good morning. welcome. the gaithersburg book festival. my name is marc korman. i'm a state delegate representing montgomery county in the maryland general assembly. and i apologize for forgetting my sports coat at home in the biggest fashion pas since barack

obama wore a tan suit that one afternoon and blew up twitter gaithersburg is a city that values and supports the arts humanities. we're pleased to bring you this fabulous festival, thanks in part to the generous support of our sponsors, including our title, the carnegie at washington, and all of our great volunteers. you see them. please join us in expressing our deep thanks and appreciation. a few announcements. please silence all of your devices for the latest updates. make sure following gaithersburg book festival on facebook and twitter. if you post about the festival, please use the gbv. your feedback is really to us. surveys are available on website, which you can access at gaithersburg book festival dot org or using the key qr code. you see on the signs around us. by submitting a survey you'll be entered into a drawing for a $100 visa gift card. i also should acknowledge we have the mayor of gaithersburg with us, the founder of this festival, as well as our state,

and the mayor as well as our state comptroller. brooke lerman, as well us as well. so thank you both for sitting in our author gabe cabe devin benedetti will be signing immediately after this presentation. copies of his book are on sale and the politics pro store and the activity center. and a quick plug for buying books. this is a free event, but it does our festival. if you buy lots of books, the more books we sell at our events, the more will want to send their authors here to speak with us. purchasing. purchasing from our partner, politics and prose helps support one of the world's great independent bookstores. it benefits our local economy and supports local. and by the way, they make great gifts. i already a bagful right over there to give so if you enjoy this program and you're in a position to do so, please do buy books here today and at the store in the activity. our author this morning is de benedetti.

author of the long alliance the imperfect union of joe biden and barack obama. gabe has been the national correspondent for new york magazine since 2018, were among the articles written about his two subjects in this book. our how joe biden became the president elect. what obama is saying in private about the democratic party. what obama is doing behind the scenes to help democrats win, and most recently favorite old beats crazy. prior to that, he worked at politico reuters and his writing has appeared in the new york times, the economist and vanity fair. gabe, welcome to gaithersburg. it's great to be here. thank you so much. that's all true. sorry for my slight delay. i was stuck in the traffic apocalypse out to 70, but it's great to be here. we are known for our traffic here, so i'm you got to have the real local experience right gabe in your book's preface you write and i'm quoting these pages

aimed to tell the true winding story of a nearly two decade relationship that has a claim to being the most consequential any in 21st century politics, having shaped both actively and not just for presidential campaigns and to different political parties, but also worse the recovering from a devastating near depression movements, social equality, the right for the of american democracy. and now, depending how you're counting three presidencies, it covers a bond that has been at times tense affection, nonexistent and iron clad. would you say that's the book's mission statement? yeah, i think you basically covered it there was about 400 pages of that. you. but yeah i think the way that i i'll you about why i decided to write this i set out to i've been covering both of them for quite some time. president obama and biden. but i set out to write this in, the aftermath of the 2020 election because i was seeing a strain of coverage that really struck me as as basically and

what this was was there there were story after story and broadcast broadcast about, you know, implicitly what we were in for now was a restoration of the obama years. and obviously there was something to that and that was certainly the subtext of a lot of the way biden campaigned in 2020. but i knew that of them actually saw it that way personally and that their relationship was pretty far from this, you know, seamless bromance as they like to talk about it more than this, a little bit more than that. joe biden loves this book. biden wrote that. he displays it in his office. he does display it or or one of those he has a number, these picture books or mystery novels about their fictional time together that he loves talking about. but anyways, obviously we all know that the public images that they are these again their relationship really been seamless for a very long time that they're very close friends. they refer to each other as brothers. but the truth is that they look at politics very differently now. they were fully formed politicians both before they interacted for the first time. and there have been some very significant ups and downs certainly before the time they

became president, vice president, but really since as well and you know that includes during their eight years in the white house. so this this idea that were simply going to return to what many democrats thought of as the good old days pre-trump was not really at all true. and so i set out to report on this. i talked to lots and lots and lots and lots people and thought back to those good old days or that's what that's how a lot of people framed it anyway. and away with a much more complicated story which is that it's certainly the closest relationship that we've had in modern times between a president and a vice president and certainly a president and a former president. now. but that that is far from whole story. and that's what makes it interesting. yeah. so reading your book, first of all, obviously, as you said, it's more complicated than the stereotype and going to sort of bucket it into a different is recognizing that there's bleeding between those phases. but reading your book i sort of looked at it as kind of the early days when they first met and served together in the senate through the campaign in 2008.

and of course, the presidency, the presidency or that the intermediate period between that the the presidencies of barack obama and joe and of course, the current period we're in is the biden presidency. and as i said, i think that's far too simplified, but i think it's a good way to sort of walk through some of the issues for that, for the audience. so, you know, starting with those sort of early days, when did they first meet so. first interacted? well, it's a little bit of a complicated question. you do get different answers from different people. the real answer is that they first met for the first time after obama was elected to the senate in 2004. but that was a time when joe biden had basically thought about running for president, was decided ultimately not to. in 2004, believe that he was to be john kerry's secretary of state and had seen obama perform at the 2004 convention, which is, of course, the star turn that turned him into this political superstar and had seen

that all these people were essentially asking, what is that guy going to run for president one day? and he had cautionary words for the obama team. this is biden, who had already been in the for a long time at this point said to the obama team, you know, make sure that he keeps his head, that he does the work. and he thought that was imparting some sort of very, you know, insider knowledge advice. but, of course, this was conventional wisdom. that's what they were going to do anyway. so anyway to make a, you know, long ish complex, ish story short, they really met in the early days of obama's time in the senate when he had first got there, there was a lot of talk. this is early 2005, i should say, not for him. there a lot of talk about the notion that he was going be, you know, the next big thing. and biden bristled at that. but but obama wanted to join biden's foreign relations and he made that clear. and biden eventually invited him over to his office to have a conversation. so they had this first conversation. and biden, you know, has been watching obama from afar he's already thinking about how he's likely to run for president.

28 but the important thing to think about with biden at this point is that he really saw as the democratic counterweight to republican foreign policy. this is on iraq, afghanistan at the time he thinks of himself as really, you know, being an important figure in, the national conversation. he's a counterweight, the bush white house. so he invites obama over and he essentially makes clear to obama, well, sure, we'll have you on the committee. you'll be the most junior member. whatever. no problem. good. have some star power around. but basically a quick little conversation and they determine, well, maybe we should get to know each other a little bit better because obama has to go back to chicago. that this is very early on. biden has to go back to wilmington and essentially say, well, maybe have a decent relationship here, but neither of them is thinking of the other all that much at all. biden's got this other stuff going on. obama's trying to meet every other senior senator there is, really figure out his place in washington. he's quickly determining that he doesn't like the senate, that he's going to have to do it anyway. and so biden essentially says to

obama, well, this is fine, but let's get to know each other little bit more. let's plan for a dinner sometime soon. we'll just get dinner at some cheap italian place here on capitol hill. nothing fancy at all. now, this was a total misunderstanding. they were they were completely misreading each other at that moment when obama biden say we're just going to get something cheap, you know, nothing. we'll it'll be chill obama this as who is this guy think he is you for the first time. obama has money because he's just signed a book deal after the 2004 race. so he thinks, oh, i can afford it. actually. and he also thinks of as this kind of old school guy who's around the senate for the longest, longest time possible, who is not really an exemplar of how things get done in washington. you know, obama had gotten to d.c. promising to move past the old way of doing things. and he sees biden as one of these these old guys. so obama says to him, well, we can go for something fancy. you know.

i can afford a joe biden. of course, back. and he doesn't say any of this out loud. he says he's thinking to himself, well, i can't afford it. you know, and who does this guy think he is you know, he's just a little senator. i'm just trying to be casual here. so anyway, they never have that dinner. they walk away from this meeting not scheduling any follow ups and they end up spending a lot of time together on the relations committee. but, you know i'm sure people here know how these committees work. they really aren't really interacting in any serious, substantive way. biden is running this show. obama is the most junior. they certainly see a lot of each other, but it's much more of obama watching biden talk and talk and talk as he sees it during their time together in the senate do you know if they worked on an actual legislation? i know they were on the committee together and nothing super substantive. nothing worth noting in any room. i mean, there was a lot going on at that time. i don't want to understate it, but what obama very quickly trying to figure out what his place in the senate was going to be. he was interested, the foreign relations committee, but he didn't want his dad, he didn't want to be known for a in particular. he had, you know, become quite

famous when running for senate for giving this speech about the war. you saying that he opposed dumb wars. that's an oversimplification. but that is what he said. and that was the headline. and biden was wary of talking about it in those simplistic terms where senator obama actually may be closer. senator lugar, the republican lead on the committee with senator biden, he read the book closely. yes. and that was quite telling to a lot of people. so lugar was the also quite seasoned republican lead on that committee, someone who talked a lot about bipartisanship. and he had heard while obama was for the senate that obama was very interested in some of the work that he'd been doing, nuclear nonproliferation, exactly. a sexy topic in an illinois senate, but obama talked about it and lugar said maybe there's something to this guy. they actually struck up a very good relationship, one on some foreign trips together that obama still thinks about, actually. and it was quite telling that he actually had this relationship with this older republican but didn't really any relationship to speak of with biden who was, of course, in his own party at

the time it led to some uncomfortable dynamics biden was aware of it but again, biden had his own things going on. you know, he thinking, i'm going to run for president. i don't have to worry about this guy. he can run for president in 20 years or whatever. and, you know, so with that later. so i should press fast forward there what i'm going to have to do a lot, unfortunately, they've got these guys have been in each other's orbit for so long now that back campaign for the presidency i think maybe biden thought he was on a collision course with senator obama. i'm not sure if senator obama saw it that way. but do you recall what what senator obama or senator biden, excuse me was quoted as saying on the first day of his campaign? yeah, i'll let you read it if you have it there, because i don't want to paraphrase it incorrectly, but it was not good. yeah. so this is a quote. this is not me saying this. i mean, you got the first mainstream african-american articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy. i mean, that's a storybook. so what effect would that have on the obama relationship, such as it was? sure. so you set this up well, which was so biden says this on the day that he launches his campaign.

now, i don't know if we can all remember what the early days of that campaign looked like, but it was pretty clear to most people that it was going to be obama, hillary clinton and john edwards was also in this mix at that point. joe biden was running. he was taking somewhat seriously, but somewhat is operative word there. i mean, he really was polling that well. he thought he was going to be a serious candidate basically as soon as he said this and the new york observer published it, that was the end of his campaign. he kept running a while, but his donors pulled out, said, actually, i don't know about this. you know, obama saw this and sort of couldn't believe that he had said it, but he made it quite he said, you know, i don't think this guy's a racist. i think he misspoke. i think, you know, this is obviously not great. but obama want to get into this topic already. he knew that he was going to have to address his race in a very serious way later on in primary. and he didn't want it to be not on his own terms. so he and biden talked. biden apologized. but politically speaking, from that point, it was fairly clear that biden was going to be more or less an afterthought as a candidate himself, was clear to

everyone but him so he continued to run for quite some time. and it was not a very well positioned campaign in terms of trying to capture. he basically would recite his resume the trail in iowa for months at a time and his his brother would stand in the back of the room and sort of wave his when joe had gone on for too long and would lose the attention of the of the crowds. of course, at the same time, you have obama on this, you know, rocket ship path to the presidency at that point. so biden wasn't thrilled, but he was getting impressed with obama. he was like, you know, i don't want to i don't want to pretend that he was impressed with obama. he just was also frustrated that no one was paying attention to him. obama, on the other hand, really had no reason to think about biden at all. at that point, he was so focused on hillary clinton later on in the. but. well, i assume you're going to ask about that. well, yeah. how exactly did it go from being a guy with this misstatement? obama who obama viewed as maybe a little bit past his prime to

becoming the vice presidential nominee? sure. so as as many recall, that primary race turned into this brutal, long, drawn out battle between obama and hillary clinton. and once it becomes clear only quite late in the process that obama's actually going to be able to win this thing according to his team's delegate math, various people in his orbit, including david axelrod, valerie jarrett, sit him down and say, well, who do you think you want to have as vice president? and obama consistently surprised them by saying, i think we should take joe biden fairly seriously. now, it wasn't that surprising terms of the conventional wisdom because he was an you know, he fit all of the boxes that we in washington like to think about. you know, he's a complementary kind of figure. but they all said and i'll get into that in a second, but they all. well, but don't you not like this guy, aren't you? not by him and obama consistently said that he had actually been quite impressed with the way that biden had handled themselves during the primary debates. biden didn't get a lot of time talk during the primary debates because he was not the but he

was it was clear to obama and to some of the other candidates that he was substantively there. he really understood the policy. he really cared about it, particularly on economics and foreign policy. so obama said, well, this guy clearly knows what he's doing and so let's include him in the conversation. it was a long out conversation, but it turn out that, you know when they looked at the polling, when they looked at the focus groups that they were doing to try and figure out who they wanted to be the vice president, there were a few criteria he fit that were very important to them. they, an older white male because they wanted to calm down a lot. the fears that voters were fearing unfairly or fairly. right. that's what they that's how they that's how they it to obama they wanted literally with gray hair literally to show, you know, washington experience and they wanted someone with foreign policy experience. so you have capitol hill old reassuring man i mean these are the sort of crass criteria they were going for and biden consistently on this list so they quite quickly narrow it

down to a few people and you know at one point obama is asking other people had run in that race if they would agree to be vetted. and at one point he calls bill richardson, who had also run and, says, will you be vetted? and richardson says to him, you know, i'm flattered, but why are you doing this? you're obviously going to pick joe obama didn't see it that way, but other people could read it. so in the end, it comes down to biden tim kaine, who was then the governor, virginia, and even by the indiana senator and obama pretty quickly decides they would be okay. but he's not he doesn't feel right. it comes down to kaine and biden and they just have series of long conversation. and obama at one point says to kaine, who that point was thought of as another, you know, young, harvard educated, liberal beacon of a new kind of democrat, you know, washington or in the broader era. and and they have these long and the calculus is basically, if he picks kaine, it's going to be kind of like a clinton gore

relationship where they feel, very broadly speaking, similar political lanes. and kaine essentially says, why would you pick me? this doesn't make any sense? but obama says to him, and i'm really smushing a lot of stuff together, but obama says, you've got to buy the book if you want the deal. yeah, that's right. that's right. thank you. i'll give you your check later. but obama says to kaine, well, listen you are the choice of my heart and joe is the choice of my head. and sometimes i go with my head and sometimes they go my heart again. a lot more happens. but ultimately determines that biden is the right choice. so you describe the obama campaign's criteria for a vice presidency, for a vice presidential pick. but what is joe biden's criteria for the job? what his conditions? yeah, when he was meeting with senator obama, well, he makes a lot about this. he talks a lot about this now. and he sort of says, you know, over and over, i actually don't want to do this. i didn't want to do it at the time i needed to be convinced. and part of that was real know he had been in the senate since 1972. he had never had a boss before and thought, why earth would i

want to have a boss now? he would say, over. he had already thought that he was going to be secretary state to carry. you know, as i report in the book kerry actually informally offered him the job on election day 2004 when it looked like kerry was going to win. so he had been working on these relations matters for a long time. and he's sort of said to obama, wouldn't it be better if you put me at the state department and obama more or less said, well, but seriously, i want to make you vice president here. and that was you know, it was for biden to come around to this idea, as crazy as that sounds. now. but essentially he talks to walter, who had done a good job of it in biden's, and he gets this list of criteria saying, i will do the job if you allow me to do x, y and z. he presents these to obama and. these notions are essentially i want to be the last person in the room with you on. every big decision i want to see every piece intel that you see and. we can't go around, you know, disagreeing with each other in public. basically. obama surprisingly to biden, says, yeah, that makes sense.

you know biden is sort of thinking that he's coming with too much. and then obama says to biden. and this is relevant now, you know, essentially, you know, i want to make sure that this job is, you this as the capstone of your career. and biden responds, oh, not the tombstone. my career. what was implicit at the time and if you read the new york times article from that next day, you know, obama chooses, biden, like one of the penultimate lines. i'm i'm going to paraphrase it now is, you know, they're to have a great time politically because joe biden is going to be too old to run for president at the end of this presidency. so they won't have to worry any of that stuff we can get what actually happened. but that's suffice to say not how biden saw it. yeah, you mentioned other conditions in the book. one is that biden refused to wear any funny hats, and then the other is that they would do something together every week. that's right. the funny hats thing was one of biden's rules that he maintains will not wear funny hats. that's a dukakis thing. he just, like, won't do it. and he wanted to make sure that

they had lunch every week to maintain their relationship. he had seen enough of these relationships. presidents and vice presidents go sour. you know, at the time it was very easy to make comparisons to other president vice presidential relationships that, you know, biden had seen up close because he, of course, been in washington for a long time. and it wasn't hard to draw the comparison between. you know, jfk and lbj young change making democrat guy who's been around washington a very long time for obvious reasons because, not relationship, was really, really difficult. biden didn't want to replicate that. but he you know, obama said it's actually a good idea that we have lunch every and biden made sure that they stuck to that in a pretty significant way that surprised a lot of the people around both them so you right they did not communicate much during the campaign think they were mostly in different states most of the time joe biden was sort of out of the campaign strategy loop. but ted kaufman, who was senator biden's long serving aide and later successor in the senate had three words for senator biden when he down.

can you tell us what those were? yeah, there was a long time when biden really felt like he was an afterthought there. he was really frustrated. he was never going to walk away from the job. obviously but he sort of said, well, you know, i thought that they wanted advice here and he would get really down and feel like the obama team was really disrespecting him. and kaufman would look him in the eyes and, say three words, joe, air two. so the idea being here, you know, you've got a pretty good coming to you. let's let's try and take this somewhat seriously. so things certainly develop. and obviously barack obama wins and becomes president. spoiler alert in the book and, you know, things develop along here. i'm just going to jump ahead into the presidency and sort of ask, how important was f.d.a. and in developing their working relationship. yeah. so i think i write you know a lot of people who look back on this time now who were there on the front lines really think of that as sort of the that that that solidified their relationship because it wasn't totally what their their cadence was going to be how they were going to interact with each other. this was the matter on which obama quickly came to rely on

biden most partially because, biden had this foreign experience that obama simply have. so even before they get even before the inauguration, obama sends biden who brings a republican friend, lindsey graham, along him to to these tribal areas, as they would call them at the time. so they go to iraq and afghanistan among others. and at the end of the day, obama comes or biden comes back to obama and give them a report on afghanistan and, you know, you talk to ten different people on the ground here and you ten different answers about what we're doing here. and essentially, from that point on, biden starts advocating to obama to more or less end the us troop presence in afghanistan altogether. he was very wary and worried that obama was being overly pressed by. the military establishment, other people in his administration, to ramp up the troop count to keep this war going on forever to make a chapter short, they, you know, have debate after debate after debate over this. and at some point, obama says to

joe listen. i understand where you're coming from here, joe, mr. vice president, but what i need from you in these meetings is not just to be like, i know as annoying as possible, but to do it but to do it with a purpose so to really press every single argument to make sure that i really getting every single argument for, you know, how many troops i need to send in or take out at any given time and never disagree with me publicly after i make my decisions. you need to understand, but i do need you there basically making the pentagon's life hell. and biden says, i can do that. and you know, in retrospect there are a lot of people who are in the military establishment or some other departments at the time really were frustrated with the way that biden would go about this in meeting after meeting. but if you ask the president now the current president about that time, you know, he would say that he was absolutely. and that the war in afghanistan had gone for far too long and that, in fact, obama should have listened it more. do you think president obama him for that red team role on occasions besides the

afghanistan debate, also that sort of a regular job of vice president biden? certainly in the first term, that was the thing that they came to do more and more. but i don't want to overstate it. that is definitely the time that it was his primary role to stretch terms of debate. they did have varying roles over, over, over retirement. obviously, the relationship did change when it came to big policy matters. there a lot of times when he was when biden was dispatched to be the man on the hill for example sometimes for better and sometimes for worse as obama would come to see it. but when it came to afghanistan particular, that was the time when they literally would go into these meetings with this plan. obama's style in these meetings was to of sit back and hear everybody. everybody's argument. you know, what he would always say is by time it comes to me, it needs to be a decision point. i don't need to be the the one working all this stuff out on my own, you know i'm the president. and so they would go into these meetings knowing it wasn't obvious to the bob gates of the hillary clinton's of the world that biden had a specific role in this predetermined in this way. but obama found it very useful

great so it sounds like he got his lunches and he got his wish to be the last person in the room at one point. i think in the second term. but at one point you quote vice president biden calculated they were spending 7 hours a day with each other, which seems like an extraordinary amount of time, right? me yes. so that was productive in your interview? sure, it was mostly productive. that's certainly how they came to see it. at least i think biden started to talk about that seven hour figure in the context of. people started to was really later in the second term. well, later in the first term, and then certainly into the second term that people started to remark on the apparent strength of their relationship on a personal level and the way that biden would talk about it was, you know, we don't agree on everything. i'm going to try and push him on all sorts of but i'm spending 7 hours a day with this guy. you know we're going to start to see eye to eye on some things we're to start to understand how each other think. and the lunches were something that previous presidents and vice presidents had done, but rarely did they stick to them in such a such an interesting way.

and say that it's interesting because in the first days of biden's vice presidency, first vice presidential chief of staff ron klain, who been al gore's vice presidential of staff, said this is how we did things under gore. and there's a series of things that they did. and one of them was these lunches, you know, they would go around the vice president's would go around and collect agenda from all the agencies and then give him a note card that gore would then bring in to, you know, to discuss with clinton. now, biden did the same thing for the first two or three lunches with obama. and then at one point he turns to clean and said, i don't need to do this anymore. and these meetings obviously were about policy. obviously, they were about politics, but they were also about their lives as humans. and obama, who sort of famously really came to be rankled by the washington of doing things and really didn't like hanging with people on the hill or washington people did sort of appreciate that, even though joe was certainly a washington person, he was someone that he could also just talk to as a as a

person, as a human. it's not as if they were, you know, watching sportscenter or drinking beer during these lunches, but they were talking about their families and about just their ways of seeing the world. yeah. so fast forward, just want to get to a time. audience q&a how close was vice president biden to running for president in 2016? a few hours away. the important context here is obama had been working behind the scenes for quite some time with clinton thinking that she should be the person to run. he believed that she was a strong candidate. he believed that it politically the right moment for her. but he also believed that biden was not the right person and that biden simply couldn't do it at that time. you know, the overriding thing that we need to remember is that is right after. so we're talking about the spring through fall of 2015, which is when decision is being made. biden he wants to run, but that's when beau biden had just passed away and he was not emotionally able to sustain a

campaign, he believed it in the back of his mind. he knew this lots of people in his family knew this. obama saw it and tried to make this case to him over and over. biden sort of said to him over over in these lunches and other settings, you just got to let me go through my process and try to do this. he believed that beau wanted him to run. it was a very emotionally process for him, but he believed that he, wanted to do it and could do and should do it, by the way, because he was not with the way that the race was without him until, you know, the final night before he makes the decision in, october of 2015, he's still thinking about it. and then ultimately he determines that he can't do it. but this is after months of sort of searing conversations with, obama, among others, in which obama more or less trying to steer him away from running. yeah. so, of course, we all know unfortunately. what happens next? so i'll just jump the next phase, which is sort of the the trump years, the interregnum between the two presidencies. how did they communicate during this time. the former president, the former vice president, well, they're

both going through their weird moments at this time. you know biden had sort of assumed that he was going to be fairly retired, you know, making for the big money for the first time in his life with some speeches and whatnot. but he didn't think that he was going to you know, he thought hillary clinton going to be president. he could sell off into the sunset. i think a lot has been said and written about obama's post-presidency. so i don't need to rehash all of that, but both them were really trying to figure out what their lives look like and what they what their responsibilities in this time. but biden, fairly quickly, you know, started to think about running for president, even though a lot of people around him thought that he was too old or that he shouldn't. there was at one point a joke going around his you know, his staff that he so antsy he wanted something to do. they said, should we just get him to run for, you know, the new county council, which is, of course, the job that he had had when he was 29, he would have won. but anyway, i hope so. yes. so he beat biden quickly determines got to keep my options open. i want to do this obama is

really sort of struggling with what his post-presidency is going to look like. so it takes some time before they any real conversations. and part of this is because, you know, joe biden is really struggling with the fact that barack obama essentially pushed not to run in 2016 and he believes that he would have won that race if he could have run it. i think you actually broke some news in this book. maybe not. you tell me you. write that after mitt romney did sell it. there's a lot of news in here. i have. you broke this news. i'll spoil it because it'll give you a taste for the great insights into the book you write that former vice president biden mitt romney the night he won his utah senate race. i came out of the general of the primary and and mitt romney said you have to run. so he had more support from the 2012 republican nominee than the 2012 democratic nominee, someone run for president, if you want to put it that way. sure. yeah, it's biden has this thing that he does and always has done where on election nights he will call basically everyone who's on a and he'll either congratulate them or, commiserate them with them or whatever how he had very

few good things to say about mitt romney until trump became president and donald trump emerged. you know, biden really had actually quite viscerally bad things to say about mitt romney from when they were against each other. and actually felt the same way. but anyway, calls romney when he wins his essentially to say, well, welcome to the senate. you know the subtext to all this is we're going to need you standing up to the trump. but romney says to him you got to run. and by the way, he was far from the only person saying this, he was just the most prominent republican to say. and that's the kind of thing that was really weighing on biden at the time, because he was thinking. should i really give this one more go? and, you know, he had been thinking the first time he ever talked about running for president publicly was 1974. okay. so he's thinking about this for a long time. giving that up is not exactly that was in his vocabulary or his of thinking, but what he's hearing from people, the political spectrum, we need you to save us from trump. that's exactly he was thinking about it. you know, he really started his thoughts on this last under 20 race during the horrible events

of charlottesville as he's about openly. but whenever he would hear from someone like mitt romney that was you know, maybe there's more to this than these, pete, than these you know, people out here, the the commentary and understand because of course you have to remember that was moment when the all of the writing what was going on with the democratic party was the progressive takeover was talking about people like alexandria ocasio-cortez was, who of course, would come to be a very important voice for the party. but the thinking was this is bernie's party. now, this is not the party of joe biden. and he didn't see that way. so can you talk a little about you basically from the time now president biden won south carolina through winning the election, you talked about barack sort of behind the scenes. well, sure, sure obama had really he had one conversation. well, yeah, a series of conversations with biden sort of trying to say once again, do you really want to do this? but he knew after the 26 this is before biden jumps into the race. but before you know he goes into these meetings with biden, he

sort of realizes well after the 2016 experience, i clearly can't tell him not to run because of the way that the last one ended. so he spends a lot of time sort of asking him if he was sure he to do it. he says, you know, you really don't have to. but ultimately he determines, he says, a bunch of the people around biden. well, if going to do it, you guys come on and tell me the game plan is i want to make that biden's final stand in national is an honorable one and it's a strong one that he doesn't get embarrassed here. but what the way that that looks during actual primary race which of course. well, many of us will remember i mean, there were more candidates and there are people in this ten. and so obama wanted to take a step back and he actually got quite interested in a number of candidates who were not named joe biden was interested for a while in federal work. he was interested in people to judge. he thought there was something to elizabeth warren, kamala harris, that the point being he was always open to joe. they were still but he was never going to throw his weight behind him in any real way. and he often said to him, you know, you guys, you can talk about but make it clear that i didn't endorse you here.

so anyway, to make a long story short, finally it becomes clear to him that biden it's either going to be biden or bernie, and he gets spooked and he says it's going to have to be joe. and after months and months of staying on the sidelines, sometimes to the frustration of joe biden, he sort of steps in and he calls biden the day of the south carolina, which is the primary that ends up switching everything for biden he calls him that day. there's a debate shortly before the primary and says to him, joe, go out there and be president. now, someone called, us, anyone here and said that you'd be like all right. but to biden that he knows what that means and he gets out there. his debate performance was not particularly it was fine, but essentially it did is it infused him with this. i obama believes in me finally let's get out there and do this. he wins south carolina and then super tuesday is coming. and essentially the worry is that bernie is going to win these races. bernie sanders is going to the nominee. if if biden can't somehow, you know, beat him in a lot of these

places and obama does something biden didn't know about at the time, and he calls amy klobuchar and he calls people to judge. and he says to them, he doesn't say, in so many words, drop out of this race. but he says you have to think about where the political math is going. you have to think about what everything you've accomplished and what you want your future in this party to be and what you want the future of the party to be, and therefore, the democracy essentially saying to them, drop out votes are going to go to joe and course, that's that's what happened. and from then on, i think we're probably running out of time. from then on he became quite a prominent behind the scenes adviser to the abc, to the biden team. if not always to biden himself. so then just briefly before we turn to the q&a, how do they communicate now this current phase of the biden presidency? their roles are very different. yeah, they still talk more than any other president and former president. the way that i describes it describe it in the book. and again, i don't want to give too much away here because this is the end of book, but it really is a different kind of relationship than biden has with

anyone else because he understands that there's basically no one else out there who understands what he's going through on a day to day basis than obama. i think their conversations have slowed over the course of the presidency but in the early days, every once in a while would call and just have these long conversations. sometimes it was about policy decisions. you know, it wasn't as if biden was really just asking for specific advice, but it was more about guidance and how you think about the presidency that has slowed down but certainly as they gear up for reelection now, i think it's going to speed up again. i think we've heard enough for me so. we're going to do q&a. so raise your hand before you start talking. you need to have microphone. it's not just for the people in this tent, but this is being recorded for c-span. so why don't we start right there? thank you. that was very informative live. can you tell me a little bit about your sources of this information? sure. of course, there's a note in the back of book about this. but to make a long story, short, well, the back stories, you know, i've been covering these guys for a very long time my my day job. so i was lucky to, you know,

having covered obama white house knowing a lot of the people who were in the room for a lot of these conversations. this book was was reported with. so i did a lot of archival research. i did a lot of. well, i will that aside, i did a lot of archival research. i read a lot of newspaper clips. but the bulk the book and certainly the news parts of it were drawn from hundreds, if not hundreds, interviews with people over and over and were people who were in the room for everything that is discussed, you know, colleagues of theirs from the cabinet, the senate, from the white house, from the campaigns. most of it was on background, which meant that i wasn't people directly, but any time there's a story in there, i've verified with multiple people who saw it happen or heard it in real time. and the short answer is, if knew barack obama, joe biden at this time, i probably called you at some point, sir.

hi. thanks for this talk. it was very interesting. most of the world considers the relationship between obama, biden as president, vice president, kind of the ideal scenario for that kind of relationship and joe obviously does not have that with kamala at least to the naked eye in the general public do you know why that is what happened there as former vice president, shouldn't he have been a little more sensitive to making her feel welcome? and do you know if obama and biden talked about that at all? so, yeah, there are a few different answers to this question. let me i'll take a step back before we jump into the meat of it, just to give some of the context is when biden first sought to pick a running mate, he was out there saying, i want to find my biden because he was saying, i want to replicate the relationship that i had with obama. he said that in some interviews. he said it to enough friends that people like me started to write about it because we heard about it. at one point, obama called him and said, you got to stop saying this because it took us a long

time. you know, it took us like 250 of the 400 pages in this book to have this relationship. it it wasn't the kind of like bromance as people like to talk about it or even relationship at all really until late in the first term, if not early in the second term. and so the idea that there was ever going to be some sort of mind meld like that with your running mate, no matter who it is, just doesn't make sense beyond that biden essentially says, okay, fair enough, a good point. so he stopped saying that out loud when he chose harris. he was simply looking for different things. and obama looking for what obama needed. as we discussed someone, you know, the politics were thing, but what he really needed in terms of governing was someone who had more policy experience, more capitol hill experience. biden didn't need of those things and in fact, could not have possibly any either of those things. and what he looking for was someone who he thought could the future of the democratic party and who represented a similar way of thinking about politics as him that the issue was when took when he took office he

tried to bring harrison on a lot of early and in fact they did she was very there and continues to be by the way, in the oval office for a lot of these meetings. but she didn't come him with the same kind of stipulations for the job he came to obama with. so they their cadence of their lunches started to fall off a little bit. they have a very close relationship, but what they don't have is the kind of publicly visible governing partnership. and part of that is just because in the early days of the obama years, what biden had to do was go to capitol hill and, you know, schmooze, or he had to all these trips around the world and it's taken some time for biden to figure out what the right way of deploying harrison that way is. but they're certain they feel good about it now. it's just taken some time. there's a question back there. yes, thank you. you were reporting on lot of these events as they were happening. and i'm curious how researching, writing this book changed your understanding of or perspective

on some of these events? yeah, a lot. that's a great question. i think one thing that really changed my view of, you know, it's very easy for someone like me to become very cynical about the people that i cover. and that didn't necessarily change while i was doing this. but one thing that certainly stuck out to me is that biden really is what who he presents to the world. he's really. that guy who goes home and reads irish poetry, you know, he like curses a little bit more in private, like he he really does a lot of these things very deeply. he about his family first. and that was very it was surprising to me just how true that was. we're inclined to believe that there's a certain of showmanship to all of this, but in terms of the individual events, i think i you know, i was reporting on this in real time in, 2016, 15 and 16. but even i didn't understand just how difficult holds the conversations between obama and biden were over whether biden should run or not and how much that continues to today paint their relationship. you know, only recently did they start talking about 2024 because

for the longest time, biden thought, well, you know, obama didn't support me in 2016, he didn't think i could run he didn't support me in 2020. why i ask his advice now, obviously they're close, but it's not an unqualified closeness. so that's a really big one. and i think that saga really tells a lot about who they are today. both of them. i think i would say that's the really big. yeah. other questions. at their. are you aware whether or not president biden has a singular last person in the room? president biden has an interesting way operating compared to other recent presidents. harris is certainly there with him and the way we should say there were moments in the obama biden relationship where biden was absolutely not in the room, because as some of the aides who i talked said on the obama side, well, you know, he makes a lot

of decisions. he's in a lot of rooms like. there's a lot going on. you can't possibly, you know, be in the room for everything. but but harris, is there certainly for him. but the way that biden operates is has a group of advisers who has been around him, in many cases, for 20 or 30 years. and these are people who really understand him more than anyone. but if i had to choose one person, his is really the decision maker on a lot of things. so as we close out here. i do want to ask one maryland specific question, if that's okay. you write in the book about a really important moment in the 2012 election when joe biden is deployed to debate paul in the vice presidential debate. and i think by most accounts did a tremendous job. but do you recall who played paul ryan in the mock debates, certain junior senator from from maryland, chris van hollen, was a superstar. ah, in the eyes of those people. he's a very good debater and did a very good job pretending to be paul ryan and and joe biden still thinks about that a lot actually to this day. terrific. well that's it's always nice to put a plug in foren