Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Washington Secrets, which takes a deep dive into a new history of the Biden presidency. The verdict is brutal, even among writers who are willing themselves to find some wins. So given all that, why is Gavin Newsom talking up his relationship with a president who is even less popular now than when he was in office?
Joe Biden’s presidency was meant to be many things: open and transparent, compassionate and competent.
More than anything, it was meant to herald a return to normalcy after the upheaval of the Trump years.
It was anything but that, according to a damning new collection of essays by historians, who paint Biden’s time in office as not so much a change of direction for a nation tired of his predecessor’s antics and more a brief “interregnum” in the age of Trump.
In chapter after chapter of The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden: A First Historical Assessment, the 17 authors develop a common theme. Biden was a decent man elected to the White House at the wrong time — a Senate legislator, whose career was built on consensus, unable to adapt to a partisan moment that demanded the use of the bully pulpit of the White House.
Age overtakes him in the final chapter — “The Withdrawal” by New York University’s Timothy Naftali. A man who has been underestimated his entire life attempts to keep his candidacy alive despite that disastrous debate with Donald Trump. A pigheadedness that served him well in the past undoes his entire party as he tries to deny the undeniable.
But age is also the thread that runs through the assessment and his entire presidency. Take this line: “His advancing age and frailty turned him from a mediocre communicator into an alarmingly absent one,” according to Michael Kazin, a professor at Georgetown University.
Chapter after chapter makes the same point. Even when Biden had a good story to tell, he wasn’t talking about it. He was cocooned by his staff, who were taking their cues from the president himself.
Kazin’s argument is made in a chapter about organized labor and Biden’s inability to win over working-class America.
“With words and gestures, Biden did show empathy for Americans in distress. But he was unable to lay out, for the voters his party needed most, a path to achieving a more egalitarian, more decent society,” he writes, pointing out that Biden didn’t even mention his Inflation Reduction Act, one of his flagship achievements, during his final State of the Union address.
Other battles are more heated, as conservative media fanned the flames of the culture war.
So why wasn’t he more forceful in pushing back on attacks that he was overseeing the left-wing indoctrination of classrooms?
Why was his messaging on equity and racial justice always directed at black or minority audiences?
And how do we understand his approach to the war in Gaza, which alienated chunks of his own party while frustrating the hell out of Benjamin Netanyahu.
“His administration never found a consistent or credible narrative in the complexity of this war: how to focus on hostages, the 1,200 Israeli deaths, and the horror of October 7, while also focusing on the destruction of Gazan society and tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths,” writes Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador.
Republicans will argue that Biden was simply wrong. He pursued the wrong policies on the border, on inflation, and on rights. And he was doomed to failure for making the wrong arguments.
The authors in this collection see it differently. They pick out legislative successes and popular policies — his admittedly complicated stance on protecting abortion was more in line with public opinion than Trump’s push to overturn Roe v Wade, for example — and then ask why he still lost political argument after political argument.
The threads are tied together in a chapter on the “Modern media presidency,” by Kathryn Cramer Brownell, who leads the Center for American Political History and Technology.
She reminds us of Jen Psaki’s first briefing as press secretary in 2021, when she promised to restore “truth and transparency” to the White House.
“Yet, far from being open or transparent, Biden walled himself off from the press, using his communications staff to separate himself from reporters and the people,” Brownell writes.
Live press conferences became a rarity. He averaged 9.25 a year, which was the fewest since the next-oldest president, Ronald Reagan.
“Closing off the presidency meant he never found his own unique style of presidential communications to sell his accomplishments and to combat, or even pierce through, an information environment that was becoming more and more distorted and divided.”
Democrats are still coming to terms with their 2024. But one conclusion they need to draw fast, particularly as they think about communications and messaging, is that Trump has changed everything.
What is Gavin Newsom doing?
All of which makes Secrets wonder, not for the first time, what Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is up to. Well, he is running for president. We all know that. But why on earth is he leaning into the Biden presidency as he plots his path to even more power?
“I’ll never turn my back on Joe Biden,” he told a crowd in South Carolina earlier this year. He then reeled off a list of the former president’s achievements, including low unemployment rates among black people, triggering cheers, according to the South Carolina Daily Gazette.
As if that wasn’t enough, Hunter Biden appeared on his podcast last week and offered to help. “I’ll come campaign for you or against you, whatever helps most,” he said.
You don’t need to be Donald Trump, or indeed Kamala Harris, to know that Biden is not much of an electoral asset.
But if you need statistics, CNN has a poll. It found that Biden’s current favorability stands at a measly 30%, and that’s even now that he is not in office. Trump’s standing is at 34%, while Barack Obama is viewed positively by 57% of Americans.
Most presidents see their ratings improve as their mistakes fade from memory. Not Biden. His favorability has dropped 3 points since leaving office.
Lunchtime reading
A fictional history of the US: Secrets is a great believer in fiction revealing a bigger truth. (No jokes about the veracity of this newsletter, please.) This is a great list to understand the story of America’s 250 years.
The totally bonkers race to replace Elise Stefanik: Is this what Republican primaries look like now, and “the logical conclusion of Trump’s sweeping impact on American politics manifesting all the way down to the House level”?
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