The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden‘s White House and the Battle for America‘s Future
By Franklin Foer
Penguin Press, 2023
Joe Biden has set many records or near-records in his long life. At age 30, he was one of the youngest people to enter the Senate, but at age 78 he became the oldest person to get the keys to the White House. He was not the longest-serving senator in history. Nevertheless, he served in the House of Lords for 36 years, starting in 1973, when the war in Vietnam was still raging, until early 2009, when another war (this time in Iraq) was also just beginning to go seriously wrong. He was not the first Catholic to become president; that specific role was played by John F. Kennedy. But that’s where the similarity ends. After all, Kennedy came from the American aristocracy. Biden, on the other hand, came from a lower-middle-class background and had few of the advantages that JFK enjoyed.
If he was like every previous Democratic president, it was neither the dashing, sophisticated Kennedy with his summer home in Hyannis Port, nor even the smooth-talking, book-devouring Fulbright scholar Bill Clinton, but rather Lyndon Baines Johnson. Like Johnson, he lived in the shadow of a more refined president when he was vice president; but like the Texan, he believed in getting things done by taking the political path and making deals. In short, he was a politician and, according to Franklin Foer, possibly one of the last of a generation whose point of reference was the New Deal rather than the counterculture of the 1960s, and who really thought that the role of the Democratic Party was to empower the American working class represent.
Born in what can best be described as a modest home in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1942, Biden’s life was marked by a series of political setbacks in addition to two major family tragedies. Yet, buoyed by his religious faith and a nearly bottomless well of raw ambition in a life lived almost entirely in the Washington Beltway, he became one of the most successful politicians of his generation: first as leading senator, then as vice president under Obama, and finally, against most expectations, as the 46e President of the United States. Often looked down upon by the young Ivy League types floating around the Washington Think Tanks – many of whom seriously wish he wouldn’t run for office in 2024 due to his age and serial blunders – Biden remains convinced as ever that there is only one man who can do that. defeated Donald Trump in 2024: the same man who defeated him in 2020, Joe Biden.
Given how long he’s been around, it’s not surprising that Biden has spawned a significant secondary literature. Also, given the polarized state of America today, we should be surprised to find that much of this work is highly critical of him. A small portion of this comes from the disillusioned left, as seen in Branko Marcetic’s The person of yesterday. On the cover, the publisher describes Marcetic accusing Biden of “heralding the end of the liberal New Deal order and enabling the political takeover of the radical right.” But a much larger salvo of political missiles has been launched in his direction by his enemies on the right. For example, in one section we are reminded by the author of a man with “unfathomable levels of power and influence that have enriched his family” and “benefited our geopolitical opponents” (Marlow, 2023, xvii); another suggests that Biden spent years covering up the questionable activities of his son Hunter Biden (Devine, 2022); and in a third case he is being held accountable (with some justification) for the disastrous manner in which he managed or failed to bring about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan (Dunleavy & Hasson, 2023). It’s quite an appeal to which you could easily add another line of attack that Trump and his Vice President Mike Pence deployed together in 2020: that Biden opened the door to a socialist takeover of the United States. As Pence put it before November 2020, America was at a crossroads: one that would lead to renewal because it was based on the “dignity of every individual,” and another that would end with “growing control of the state… socialism and decline. ‘.
This recent study of Biden’s two years in the White House, written by established journalist Franklin Foer, can hardly be described as hagiography. In fact, there’s a lot here that critics could easily pick up on. On the other hand, Foer, like Evan Osnos’ earlier volume, does well to base his well-told story on a commodity that is quite rare in the United States these days: namely, the facts. Indeed, both Osnos and Foer come to much the same conclusion about Biden: first, about his political acumen in understanding that if Democrats were to win in 2020 (and undoubtedly win again in 2024), they had to win the middle ground; and second, about his desire to repair the terrible damage Trump has done to the fabric of the American polity, both at home and abroad. In Foer’s story, Biden was and remains a healer eminently.
But Biden also brought something else to the table that previous Democrats, like the cerebral Obama and the public-friendly Clinton, did not: a belief that Democrats needed to do more than just manage globalization, or, in Obama’s case, talk in somewhat abstract terms. about a post-American foreign policy. Instead, they had to be courageous enough to stand up for ordinary working people by using the power of government to rebuild the American economy from the ground up. In this regard, Biden proved to be a true economic radical, willing, in an almost New Deal fashion, to invest enormous amounts of taxpayer money in making the US economy – especially the manufacturing sector – so competitive that China would become so. would be left in the dust, leaving America’s allies across the Atlantic wondering how they could keep up.
The other big story being told here is inevitably about Biden’s biggest foreign policy challenge, which was not just China in the long term, but rather Russia in the here and now. This is a story that has been told before in several scholarly articles, but Foer tells it very much as if he were that proverbial fly on the wall listening in on all the more important conversations. After the fiasco that was Afghanistan, Biden simply couldn’t fail. And according to Foer not. After concluding in October 2021 that Russia was planning an invasion, the Biden team acted in a very decisive manner by letting Putin know that Washington knew exactly what Moscow was planning. Afterwards, his team did everything it could to warn Putin of the possible consequences of an invasion, while ensuring that it did not give the Russian leader a pretext to attack Ukraine. The trick was to do this while doing everything reasonably possible to support Ukraine and President Zelensky.
As Foer shows in some of the more revealing parts of the book, relations with Zelensky have never been easier. Biden and his team couldn’t even convince the Ukrainian president that Moscow would actually invade. Nor did Zelensky ever seem convinced that Washington always had his back. In fact, according to Foer, he used to complain that the United States never did enough to support Ukraine, neither by admitting the country to NATO – something the US and its allies strongly oppose – nor by providing the country with the most advanced facilities. -date military equipment. As more recent events have shown, this appears to be an argument that will continue well into the distant future as the war enters its second year.
Foer’s book covers only the first two years of Biden’s presidency, leaving the story somewhat optimistic at the end of 2022. Whether he would be so optimistic a year later, given Biden’s still very low ratings, is not so clear. It is also not at all clear how he would write about the impact that the deepening crisis in Israel and the impact that the war against Hamas could have on the presidential race. Yet Biden, as he aptly demonstrates, was determined to hug Israel and “Bibi tightly,” despite the fact that Netanyahu helped undermine Obama’s nuclear weapons treaty with Iran and then openly supported Donald. Trump (p. 105). But if Biden was bothered by it, he did not show it, according to Foer. Maybe he should have. With many in the US (including the more than 1 million Muslim voters) wondering whether they are any longer willing to vote for a party whose leader has so far been reluctant to call for a ceasefire, Biden could can regret the day he came so close to ‘Bibi’. In what promises to be a very close race for the White House in 2024, Democrats will need every vote they can muster. It would be ironic indeed if a war that the US had not anticipated, in a region it thought was beginning to be established, proved decisive and delivered victory to its adversaries.
References:
Alex Marlow, Breaking BidenNew York, Simon & Schuster, 2023.
Branko Marcetic, Yesterday’s man: the case against Joe BidenLondon, Verso Books, 2020.
Evan Osnos, Joe Biden: life, flight and what matters now, London, Bloomsbury, 2020.
Jerry Dunleavy and James Hasson, Kabul: the untold story of Biden’s fiasco New York, Little, Brown & Company, 2023.
Miranda Devine, Laptop from hell, New York, Post Hill Press, 2022.
Vice President Pence’s comments on the dangers of socialismLaw and Justice, July 17, 2020.
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