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With a green light, Mike Donilon prepared a memo about the pitfalls Biden would face. It came down to ignoring the noise on Twitter and from reporters. The memo’s bottom line: “You need to run as Joe Biden.”
Donilon verbally summarized the memo to Biden. He was direct.
“Look, you’ve got to run on who you are. And guess what? You’ve been vice president of the United States, you start this campaign with a profile with the voters, which is extraordinarily strong, and you got that by being who you are. And you try to change it, you may as well go home. Don’t bother.”
They came back to the concept of “soul.” By then, it had become ingrained not just in Biden’s rhetoric but as an idea with a bestselling following, thanks to historian Jon Meacham’s 2018 book, The Soul of America.
When Meacham moderated the conversation with Biden at the University of Delaware that winter, Meacham told him, “I wrote the book because of Charlottesville.”
Meacham, who lived in Tennessee, had also grown friendly with Biden and Donilon behind the scenes, providing insights on language and historical tidbits in phone calls. As Meacham defined it, soul was a set of values, a force that pulled Americans toward grace.
Biden and Donilon relished the input. Meacham seemed to get Biden, unlike many of the pundits who were constants on cable news, and he slowly became the informal Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., dubbed the historian of power, for the not yet announced Biden campaign.
“I’m going to announce,” Biden said to the three-person Delaware congressional delegation in March 2019, all Democrats. Biden had asked the state’s two senators, Chris Coons and Tom Carper, and Delaware’s lone House member, Lisa Blunt Rochester, to lunch at 101 Constitution.
Coons, who held degrees from Yale Law School and Yale Divinity School, always felt he understood Biden. They were both spiritual men, Delaware men.
He had known Biden for 30 years and had been elected to the New Castle County Council, the same office that had given Biden his start. He and Beau Biden also had been friends, and Beau had asked Coons to run for his father’s Senate seat in 2010 when Joe Biden resigned to become vice president.
Coons was not surprised to hear Biden was in. Biden spoke about Charlottesville, about the country’s alarming divisions. His basic pitch was being honed.
Carper and Blunt Rochester left after lunch, but Coons hung back. He and Biden talked Delaware.
“Joe,” Coons said, looking Biden in the eyes, “I’ve got a piece of advice for you. And you know, you may not want to hear this, but Lisa is a congresswoman in her own right.” Blunt Rochester was the first woman and first Black person to hold the at-large Delaware seat. “She’s an elected statewide official.”
“Yeah,” Biden said. “What’s your point?”
“You talked about her dad who had been city council president. You talked about how close you are to John Lewis,” the Georgia congressman and civil rights icon. “You talked about how you’re going to get endorsed by this person and that person.
“You needed to give her the respect of looking her in the eyes and saying, ‘Congresswoman, I would be honored to have your support.’ ”
Biden blinked and turned to look out the window.
“I thought I did that,” he said.
“No, you did not do that,” Coons said. “It’s uncomfortable for you because you don’t want her to say no. And it’s uncomfortable for us because we don’t want to be taken for granted. But I’m telling you, you need to invest time in actually respecting her and asking for her support.”
Coons worried for a moment that Biden would be angry. Coons paused and pulled back. Biden looked at Coons.
“You know, that’s what Beau would have said if he were here.”
Biden grew quiet. “This is going to be harder than I thought because I don’t have anyone to give me that kind of advice. I want you to promise me, when you see me do something like that, you will tell me, even if it pisses me off, even if I don’t want to hear it.”
Coons promised.
“I’m just wondering how you felt that lunch went,” Coons later said in a phone call to Blunt Rochester.
There was silence. Coons asked if she thought Biden was respectful in how he asked for their support.
“Hell, no,” she said. “It’s like he was telling me that I should support him because my dad supported him. And I’m not my dad.”
“Yes,” Coons said, “that’s what I heard.” Although he had already spoken with Biden, he asked, “Would you be offended if I conveyed this to the vice president?”
“That would be helpful because I was a little upset,” she said.
Blunt Rochester was soon invited to visit Biden at his home on Saturday. She had serious questions about Biden as a presidential candidate. “Is he really ready for this?” she thought. “Is he the one?” She knocked on his door. Nobody answered but she could hear dogs barking.
Suddenly, she saw Biden driving down the hill, carrying coffee and bagels. I didn’t know if you ate, he told her. They then went into his study. She noticed a picture of Beau in his bomber jacket.
Biden told her he wanted hard questions.
She asked him how he would bridge the gap between progressives and moderates in the party. What kind of people are you going to have run this campaign? Who would you be looking at for your cabinet?
His answers were not particularly original, but she was struck by the intensity of his engagement. He wanted her to ask him more questions. He almost looked pained when he talked about his family, what cost they would pay and how they were encouraging him to run. On domestic policy, he said he wanted to expand Obamacare.
I would want a woman as my running mate, Biden told her. That was a surprise to Blunt Rochester and was not something he had yet said publicly.
Biden said people were pressuring him to say he would only serve one term, but he had resisted.
After two and one half hours, Biden walked her to her car. Before leaving, she asked that they say a brief prayer together. And so they prayed. She drove away feeling that Biden was born for this moment.
Blunt Rochester soon endorsed Biden and went to multiple states and churches to campaign for him, from Harlem to the heartland. She campaigned harder for Biden than Coons did. Biden asked her to be one of the co-chairs for his campaign and later to be on his vice presidential selection committee.
Once Biden was elected, she knew he had lots of incoming—advice, special pleadings, recommendations. But she stayed close to him, ever judicious about his time. “I’ve always felt that he would listen,” she said.
Biden’s past habits hovered. His penchant for hugging and kissing women he met, including candidates and elected officials, was being newly scrutinized as the Me Too movement exposed sexual harassment and assault.
Biden had long dismissed criticism of his conduct as a crude attempt by Republicans to sexualize his interactions with women. But on March 29, 2019, it was not a Republican but a former Democratic state assemblywoman in Nevada who accused Biden of “demeaning and disrespectful behavior” for kissing the back of her head at a 2014 event.
“An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden,” read the headline of a story written by Lucy Flores, the Nevada Democrat, for New York magazine. Biden was floored.
On a call with staff, Biden sounded hurt and exasperated. “I never meant…” he began, his voice drifting off.
Then, in a speech a few days later, Biden joked about being given permission to hug the president of the association who had introduced him. He also told reporters he was “not sorry for anything I’ve ever done.” The reaction was fierce. Biden stopped making the joke.
In her book, Jill said her husband comes from a family of huggers. But after the Flores episode, and public complaints from six other women who said Biden’s touching and kissing made them feel uncomfortable, Jill was firm with Joe: You need to change, fast.
“He needs to give people their space,” Jill Biden later told CBS This Morning. She called the women who came forward courageous. “Joe has heard that message.”