WASHINGTON — Barack Obama was riding his call for generational change to the Democratic presidential nomination in the spring of 2008 when he began musing about potential running mates with aides traveling with him on the trail.
“I want somebody with gray in his hair,” Obama, then 46, told one of them. He was thinking about an “older guy,” he told another.
That older guy, people around the candidate would soon learn, was Joe Biden, 65, a has-been to pundits but to Obama a sweet-spot pick — a policy heavyweight with limited political horizons, assuming that would ensure loyalty and minimal drama. Obama was already phoning Biden two or three times a week to solicit advice, and to decide whether the Delaware senator’s many positive attributes outweighed his singular liability, a notoriously self-tangling tongue.
Over the next several months, Obama’s top advisers would present 30 alternatives, all of whom he respectfully considered. But his preference was clear from the start. When it came time to decide in August, Obama chose Biden over two younger finalists — Tim Kaine, the governor of Virginia, and Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, peers in the mold of Bill Clinton’s choice of Al Gore in 1992.
“You are the pick of my heart, but Joe is the pick of my head,” Obama told Kaine after he made his choice, according to people with knowledge of the exchange.
Eleven years later, Obama’s cautions and calculations have come to roost.
Obama, standard-bearer of change but conscious of the racial dynamics of his candidacy, was wary of asking voters to digest too much at once. In Biden, he found a running mate who would conjure the comforting past and provide experience he did not possess, but would not maneuver for the presidency from the No. 2 slot.
While Biden exceeded the first two expectations, he never abandoned his aspirations for the top job. He has leveraged his steady vice presidency into a fragile front-runner status in the 2020 primary, at the even more advanced, and politically vulnerable, age of 76.
What’s more, the choice of Biden as a hedge against change has left the demographically and ideologically evolving Democrats profoundly divided as they desperately seek to unseat President Donald Trump. Even as Biden casts himself as the man to complete and cement the Obama legacy, that legacy has moved to the center of the Democrats’ fractious debate.
The Obama-Biden origin story has been often told, and often sentimentalized. But a re-examination at this crystallizing moment of the primary campaign, based on more than two dozen interviews with Obama and Biden aides and others with knowledge of the relationship, reveals a more complicated dynamic between the two men, and one that is still evolving.
Biden and his advisers initially thought he might be a better fit as Obama’s secretary of state, and he bridled at the Obama campaign’s attempt to control his every utterance and personnel move. He exploded when campaign researchers began asking questions about the private life of his family, especially his younger son, Hunter.
Obama, for his part, took a long time to warm to Biden, and kept him at arms’ length in the early days. Up until earlier this year, he suggested Biden would be better off sticking with his vague promise, made during the audition for the vice presidency, that his short-lived 2008 presidential campaign would be his last.
That has changed: While initially skeptical of Biden’s decision to run, Obama, driven by affection and loyalty, has been more active in advising his campaign than previously known — going so far as to request a briefing from the campaign before his friend officially joined the fray, according to people close to both men.
“It’s an incredible turn of events, when you think about it,” said Bayh, who retired from the Senate in 2011. “The question then was, ‘Do you happen to fit the moment?’ The question now is, ‘After all these years, can you turn yourself into an independent source of power, as opposed to being just a loyal and faithful wingman?’ Only time will tell.”
A Difficult Decision
Obama’s two top strategists, David Plouffe and David Axelrod, had Biden at the top of their list. The choice was not just about politics and optics. Obama, confident to the point of cockiness about his political chops, was privately expressing anxiety about his ability to govern — conceding that Hillary Clinton, his chief rival for the nomination, had made valid points about his inexperience.
What most impressed Obama’s advisers, however, was Biden’s ease with his family; he was comfortable expressing affection to his wife and grown children in a way that most politicians, including Obama, were not.
The intensity of those bonds would become apparent after Obama picked Biden, and campaign researchers uncovered potential public relations problems stemming from Biden’s son Hunter, including complications from his lobbying work and indications of marital, legal and substance-abuse problems. (Those issues were examined in detail by The New Yorker earlier this year.)
When an Obama campaign official flagged the issue, Biden grew angry and warned, “Keep my family out of this.” The issue was dropped, according to a person involved in the vetting process.
Biden would be the final person he spoke to before making a big decision, and the two men would have weekly lunches. Biden also made a loyalty pledge that would become the basis of their deeper personal bond. “You make a decision, and I will follow it to my death,” Biden said, according to Ted Kaufman, one of Biden’s oldest friends and advisers.
At some point, Biden also told Obama aides that “Barack would never have to worry” about him positioning himself for another presidential run. He was too old, he told them, and he viewed his new job as a capstone, not a catapult. But while both sides assumed that vow covered the duration of Obama’s presidency, what might happen after that was never explicitly stated.
Biden was the only one of the finalists to make such a promise. “That was helpful,” Plouffe said.
A Protective Partner
The next eight years are the stuff of buddy-movie lore — “a shotgun marriage that gradually turned into a love story,” in Axelrod’s telling.
Still, Biden’s simmering ambition was a source of unease for both men. Plouffe shut down an early move made by Biden as vice president to assemble a presidential team-in-waiting, blocking Biden’s attempts to court the party’s West Coast fundraising elite and rejecting an attempt to hire Kevin Sheekey, a veteran Democratic operative.
In 2016, Obama quietly pressured Biden to sit out the race, partly because he believed Clinton had a better chance of building on his agenda, and partly because he thought Biden was in no shape emotionally following the illness and death of his son Beau in May 2015.
By now, the line between heart and head, between the personal and political, so clear a decade ago, has blurred completely.
The two men spoke at least a half-dozen times before Biden decided to run, and Obama took pains to cast his doubts about the campaign in personal terms.
“You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t,” Obama told Biden earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
In his interactions with Biden — the pair had a quiet lunch in Washington last month — Obama has hammered away at the need for his campaign to expand his aging inner circle.
In March, Obama took the unusual step of summoning Biden’s top campaign advisers, including the former White House communications director Anita Dunn and Biden’s longtime spokeswoman, Kate Bedingfield, to his Washington office for a briefing on the campaign’s digital and communications strategy with members of his own staff, including his senior adviser, Eric Schultz.
When they were done, Obama offered a pointed reminder, according to two people with knowledge of his comments:
Win or lose, they needed to make sure Biden did not “embarrass himself” or “damage his legacy” during the campaign.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.