The parade of Joe Biden books

What the real 'Original Sin' was

Why now? That’s the question a lot of people are asking about the spate of books examining the increasing infirmity of President Joe Biden.

The man who replaced Biden in the White House is tearing up long-established rules in a rush to enhance presidential power, humiliating foreign leaders in the Oval Office, impulsively imposing high tariffs and ranting on social media. And sadly Biden is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer, his office announced Sunday.

Shouldn’t reporters be focused entirely on the spectacle of President Donald Trump’s administration happening now, rather than on what went on behind the scenes in Biden’s final years in office?

It’s a good question. The answer is complicated. Yes, the media needs to prioritize coverage of the current administration, but we also deserve a full accounting of what happened in the interregnum between the two terms of Trump.

Journalists live to tell true stories, especially ones that politicians try to hide, and to follow their curiosity. And historians will need that reporting to make sense of this turbulent time for future generations.

The losers

There’s another factor. Sports writers long ago discovered that the best story is in the loser’s locker room. Jimmy Breslin was one of the writers who took that notion from covering sports to hard news.

Look to the losing team to uncover raw human emotion, overconfidence and miscalculations — and the finger-pointing that invariably follows defeat. On a pure storytelling basis, it’s no surprise that there are already three books about how the Democrats lost the 2024 election.

Their campaign was pitched as an existential contest to preserve democracy against a man who falsely claimed victory in 2020. Their failure to retain the White House stings every day as President Donald Trump takes an axe to the government and especially programs and policies cherished by Democrats.

Original Sin, the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, puts Biden’s “politburo” of close advisers— along with first lady Jill Biden — in an especially harsh light for allegedly covering up the president’s disability.

Their briskly readable account amply documents the concerns of prominent Democrats, inside and outside the administration, who doubted whether Biden was up to the presidency in the final years of his first term, let alone for a second term that would take him to the age of 86. Most of those people — Tapper and Thompson say they interviewed about 200 — wouldn’t speak candidly until after the election was lost. (The other recent books on Biden are by Chris Whipple and by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes; Biden himself has said he is writing a memoir.)

Plouffe’s accusation

One of the few people who agreed to let Tapper and Thompson use his name was David Plouffe, the former Obama campaign manager who parachuted back into politics to help run the last-minute campaign of Kamala Harris:

Harris, he said, was a "great soldier," but the compressed 107-day race was "a fucking nightmare."

"And it's all Biden," Plouffe said. Referring to Biden's decision to run for reelection, then wait more than three weeks to bow out, Plouffe added: "He totally fucked us."

The “original sin,” according to Tapper and Thompson, is that Biden didn’t drop out years earlier, and his team concealed all the ways in which he could no longer fully meet the demands of the presidency — until the debate on CNN last June showed the country the truth. Had he signaled that he was not running, Biden could have ushered in a new generation of Democratic contenders for the White House.

“If history is any guide,” the book argues, “a competitive primary and caucus process would have produced a stronger Democratic nominee, one who had more experience with debates and taking questions from reporters, one with a more cogent and precise answer as to why they were running, one with time to introduce themselves to the American people.”

But is it that simple? And was there a different “original sin”?

Clinging to power

Like most other presidents in U.S. history, Joe Biden was intent on holding onto power as long as possible. Yes, George Washington voluntarily surrendered it after two terms, setting an admirable precedent. A few, including James Polk, chose not to run for a second term. But more commonly, even unpopular first-term presidents have tried to win another four years, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Trump 45.

Woodrow Wilson stayed in office until the end of his term in March, 1921 despite being severely disabled by a stroke in October, 1919. That didn’t stop Wilson from thinking until the end of his life in 1924 that he could have been elected to a third term, according to Kurt Wimer, a political science professor. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for a fourth term in 1944, even though he was dying of congestive heart failure (and died the following April).

According to the Tapper and Thompson book, the tight circle of people around Biden, who saw his struggles firsthand, seemed to express few doubts about the wisdom of running again. In a way, this is also not surprising.

Seth Rogen’s terrific show on Apple TV, The Studio, makes light of the frantic reaction top Hollywood execs display when word slips out that a tech company is about to purchase their studio and throw them out of their cushy positions. As Mel Brooks, playing a governor, declares in Blazing Saddles, “We’ve gotta protect our phony baloney jobs.”

Tapper and Thompson report that one member of the Biden inner circle, Mike Donilon, left the White House and was paid about $4 million by the campaign for less than a year of work. Other aides benefited when their relatives landed jobs with the administration.

[Bruce] Reed's daughter started as Biden's day scheduler, Donilon's niece worked at the National Security Council, and [Steve] Ricchetti's children would find jobs in the White House social office, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Transportation.

Why wouldn’t they want four more years?

Cover-up?

If there was a cover-up, it was a failure. Americans saw plenty of evidence of Biden’s decline.

That included Special Counsel Robert Hur’s disclosure in February 2024 that he would not bring criminal charges against Biden for mishandling classified documents. One of the factors he considered: “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

Hur’s report was a media sensation. The White House and its Democratic allies pushed back hard, saying Hur’s comment was not only untrue, but a politically motivated cheap shot. (The release of transcripts and audio of the interview have shown that Hur was being honest.)

Four months later, as Tapper and Thompson put it, “the White House went to war. Against a newspaper. The Wall Street Journal had just published an investigation with the headline Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”

“Progressives and Biden supporters in the news media also openly bashed The Journal’s reporting.” The critics suggested that the article was Republican propaganda, since many of the sources were members of the GOP. But the Journal’s reporting seemed to be vindicated a few weeks later by Biden’s performance in the debate.

Reporters who covered the issue of Biden’s age were criticized by the White House, some prominent Democrats and media critics. After all, then-former president Trump was only three years younger than Biden, they pointed out.

The phantom primary

We’ll never know what would have happened if Biden had announced in 2022 that he wouldn’t seek another term, or even if he had refrained from endorsing vice president Harris in July and left room for a last-minute open primary.

But the idea that such decisions might have ensured a Democratic victory in 2024 is open to doubt.

Biden’s approval rating began to plummet in the summer of 2021 when the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan. As Tapper and Thompson note:

The president ended the war, as promised, but thirteen US servicemembers and hundreds of Afghans were killed in the chaos as the Taliban recaptured power. He never communicated adequate regret, never fired anyone, and would react defensively when the issue was brought up. The topic could easily trigger his temper at his own aides. His approval ratings sank into the low forties, then by the following summer the thirties, and never recovered.

Many Americans had voted for Biden mindful of the chaos of Trump’s first term. As Ezra Klein wrote for Vox in 2019, “Joe Biden isn’t promising a political revolution. He’s not promising to drain the swamp, restructure the Senate, remake capitalism, or usher in socialism. What Biden is promising is a return to normalcy.”

And that was before the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic made “normalcy” even more appealing to most Americans.

But once in office, Biden put the “return to normalcy” aside and pushed for a vast increase in social spending. In April, 2021, the New York Times reported, “Mr. Biden announced the third blockbuster domestic funding proposal of his presidency, hours before his first speech before a joint session of Congress. Mr. Biden’s plans add up to about $6 trillion and reflect an ambition to restore the federal government to the role it played during the New Deal and Great Society.”

Tapper and Thompson imply that the influence of Ron Klain was a factor:

Klain had become one of the most powerful chiefs of staff in modern history.

Republicans taunted Biden by calling Klain ‘the prime minister,’ but people inside the White House sometimes quietly called him that too. He steered and staffed the White House in a way that seemed contrary to Biden's centrist reputation.

Klain would say he was merely trying to enact the bold progressive agenda that the president had campaigned on.

Progressive Democrats were indeed thrilled with the first years of Biden’s tenure, lionizing him as the next FDR or LBJ, the architects of the social safety net constructed in the 20^th Century. They also liked his support for the protests following the murder of George Floyd and for trans rights.

What Biden didn’t see coming was the surge in inflation following the pandemic, which many economists attribute to the end of the pandemic, supply chain disruptions and vastly increased federal spending under Biden and Trump. But the voters blamed the Democrat in the White House for it, and Biden never developed a communications strategy to counter the criticism.

According to Tapper and Thompson:

“It was clear early on that President Biden needed to acknowledge that prices were too high and needed to come down," one pollster said. "But Donilon and others at the White House would refuse. They said if we acknowledged it, no one would remember anything else.

1968

Tapper and Thompson write that Kamala Harris faced an unprecedented situation when she replaced Biden as the presidential nominee. But there was at least one other time in U.S. history that a vice president stepped in to replace a president’s failed re-election bid: in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson dropped out after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary.

His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, ran instead and, tarnished by his connection to LBJ’s controversial escalation of the Vietnam War, lost to Republican Richard Nixon in November. True, Humphrey learned of his president’s withdrawal much earlier than Harris did — in March, not July. Humphrey was known as the “Happy Warrior” in politics, but that could hardly have been the precursor to Harris’s “Joy” campaign strategy.

Hubert Humphrey in New York, 1968. (Photo: Bernard Gotfryd)

Could a Democrat have run and won the party’s nomination in 2024 while disavowing the Biden policies that were heavily supported by the progressives who vote in Democratic primaries? When Rep. Dean Phillips briefly challenged Biden, ABC News’ 538 pointed out, “A fundamental problem for Phillips (or any primary challenger) is that Democrats have a positive view of Biden's work as president,” with 78% in favor.

Perhaps candidates could have made a stronger case for those policies. But they would still have had to cope with an “original sin” — of the blowback among moderate voters from the progressive stances taken by Biden.

In November, NPR’s Scott Horsley reported, “This year's election results made one thing clear: People really don't like paying more for everyday expenses.”

“And when prices soar, the politicians who are in power often pay for it — as Vice President Kamala Harris and congressional Democrats experienced firsthand.”

Tapper and Thompson note:

When Obama ran for reelection, he didn't effusively praise the economy-and he certainly wouldn't have pushed anything as tone-deaf as "Bidenomics," as Biden was doing, following a period in which inflation had peaked at 9.1 percent. Obama's message had been that he understood why people remained unhappy with the economy, that it was getting better but much more work remained to be done, and he just needed more time. Voters bought it.

In 2024, inflation wasn’t the only burden borne by the Democrats. Voters also objected to the surge of immigration under Biden. In the Tapper and Thompson book, there are hints that Biden could have gone in another direction:

As one senior administration official recalled, there was a plan from day one of the administration to crack down on the southern border, to send US Border Patrol agents and immigration adjudicators to deal with undocumented immigrants, to build more facilities so that they could be processed and either deported or sent to the proper place as soon as possible. But that plan disappeared, the official told us, and immigrants were instead released into the country immediately pending immigration hearings months or even years later.

What had happened?

Seeds of defeat

The 2024 election might not have been the disaster it turned out to be for Democrats. But the seeds of their defeat weren’t planted when Joe Biden decided to run for re-election, or when he blew the June debate — or even when he anointed Kamala Harris as his successor, as harmful as those events turned out to be.

The bigger mistakes came a lot earlier, when Biden let his nostalgia for the New Deal and his lack of attention to the border put in place policies Democrats couldn’t sell to the swing voters who decide presidential elections.

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