On Politics: A disappearing president steps back into the limelight
A disappearing president steps back into the limelight
The latest, with 82 days to go
For a few minutes on Thursday afternoon, President Biden stood silently onstage in Maryland, his hands folded and his body swaying ever so softly. On one side of him was Vice President Kamala Harris, heaping praise on him; hovering on the other side was Harris's face again, emblazoned on a shirt worn by a member of the crowd. It was the pair's first time onstage together since Biden withdrew from the presidential race. The appearance, three and a half weeks in the making, had great potential for awkwardness: an event for the Biden White House with the vibe of a Harris campaign rally. If it looked like Biden was living in Harris's world now, he kept the focus on Trump. "Let me tell you what our Project 2025 is," Biden said, evoking a set of conservative policy plans drawn up by allies of former President Donald Trump, once he stepped to the microphone. "Beat the hell out of 'em." Unburdened by the weight of defending democracy in an embattled presidential campaign, Biden joked repeatedly about his age — "I served in the Senate for 270 years!" — referred to former President Trump as "Donald Dump," and delivered a line that had bedeviled him at the debate where his candidacy unraveled. "This time," he said, "we finally beat big pharma." It was a flash of a Biden who has not been seen much since he dropped out of the presidential race on July 21. He is no longer his party's standard-bearer. He has not appeared on the campaign trail. He seems in many ways to have shrunk from public view. It all got me curious about what these past weeks have meant for Biden — a man who is, of course, very much still president. My colleague Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent, has watched Biden and Harris up close, and he spoke with me this afternoon from the event in Maryland. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity. JB: We know Biden's withdrawal from the presidential race upended the campaign. Did it also change his presidency? PB: Instantaneously, his presidency as he knew it was over. Now, he had six more months to be president. There are a lot of things you can do as a lame duck. But he no longer had the authority and the attention, the bully pulpit and the power that comes with being a president who might have a second term. That's one of the reasons he didn't want to drop out in the first place. Has he actually stepped out of the spotlight? Or does he simply garner less attention right now? It's a little of both. He's been scheduled pretty lightly. He said he's going to have a vigorous campaign schedule, and he hasn't. He'll give a speech at the Democratic convention on Monday, and then he will be on vacation until Labor Day. That doesn't mean things aren't happening behind the scenes — he's paying a lot of attention to the cease-fire talks in the Middle East, he's making a lot of calls to foreign leaders. He's still active — but it's a very different kind of presidency now. Biden is an unpopular incumbent who wants his party to remain in power. If he is intentionally receding from the spotlight, is that strategic? He's actually a little more popular now that he's decided not to run! Broadly speaking, voters did not want him to step aside because of some toxic political problem — it's just that they thought, "OK, thanks very much, you're 81, you're good." But I do think he's flipped positions with Kamala Harris, in a way. Up until now, for three and a half years, she always had to make sure nothing she did got in his way. Now, it's his job to not upstage her. It's his job not to do anything that gets in her way. It's kind of an odd situation. He's a commander in chief, but he kind of has a secondary role now. Today's event was a chance for Biden and Harris to celebrate landmark price negotiations between Medicare and big pharmaceutical companies. Over the course of his presidency, Biden has struggled to communicate to the public about moves like these, which he views as major achievements. Do you think Harris is doing that any better? She has a different way of presenting their case. She's not focusing, the same way he did, on the latest infrastructure project, or reminding people about $35 insulin. She is tapping into a larger, broader, more emotional resonance. She's not mired in the particulars of the record. And that contrast was on display in Maryland today.
Do we have any sense of how their relationship has been over the past three weeks, and why it's taken this long for them to hold a buzzy joint appearance? It's a very good question. Years from now, when we read the memoirs, we'll learn a lot more. Generally, I would say that they have a good working relationship. They like and respect each other, but I don't get the sense that they're particularly close. They are of different generations, different coasts and different backgrounds. She maintained nothing but public loyalty during the weeks that he was trying to decide whether or not to stay in the race. Today, she was very warm toward the president, lavishing him with praise and hugging him when she ceded the podium. What role do you think he wants to play for his party and in this election going forward? In a way, he adds an extra principal to their ticket. Biden can validate Harris for voters who may feel uncomfortable with her, who don't really know her, who may not feel like they connect with her, but who do connect with him — in places like Scranton, Pa., and others where "working-class Joe" has a longstanding connection. He can say, "She's one of us. She gets you." In that sense, he has a role to play. The convention will be remarkable. We'll see a man who was running for president passing the baton. What should we expect? I'm sure it's a pretty disappointing demotion to go from speaking Thursday night, when the nominee speaks, to Monday night, when he is now scheduled. I expect he will give a gracious speech and then disappear. And maybe that's the best thing for Harris. It's going to be her party now. She has to make it her party. Ceding the stage may be the hardest thing to do, but it's also necessary, so the new generation can assert itself. Biden is a proud man. He's a stubborn man. He believed he still could have won, as our colleagues reported today, and he believed in his own resilience. But, since he made the remarkable decision to step aside, he has not tried to keep attention on himself, and maybe that's to his credit, because he recognizes that it's no longer his campaign to run.
AD WATCH An odd couple teams up in UtahSometimes, politics is just petty — and I, for one, find it hard to resist an innocuous helping of mess. So an ad featuring a Democrat and a Republican in Utah caught my eye. I asked my colleague Jonathan Weisman to tell us the tale. Talk about the enemy of my enemy being my friend. Phil Lyman, the conservative Utah Republican who challenged Gov. Spencer Cox, who is more moderate, in the state's Republican primary this summer, has teamed up with the long-shot Democrat running for governor, Brian King, for an advertisement attacking Cox. The one thing they both agree on, they intone together, "is that Spencer Cox should not be our next governor." Lyman, who is mounting a write-in campaign, urges voters to put his name on the ballot — before King interrupts him and urges people to vote for him, instead. To say these men don't see eye-to-eye on the issues is an understatement. King, whose campaign paid for the ad, was a combative minority leader in the Statehouse, known for pushing gun control in a state where such policies are anathema. Lyman was convicted on federal charges after organizing a protest of an all-terrain vehicle ban on Bureau of Land Management land, then was pardoned by former President Donald Trump. He still mustered 46 percent of the vote in the June 25 primary against Cox. In a way, the ad is a display of bipartisanship that Cox might appreciate. Cox, who has denounced Trump, saying that the former president represents "neither goodness nor kindness," has made calls to "disagree better" central to his political brand. That phrase pops up in the ad — as a punchline. — Jonathan Weisman Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
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