Joe Biden thinks he'll survive Tara Reade’s accusations. But suddenly, the country needs a lot more than an average-Joe president, and he knows it. gdebenedetti reports
Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux When fourth-term senator Joe Biden built his Wilmington, Delaware, home in 1996, he had no plans to turn it into a backup office, let alone a presidential-campaign isolation bunker from which to plan a crisis presidency an order of magnitude more expansive than anything in the past half-century.
And while 2009 shows that spending unprecedented amounts of money alone doesn’t necessarily make a presidency transformational, the pandemic and the economic collapse it has produced have expanded Biden’s sense of not just how much relief will be required but what will be possible to accomplish as part of that recovery.
Is this news to you? Or does the vice-president seem about as far from a transformational crusader of the left as could fit in today’s Democratic Party? Even during lockdown, Biden has been doing quite a lot of interviews and making a wide range of appearances from his basement studio — in many, signaling explicitly the new ambitions now demanded of an aspiring president.
Then, finally, Biden got the question in an interview with Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski. “It is not true. I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened,” he said on May 1, calling on the secretary of the Senate to release the complaint Reade said she had filed . Those around Biden have been naturally cautious in discussing the accusation, but they appear sure their candidate is innocent and have aimed their response at transparency, particularly around the complaint Reade says she filed.
Joe and Jill Biden at home. Photo: Courtesy of the Biden Campaign Because of the pandemic, none of Biden’s top advisers have seen him in person since mid-March, when a handful visited to prep for his final debate against Sanders. Nowadays, only two staffers — his traveling chief of staff and his wife’s chief of staff — ever occasionally drop by his house and only if they are properly masked and gloved. The same goes for his Secret Service detail.
From the outside, the expansive ambition seems an uncomfortable match for Biden, a constitutionally nostalgic dealmaker who places a premium on Washington comity.
Two months in, Biden’s daily questions are often oriented around understanding the landscape he would face next year. “We don’t know how things are going to be in January 2021, but in all likelihood there is still going to be enormous suffering in this country,” said Sullivan, who speaks with Biden regularly. “A lot of people will be knocked down and will have a hard time getting back up.
This isn’t the confrontational politics preferred by party activists, but it may not be as dead in the water as they assume, either. And when Biden has talked to senator friends recently, he has asked about the prospects of taking the chamber back.
“That’s not him measuring the drapes,” said Sullivan. “He’s been there before, and part of the reason that’s on his mind right now is he is highly attuned to the importance of speed, efficiency, effectiveness, ambition, execution. The premium on those things right out of the gate — both to deal with the immediate emergency but also to drive a legislative agenda — has gone way up as a result of this crisis.
Most of Biden’s shortlist has already been asked and has stood by him. Democrats have mostly followed the lead of his unequivocal denial. But a broader conversation still looms, in part because Trump’s defenders are desperate to cut down on Biden’s huge lead among women voters — a national Monmouth poll in early May showed him leading Trump by 20 points among women, even as nearly nine in ten Americans expressed familiarity with Reade’s accusation.
And yet he’s grappling with the sudden disappearance of an environment in which he thrived.
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