← The Focus Group Podcast
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- [00:00]
Sarah Longwell
Foreign. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus group Podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, and this is our first show of 2025. And I gotta tell you guys, I had to decide, do we look forward into 2025 and talk about Trump, or do we look backward and talk about Joe Biden's legacy? And I gotta say, this is the last show of Joe Biden as president. The next time we do this show, Donald Trump will be the President of the United States. So I decided, let's look back. Let's talk about Joe Biden's legacy. Look, it's a tough show for me a little bit because two things are true at once for me. I wanted Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump. I wanted it as badly as I could have wanted anything, both in 2020 and in 2024. But I think that Trump's return to power was driven in no small part by a series of catastrophic decisions b made. And mainly it's just I wish he'd had the good sense to step away from the 2024 race long before he did. So I wanna talk about what I've heard from voters about him, how he and his team viewed their relationship with the public, and what his legacy is gonna be. My guest today is one of the great chroniclers of the Biden years, Evan Osnos, staff writer at the New Yorker and author of Joe Biden the Life, the Run, and what Matters now, and Wildland the Making of America's Fury. Evan, thanks for being here.
- [01:34]
Evan Osnos
My pleasure, Sarah. Great to be with you.
- [01:36]
Sarah Longwell
Okay, so you've spent a good amount of time with Biden in recent years, and I'm just gonna cop to something. When I was trying to decide, do I wanna look back, I wanna look forward. One of the things that pushed me over the edge is that Joe Biden has come out of late and made some pronouncements where he is running the counterfactual in his own mind and saying, had it been him running, he would have won. And I disagree strongly with this assertion from Joe Biden, but I guess, is there anything about his recent behavior, since you know him well, have sat down with him that surprises you? Like, how do you think he's comported himself in these last months since his, oh, Kamala's loss, but, you know, the end of his presidency.
- [02:19]
Evan Osnos
It's also, to your point, it is Joe Biden's loss, too. I would sort of separate those, Sarah, into the two questions, because there are two questions. One is, did anything surprise me about that and then how does he comport himself? No, I'm not surprised that he believes and is now saying publicly because he's been saying it privately. When you do this kind of work, you develop a mental sort of Biden GPT. I could reasonably anticipate his metabolic and emotional and ultimately kind of strategic reaction to these things. There was no question that once Harris lost that he will have found refuge in a non provable fact in his mind. And look, the data is very clear. I think he's wrong that he would have beaten Donald Trump on election day. There was always lurking in his calculation and those of some pretty smart political people around him who we can talk about how they got into this mess of thinking this way, that there was a kind of dark matter, something was going to change in the public attitudes about that was going to suddenly improve their outlook. And that was never based in fact or science. It was based in some, I think sentimental beliefs about the electorate and what they care about. How he has comported himself. That's a sort of more personal question which is, yeah, I think like a lot of people, there are things about how Joe Biden has gone about the last 18 months that are disappointing and I think that will tarnish his legacy. What happened in the end, as in so often is the case in figures in literature, really that's always what's drawn me to him, is that he has these kinds of almost characteristics of a novelistic figure that he allowed his frailties, his insecurities to overwhelm everything and it became the defining fact of his, what were ultimately unsuccessful decisions.
- [04:22]
Sarah Longwell
Sometimes now I can anticipate some readers reactions and they're gonna be like, well if you guys are just gonna hate on Joe Biden, I'm out. I'm not here for that. And I wanna say that's not what I want this to be. Because I think that as this little interregnum here between when Joe Biden lost and before Donald Trump takes office, it's been a lot of self flagellation, introspection, very needed about what Democrats could do differently, answers to what Democrats can and need to do to win going forward, many of them are contained in the things that Joe Biden did wrong. And without studying those things, without looking at them with sort of clear eyes and without, as you mentioned, some of the sentimentality that I think can come from feeling like the unfairness of Joe Biden being a superior person to Donald Trump. Right. When you just like hold those two things together, you're like, don't say bad things about Biden. This guy, look at Donald Trump, look how terrible he is. Let me tell you what guys, we got four years ahead of us in which we can do all of that. But I wanna learn the lessons. I wanna marinate in the potential lessons from the last four years. And so I wanna start by putting you, dear listener, I've already done this to Evan. He's done his time in the time machine going back to 2020. Because when I did focus group with the persuadable bucket, right? Cuz everybody who listens to this show a lot knows I was in the business of trying to defeat Donald Trump back then. And I did the focus groups because I was trying to figure out who's persuadable, who do you get? How do you get them? And when we were talking to them, it was like loud and clear that the persuadable voters, these were not pro Joe Biden voters, these were anti Trump voters. They saw Joe Biden as a flawed but acceptable alternative to to Trump. And I gotta say back then, I do not think there was another Democrat who could have beat Donald Trump in 2020. I think Joe Biden was uniquely suited for that moment.
- [06:30]
Evan Osnos
Agree. That was also what led him to the misjudgment that he was uniquely suited in 24. I would also say that what you're describing, which was that people were not enthusiastic pro Biden, they were anti Trump. That, that insight, which is very hard for anybody to take on board personally if you're the subject of that, if you're the person who is being described to you analytically, correctly as look, people don't love you, but they like you better than the other guy. That's a hard thing to keep contained. I think in your own self assessment. And part of what happened is that it kind of spilled outside the container and people said we want you to be a certain kind of president, a non Trump, a caretaker, a transitional figure in some ways. And it's amazing to look at it now how little of that he retained. By the end of his four years, he had decided he needed to be a transformational president. He decided he was not to be a transitional president. He decided he was in so many ways things that violated this unspoken compact he had with the voters in 20.
- [07:34]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, and let's get to that idea that it was unspoken because I'll tell you who spoke about it. The voters spoke about it. And I'm sure that all the people who go up to Joe Biden and talk to him and are excited to see him. They do love Joe Biden. There's plenty of pro Joe Biden Biden voters. But the people who were persuadable to switch from Trump to Joe Biden, that ain't those folks. And so these are people who were, in our judgment, persuadable at the time. Right. So they were very down on Donald Trump. I want you to hear how they talked about Joe Biden. He's like your grandpa that you just go, bless your heart. Like some of the things. I almost feel like he's a little old school where you're trying to teach your parent how to text those, like, more recent technology skills. And he doesn't quite catch on too quickly, but eventually gets there. If I vote for Biden, I don't think that he's going to survive the presidency. And I'm not sure who I'm voting for, because Biden seems to just be doing what they tell him to do and reading the teleprompter. And I have to say, that's one thing that Trump has never done. I mean, just as a human being, I'm actually concerned for his health. I mean, I'm not just touting this. I'm actually concerned for his health. I mean, the man has suffered child loss and a variety of other things in life that would really cut a person down. Two children. It's just as a person that hurts my heart to know that he's going to have the most stressful position that anybody in the world can have. And to see him like this, it actually hurts. So I will freely admit I worry about the fact that Biden very frequently does not seem to necessarily be there mentally. And so that's a concern is if I vote for Biden, is he going to be able to serve out his term? Is he going to serve it out as a figurehead and really not be cognizant of what's going on?
- [09:49]
Voter 1
Biden appeals to me because I think.
- [09:50]
Voter 2
He'S pretty moderate, as opposed to somebody like Bernie Sanders. But a lot of the comments are right. He's a kind of a career politician, and I don't really know what he's accomplished.
- [10:02]
Voter 1
So that's a little scary for me right now.
- [10:04]
Voter 2
He's kind of has my boat because he's not Trump, and I really want.
- [10:08]
Sarah Longwell
Him to come forward and grab my.
- [10:11]
Voter 1
Boat a little bit more.
- [10:12]
Voter 2
I want to know what he's going to do with the pandemic. I want to know how he's going.
- [10:16]
Sarah Longwell
To unite our country, because we're a divided country. Right now, I don't really think greatly of him, but I don't think horribly of him. I think it's just again, another politician who has been in politics for decades and decades and decades. He's really only a one term president if he gets elected because of his age. And I was like, okay, so for some reason that thought has made it more palatable, I guess. But when you look at a video of even five years ago of Joe having conversation and then how he communicates today, there's a distinct difference. And I get that with COVID everybody was quarantined, but we didn't see anything or hear anything really about Joe for what, five months, four months? So I'm wondering if he was ill and something underlying is going on. I think Biden would be a caretaker.
- [11:15]
Voter 2
President, but I think that's what we need right now. Me, I can't take having a pig in office anymore.
- [11:21]
Evan Osnos
And Trump is a pig.
- [11:23]
Sarah Longwell
I had to hold my nose and vote for him because they were too.
- [11:26]
Voter 2
Trash candidates in 2016. One was more trashier than the other. This time around, I vote for a.
- [11:33]
Sarah Longwell
Poodle over top Trump. I'll vote for anybody over top Trump as long as my vote counts. Okay, now I want to emphasize again, this was going into the 2020 election, okay, so we identified these as persuadable voters. And Evan, I'm interested in overall, what surprised you. But I just want to emphasize, like the age stuff didn't just start coming up in 2024. It was all over the place way back then. But anyway, you watched the whole thing with these guys. So what struck you about it?
- [12:02]
Evan Osnos
What you hear in those voices was a shallow reservoir of support for Joe Biden. It was there, it was decisive at the time, but it was shallow. And in some ways that's been a feature of Biden life for a long time. At one point or another, there are pro Biden super fans, but that's a minority of the electorate, to say the least. And I think what happened in some ways between election day of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021 will turn out to have been a really decisive and in its own way, a somewhat toxic period for him, because it was in that period that he decided that I have something like a mandate to do giant things. And it was valorous. Look, it was we can do hard things. That was one of the things that was, I remember on the wall of one of his closest advisors in the office. And that has the ring of nobility about it, except that it misjudges where the electorate was and misjudges how brittle that support was going to be. And so one of the things that comes through is that once the sort of beginning of Trump amnesia took hold, people began to forget about what it was like under him. Once Covid began to fade, people stopped giving credit to anybody like Joe Biden for getting them through Covid. And it just became, okay, now I feel sour. I feel like my prices are too high. I feel these things. And who is the guy in the line of sight? And it's Joe Biden.
- [13:40]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. You said something at the top of that answer that is really right, which is that the support was very shallow, which meant that he owed almost no room to make people unhappy. And the fact is, you take the shallowness of that support and you add on top of it a record that is simply not going to please everybody, even if some people are going to be pleased by it. And then you add on top of that the forgetting about Donald Trump, like the thing that I was experiencing in the groups. People were so mad at Trump in 2020 because Covid was raging and Joe Biden didn't have to campaign in a vigorous way. People didn't see him, and they still thought he was too old. He could kind of recede and allow people's disgust for Donald Trump to overwhelm the vote and sort of allow him to win. All those things were taken away from him as he ran in 2024. Plus, he was four years older on top of it.
- [14:41]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, I remember in 2020 when he had, let's say, implied over and over that he was only gonna do one term. And implied is an important thing because he was asked directly, are you saying you will only commit to serving one term? And he dismissed that idea. It happened more than once. So he was trying to have it both ways. He didn't want to have to make a choice between saying, I'm only going to run for one term, which would instantly kind of make him a lame duck. And all of his old genes didn't allow him to do that. His, I would say, kind of proven political genes. And at the same time, that then allowed this abscess in the public consciousness to begin to grow, which was ultimately, people thought he was only going to do one term. And when he violated that, so much of what, you know this better than I do goes on between the voter and the political figure is this compact. And if you violate what they want you to think of them, they punish you for it.
- [15:32]
Sarah Longwell
But, like, he did talk a lot about Being a bridge to the next generation.
- [15:36]
Evan Osnos
Yeah.
- [15:37]
Sarah Longwell
And I think I, as a political observer understood the need for him to not signal that he would be a one term president.
- [15:42]
Evan Osnos
Right.
- [15:43]
Sarah Longwell
There's a reason that Donald Trump right now is like, I don't know, maybe they'll change the rules because I'm doing such a good job. Right. He doesn't want to be a lame duck. At the same time, I have gone back and listened to a ton of these it's all over as an implicit promise to the point where, like, I'd sort of forgotten actually how much people had internalized the idea that he would be a one term president. And Joe Biden had announced he was running, he was the nominee. And there were still a lot of people who were like, well, he's not gonna run again. He's too old. Right.
- [16:11]
Evan Osnos
Totally. Right.
- [16:11]
Sarah Longwell
He'd be like, no, no, he's definitely running. And we would be like shocked by that scale.
- [16:16]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, it's completely true. No, they in a way sensed something about the race that even we didn't as people closely involved. But can I point out something too? There was a fascinating moment the last time I talked to him was in January of 24 when I interviewed him. And one of the questions I asked was, was there ever a moment when you thought you wouldn't run for reelection? And he said, no. And then he went on with why? And he said, because, in effect, I've proven that I can do this job well. And I always thought after that story ran in March of last year, people didn't zero in on what a revealing moment that was by Biden to say, no, I never thought about not running again. That's why I say something important happened between election day of 20 and 1Q21. Part of that was January 6th. Part of that was his belief that he had the potential to be able to use Covid as a springboard to do transformative changes to the economy, to the workforce. And he overplayed that hand.
- [17:23]
Sarah Longwell
I think it might have been the same interview. He said something to you, like, if you thought you were the best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, were going to change the nature of America, what would you do? Is that from the same interview? That is revealing.
- [17:39]
Evan Osnos
It's hugely. Yeah. What's revealing about that that ultimately hurt him was that he put too much emphasis on the personal element of politics. And like a lot of, you know, figures in literature or comic books, your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. His greatest strength had always been that he had this kind of deep psychological understanding of politics. He, you know, he always knew to ask the other foreign leader, you know, how their kids were doing and if their spouse was sick or something. And then the negative side of that was that he became too involved in the personal bitterness, rivalry, contempt between himself and Donald Trump. One of the things that I think people always forgot is Donald Trump didn't just try to steal the election in 2020, he tried to steal it from Joe Biden. And Biden, who has this intensely personalized view of politics. He used to say he tells people who work for him, politics isn't local, it's. And that was in its own way a blinding belief because it blinded him to the fact that he was making the wrong decision about running again in 24.
- [18:47]
Voter 2
Yeah.
- [18:47]
Sarah Longwell
Just because you did spend this time with him, what do you think he thought voters thought of him? Like we're listening to them. I felt this now for many years, like how shallow the support was, especially among this section of sort of swingier voters. But how do you think he saw the voter's relationship?
- [19:04]
Evan Osnos
That's a really interesting question. I think just to state something obvious, he clearly over interpreted the signs of support that he saw and he thought that they were signs of much deeper support. I don't think he ever believed that they were only voting for him as the anti Trump. He believed that he represented things like decency, persistence and proximity to the working class experience that he thought would be dispositive. He thought they really were elevating him for those things. And I think that also part of what he believed about the voter was, and this is partly to what Mike Donilon believed about the voter was that there were kind of two layers to what voters talk about. There's this sort of reflexive answer people say, which is, do you want Joe Biden to run for another four years and will you supportive? And they might say, oh no, it's time for new blood. But then they believed that there was beneath that a kind of deeper text to what voters believed and that that deeper idea had to do with and was really rooted in a fundamental fear and hostility of Trump and Trumpism and what it represents. They were banking on this idea. And Donelan believed that this election 24 was going to be most similar to the 2000 election that went against John Kerry. In his mind, he believed that, and Biden shared this, that people would be finally motivated by the shock and horror of what January 6th meant. And what they misread was that was a long time ago. And A lot of stuff had happened and there was a lot more immediate local information on people's minds.
- [20:56]
Sarah Longwell
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- [23:03]
Evan Osnos
Totally right.
- [23:04]
Sarah Longwell
Also, when inflation, you started to see inflation start to move, it started to tick up. That stuff all happened like early and quick.
- [23:12]
Evan Osnos
Exactly.
- [23:12]
Sarah Longwell
He never recovered. Like his numbers went underwater, they dropped like a stone, never came back. So I wanna play now what we heard from Trump to Biden voters. So Trump 16, Biden 20 voters from July to September of 2021, when all this stuff was kind of happening, Honestly, a reason why I wouldn't vote for Biden in 2021.
- [23:35]
Evan Osnos
For.
- [23:36]
Sarah Longwell
And this is just thinking as a.
- [23:40]
Voter 2
Speaker, as a person, his personality is not very dynamic.
- [23:45]
Sarah Longwell
His age is showing. And I think just by 2028, would he still be in a position in his life to be the president?
- [23:56]
Voter 2
As a very old man, he's mediocre in his performance. Afghanistan could have been handled a lot better. This idea of spend, spend, spend our way to overcome Covid. I wonder what's coming down the pipe for somebody like my grandson. You can't just keep spending money and keep going further and further into the hole. It just doesn't work out. We can't run our own households by spending ourselves without the income to match. The kick the can mentality has always.
- [24:32]
Evan Osnos
Been in politics, but it seems like it's especially bad with Biden where we're.
- [24:36]
Voter 2
Incurring all this debt.
- [24:37]
Evan Osnos
I don't know how we're ever going.
- [24:38]
Voter 1
To pay it off.
- [24:39]
Voter 2
I think Afghanistan was kind of the.
- [24:42]
Evan Osnos
Turning point for me.
- [24:44]
Voter 2
I feel like Biden had been sort of not just Biden, but the leadership has been sort of a we'll wait, see what happens. It's only a couple months into his thing, but I think with Afghanistan, I kind of feel like I have the same perception that I did even a couple years ago. And I feel like we're starting the trend downward. It's not like all hope is lost, but I'm really worried about what kind of decisions are being made at the top and how they're going to affect our lives.
- [25:14]
Voter 3
A few months ago, I was very optimistic. I thought we were heading in the right direction. Covid would would be a distant nightmare. Lockdown would be a distant nightmare. Life would get back to normal, I thought. And then the divisiveness of the country. I thought that people would start coming together because things would start moderating. But having said that, it seems that it's not really occurring. I think Biden can only do so much. He screwed up the Afghan thing. We should have started getting, you know, getting people out long before we did. And that was a fiasco. Quite frankly, I feel bad because, you know, I don't know how strong he is and how competent he is to make those decisions that need to be made. We just need to get the COVID back under control. And if we don't do that, I don't think the optimism in this country is going to be real good. And I think it right now, it really is reflecting in the president's stats. It's starting to show. The other Thing is, the Afghanistan mess, there's not a good resolve for that. That started with Trump and it just went down the hill from there.
- [26:30]
Evan Osnos
So he claims that his strength is international affairs. And that pull out in Afghanistan was. Well, we all saw it. I had never seen anything like that since when Vietnam happened. I was a kid, in terms of everything I read about. We left equipment, we left resources. It was abrupt, it was chaotic. I don't think he was ready himself outside of Afghanistan.
- [27:07]
Voter 1
I can't point to anything that I say he screwed up, but I can't point to five policies that I would say. I'm for that, I'm for that. I'm for that. I love my father and I respect him to death. He's 83 years old. He was a conservative banker, a great, great man, still alive. I don't want him to be my president. He's 84 years old. Biden, I don't believe for a second Biden was going to run for a second term.
- [27:37]
Voter 2
The border in general is a mess. You know, Kamala hadn't been down there for months at a time. Why not? He could have just said, hey, just get your butt down there. At least, you know, whatever you're doing, just get down there. Didn't happen. And you know that that thing has been a mess. And we've got all the other stuff that came before all of this. Healthcare has been a mess for decades and we haven't heard a peep about it. Instead we're talking about this infrastructure bill that's as much social programs as it is roads. So I don't get a strong sense of leadership from him. I get a sense that everybody around him is trying to lead and he's just kind of picking and choosing what he feels like going along with. I don't think one person can just be like, I can fix all of this, because there is a lot going on at all at one time. I don't think he's focusing on the correct thing. He doesn't really give out a lot of plans or details. You know, what's going on, what's happening, things like that. And I think that's just not a good sign of leadership. You gotta have good, concise communication. You have to have plans, you have to have, you know, attainable goals.
- [28:38]
Evan Osnos
And I feel like a lot of.
- [28:40]
Voter 2
What he talks about is more fluff of, hey, we're gonna go do this, or hey, we're gonna do that without.
- [28:44]
Evan Osnos
Any substance to it.
- [28:46]
Sarah Longwell
I know that was a lot of sound, but I did a Million of these flipper groups. Cause I was really focused on them and I was pretty concerned. And I remember, so going back to this piece of yours, you and I talked for this piece because I was listening to the voters and I remember, I'm pretty sure I said two things. You can tell me if I'm wrong and I can't remember if they were in the piece. One of them was that I roughly agreed with, I guess, the dominant thinking and strategy of the Biden team that, well, once people see Donald Trump, they'll be like, oh yeah, now I remember all my hope was pinned on the anti Trump coalition. The anti Trump coalition coming back. And when they sort of got a load of Trump again, when they saw him again, they'll be like, nope, I'd rather vote for a tomato can than this guy and Joe Biden step up from a tomato can. One of the other things though that I said in that is you asked me point blank because I was complaining, I was doing a lot of complaining about Joe Biden in this interview and all the things I thought he was doing wrong and all the things I was hearing from voters, I was like, listen man, you listen to these voters like they do not want this guy to run again. And you said, do you think he should run again? And I was like no. Which was tough because I was actively at the time really trying to get the guy elected. But I also could not believe he was running again. Cuz there was no way they weren't doing focus groups. There's no way they weren't hearing this from voters. And so I gotta ask you, as somebody who was in his inner circle circle, how could they have been hearing what I assume was the same thing I was hearing and have thought, we can power through this, it'll eventually work for us in the end because we were losing in every one of these swing voter groups, you were losing a few people.
- [30:27]
Evan Osnos
If I can, I want to also remind you of a third thing that you said that turned out to be quite prophetic actually, which is that you said that something seems to have happened during the Trump years. We all as Americans became accustomed to seeing this person in our faces, in our lives. Even if we didn't like it, we expected to see that president there. And what you hear then now, and it's just astonishing. And I think you were picking up on this when we talked at that time. But it's very much in those focus group clips we just listened to is people felt a sense of a void, a sense of an absence of leadership. And they framed it in different ways. Some people would say, oh, he doesn't speak with enough substance. Other people said, he seems old. But what they're really getting at, and this is in some ways I've found to be one of the hardest things to explain to myself and to readers in this period has been what it means that Joe Biden is unsatisfying as a quote, unquote communicator. That's such a crappy, insufficient bit of description. But what it is is something real, which is that they never felt that he was either robustly, personally, passionately involved in these issues or that he was capable of delivering on the things he was passionately involved in. You know, the problem of Trump is that even for people who find him odious and unbearable, nobody particularly doubts that this guy is running his operation. That's a fact. It's almost like a kind of biological, animalistic reality that people looked at Biden and just said, he seems like a wounded animal. And I think the age was inescapable as a political constraint and reality a diabolical fact. And he denied it because. Because his own self belief was rooted in the idea that you never succumb to things people tell you are insurmountable. That was his whole life, personally, politically, couldn't bear to accept it. And I think also because he resented the fact that his enemies were saying it too. And so he lost the ability to differentiate between people who were giving him good advice from a place of good faith and people who were telling him he was too old and should get out because they wanted him to fail. He lost that. And I think the people around him. You asked about his inner circle. I think that there is in that particular inner circle a dynamic of such us against the world. Every White House has some of that, but not every White House believes that. It has been systematically, and I use that word specifically, systematically, underestimated and misjudged going back years. So they overread the lessons of 2020 when people said he couldn't win, when they counted him out of New Hampshire and everywhere else, and they took that as a get out of jail free card and came to believe that that idea that he had some sort of super capacity to overcome negative expectations, and they let that guide them to the point of magical thinking.
- [33:29]
Sarah Longwell
I was both hearing from all these voters, so I knew what was true. And I lobbied hard about, like everything I was in. I remember I went on pod stage, people got so mad at me. I was like any other Republican runs against Joe Biden, he's toast. This is back during the Republican primary, like, he's not going to win, but maybe if it's Donald Trump, like, Donald Trump had such unique downsides that I thought, like, maybe he can eke it out against Donald Trump, because people hate Trump so much. During the period in which it was like, this is going to be Biden, like, he has made up his mind. There's nothing we're going to do about it, I sort of was like, okay, how are we going to get this guy elected? And a lot of it is about reacquainting people with this Donald Trump guy that they really didn't like. By the end of 20, 20, 20, the problem was people were hitting the point where they were like, it is irresponsible of me to vote for Joe Biden again. But then he gave the State of the Union, and we were all like, okay, signs of life. That looked pretty good. Maybe we could do this. And then came the debate. And I guess what was amazing to me after the debate was like, not only did it take weeks for them to decide, actually, this is over, Nancy, Pennsylvania. Pelosi had to come see them, but also they fought it with bazookas. And I guess I don't know, to me, that's the part where I can't sort of get over the people inside Biden's team or his inner circle saying, no, we gotta gut this out now.
- [34:50]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, it was over. It was.
- [34:52]
Sarah Longwell
We also have a health event on stage that spoke to the number one thing that voters weren't able to get over about him. It wasn't gonna change. Sorry. You talk.
- [35:01]
Evan Osnos
I think that part of what happened here is this fact of politics, campaigning, electoral moments, a big chunk of it is salesmanship. You are selling a product. You are selling a person. You're selling your candidate. And you might know that those soap flakes are, you know, 60% asbestos, but, by God, you're going to sell the hell out of those soap flakes. That's the nature of. Of politics. It's an ugly reality of it. And most of the time, or some of the time, you want your person to be. We like to imagine that the people that they're selling are great. And we've all been in the situation where we know a communications professional or a political professional. I mean, you've probably been in this situation, right, where you have to sell something that you don't believe in or that you have deep doubts about, but you're in the final hundred meters of the thing. You you're not going to begin to say, you know, maybe my critics are right. So, look, I'm not trying to defend it. I find it indefensible, ultimately, that Biden put himself in this position. There's no other way to describe it, and he bears the consequences for that. What I do find interesting from a literary perspective, which in the end is what got me into this interesting situation of following Joe Biden, was that I started writing about him when he was actually not a winner. I mean, he was in the vice presidency. And what I found fascinating was that his life was this oscillation between tragedy and resilience that is interesting, inherently interesting. Much more so than a lot of the people here in Washington who've had a kind of unmitigated glide upward through one thing after another that doesn't make for great writing. Just one other thing on this. I think that the people around him, as we do with anybody in our lives who is getting older and is losing ground cognitively or physically, you're not judging them on a single event. You're judging them on this rolling average over the course of a week or a month. So you'll say, okay, oh, he was pretty good in that meeting, or pretty good at the State of the Union. And then, gosh, he was horrible the next day. If you'd seen him, he could barely string two senses together. But they put that all together, and they come up with this kind of conception of him, which is different than those of us who were seeing him from the outside. The step change down. I don't think that Tony Blinken is lying, that the people around him are not lying when they say they saw him on the debate stage and were shocked because that was such a terrifying level of incapacity that they wouldn't have put him out there out of pure self interest. They wouldn't have been advocating for an earlier debate, which they were, had they thought, this is what he's gonna do when he gets out there.
- [37:42]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, that's a good point. And, you know, you just said something. The literary component, because so much it is the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and the way that even the world constructs narratives. And you're right that his constructed narrative was about resilience, was about overcoming odds. And so I can see how to him. Because in my mind, I'm like, well, the story you told us was about democracy and was about making sure that we did the right thing for the country and we preserved things. And you failed at that because of your own narcissism But I can see it your way and understand that if not finding it still tremendously unsatisfying. But I can sort of see that, which is interesting.
- [38:25]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, me too. I find it tragic more than unsatisfying. I find it, yeah, ultimately he degraded the role that he'll have in American history. And that's a sad fact. But I'm not really evaluating people. I'm trying to understand why they do the things they do. And that, from my perspective, is as interesting to me as the question of what kind of damage in Donald Trump's early life produced the person that we contend with now. That in and of itself is psychological. Psychologically interesting.
- [38:57]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. I don't really care what broke him and all these other tech bros. I just know we're paying the price for it. Totally. All of these broken old men that I get, we gotta deal with now.
- [39:07]
Evan Osnos
I know. I mean, I used to think about Trump, by the way, is that I don't really care about his motives because it's like asking a horse why he runs. It doesn't matter why he runs. Just the fact that he's running is what we have to contend with. And with Biden, I found it was different because Biden was not, I think, motivated out of a malicious combination of impulses. I found his psychological motives to be more intriguing.
- [39:30]
Sarah Longwell
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- [41:29]
Voter 2
For what he was able to achieve in an extraordinarily partisan environment and pass bills and create change for many generations to come was nothing short of a miracle, given the headwinds he faced. That being said, I really, truly believed he would be a one term president and not run again. And when he announced his decision, I think the majority of people in my camp kind of grimaced and reluctantly supported him to the point where it felt painful to support him.
- [42:05]
Voter 1
Who was it that said him not getting out of the race really overshadowed.
- [42:10]
Sarah Longwell
All the benefits of his presidency?
- [42:12]
Voter 1
I'm paraphrasing, but I agree with that wholeheartedly. It's hard to think what good he did other than the negative of hanging in there for so long. I agreed that back in 2019, I was of the mindset thinking that he could be two terms, but as time moved on, no, I really wish he.
- [42:35]
Sarah Longwell
Got out of the race long before he did.
- [42:39]
Voter 1
I think that's why Kamala lost. She didn't have enough time. But yeah, I mean, he helped the economy. It's hard to pinpoint, like, an exact thing. I would have to Google and be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that. I think what you have to put in your mind is that Covid was such a horrendous thing that people just wanted to kind of get up and say, okay, it's over with. Now we're good. I mean, a million people died. That's more than in every war the United States has ever been in. He came in and kind of stopped the showboating. He just did the job like a guy who does his job everywhere else in the country without making too much of a fuss about it. Now, his rollout of the vaccines worked. We're here. His infrastructure bill, although it kind of drives me nuts with all of the construction on all the roads. I guess eventually that will be a good thing, you know, and of course, the downside is not getting out. He had promised to be in, but you have to look at the Democrats. Didn't really have anybody that was showbiz enough to get past Trump. He's sacrificed a lot throughout his life. He's benefited from some things in politics and so forth, but he committed himself to that process. And so I think that the fact that he just even continued on was monumental. And some things that he didn't accomplish, I didn't expect him to anyway, because of the division, not because of a lack of will on his part.
- [44:21]
Sarah Longwell
For me personally, I'm like a college grad with a lot of student debt. And I feel like Biden tried. He tried for a long time, and then he just kept getting, like, sued and stuff because, like, what he introduced, I was like, oh, that will help me with my debt. And I was like, yeah, the thing. And then, you know, we see how well that worked out.
- [44:43]
Voter 4
I felt it was a little ageism because we're finding that people live longer, they do have sharp mentalities enough. And I do believe he tried to stay in too long. I totally agree with that because I even feel those of us from Georgia are very familiar with John Lewis. I felt that he should have laid the path for younger people. And I think that might what be the biggest failure of basically, I guess both parties. You have elders that try to stay in too long.
- [45:17]
Sarah Longwell
Okay, so these are Democrats who like Joe Biden, basically. And here's what strikes me, and I'm interested in what struck you, but the fact that they're kind of struggling to be like, what did he do? Because I'll tell you, if you go on Blue sky and you say something negative about Joe Biden or even on Twitter, man, people come hard and they're like, the economy is great and everything was fine and Biden did this, this and this. And I'm like, okay, these are like highly engaged Joe Biden advocates. But if you listen to folks in the focus groups who are just standard issue Democrats, they do not know what Joe Biden did. And to me, and this is gonna get to my great thesis, you talked about this in the beginning when you were like, what does it even mean to be a communicator? And I'd forgotten that I said that thing to you, but that is 100% true about how Donald Trump was in everybody's face. Joe Biden then felt absent to People by not being in everybody's face. But one of the most strategic failures was that both Biden and Kamala Harris, the calm strategy seemed to be like, don't let people see too much of them. And that it is a total misunderstanding of the new communications environment which demands that people know you and see you and understand your positions. And the fact that he has these signature that he would point to as big achievements, big bills and people don't know that much about them or don't remember them is a massive communications failure that I think was a big part of the problem of why people don't see the good things that he did.
- [46:50]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, one of the things that this group, group mentioned, it was not here in the shorter clips, but that I've seen them say is they've talked about we need different kinds of candidates. Meaning some want celebrities actually, and then some say, well, no, we don't want celebrities, but we want somebody like AOC who will tell you honestly what she thinks, what links these two ideas. They want a sort of vigorous, present, firm and let's call it what it is, charismatic figure in their face. I have to say I didn't expect that. I remember in 2020, one of the outgoing Obama administration officials, who was not a big fan of Joe Biden, but had a lot of understanding of politics, said to me, you know, maybe America's ready for a boring president again for a while. And that was an insight of a kind because I thought, well, yeah, maybe that's true. After all of the agonies of Trump, we're all so sick of talking about him at dinner. We don't want the push throughs on our phone at midnight, whatever. Maybe we want to forget about the presidency and just kind of let it be a self cleaning oven for a while. And it turns out no. And Biden knows this now, belatedly, as he said the other day, he kind of wishes that he maybe put bigger signatures on his checks. Maybe he should have signed these checks to people. Right. I mean, it's a bit of a vulgar fact, but it is still a fact that people want to be led by somebody who's got a sense of throbbing intensity about this office and about their place in it, how they're gonna run it. As we think about forward looking lessons from this, that is something, you know, whoever the Democrat is that's gonna try to step up and take their next swing at the plate, it better be somebody charismatic, not technocratic. It better be somebody who has a real kind of lusty sense of why they are going to lead the American public because people feel hungry for leadership now. And unfortunately, poisonously, Trump satisfied enough of that need in ways that I don't think we appreciated going into it.
- [48:52]
Sarah Longwell
I was a broken record about this on some of the other shows about communications strategies. And by strategies, I don't even mean something that's cooked looked up in the White House comm shop. Actually, I'm not talking about putting out press releases. In fact, stop putting out press releases, everybody. What you need, you need the kind of leadership that inspires a gajillion TikTok videos and a gajillion surrogates and makes people wanna go out there and fight for you and creates incentive structures in your slipstream. Why does Trump have so many people out there advocating for him? Why are there so many pro Trump media outlets? Well, because there's an entire financial advantage, incentive structure now to go out and be part of the MAGA universe. It's created a million new stars who are out there whose incentives are all around pushing Trump, Trump, maga, MAGA and feeding off each other. And the Democrats think like, we need to build new media institutions. I think this is top down. I think you need a leader that people can get excited about and that spawns movements. And without that, you are playing an old game. And I do not mean just to be clear, you need a corresponding demagogue. I don't think that. I just think you need somebody who can talk authentically to the American people and they be like, even if I don't agree with this person 100%, I believe that they believe what they're saying. I think that it's true to them. I think Kamala surpassed what people thought she could do from a communication standpoint, but still never quite cleared for people. That's like, I know who she is. I get it. I see exactly what she's saying when she says opportunity economy, I know just what that means. Right. Like you never got there.
- [50:26]
Evan Osnos
And I mean, here's a little bit of just an interesting indicator. You know, I wrote a profile of KAMALA in the 100 days, you know, period after she took over the ticket, and she never agreed to an interview with the New Yorker, which is pretty astonishing. You know, historically, Democratic nominee seems like.
- [50:45]
Sarah Longwell
Your people are kind of in her wheelhouse, maybe.
- [50:46]
Evan Osnos
Well, you would think. And I think it was really a tell because in a way, I think there was a complacency around her. Look, I think she did as good a campaign as anybody probably could have. We can debate that all day. But anyway, there was a real assumption that they were good enough on the persuasiveness scale, and they were wrong. I was running into people putting on my Sarah Longwell hat. I was running into people in my informal life of focus group, meaning just out talking to voters who were meh. Who were ambivalent about it. And I remember thinking, this is potentially a really big sign of distress, or maybe people will just be happy enough the way they were in 20 to vote. And in the end, of course, we know that it was a massively dispositive fact. One other thing just to mention, it's funny we started talking this conversation because I've been writing about Biden over these years. It turns out I've really been thinking a lot since the election that the book of mine that explains this period is not the Biden biography. It's the book.
- [51:50]
Sarah Longwell
It's the rage.
- [51:51]
Evan Osnos
Exactly. It's the subtitle about fury. I mean, this is a bleak resonance, but it is a fact. That book starts with a story about a wildfire in California. California? Why? Because I decided that that was the metaphor for our politics, that there was all of this dry tinder all over the place, and that it felt as if politics was waiting for a point of ignition for a person to ignite it. That person was Donald Trump. And as it felt to me, at least in the terms of that book, the fury of the land was kind of mirroring the fury of the people. And I think we're now in a place where Democrats have to take the lesson that people are angry, they're furious, they're going to stay angry, they're going to want leadership, they're going to want somebody with intense capacity to inspire. Biden never had the capacity to inspire that fury that's out there. Could be a tool. Ultimately, to your point, this is not a prescription for demagoguery. What it's saying, though, is that you can't expect people to stop being angry. You have to recognize where they are and what they're hungry for.
- [52:56]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. Okay. Before we get out of here, I want to hit the hunter thing because I kind of want to do a. Like, again, Twitter blue sky, not real life. Because when I talk to regular Democrats and it goes to your point and sort of a theme, I think of this conversation about just like the broken compact where people can understand things, but like, when you tell them over and over again that you're gonna be a certain way on so many fronts. If you say you were gonna be the pro democracy party or you say you're gonna be the pro democracy president. You lock yourself in to be like, no, no one's above the law. I'm not above the law. You better be perfect on that, bro. And so, on his way out the door here, I find it interesting or something that he decided to kind of be like, well, forget it. I'm gonna pardon hunter. And the legacy's already in a tough spot, and he kind of moved on this. So let's hear how these Democrats felt about the pardon.
- [53:52]
Voter 2
He did multiple times that he was not going to get involved, not going to get involved. And then he did. And people just kind of were like, well, what the hell did you. Why did you even do that? Yes, it's his son. Yes, we know he loves his son, but he said specifically that he wanted the justice system to run its course. And lo and behold, he inserted foot and mouth. And I think that really lost a lot of credibility. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it really overshadowed all the. All the good things that he did in his first term. So I think his legacy is going to be tarnished in two parts. Not being able to essentially walk the walk and talk the talk towards the end of his tenure. And on top of that, I would say an element of stubbornness and selfishness and not relinquishing power and giving it to a younger generation to kind of take the torch and run with it.
- [54:52]
Voter 4
I was very disappointed about that because I said, yes, let the system do what the system does. And even though it's your child and I understand all of your history and your losses and all that, I was really proud and glad that this is something that he was going to allow to happen and go through. And when he did that, I said, you couldn't even tell me the sun is shining and I got on sunglasses. Can't trust you anymore.
- [55:16]
Voter 1
I'm looking on the good side. Okay, he pardoned his son. Now we've got both sides abusing pardons. Let's get rid of presidential pardons now. It doesn't look political. Both sides have abused it. Let's get rid of it.
- [55:33]
Voter 2
I was okay with it because I'm like, Hud and Biden went through a lot of crap. I mean, Marjorie Terror Greene. So does penis. And again, what he got charged for, for having a gun and file his taxes late, and they're about to put him in jail for that. It's not like Donald Trump would. He pardoned part of Steve Bannon, all.
- [55:51]
Evan Osnos
Those other people who actually did worse crimes.
- [55:54]
Voter 2
It is unfortunate that he did it. It wasn't that big of a deal to me. I mean, almost every president has pardoned someone that they probably shouldn't have, but at the same time, it's kind of like, you know, just get rid of it. It's being abused at this point.
- [56:08]
Voter 4
It wasn't so much the pardon, it's the fact that he went back on his word.
- [56:12]
Voter 2
That's it. That's it.
- [56:13]
Voter 4
He went back on his word literally.
- [56:16]
Voter 2
Like the equivalent of read my lips, no new taxes. It was the same. Hasn't every other president done the same thing?
- [56:23]
Voter 4
Not on this level. They say things, they get in office, they realize they can't do it, but not on this level where he repeatedly said that he was going to let the system do if his son was guilty, that type of thing, and then he pardons him. Yes, your son and I can understand that. I don't know how many people on here have children, but, you know, your children are near and dear to you, and you do almost anything for them, except if mine do wrong, you got to suffer your own consequences.
- [56:50]
Sarah Longwell
So according to some of the polling that came out on this, 38% of Democrats approved of the pardon, while 27% disapproved. And among all Americans, only 22% approve of the pardon. So you mentioned in your work that Biden puts a very high premium on family solidarity and loyalty. Is this pardon a case of family solidarity winning out over the sort of restoring the soul of the nation rhetoric? Do you think it is going to impact how history treats him?
- [57:18]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, I think it is a case of family prevailing overall. I think that in its way, you know, family is the skeleton key to explaining a lot of Joe Biden's sometimes inexplicable choices over the course of his life. But that is what happened. I will add another thing, which is I think that there was a piece of this that comes from a very personalized sense of how he experienced the loss of being ejected from the race. Which is to say, I think at a certain point he finally said, you know what? Nobody cares about me. I'm just going to look out for myself and my own. And this is not something anybody's told me. This is just my own understanding of him is that I think at a certain point he said, you know, I'm not going to allow one final boot in the jaw of watching my son go to prison. I'm not defending this, by the way, Sarah, I'm just explaining it. I find that, as we've talked about, that's what I kind of Consider my brief. And I think the explanation is that this is a guy who felt like he had just lost to Donald Trump, in effect, by being pushed out of the race. He felt that the American people didn't want him. And he finally said, I'm not going to accept one last agony, and so fuck him. Yeah, I remember talking to a couple people around him who had hinted that if he lost the race, or this was before he was out, if he lost the race, that he might pardon him. And I think that is what happened in the end.
- [58:59]
Sarah Longwell
When I hear that as a human and as a parent, I get it, man. I really do. And knowing Trump coming in and the way that they're gonna seek retribution, I mean, I get it. But that's the thing about being the president, the thing about taking on that role, right, Is that you say, and then specifically being a president where you're sort of raison d'etre is the by the book and return to normality and all of that. I think that's. That's a struggle. But I guess I wonder so much in the answer that you gave and, like, is how Joe Biden feels like he's been treated. It's about him, which is really, I think what bummed me out during this period is how he kept making it about him. I mean, all the answers that people gave are similar to the ones you did where it's about him and how he feels like he's being treated. Do you think that the narcissism required to, like, be the President of the United States States makes it then very difficult for you to, like, see past your own whatever like, is that. Is it just too fundamentally intentioned?
- [60:07]
Evan Osnos
You know, narcissism is in the job description, essentially, is the problem. I think there is some of that, but I also think that at the risk of giving another dimension of a selfish reason, I think that the fact is he was aware that Hunter Biden was probably prosecuted in the way that he was because Joe Biden had chosen to run again. There were people close to Biden back in 20 who thought that it was a big mistake for Biden to run precisely because it was going to expose Hunter Biden to scrutiny and prosecution. So he's carrying that around in his mind, having, by the way, spent his whole life celebrating his late son Beau, in earshot of Hunter Biden, calling Beau Biden over and over, over the finest man I know. And now here he is. Beau is gone. The presidency is gone. All that's left is Hunter, the family. And here he has his moment. I'm not defending it. I'm explaining it the way you would try to explain a character on a page. And I think in the course of that, he took down a big chunk of his legacy with it.
- [61:12]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, I guess it's a tragic kind of end. And part of the tragedy of it is that he did do a number of things like the economy is in a macro sense at a very strong spot. And as a result, Donald Trump is about to inherit a ton of infrastructure that's going to be built, a good economy, probably a quickly ending war or at least a drawdown of tensions in the Middle East.
- [61:40]
Evan Osnos
And I will say on a day to day basis, right now, as of January 1, 2025, people in need of prescription medication pay less for it than they did before. They have caps on it. That is a fundamental contribution to American history. And I think this is not us sort of stuffing in some good stuff at the end. I do think that in the course of trying to understand his psychology, which is what we've done, understand why that compact with the voters was broken, we also are thinking ahead to how will history talk about him in 40 years? And one of the things they'll say is that he made some contributions to the daily life of Americans that will be paying dividends for years to come.
- [62:18]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. Evan Osnos, thank you so much for joining us. This was a great conversation and I think probably just what we need to be done with this era. As mad as I am right now, I'm going to miss it all. Yeah, a great deal.
- [62:31]
Evan Osnos
It's great to talk about this stuff with you always.
- [62:34]
Sarah Longwell
And thanks to all of you for listening to another episode of the focus group podcast. I can't wait to do 2025 with you guys. Remember to rate and review us on Apple podcasts and subscribe to the bulwark on YouTube and we will see you guys next week by.