The seeds of President Joe Biden’s reaction to the Democratic Party’s crisis of confidence in him were planted years ago.
Facing an extraordinary push by his friends and allies to end his political career, Biden has responded with defiance. For three weeks, he has dug in, denied polling evidence and vowed to stay in the race, claiming that he is the only one who can defeat former President Donald Trump. Only in the last few days have people close to him said they believe he is more receptive to stepping down.
To many of his allies, he is in a surprising crouch for a politician who has built his identity on service to country over self.
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But those who have been close to him for years say that Biden’s response is a culmination of the regret, pride, anger and fear that has been building in him for at least the last decade. All of that is painfully evident, they added, from his own words.
It was in October 2015 when Biden, then vice president and grieving over the loss of his son Beau five months earlier, announced in the White House Rose Garden that he would not run against Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. A few months later, he looked back on the decision and said, “I regret it every day.”
Publicly, he explained his decision not to run by saying that the grief process was unpredictable and that it “doesn’t respect or much care about things like filing deadlines or debates and primaries and caucuses.”
With President Barack Obama and Biden’s wife, Jill, by his side, Joe said that “it may very well be that that process, by the time we get through it, closes the window on mounting a realistic campaign for president.” In conclusion, he said, “it has closed.”
But privately, people close to him said he was furious at what he saw as a concerted effort to push him aside in favor of the other candidate. It was a precursor to the kind of pressure he is now under from fellow Democrats.
Then, like now, his friends made the case that he would lose — to Clinton and Sanders, and later to Trump. David Plouffe, Obama’s top political adviser at the time, sat down with Biden and showed him polling, The Atlantic reported. “Do you really want it to end in a hotel room in Des Moines, coming in third to Bernie Sanders?” (Eight years earlier, Biden had finished fifth in the Iowa caucuses and dropped out of the race.)
To Biden, the message was clear: Obama wanted him to stay on the sidelines. So did Obama’s aides. And Clinton. The grief over his son was real. But so was the feeling, according to several people who had conversations with him at the time, that he was being railroaded by people to whom he had been nothing but loyal for years. He deserved better, he told allies, and thought he would have proved them wrong if he had run.
David Axelrod, who as a senior adviser to Obama observed Biden closely for years, said the president has had a chip on his shoulder about the decision, fueled in part by anger that he had been driven out of a race by people who never really respected him the way he thought they should have.
“That chip,” Axelrod said, “is the battery pack that has driven him his entire life.”
The president has rarely let that anger show over the years since, but once Trump was in the White House, Biden was more open about his feeling of regret and his belief that he could have won in 2016.
“I regret that I am not president because I think there is so much opportunity,” Biden told Oprah Winfrey in an interview toward the end of 2017. Pressed on whether he thought he would have won the nomination had he run, Biden said yes, though he also said he was confident at the time that Clinton was qualified.
“So I didn’t feel like I was leaving the field and because I left the field that there wasn’t anybody who could, you know, run the country,” he said. “I didn’t feel that way.”
Things are different now.
Since his stumbling, unsteady debate with Trump on June 27, Biden has said publicly that only he can defeat the former president in November. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, his campaign manager, insisted on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Friday that Biden is “in it to win it.” But in private in recent days, Biden has asked how Vice President Kamala Harris might be able to win, according to Democrats briefed on his conversations.
Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos two weeks ago that “I don’t think anybody’s more qualified to be president or win this race than me.” Last week on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” he scoffed at the people trying to tell him what to do, saying, “I don’t care what those big names think” he should do following the debate.
“I’m getting so frustrated, but by the elites,” he said, his voice rising and his anger obvious. “I’m not talking about you guys, but by the elites in the party; they know so much more. But if any of these guys don’t think I should run? Run against me. Go ahead and announce for president. Challenge me at the convention.”
Biden’s victory in 2020 might have erased some of the regret and anger he felt by having not run in 2016. Had he decided to serve only one term, his forever legacy might well have been that he was the one who prevented Trump from winning a second term in the White House.
But people who know him say Biden is driven by a deep reservoir of pride and a desire not to be seen as a one-term president, less successful — at least by that measure — than Obama or former President Bill Clinton, both of whom won the approval of voters to serve a second four years. In modern times, the only Democratic president to try and fail to earn a second term was Jimmy Carter.
It is also fear, said one person who worked closely with him for years, that haunts him: the fear of becoming irrelevant after so many decades at the center of the national conversation.
In a Vanity Fair interview in 2017, Jill Biden hinted at her husband’s worry about drifting into irrelevance.
When she was asked whether she would ever tell him to just enjoy life, she responded, “Do you understand what ‘enjoy life’ means for Joe?”
She was suggesting that it was unthinkable that he would stay on the sidelines for long. Spending the Trump years as the namesake of an academic institute at the University of Delaware (staffed with people who would later fill out his White House and Cabinet) was not the same as being in the center of the arena. As 2020 approached, almost no one around Biden was surprised that he wanted to try again.
“President Biden is motivated to ‘finish the work’ on behalf of the American people — having rich special interests pay their fair share in taxes, strengthening and expanding Social Security, restoring Roe, and bringing the country together,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, said Friday.
Now there is little doubt among people who know him that his narrative of this moment — being pushed out, against his better judgment — is at the heart of his decision-making.
“They were wrong in 2020,” Biden said on “Morning Joe.” “They were wrong in 2022 about the red wave. They’re wrong in 2024.”
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