THIRTEEN
In January 2020, Biden was campaigning full-time in Iowa ahead of the caucuses.
In between stops, he met regularly with Tony Blinken, his longtime top foreign policy adviser, for briefings on the world.
Blinken had served as No. 2 in the State Department during the Obama years after first working for Biden in the vice president’s office. He kept in touch with the foreign policy and intelligence establishments as well as anyone outside government.
While known for his smooth diplomacy in both professional and personal dealings, Blinken kept his hair long and played in a dad-rock band.
That January, news of a virulent virus emerged from China. On January 23, China locked down Wuhan, one of its most populated cities, and restricted its population of 11 million people to their homes to control the outbreak.
Blinken told Biden a global health emergency could explode, perhaps into a pandemic. He urged Biden to speak out on it.
Biden talked with Klain, who had overseen the Ebola crisis for the Obama administration in late 2014 and early 2015. Klain had led efforts to track individuals from Ebola-stricken countries and worked closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Get out in front of it, Klain suggested to Biden. Blow the whistle loudly.
These outbreaks are always harder and take more time than anyone thinks, Klain said. It is not over until it is over, and you risk over-responding or under-responding.
They agreed it was precisely a governing, organizing matter that Trump could not handle. But Biden could.
Biden and his team drafted an op-ed and placed it in USA Today, the daily newspaper aimed at travelers who would be alarmed about a worldwide health crisis.
It ran on January 27. The headline: “Trump Is Worst Possible Leader to Deal with Coronavirus Outbreak.” Biden blasted Trump for tweeting “it will all work out well” and for proposing “draconian cuts” to the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. He pledged, if elected, to “always uphold science, not fiction or fearmongering.”
The next day, Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, warned him, in a top secret Presidential Daily Briefing, that the mysterious pneumonia-like virus outbreak would be seismic.
Sitting at the Resolute Desk, Trump looked intently at O’Brien.
“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” O’Brien said.
“What do we do about it?” Trump asked, turning to Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, who had been a Wall Street Journal reporter in China. Pottinger said his excellent sources in China believed the U.S. could suffer hundreds of thousands of deaths from the virus.
Cut off travel from China to the United States. A major health crisis was coming, Pottinger said, that could resemble the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 that killed an estimated 675,000 Americans.
Three days later, Trump curtailed travel with China, but the president remained distracted. There was the upcoming Super Bowl, the Democratic presidential field, his State of the Union address—and his Senate impeachment trial.
At the heart of the trial was Trump’s angst about Biden. Trump publicly dismissed Biden, but he and his senior advisers knew Biden, unlike Hillary Clinton, had a strong base among blue-collar voters. Since Trump had narrowly beaten Clinton, any erosion of Trump’s support with those voters could be crippling to his reelection chances.
On July 25, 2019, Trump had called recently elected Ukrainian prime minister Volodymyr Zelensky, who was seeking a commitment of military aid from the United States in Ukraine’s conflict with Russia.
In the call, a transcript of which Trump later ordered released, Trump asked Zelensky to talk with Attorney General William Barr and the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, about an investigation of the Bidens, particularly Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that faced legal trouble.
In early February, Trump was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate of impeachment charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress, falling 10 votes short of the 67-vote, two-thirds majority required by the Constitution to remove the president from office.
Jake Sullivan, previously a top national security aide to Biden and to Hillary Clinton, was another super high-achiever inside Biden’s campaign.
Sullivan, 42, was Yale Law School, a Rhodes Scholar, and a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Rail thin, he was cautious and serious. In meetings, Biden often asked, “Jake, what do you think?”
Sullivan had studied the upcoming caucuses and primaries. They were obviously unfriendly terrain for Biden—mostly white and rural.
Early on, Sullivan came up with a strategy, one he wrote down and kept:
4-3-2-1
Fourth in Iowa, third in New Hampshire, second in Nevada, and first in must-win South Carolina.
By February 2020, the 4-3-2-1 plan was on the brink of collapsing entirely, and campaign manager Greg Schultz was under mounting pressure.
Biden, averse to the drama of a public shakeup, kept Schultz on board, but dispatched Anita Dunn to the campaign’s Philadelphia headquarters to take charge of a demoralized campaign with a shoestring budget. She was now de facto campaign manager.
The Iowa caucuses on February 3 were a drubbing—the expected fourth-place finish. Biden won just 16 percent of the vote, slumping behind Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren. That trio took 70 percent of the vote in the state.
As the New Hampshire primary neared, Dunn warned others that Biden may not be able to compete if Bloomberg began to make gains nationwide. Super Tuesday, a battleground with 1,357 delegates in 14 states, lay ahead on March 3, following the first four contests.
Biden was not pointing fingers or blaming people. Dunn saw no self-pity. Instead, he asked, “What is our plan and how are we going to do this?”
With scant funds, Dunn shut down Biden’s Super Tuesday efforts. Field staff east of the Mississippi were sent to South Carolina. Those to the west of the Mississippi were sent to Nevada, where Biden was looking to kindle labor support.
Buttigieg, surging in the polls after a narrow delegate win for him in Iowa, saw the New Hampshire primary on February 11 as a chance to take the lead.
To try to slow him, the Biden campaign pulled together a brutal attack video called “Pete’s Record,” comparing his record with Biden’s. The ad’s narrator said both Biden and Buttigieg had “taken on tough fights.”
“Under the threat of nuclear Iran, Joe Biden helped negotiate the Iran deal,” the narrator said. Then the background music lightened up, like a cartoon track. “And under the threat of disappearing pets, Pete Buttigieg negotiated lighter licensing regulations on pet chip scanners.”
It went on, the music alternating, touting Biden’s work on the economy and Obama stimulus package, “saving our economy from a depression” while “Pete Buttigieg revitalized the sidewalks of downtown South Bend by laying out decorative brick.”
The campaign, though, had no money to run the ad on television. Donilon argued to Biden that it was politically necessary to release it to the media and on YouTube. The pickup could be greater than a paid ad.
“I hate it,” Biden said, but agreed the video could be released.
About six hours later, Biden called Donilon: “Take it off. Take it back. I don’t want it airing any longer. Take it down!”
It was too late. The media was running the ad, with some commentators saying it showed Biden’s desperation. Buttigieg’s aides labeled the attack as a classic example of snarky, dirty Washington politics.
Biden was polling fifth in New Hampshire. On top of that, campaign finances were dwindling.
On the eve of the New Hampshire vote, Jake Sullivan and Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield sat in a bar in Manchester, New Hampshire. Sullivan wrote a new sequence on a napkin:
4-5-2-1
New Hampshire was a catastrophe. Sanders and Buttigieg each received about 25 percent of the vote, and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, another moderate, exceeded expectations and took 20 percent. Warren finished fourth.
Biden, with about 8 percent of the vote, in fifth place, left New Hampshire that night and dashed toward South Carolina.