The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House... by Franklin Foer--Damned If You Do; Damned If You Don't!--A Review and Discussion

For Biden the process and the substance were intertwined. Although he liked to brag about being a constitutional scholar—on the basis of seventeen years Biden had spent as an adjunct professor at Widener University Delaware Law School—he really had one primary profession in his career: he was a politician. His expertise was nose counting, horse trading, and spreading a thick layer of flattery over his audiences.

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Some call Joe Biden boring... Me, after spending nearly 40 years on a university campus, where nobody was concerned with you as a person unless you made a mistake or a complaint had been received, I'll take Joe's exceptional experience and expertise and never hearing much communication from him because we learned from the news that he was doing his job, even if some were not totally happy with the "how" it had been done, over any individual who had NO governmental expertise. Me, I can guarantee from my professional career on a university campus, I had better credentials to handle a political job than the former president did... especially in the mechanics of getting various tasks done via a simple plan of action.

One major thing this book reveals is that President Biden seeks out, uses and depends upon the input from a group of experts in a specific field. Only then will he begin to formulate a proposal for accomplishing an important mission...

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Just before the New Year, when Biden called his friend Jon Meacham, he plastered on a resolute face. By any objective measure, he was in a terrible place. For months, he had invested his precious presidential time into the pursuit of Build Back Better, only to look like a fool when Joe Manchin sideswiped him on Fox News. Despite the attention he devoted to Vladimir Putin, Russian troops were rolling toward the Ukrainian border. Not so many months earlier, Biden had told aides that his presidency would be defined by his response to COVID, yet omicron was surging through households and schools and workplaces, a triggering reminder of the early days of the pandemic. The primary agenda item for the call with Meacham was hardly more uplifting. The president was looking ahead to a grim milestone. He wanted to discuss a speech commemorating the first anniversary of January 6 that Meacham was helping write. Part of why Biden felt simpatico with Meacham was the sentiment in the subtitle of the historian’s most recent book, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. Biden was among the truest believers in the power of the better angels. They might advance only a few yards at a time, but they kept on advancing. That faith, however, had begun to wobble. The past year had chastened him. He began it hopeful that the nation would embrace the blessing of the vaccine. But moral suasion and logic failed to move red America to protect itself. The power of right-wing propaganda inoculated a large portion of the country against reason. By the end of September, the nation had exhausted Biden’s faith in the better angels. Because so many Americans resisted the collective efforts to smash the virus, he tried to force their compliance by mandating the vaccination of the military, the federal bureaucracy, health care workers, and employees of large companies. And he was done politely asking. When he announced the mandates, he bellowed, “We are patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” 

Working through drafts of the January 6 speech with Meacham and Mike Donilon, Biden kept pushing them to toughen the language, to harden the speech’s critique of Donald Trump. That, too, represented a shift in his thinking. When he came into office, he felt as if he could destroy Donald Trump by ignoring him. He worried that by going near the fire, he would feed it. So he rarely mentioned him by name. When the former president held a rally or issued a menacing statement, Biden resisted the impulse to respond. As he edited the speech, it was as if he were permitting himself to fully process the horror of January 6. The more he paused to think hard about it, the angrier he became. Even after rioters went in search of Mike Pence’s neck, even after congressional leaders feared for their own lives, the Republican Party remained staunchly loyal to Trump. The party was enthusiastically complicit in Trump’s plot to short-circuit the next election. He said he was done dancing around the subject of Trump. This was the occasion to deliver the indictment of Trump that history demanded and the man deserved. In the final draft, Biden stuck to the literary conceit of omitting Trump’s name. But he now did so derisively. “He’s not just a former president. He’s a defeated former president” was a statement intended to wound what he described as Trump’s “bruised ego.” Even before his writers began working on the speech, Biden knew that he wanted to deliver it in Statuary Hall, where insurrectionists had literally defecated on Congress. Standing on the site of the riot, he wanted to recount history without euphemism, to provide a rejoinder to the right-wing revisionists who sought to soften memories of the day. The threats against democracy were ominous, and he believed that they needed to be described with graphic imagery: “I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy.” Meacham had worked on Biden’s inaugural, a speech that celebrated the resilience of institutions. As he watched the evolution of this speech, he thought to himself that his friend had journeyed from Locke to Hobbes, to a darker, more realistic view of human nature. At the age of seventy-nine, Biden was confronting his teetering faith in better angels. — As Meacham and Donilon finished the January 6 speech, he wanted them to draft a companion address. A week later, on January 11, he intended to fly to Atlanta, to the cradle of the civil rights movement, to lay out his prescription for the crisis of American democracy. 

The consistent underestimation of Joe Biden was his diesel. It propelled him to keep chasing the image, over the course of three presidential runs. He pursued it into his late seventies, even though diminishingly few of his peers considered it plausible—and even though his inability to surrender his ambitions occasionally verged on the undignified. He believed that fate—a word strewn across his monologues—sometimes required him to travel the ugly path to success. At every station in his adult life, joy marched in lockstep with trauma. And when the image in his head transposed itself into reality on January 20, 2021, it seemed entirely fitting that the inauguration, which he had so long desired, deviated so wildly from his expectations, and was stalked by death...

In the dream version of the day, he solemnly strides onto the stage erected on the west front of the Capitol, through doors held open by marines. But when that day arrived, the glass in those doors was shattered. Two weeks earlier, right-wing paramilitaries battered them with flagpoles and purloined police shields in a violent quest to prevent him from ever taking office. The inaugural dais looked down onto steps, where police officers trying to fight off the surging mob had slipped in pools of blood. Instead of a democratic extravaganza, his inauguration was surrounded by wire fences and Jersey barriers, guarded by armored vehicles and twenty-six thousand members of the National Guard who descended on Washington for the event, determined to prevent a reprise of the violence of the sixth of January. Even if the public had been permitted to pass through the checkpoints surrounding the city center, it wouldn’t have come. Through the winter, it sheltered at home, worried that it might die by inhaling particles of disease wafting in the air. A global pandemic was at its lethal peak. On January 19, the eve of his inaugural, COVID’s death toll surpassed four hundred thousand. Despite the development of effective vaccines, the government had scant doses—and no effective plan for distributing them. To fill the expanse of the unoccupied Mall, inaugural planners planted two hundred thousand flags across the lawn, representing the absentees. Biden couldn’t address an adoring crowd, just sheets fluttering in the wind. This was not the image in his head. It was a postapocalyptic tableau—and the nation that he inherited. — The electorate turned to Joe Biden as a balm. Postmortems of his victory ascribed his success to the fact that voters hoped the kindly grandfather might impose calm and decency, a bit of boredom, and a dose of competence, after four erratic, enervating years of Trump. But voters’ expectations for Biden didn’t line up with his own.

“I’ve never done anything like this, where everything you write gets mined and turned into clickbait,” Frank Foer told me about his new book The Last Politician, a detailed study of the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency. “Fox News and the New York Post pull something out and act like it’s a critique of Biden. And their audience buys the book and writes Amazon reviews that trash it, saying it’s a puff piece.”

I wouldn’t call The Last Politician a puff piece or critique. It’s an attempt to understand a White House that has conducted much of its business outside the spotlight, perhaps to its detriment. It’s a chronicle of a presidency at a time of transformation, while it drives some of that transformation itself. It offers the opposite of lazy narratives about an old president, disconnected from events shaping the nation. But it also shows how the White House reinforces that narrative through its theory of politics. Continue on with another review...

While pulling things together to begin my review of Franklin Foer's latest book, this time, moving into the first two years of Biden's presidency, I took the time to check Amazon reviews. Over 46% were "1s," a clear sign to me that MAGA members had moved quickly to place their negatives, whether or not they even read the book. Things like "if you like Biden" you'll like this book??? What exactly does that even mean? The book was written by Franklin Foer--Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor of The New Republic, commenting on contemporary issues from a liberal perspective.

As you can see, Foer is already identifying himself as a liberalist, or, at least, it is his assignment to write on those issues that are defined as liberal. But does that mean he is a Biden supporter? Not necessarily.

I am a Biden supporter... That does not mean that I have the prerogative to trash a book in comparison with those I might read written by conservatives. In fact, in my opinion, it is clear that Foer freely shares any secrets he might have found out about during his time with this administration's staff. 

First, of course, when reading a book, you begin to get a feel about whether the book is well-written. This one is. Indeed, his extensive index and footnotes provides readers a chance to confirm or even speak against those ideas that were shared by others. He also does a neat trick with the footnotes, he links back to where it is placed in the book, so that, if we want to compare, we can. As a footnote "professional" you might say from when I was working on university master or doctorate submissions, (I was editing), I loved this up-to-date methodology for how to handle research references.

So, please consider my titled statement as being related to the issues as they happened, versus either what the book says or what I had already learned via news reports. What I mean is that, given what has happened within the republican party and the spread of lies and misinformation, it seems that Joe Biden or any democrat's activities,  will be damned if he does--or doesn't... What a waste of time for the central governing body of our Nation!

It is sad to me. I would hate to think that, in my own life, that my value would be based upon how any one individual might feel about me. You see, I have both sympathy and empathy for Joe Biden. We are clearly close in age. Therefore it rankles me, just as it probably does him, when others empathize his age as opposed to his very real acts of performance! And, you know, folks, I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about the political world of the United States. And, in my opinion, if we had more people like Joe Biden, as well as many who are acting on behalf of democracy, the running of the government would NOT be a major daily source of News... Boring, but informative. We Need That Now!

Thankfully, I am aware that the world itself has changed dramatically over the last decade. Perhaps more than in any other period of time. The volume of acts to affect our basic freedoms, performed by the republican party, has not only increased, but has changed to be based upon hate, prejudice and violence. I ask you: Could you be bombarded with so much crap without getting angry once in a while? Then I say, let the President speak his mind and if he makes just one statement that could be taken wrong, then let it pass away... Goodness knows anything that Biden says will at least make sense, which is new over the last administration's one statement said one day, changed the next day, and then moved back and forth just for good measure... LOL And, yes, anything that is being denied these days are surely the truth...and there is documentation to prove it!

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First, it should be noted that Foer spent no time with President Biden in writing this book, other than being able to sit in on some group sessions. In fact, readers will see so many new and different names used, you may not follow the "characters." I was impressed with this. But, at a minimum, a list of characters in front would have allowed readers to learn who these people were as they read.

Foer's book somewhat follows a chronological view of major issues during the two-year time period starting post election. Remember that we were all dealing with the Covid Pandemic that had already begun in the previous administration. We know from Woodward's book, Rage, that Trump had worked to keep the true facts of the severity of the virus from Americans. In this book, at the point where the transition of administrations should have started to occur, those individuals who came in routinely to pick up on the status and reins for this monumental task, after being held off by outgoing staff for as long as possible, finally had to realize and accept that no plans had been made to actually distribute and administer the shots! Thus it was the Biden administration who had to "move the mountains" to get millions vaccinated. And succeeded!

An interesting tidbit was the fact that Trump's "Warp Speed" designation for ordering the necessary vaccines, actually put many on alert since they weren't sure that the vaccines had received full testing. But, then, of course, we all knew that it was Trump himself who refused to wear masks and his rhetoric led to the unwillingness of many republicans to not accept the tested and approved vaccine(s). It was actually fascinating reading the details of what happened to deal with the monumental task facing the new administration. However, as we read, it was clear that the competency of these incoming people could not have been better prepared to brainstorm and move forward...

One of the fascinating pieces of new information I learned is that this president and administration had many aides that were either just out of university(s) or in early years of working. (These aides were those I mentioned above as new characters.) To me, this awareness allowed me to realize and approve of the fact that Biden is quite aware that he needed people with more up-to-date methods and information, while at the same time, he was then able to merge his own significant wealth of experience and knowledge, to bring about the best possible decisions or plans of action. To me, this totally takes away any concern about Biden's age, since he, in effect, is providing the perspectives of both the old and the new in all issues affecting the United States. 

“I’m now the fourth United States President to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan: two Republicans, two Democrats.” Pushing his finger into the podium, he intoned, “I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.”

One of the early decisions of the new administration was to make a decisive act that had been "talked" about for over 20 years, but never acted upon. Here is where I began to think about that old saying: You are damned if you do and damned if you don't. Specifically, it was a goal of President Biden to bring back our American soldiers... And he had the guts to follow through and do it...

Now here's the key point of the situation. Trump had met with the Taliban and given a date by which America would withdraw. Did action begin at that time to actually plan for and implement? No. We begin to see a pattern, do we not? Trump talked and claimed of actions... But then never really followed through on dealing with the entire picture and its potential ramifications... So, really, few actual accomplishments were made.

Consider two specific points. There had been no early preparation for an easy withdrawal. Indeed, there had been no review and judgment analysis with the country's president and Afghani military leaders. Could we, Biden's administration, not expect to have the Afghani military, after 20 years of training with Americans forces be fully ready for this occurrence, no matter how seemingly last-minute it was announced? Could we not have expected that the past administration would have been working with his people toward that day? Or, as with Covid, had anything been done...at all? 

Indeed, No... The president soon left the country and the Afghani military were not prepared to act on their own plan, without the involvement of the U.S. Whether or not, during those 20 years, "anybody" had guided the people of the country as to the future, without "protection," it is and perhaps will never be clear. 

BUT, there were at least three previous presidents who were involved with this issue...and, undoubtedly did nothing significant, except one thing. Trump met with the Taliban as opposed to the Afghani government, military and people. Indeed, he set a date for withdrawal. Why? What I personally believe is that, once again, Trump met with who he considered "his" autocratic peers, scheduled a date pulled out of his or the Taliban's hat... And didn't give a damn about the country or its people. He was going to bring the soldiers back to repurpose the money he wanted to spend for his own uses...just my personal opinion, of course...

What I also believe, is that nobody in America felt the pain of what actually occurred more than Joe Biden and his staff. He had done what Americans had wanted him to do. Yet, because of the non-activity planning that should have accompanied the set of a date of withdrawal by Trump, Biden was caught holding the crisis created by Trump and having to deal with it. How many times has the country been left in the lurch due to lack of follow through by that president?

You may even be correct in saying, not many, because, let's face it, the last president was not a planner who could deal with many multiple issues at the same time, keeping up-to-date on them, and being able to, importantly, direct and give specific details as to who, what, when, and, sometimes, how, to subordinates, peers, et.al., were to be handled.

Foer spends considerable time sharing an overview of the interaction with the Chinese President during this time. Personally, I wondered whether Foer, himself, was finding the exchange fascinating and wanted to talk about it. I was more intrigued by the way Biden moved forward to speak of former meeting times between the two men, while, at the end, Biden then went straight to the points that he wanted to bring forward in the meeting...

And then there were the two Senators who went slightly rogue within the Democratic Party. If this daily display played on news didn't keep you aware of what was happening, Foer presents a, may I say, delightful look as two aides were caught in this seemingly power struggle, with even a little break for a song! LOL

Sullivan was an earnest Minnesotan with carefully parted blond hair who vigorously defended the artistry of Billy Joel to his friends. When he would describe himself as the type of kid everyone hated for having memorized world capitals, he also evinced the sort of self-deprecation that disarmed skeptics. His mother, a guidance counselor at a public high school in Minneapolis, burned with ambition for her children, four of whom went to Yale. Tony Blinken hired one of them, Sullivan’s younger brother, Tom, to be his deputy chief of staff for policy. After starring on the high school debate team, Sullivan embarked on the long march through the Institutions: after Yale, a Rhodes Scholarship, followed by a Supreme Court clerkship for Stephen Breyer and a seat at the State Department. He was a favorite of Hillary Clinton, who kept handing him portfolios of ever greater importance. Richard Holbrooke once hailed him as a future secretary of state...

Of course, every newsman wants to include a little dirt in any political story, so Foer included an entire chapter and called it The Spring of Self-Pity... You know how it goes...

As Klain watched the explosion of joy, he thought, Why aren’t we receiving any credit for making this possible? The whole nation could rush to see Top Gun: Maverick in theaters thanks to the White House,

because of the steps it took to disseminate vaccines, and its guidance for safely reopening the economy. The public wanted a return to normal; well, this was normal. Yet the public seemed to think that Joe Biden had almost nothing to do with this feat. Judging by the polling, the public had little regard for his presidency. Only 38 percent of the nation approved of his performance—roughly the same response that Donald Trump consistently mustered. Klain saw something darkly humorous about the White House’s inability to move that number. Each time the public grew exercised about a problem—the lack of COVID tests, a shortage of baby formula, container ships unable to unload in ports—the administration would drop everything to solve it. These were the practical details of life, where the government touched the quotidian, and Biden obsessed over them, spending hours, say, sorting through the logistics of using the air force to import baby formula from abroad. But each time the Biden administration made progress fixing an issue, it suddenly disappeared from the public’s list of top concerns. The public only lashed the administration, never rewarded it. There was no glory in technocratic troubleshooting...

And, of course, Foer covers overturning Roe vs. Wade. One of the things I learned was that there was a SCOTUS Blog--in fact, several...FYI...

In the chapter Dobbs vs. Biden, we become privy to the actual issues that confronted Biden. As a Catholic, he has had years of being told that abortion was a sin. I'll be talking about this issue more when I finish reading my present book... But I want to finish with what happened when Biden began to be confronted with what happened because of this reversal...in reality.

But Biden seemed entrenched, and kept privately citing statements that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops published, excoriating him from the right. It was as if the group understood that it could prey on his guilty conscience. Faced with the messy psychological dynamic at play, aides debated enlisting Biden’s sister, Valerie, to make the case for signing executive orders. Their best ally, in the end, turned out to be the radicalism of the antiabortion zealots in the states, who were quickly availing themselves of Dobbs to institute draconian restrictions. In Ohio, a trigger law imposed a sweeping ban on abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy. Reports began circulating about a ten-year-old girl from Columbus, raped and pregnant. Because of Ohio’s ban, she needed to travel to Indiana to find a doctor to perform the abortion. This was the sort of morality tale that roiled Biden’s imagination, the bullying of the defenseless that set him off, allowing him to shift into the role of fatherly protector. Two weeks after Dobbs, he signed an executive order protecting access to medication abortion. As he did, he found himself growing unexpectedly emotional, invoking the case that rattled him so badly. “Ten years old—ten years old!—raped, six weeks pregnant, already traumatized.” He chopped at the air with his hands and seemed to almost vibrate with anger. “Imagine being that little girl!” 

Compared with his performance on June 24, he sounded far more convincing; that was because he was far more convinced. This was Biden’s method for working through issues that conflicted him. He needed to vent, brood, and process his own doubts. 

On August 2, Kansans went to the polls to vote on a referendum to amend the state’s constitution to remove the right to abortion from the document. Most prognosticators predicted that Kansas, hardly a bastion of social liberalism, would remain true to its social conservative self. But women, roused by Dobbs, turned out en masse and overwhelmingly rejected the amendment. It lost by a margin of 18 percent. Districts that Trump had won decisively, like the swath of suburbs and farmland north of Wichita, voted pro-choice. The referendum affirmed Biden’s strategic instinct. It would have been counter-productive to embrace the more aggressive response to Dobbs proposed by others. But as he watched the results, he couldn’t quite believe what he saw. Whatever his qualms, he now possessed the issue that provided his party with a fighting chance of surviving November’s midterms. The issue that tormented him was the issue that could save him.

And that, folks, is why, no matter his age, I believe we must support Joe Biden as our continued president. There may be issues that he had promised but had not been able to achieve (but, of course, there have been major achievements that have surpassed any recent president, while they fell short of what we all know is needed, especially for schools, teachers and children.) But, for me, and I hope for millions of you, it is, in the end, the man's concern and, yes, love for our nation and all of our citizens. We must fight against the hate, prejudice and violence now being used by the republican party against our citizens and against the constitution itself...

God Bless

Gabbie