Analysis | History sheds light on why Biden skipped previous presidential bids – The Washington Post

Joe Biden called a family meeting a couple of weeks after a terrible debate performance, pulling together his relatives and a handful of longtime advisers.

During the session, Bidens advisers pointed to the debates negative blowback, arguing that it would sink polling and dry up fundraising for his presidential campaign. But Bidens children believed that abandoning the race would cement Bidens debate screw-up as the thing everyone would remember, dishonoring Biden if he didnt fight on.

The year was 1987, nearly four decades ago. The setting was Bidens first campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Biden then a senator from Delaware opted to pull out of the presidential campaign, heeding advice from his family and choosing what to him was a larger purpose.

In that long ago moment, captured best in a pair of political books one an autobiography Biden chose a different path from the one he claims he will follow today. After a halting debate performance two weeks ago, Biden insists hell stay in this race.

Back in 1987, some aides and family members argued that he should stay the course. Others contended that he could not win. But one senior aide found a different rationale: The more Biden focused on the campaign, the more he was distracted from critical work in the Senate.

Senate hearings had just begun for Robert Bork, an extremely conservative nominee to the Supreme Court. Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings. His debate mistake had come at the Iowa State Fair a few weeks earlier when he lifted many lines from the British Labour Party leaders campaign literature with no credit and spawned stories about plagiarism and law school rsum inflation.

As he would later write, Biden asked his wife, Jill, alone in their bedroom that night, the key questions: Could we save my presidential campaign and stop Bork? And which was more important?

He announced his withdrawal from the campaign the next day in a Senate office next to the committee room, then went straight to work, helping defeat Borks nomination in the weeks ahead.

In 1987, Biden found his exit ramp off the presidential campaign: His own honesty had become a central character in the Bork hearings. The incident, and the deliberations behind it, shed light on why Biden wants to remain in the 2024 reelection contest and the factors most influencing his thinking.

For those wondering what it would take for Biden to bow out of this years election, the best reading material comes from Promises to Keep, his 2007 autobiography; What It Takes, the late Richard Ben Cramers epic recounting of six candidates running for president in 1988; and Promise Me, Dad, his second autobiography, recounting his son Beaus death in 2015.

That most recent book, published in 2017, recounts another politically dramatic moment when Biden also decided to abandon a bid for the presidential nomination in 2016 though in that case he hadnt yet launched his effort. Then, as in 1987, Biden realized that he had another, more important job: Tending to his family, still heartbroken after Beau Bidens death from brain cancer.

In both 1987 and 2015, Biden faced long-shot odds of success. Pundits and other Democrats had largely written him off. But he would never admit defeat while on the way to the exit.

Instead, Biden would explain that the stakes of his divided attention were too high for him to pursue the presidency.

In 1987, that meant possibly tilting the Supreme Court toward the far right for a generation. In 2015, it meant abandoning his still grieving family for the campaign trail grind.

Its the right thing to do for the family. Its the right thing to do for me, Biden told longtime adviser Michael Donilon, according to his 2017 memoir, about giving up the 2016 race.

Those decisions provide the best insight into Bidens decision-making as he weighs his options in the wake of the debate.

The president, 81, is currently defiant, insisting that he is not too old to do the job and that, despite a couple dozen Democrats in Congress saying the contrary, he will defeat Donald Trump just as he did four years ago.

As these books make clear, no one has been able to convince Biden himself that he will be defeated at the ballot box. Tell Biden that he has to get out because hes going to lose, and the history suggests he will dig in for a fight.

The past suggests that different arguments might stand a chance.

Tell him that the world needs Bidens full attention as president for the next six months, and maybe things unfold like in 1987 and 2015. Tell him his last six months in office will focus almost entirely on shoring up the Ukraine coalition and negotiating a cease-fire in Gaza. Tell him about potential Nobel Prizes.

Tell him to let an understudy perhaps Vice President Harris run for the second Biden term that he so covets. A full-time president would allow for a full-time candidate to prosecute the case against Trump.

But these points would face an I-told-you-so rebuttal: Republicans ended up winning in 1988, with George H.W. Bush notching an electoral landslide, and Trump stunned the world in 2016.

The current drama has already outlasted the 1987 political implosion. It took just 11 days between the first New York Times story, by Maureen Dowd, about the Iowa debate speech and the withdrawal speech next to the Senate hearing room.

Biden, just 44 at the time, launched that campaign in June 1987, and for a few months he took command of the race. Until the Dowd story broke and other opposition research flowed into the open.

In public Biden turned angry, lashing out at a New Hampshire voter who asked about his qualifications for president. I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, Biden barked at the man.

Privately, he bemoaned the newspaper columnists and late-night talk show hosts who mocked him. In his 2007 memoir, he devoted several pages to the New York Times coverage, particularly R.W. Johnny Apple, the senior political correspondent who wrote some scathing pieces.

Biden, a University of Delaware graduate in a Senate filled with Harvard alums like Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) or Yale grads like John Chafee (R-R.I.), always embraced Middle Class Joe as his nickname. He clearly carried a state-school chip on his shoulder toward the elites.

And the Times came to embody that worldview. He craved the papers affection but was also enraged when he faced criticism from it.

If I quit the race, I was conceding the Johnny Apples were right, he wrote in Promises to Keep.

He called a meeting at his Wilmington home, dubbed The Station. His inner circle included his wife, two sons, his sister and her husband, his two brothers, his parents and a handful of his longest-serving advisers.

Beau and Hunter, 18 and 17 respectively at the time, were encouraged to speak up and share their views like full-fledged political consultants.

Ive never been a quitter never quit anything in my life, Biden said, according to Cramers What It Takes.

Thats right, Beau said.

Hunter worried that quitting would be an admission of guilt. The only thing thats important is your honor, he said, according to his fathers 2007 book.

Back then, his advisers contended that Bidens campaign could still limp forward, though others worried that the air had gone out of his political balloon. His top press aides warned him that other negative stories from the media were coming, including about Bidens brothers James and Frank.

But then Mark Gitenstein, Bidens top lawyer on the Judiciary Committee, explained that all the time Biden would have to spend on the campaign trail would make him look like an absentee chairman when it came to the Bork hearings.

If we win Bork, it will be despite us. If we lose now, its going to be because of us, said Gitenstein, who is now Bidens ambassador to the European Union.

In Bidens book, his mother, Catherine, delivered the final vote: I think its time to get out, she said.

But in Cramers telling, another voice weighed in just as heavily.

Get out, Ted Kaufman said.

Kaufman, 85, has been by Bidens side since his first days as senator in 1973 and was his chief of staff in 1987. He has remained his closest nonfamily confidant even without officially working for Biden the last three decades.

Leap forward to October 2015 and another family meeting. Theres Kaufman, along with Hunter and Jill Biden; Valerie Owens, Bidens sister; and four other longtime aides, including Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, then his vice-presidential chief of staff and now White House counselor. Democratic superlawyer Robert Bauer and his wife, media expert Anita Dunn, also joined, two newcomers to the fold who have grown close to Biden in the past nine years.

The political circumstances were completely different from 1987.

Bidens popularity rose as the public watched the vice president publicly grieve Beaus death, but the presidential race had taken off without him. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton corralled massive support from the Democratic establishment while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) built a strong insurgent campaign.

But Biden and his team saw a lane. Friends like Bill Bradley, the Princeton basketball star and thoughtful three-term senator, gave encouragement. George Clooney, a supporter who now wants Biden to step aside, told Ricchetti he would step up with any and all assistance, Biden wrote in Promise Me, Dad.

Even Dowd, now a Times columnist, wrote favorably about his chances. The elites, the bane of his existence in previous runs, liked him.

One final family meeting came Oct. 20. Plans for an announcement and campaign rollout were set. These late-entry bids for the presidency had failed every time in the modern era, and he would be way behind Clinton and Sanders, but everyone seemed on board.

This time, Donilon realized there was another, more important, mission. Donilon, who was a top aide to the vice president and now serves as senior White House adviser, had been one of the main drivers behind Bidens decision to enter the campaign. But that night he saw panic in Bidens face, his jaw clenched up.

What is it, Mike? Biden asked.

I dont think you should do this, Donilon told him, according to Bidens book.

Biden needed to focus on the most important job at hand, trying to heal his family.

That was the message that got through to the man who had spent decades chasing the presidency, convincing him that there was another, more important challenge to tackle.

Biden announced the next day that he wasnt running, just as he announced his withdrawal in 1987 the day after Kaufman and Gitenstein told him to bow out.

I had to do my duty for the duration, Biden wrote on the last page of his 2017 book. I had to do my job.

Originally posted here:
Analysis | History sheds light on why Biden skipped previous presidential bids - The Washington Post