Maureen Dowd: ‘The Obama West Wing treated Biden quite shabbily’

At this week’s Irish Times Summer Nights Festival, Hugh Linehan interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maureen Dowd about today’s America. This section of the conversation focuses on the Biden presidency

Maureen Dowd: To understand the Biden presidency you have to understand that for the last couple of decades the narrative of Joe Biden was set, in a way that only Joe Biden and very few other people disagreed with. That narrative was: he was lucky to be chosen as Barack Obama's vice-president; he had hit his ceiling; and he could never run for president, because he couldn't attract enough voters and couldn't raise enough money and he had too many gaffes.

But people ignored that he appealed to a core group that the Democrat Party wants to get back. So when they chose Hillary over Biden, they were choosing kind of the elitist status quo and ignoring that he had that quality of being able to talk to those people. Joe Biden loves nothing more than to go into the hardware store in Wilmington and talk about nuts and bolts.

Hugh Linehan: Isn't this the fuel that powers the engine of populism: elites getting completely disconnected from the experiences of people on the ground, who feel they're being talked down to by Harvard and Yale and Manhattan and Washington?

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Maureen Dowd: Yes, that's exactly it. I once read an interview with Obama in the New Yorker with David Remnick where he was talking about globalisation and people should have gotten on board faster, but I don't think he ever explained it. People were scared. They needed a leader to take them through the transition to globalisation, and even though Obama likes to be a professor, he didn't do that, he didn't explain "This is where we used to be. This is where we're going. Don't be scared. We've got this." You know, it was just kind of like, "Get on board", and so I think that that created a huge disconnect.

Hugh Linehan: You've been quite hard on Obama over the years, and I wonder do you feel a little bit justified by the last few months? Because people have compared the first few months of the Biden presidency very favourably with what happened when Obama came in in 2009 and a lack of boldness on Obama's part.

Maureen Dowd: Obama was this once-in-a-lifetime amazing political figure who accomplished what none of us thought could be accomplished. I was on the road with him for a year and wrote all positive stories. He got elected and it was thrilling, but what we didn't know was he didn't like politics, and he kind of hid that.

Politics is the art of persuading people who don’t want to do something to do it, and he thought that was beneath him. So, it’s very hard to get a gun control law passed as president unless you do a bit of wheeling and dealing, you know? And he thought he was such a big change that he wanted to tamp down change and not go for the big and the bold. He thought he himself was big and bold enough, and I think that was a mistake, because people elected him because they had an appetite for big, bold change.

Nobody from the Obama West Wing thought Biden could be president, but now he has a chance to go bigger and bolder than Obama. People used to dismiss him and really treat him quite shabbily at times. Not Obama. Obama would make a crack now and again, but other than that was very good to Biden when his son was dying. But the snotty aides would be dismissive.

Now Biden is saying, “Wow, maybe I have this opportunity to be big and bold” to these same people who were dismissive to him. But the clock is ticking because if we get a Republican Congress in the next election, then Biden’s plans are kaput.

Hugh Linehan: When Obama came in, he had a whacking great majority both in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Biden is much more precarious. He just depends on Kamala Harris's vote to get anything through with a 50-50 in the Senate. So, he's got to act pretty fast, doesn't he?

Maureen Dowd: He has this two-track thing going where he has one Bill that he is portraying in a tableau to be bipartisan, and then he has another Bill that Nancy Pelosi is going to ram through, you know with a lot of social safety net things that the Democrats want. He's not doing what Obama did, which was to wait too long. It's in Biden's nature to be bipartisan, so he's trying to do that, but he's got another track going as well.

Hugh Linehan: Can he be successful? There was a lot of highfalutin talk in the first three months that he was going to be like a new FDR, or a new LBJ.

Maureen Dowd: I love the romance of the Biden story. The fact that this guy everyone had written off gets to be president at this very belated state is a pretty amazing story. And the fact that he has fallen in love with the idea of going big. It may be impossible, and it might turn out to be more Don Quixote than FDR, but I like that he wants to try and try, and dream big.

Hugh Linehan: How different is the Joe Biden now from the Joe Biden you saw 20 years ago?

Maureen Dowd: He's going through a normal ageing process. When Trump first got in, the reporters were looking at old tapes of him in the 1980s and saying he'd lost a lot of his vocabulary and he wasn't talking as well, and after about a year they forgot about it, and I think Biden's doing fine that way.

It’s kind of poignant to watch his aides overprotect him. He’s like a dog going up against an electric fence and getting shocked when he’s talking, because he stops himself. His aides have drilled in “Don’t talk too much. Don’t make gaffes.” So, he isn’t as freewheeling. He’s thinking all the time, “Am I going too far?” and I think then it causes some hesitations in his speech.

He’s the epitome of Senator Moynihan’s line that to be Irish is to know that the world is going to break your heart, because he had his wife and daughter killed, then his son died of cancer, he himself had an aneurysm, he’s had scandals he’s gotten through. Yet he does not in that typical Irish way let himself get dragged down by the past. I wonder if he is Irish at all. He’s not a vengeful person like Trump is. He has a sunny disposition.

Hugh Linehan: How important is his Irish-American identity? He can barely open his mouth without a Heaney or a Yeats quote coming out of it, and he's always talking about being Irish as far as I can tell.

Maureen Dowd: The biggest difference between Obama and Biden was that Obama was not sentimental at all, and in fact it hurt him because he didn't know how to do a Reagan Challenger moment where he would bond with the country after some tragedy or something. Obama just didn't like the cheap sentiment. And Biden loves the cheap sentiment. He just loves it.

I remember one time I had been in Ireland when he was vice-president, and I was at Ashford Castle, which is near where his family is from, and I brought him back a book about it, and he was all excited.

Most of the presidents I've covered have been Anglophiles. A National Security adviser once told me Reagan had a little crush on Margaret Thatcher, which he talked about on the plane back from a summit once. And then the Bushes, who the first they thing they would do was haul in the Winston Churchill bust into the Oval Office.

I would [always] go to the annual St Patrick’s Day party in the White House, but I don’t think Obama and Michelle enjoyed that at all. There were always some tipsy Kennedys in the back making noise, and they got out of there as fast as they could. So Biden is one of the few presidents in modern history who is absolutely crazy about the Irish and intends to celebrate them in every way he can.

This is an edited transcript of an interview with Maureen Dowd at the Irish Times Summer Nights Festival on June 30th