IN MAY 2001, Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican Party, declared himself an independent, and started caucusing with the Democrats. This gave the Democrats a one-vote majority in the Senate, which meant that Biden became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, a position he’d long coveted. At about this time, Ted and Dennis asked whether Jack and I would hold a big Biden fundraising event at Quinn Gillespie. The event was a huge success. It raised over $75,000 for Biden and was a well-timed celebration of his ascendance to foreign relations chairman. I introduced him and told a story from 1979 of the Tuscaloosa News editor defending his decision—to me, an irate college student—to banish to the back pages Biden’s revelation that Soviet troops in Cuba was a phony issue because Biden’s speech was “only one man’s opinion.” Now, I said, that opinion carries weight around the world.
Jack and I hosted a similar event for Biden two years later. Biden, whose assistant campaign treasurer had embezzled $350,000 of campaign funds, showed almost maudlin appreciation to the crowd for helping refill his coffers. As usual, he didn’t thank me, either at the event or afterwards, even though I’d done more work than anyone to make it a success. This time, I couldn’t remain silent. When Dennis took me to lunch to thank me for the event, I told him that not only had Biden let me down at a critical moment of my career (by not calling Mikva), he couldn’t seem to bring himself to thank me when I bust my ass to help his political career. It had been more than twenty years since Biden had signed my notebook “Please stay involved in politics, we need you all.” I had—but had received precious little from Biden in return. As a lobbyist, I’d not once asked for a meeting with or favor from Biden (to his credit, he was famous for not doing them anyway). A little personal appreciation wouldn’t kill him. Though taken aback, Dennis was sympathetic. After all, for the past twenty years, he, like Ted, had been mollifying the many dissatisfied members of the extended Biden family.
Two weeks later, I received a handwritten note from Biden: “Jeff, you’ve always been there for me. I hope you know that I will always be there for you.” This, after “thanks for being a true friend,” was the second disingenuous note Biden had sent me. He’d never been there for me, not in any direct way that had propelled my career or raised my standing in Washington. All he did—weeks after the fact, presumably after succumbing to pressure from Dennis—was send me one-line notes.
Yet I consciously decided to keep playing along and advised every other former Biden staffer to do the same. It was in our interest to stay involved with Biden. I called it the New Contract. Yes, Biden was an equal-opportunity disappointer; he wouldn’t lift a finger to help anyone but his family, a tiny group of insiders, and his longtime backers in Delaware. But Ted and Dennis will always help. Biden is only getting more powerful in DC. Do the math, I’d say (to them and myself): It makes sense to be known across Washington as a Biden guy in good standing. No one needs to know the truth. Besides, while I’d become increasingly disappointed by him personally, he still had the strengths as a politician I’d admired when I first met him: his command of the issues (those he cared about), his positions on most issues, and his occasional willingness to buck party orthodoxy to do what he thought was right.
That was my line in 2004 when I roped in as many Biden supporters as possible to raise money for John Kerry’s presidential campaign by holding a Georgetown cocktail party at which Biden and the late Richard Holbrooke had agreed to speak. We printed invitations saying Biden and Holbrooke would be there. By working the foreign policy establishment hard, we raised more than $200,000. On the day of the event, I got a call from Biden’s scheduler, asking me if I would hold for Biden. He came on the phone: “Hey, buddy. How badly do you need me to be there tonight? I really want to go home to Delaware.” I couldn’t believe he was trying to back out. “Senator, there are going to be 150 people there tonight who wrote $1,000 or more checks because I promised them you’d be there. You simply have to keep your word to me and show up.” Biden grudgingly said he would.
Like supplicants for ambassadorial posts, droves of Professional Democrats had attended, hoping for their one-on-one moment with Biden and Holbrooke. Professional Democrats are not just the lobbyists. The term applies to almost all Democrats in the legal, policy, foreign policy, and even national security worlds, each of whom is trying to climb the greasy pole of power. Currently, Clinton veterans are Washington’s dominant generation of Professional Democrats. Professional Democrats don’t shake up the system; they are the system, and they want to preserve it so that it works best for them. They want to serve at least a year or two in every Democratic administration as part of their steady rise in the Democratic hierarchy. That night, many of them had made the maximum allowable contribution to the Kerry-Edwards DNC account.
Not every former Biden staffer bought into the New Contract. Five of the seven friends from the 1987 Biden campaign with whom I still had lunch once a month had stopped helping Biden. Even though I was disappointed, I did my best to keep the flame alive among former staff. I still wanted to believe that I—the college student who’d met Biden and later left Wall Street to join him—was symbolic of Biden’s ability to inspire people, to change lives, and to lead. If he could do it with me, he could it with other people.
In truth, by this point none of us believed that Biden had a realistic chance of becoming president. But the New Contract—to those of us who upheld it in its strongest form—included playing along with Biden’s presidential delusions. So when Ted asked me in 2006 whether I wanted to be involved in the upcoming Biden presidential campaign, I said “sure.” Why quit now? In the one-in-a-thousand chance that Biden struck lightning in Iowa, the payoff on all the chips I’d put on the table over the years could be huge. It was like Pascal’s wager. I should live as though God exists and Biden will become president, because in both cases I have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Because I’d raised more money for Biden in Washington than anyone else in the past fifteen years, Ted asked me to be treasurer of Biden’s new political action committee, Unite Our States. Our inaugural fundraising event in Georgetown raised $200,000 (and I actually got a thank-you voicemail from Biden). Ted also once again got me involved in the early campaign strategy sessions. The first I attended with Biden was at his house in Wilmington. It was a gathering of his biggest rainmakers, people who’d raised money for him over the years or who were proven fundraisers who’d expressed support for him this time around.
Most candidates make hundreds of calls a day. In contrast, when it comes to fundraising, Biden (and Ted) are products of their home state, which is tiny. If you throw a party in Delaware, you’d better invite everyone—or no one. If you only invite a few people, the rest of the state will hear about it and be angry that they were left out. The same thing applied, so went the Biden campaign logic, to personal calls from the senator: if he calls some people, everyone will expect a call and be disappointed if they don’t get one. That’s why Biden always had his disciples pass the hat for him.
More importantly, Biden absolutely hated making fundraising calls, and everyone at the meeting in Wilmington knew it. Biden said to us: “I’ll challenge you on how much time I should spend doing fundraising, because I believe momentum is more important. If I can generate a rise in my poll numbers in Iowa, that will do more to raise money than if I spend all day on the phones when I’m stuck at 1 percent. But once we jointly decide on a strategy, and we reach a compact on how much of my time should be spent doing calls, I give you my word I’ll do them.” Later in the campaign, a twenty-three-year-old fundraising staffer got into a car with Biden with a list of names and phone numbers: “Okay, Senator, time to do some fundraising calls.” Biden looked at him and said, “Get the fuck out of the car.” At moments like this, even I could be an enabler. Instead of confronting Biden with his churlish treatment of a kid who was just following instructions, I went into mollify-mode and tried to make the staffer laugh: “How fast was the car moving at the time? Did you do the tuck and roll that I taught you?”
In a town preoccupied with fundraising, Biden was indeed an exception. Other senators typically spend hours out of every day calling big fish to do events for them or even smaller donors for $1,000 contributions. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, when given a long list, has called past Democratic contributors who didn’t even know who Reid was when they took the call. Delaware, which is the size of a large county in most other states, had spoiled Biden. He liked keeping his integrity intact; fundraising, he perceived, was a threat to it and one he’d long avoided. Presidential campaigns are gigantically expensive cash-raising contests, and he was ill prepared for it.
If Biden lacked the discipline necessary for a presidential campaign, so did, this time around, his inner circle. None of the stalwarts wanted to work on the campaign full-time, and they were having a hard time finding a campaign manager and other campaign staff who’d devote eighty hours a week to the campaign. Biden’s bid, which pundits unanimously considered hopeless, nearly ended before it started. The day he announced his run for president, an interview surfaced in which he’d called Barack Obama “articulate and bright and clean.” He’d actually been trying to be complimentary, but his adjectives sounded condescending and, in the case of “clean,” at least latently racist.
Because of my history with Biden in Texas, I made a point of flying to Houston for a fundraiser organized by many of the same people who had done events for Biden in 1987. Over the years, I’d become friends with two of them, Greg Jones and Ron Franklin. The Houston event was at Greg’s home. Biden arrived and began speaking to a packed living room. Dinner was waiting in the next room, but Biden was just getting started. As a longtime staffer, I knew to keep flexing my knees while standing through a Biden speech. After awhile, I noticed that the room was getting uncomfortably warm. Suddenly, a woman fainted. Two men caught her and carried her out a side door. Biden just kept on speaking. Finally, Dennis had to come in and announce that dinner was getting cold. As the guests filed into the dining room, I stood in the foyer and asked a couple of them for their impressions. “He’s got senatorial disease,” one said. “He talks too much.” At that moment, the front door opened, and the foyer was bathed in the flashing red lights of the ambulance into which the fainting victim was being loaded.
On this campaign, Biden and I saw more of each other than we usually did. Before one event, we were alone together. I did what I always did: put on a fake smile, said how good it was to see him again, and briefed him on the group he was about to speak to. This one time, Biden apparently tried to get past what had happened between us. He gave me a quizzical look, as if to ask, “Why are you like that with me? Why aren’t we friends?” He even started to say, hesitantly: “Why are you, why can’t we . . . ?” I looked at him and didn’t say anything. Maybe another time, I thought, because we aren’t going to solve a decade of bad feeling in the three seconds before the host walks through that door to start this event.
In September 2007, I went to Iowa to get a feel for the campaign. It was the weekend of the Harkin Steak Fry, an important political rally hosted by Senator Tom Harkin that draws all the of the candidates and thousands of Iowans. On the Saturday before the Steak Fry, I spent the day with Danny O’Brien, Biden’s former chief of staff, who now served as the campaign’s political director. Danny would spend a year of his life in Iowa, living out of a suitcase, putting in eighty-hour weeks, and making one of the greatest personal sacrifices for Biden I’d ever seen. We went to the Iowa-Iowa State football game, and Danny worked the state senators and representatives he hoped would endorse Biden. We also went to a backyard Democratic barbeque, where Biden’s son Hunter shook hands and joked with everyone there. At both events, we ran into Senator Chris Dodd, whose campaign was even more quixotic than ours, but with whom the Biden people (even I) shared a sense of incredulity and injustice that upstarts like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were getting more traction than experienced hands like Biden and Dodd.
Driving to the Steak Fry the next day, I saw scores of buses filled with Obama and Clinton supporters; as I got closer, hundreds of people in Obama and Clinton T-shirts were streaming to the event. Not a single Biden sign or supporter. The event itself was like an outdoor rock concert, with thousands of people spread across a hill, looking down on the stage where the candidates would speak. The crowd seemed to be evenly split between Obama and Clinton, with a sprinkling of Richardson and Edwards supporters. I turned to see Biden and a few staffers entering the grounds. I went up to Annie Tomasini, Biden’s deputy press secretary, and asked her where our supporters were. As Biden, undaunted, waded into the crowd and started pressing the flesh, Annie said, “We’re hoping for a snowball effect.”
The hope went unanswered. Biden did well in the televised debates (famously responding with the single word “yes” to the question “do you have the discipline not to talk too much?”), but his poll numbers were mired in single digits. So our fundraising never improved, and we operated on a shoestring. Meanwhile, Obama was raising tens of millions of dollars. After the 2008 campaign, statistics would show that three of the top seven employers of Obama’s largest contributors were Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan, and Citigroup.
In early December, I flew to Iowa to stay (except for a brief holiday break) through the caucuses, which were scheduled for January 8, 2008. After watching the final debate in Des Moines, my plan was to travel with Biden for a couple days to get a sense of his message and how he was connecting with caucus voters. The next day started early with a breakfast in a supporter’s home in southeast Iowa. There were about forty people there. Biden put his arm around, and chatted briefly with, each one of them before he was introduced to speak. His speech wasn’t very good. He spent a lot of time on his résumé. A question about climate change sparked a change, though. He gave a passionate answer, talking about his early involvement with the issue as a sponsor of the first fuel-efficiency bill. Okay, that’s more like it, I thought.
Our next stop was a small hall in Fort Madison, and Biden was warmed up now. He walked among the thirty people who’d shown up, extemporizing a speech that had a clear narrative line and that wove in, at the proper moment, genuinely funny stories from his many years in the Senate. It was an outstanding performance and vintage Biden. If he didn’t just convince those people he should be president, I thought, he never will. Biden tried to give the same speech at the next stop, but this time it was disjointed, and at one point he told the punch line to a story without having set it up. It was clear that Biden had done little or no preparation and was trying to wing it at every stop. Sometimes he pulled it off, sometimes he didn’t.
Having seen enough to realize we weren’t going to win, I drove on to Waterloo. The Waterloo headquarters were dingy and depressing, but the staff was young and enthusiastic. Greg Jones had come up from Houston to ride out the campaign with me. His wife later joined us. It was tough work doing the phone banking and door-to-door canvassing, just as I had for Biden for so many years in his Senate campaigns. Each night, we went to a casino outside Waterloo for a nice dinner and a glass of wine, dulling the pain of the slow march toward caucus-day disaster.
Each icy Iowa morning, Greg and I met for breakfast or a workout at the local gym before starting another day of drudgery. I’d bought a GPS for my rental car so I could find my way around the area. At night, as I drove through snow-covered farmland to another tiny town to drop off campaign supplies, the GPS only rarely had to issue instructions. It simply displayed a straight pink line across a dark, empty screen. I was counting the days until that pink line had run its course, and I could get back to my life in Washington.