Six Takeaways From the Magazine’s Profile of Joe Biden

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Six Takeaways From the Magazine’s Profile of Joe Biden

Running as a moderate, but governing as a progressive

According to those close to him, Biden believed he had become president because of his instincts, honed in the Senate, to build a winning coalition — in this case, with the progressive wing of his party that felt disrespected by the Hillary Clinton campaign four years earlier. “When he became president, he felt compelled to govern with them being a part of it,” said Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, who added: “I also think Biden went through this metamorphosis.”

“For an older white man who most people would call a moderate,” said Pramila Jayapal, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, “I certainly didn’t think he was going to be a progressive.”

But Biden came to see Bernie Sanders, his chief opponent in the 2020 Democratic primaries, as the standard-bearer of a movement that would be necessary for his own success as a president. When Sanders visited the White House in early 2021, he told Biden he wanted to see the bill that would become the Inflation Reduction Act funded to the tune of $5 trillion to $6 trillion. “Bernie,” the president replied, “I want to go as big as we can possibly get.”

Signs of slipping concerned allies

Even amid the Biden administration’s string of legislative successes, Democrats privately shared their worries about the aging president. Two Democratic legislators involved in the 2021 negotiations in the White House for what would become the I.R.A. later said the president seemed at times to lose the conversational thread. By the end of 2023, members of the diplomatic corps were privately sharing concerns with one former member of Congress that the president’s memory appeared to be slipping in meetings with foreign leaders.

David Plouffe, the Obama campaign guru and now the senior adviser of Kamala Harris’s campaign, said Biden’s campaign team had been confidently predicting victory to him and other Democrats all the way up to the day of his disastrous debate with Donald Trump in June.

Trying to salvage his candidacy, Biden appeared on a Zoom conference call with hundreds of donors. The president insisted that things were going to be fine. The concerned viewers could clearly see him looking down as if reading from a script. According to one listener, a Biden staff member selected conspicuously softball questions for him to answer. After the call, several donors complained to Biden allies that it had been a waste of their time.

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