, I mean, do you think that that has more

to do with Biden, like average Joe Biden, like the every man personality that he exudes? Or is it, is there literally an element of him having more access to the world because he's not president? And as a follow-up, does Biden see that sort of value in Kamala Harris? And, in, in, or in, you know, finding that sort of relationship himself? Yeah. Those are, yeah, two very different questions, but two really good ones that do get a lot to Joe Biden himself, I think. So the first part, you know, no, it's not because he was every man, Joe, because it's important to remember in early 2009, that just wasn't his image at all.

You know, his image at the time was distant senator who you would see more on meet the press than on Amtrak, even though he did, you know, basically live on Amtrak. But the whole Biden and Aviators thing didn't really start until 2010, 2011, and then especially the second term. For Obama, it was more, this is someone who I can talk to, who is a real human being who isn't being paid to tell me yes, and who isn't one of my old buddies from Chicago, but who does have some experience. So it was just someone who could be a human being that he could share his experiences with. From day one, you know, Biden comes into the White House with his new chief of staff, Ron Clayne, when he was vice president. And Ron had been, you know, Clayne had been the

vice presidential chief of staff to Al Gore. So he says, let's run this stuff like we did for Al Gore. And he says, Gore had all these lunches with, you know, Bill Clinton every week. And what he would do is he would come in with these memos where I would write out for him. I'm inhabiting Ron Clayne's voice here, not very successfully, but just bear with me. He would say, you know, I would write out all of these asks that all the agencies would have and Gore would give them to Clinton. So Biden says that sounds good. And he does that for the first few weeks.

And then after a few weeks, he goes back to Clayne and says, you know, you don't have to write these memos for me anymore because that's not what these meetings are about. we're not talking about specific asks or policy points. So in that sense, it was very, very grounding for Obama to just have someone else to talk to. You know, now with Harris, you know, his conversations with Harris are very different. She doesn't offer the same role for him, partially because they don't see each other as much. And also because she didn't have the same kind of Senate experience and the Capitol Hill experience that Obama saw that Biden had. And so he was really relying on Biden to explain DC politics to him sometimes. And that's not so much something that Biden needs from Harris.

But the other part of this that's really important to know is that Biden has had this group of people, AIDS around him who've really been around him for like, you know, 30 years in some cases. And it's a small group that he's really relied on for a long time. It includes some family members, but a lot of people, you know, like the claims of the world, Bruce Reed, Steve Ritchetti, not necessarily people who are that well known, but who he's really come to rely on for a very a long time. And it's taken a long time for Harris to really break into that inner circle. He sees her as very useful in terms of political advice, but not necessarily in terms of the day-to-day governing on every single issue, at least. A couple media questions for you, Gabe.

Someone who is reading and writing this stuff, how does the way Biden has been covered by the press compared to the way his two predecessors were covered? There's a massive Trump hangover every day. You know, you can see it on a day-to-day basis. The way that Biden has covered is there's this. this constant calibration that people are trying to make about how they cover Trump, what lessons they've learned from the Trump years. You know, there's this big wish to get behind the scenes on every single decision, trying to find the secret conflict in the White House.

Often their conflict doesn't exist, but there's a real, you know, there's a real wish to try and find some sort of explosive detail, which was so common during the Trump years. But I think that that speaks to a lot of the just like pressure. So many of the Trump stories were, you know, read by millions of people. and it was seen as such an entertainment story. So it's taken some time for people to really figure out that the Biden administration just isn't an entertainment story at all. And, you know, the second half of that is that people have been struggling

to try and figure out how to write about Joe Biden, not only within the context of Trump, because Trump still does overhang everything that Biden does, because he might come back. And because there are these massive high stakes about, like, the future of the democracy with every decision that Biden makes, At the same time, you see people, you know, parsing the gaffs that Biden makes so much more than they would have with previous presidents. And a lot of people close to Biden sort of say, how come you weren't doing this with Trump?

And of course, the answer is because Trump did 15 things like this every single day. So there's a lot, you can see in day-to-day coverage that people are still struggling to figure out exactly how to strike that balance of learning the right lessons and also trying to be somewhat even handed. do you think that to that end the the the biden white house has learned positively from the trump presidency well in some senses surely you know they they have i think what they learned more of was from the obama presidency because if you'll recall back in the obama days there was a lot of hand wringing you know this is when i was covered the white house you know for roiders even there was this constant concerned that Obama was taking too much advantage of the new media and being dismissive of the Beltway press and going around us by putting clips on YouTube or whatever. You know, Trump never

did anything like that. And of course, it was easy to understand, by the way, why Obama did that because he didn't have to rely on the Beltway press. And we were really struggling with how to deal with that. Trump didn't do anything like that. He totally flooded the zone. And as a result, completely polarized, you know, the American electorate. Biden has watched all of that and watched, of course, the stuff that Obama did. And he's doing a lot of the stuff that Obama did. But he's also sort of tried to do the opposite of what Trump did. You know, Biden does best when he is not the protagonist of American politics. You know, he, Trump has to be the main character at all times. Biden doesn't really give interviews that often.

He does sometimes. But that's partially because he doesn't think, you know, he had this implicit promise during the campaign. You know, Michael Bennett, the Colorado senator actually said it outright. Biden never said it, but it was the same pitch, which was, you know, when you wake up in the morning, I won't, as president, I won't be the first thing that you think about. You know, you won't have to think of, there will be whole days when you don't have to think about me as president, which is, you know, really it's one of the ethososes that Biden is trying to try to go with here. And so his reactions, interactions with the press are really painted by that, that he doesn't feel like he is necessarily the person who's going to be driving the national narrative every day

because there shouldn't be one national narrative necessarily. Obama cared about what the press thought about him or at least cared about what a very specific circle of people thought about him. Does Biden care what the press thinks about him? Yeah, but in a different way. When he became president, he started thinking a lot about his place in history and these sort of grand terms that weren't really what he'd like to talk about previously. He thinks a lot about what the John Meacham's of the world think about him.

You know, Meacham is one of his advisors, you know, pop historians, things like that. He used to think a lot about, he used to read his clips, you know, vociferously. And he still does, of course. He wants to make sure that, you know, he's being treated fairly by the Post and the Times and Politico. But now it's much more about specific columnist, Tom Friedman, you know, Maureen Dowd, than it is about making sure that he's on A1 of the Times, you know, looking good. They both seem to care a lot about what David Brooks thought of them. Yes, they did.

Yeah, that continues. doubt about that. And, you know, maybe Trump does too, but that's, I haven't figured that part out yet. You talked about the way that the press treats Biden as compared to his two predecessors. And you mentioned he doesn't give that many interviews. You know, one of the ways that sort of shakes out, both in terms of media coverage and in terms of Twitter coverage, is a lot of commentary on Biden's age, which has been going on since the campaign and before. How do you feel about that? as a lens through which to cover Biden? And how does the Biden White House deal with that on a regular basis?

Yeah, it's tough because, I mean, it's obviously a real issue. Biden actually, to his credit, if you listen to the words, he says, he doesn't shy away from that. You know, he says, yeah, I'm older. And by the way, his White House physician has put out his annual letter last year and said, yeah, he's aged. He walks more stiffly. He speaks more slowly.

I've talked to a lot of people who are really close with Biden about this. And they essentially say, no evidence whatsoever that he's, is mentally declined at all, but he is clearly, you know, physically slower as anyone is at that age. They're really frustrated about people within the White House and close to it, about the idea that the fact that he's not giving these interviews means that he's slowed down or is not doing well age-wise. Because they often point out, you know, Trump has always been totally incoherent, can't string a sentence together. And no one has ever said that that's because of he's aging or senile or anything like that. They really think that, you know, people particularly in the media have fallen for this sort of right-wing line about Biden's daughtering. And they don't really know if there's an easy answer to that.

You know, Biden tries to show off by like running upstairs and things like that once in a while talking about his workout routine. There's a funny scene I have in the book where, you know, this is back in 2012, but he'll remember that Paul Ryan, all the coverage about him was about his obsessive workouts. You know, the first thought that Joe Biden had when he got on stage with Paul Ryan in the 2012 VP debate was. was, I can take this guy. So, like, that's the terms that he thinks with and still to this day. And he's really frustrated by it. But it's true. I mean, he's the oldest president we've ever had.

And he's, he had two aneurysms 30 years ago. I mean, he's not someone who doesn't know about health challenges. So he, it paints everything that he does. I loved his answer to Scott Pelly last end on 60 minutes. Watch me. You think I'm too old? Watch me. I'll show you.

Exactly. Exactly. He wanted everyone to know during 2020 when there was the whole line of, you know, Joe Biden's hiding in his basement during COVID. He wanted everyone to know that he did his Peloton ride every single morning. Sometimes he lifted weights too. The book is The Long Alliance, The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Gabe, do you want to stick around and help David Shoemaker guess the strain pun headline?

I won't be any help, but I will absolutely be here for that. Yes. It's time for David Shoemaker and Gabe de Benedetti guest the strain pun headline. Yeah. All right. last Monday's headline about an NFL team's puny offense was the silence of the Rams. Today's headline comes to us from listener and journalist Mike Moynihan. It's from Politico's Brussels Playbook.

Not something that's in my usual cue, but okay. Germany, as you guys know, has been somewhat wishy-washy about giving military aid to Ukraine. But Germany is now following the lead of the United States, sending 50 armored vehicles called the dingo to Ukraine. So Germany's wishy-washiness is over thanks to the dingo. What was Politico's Brussels playbooks strained pun headline? Dingo. Dingo bingo.

Dingo. What is it? Dingo start, no, um, decision. Gabe is in quiet contemplation here. Um, strategically quiet. How many dingo phrases are there in popular culture? Why don't we start there?

Oh, the dingo ate my baby? The dingo, German wishy-washiness, the dingo ate my maybe? The dingo ate my maybe. Wow. Oh, my God. I love it. Gabe, I don't remember Politico being that clever.

Yeah, that's because I love. They've stepped things up. Huge thanks to Gabriel, the Benedetti. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Jonathan Kermah. I'm back later this week. And then David and I are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.