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Could This Political Marriage Be Saved? Biden and Obama Found a Way.

In “The Long Alliance,” Gabriel Debenedetti traces how political leaders of different generations and contrasting temperaments helped each other succeed.

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By Jason Zengerle

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THE LONG ALLIANCE : The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama , by Gabriel Debenedetti

In “The Long Alliance,” Gabriel Debenedetti writes that Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s nearly two-decade-long relationship “has a claim to being the most consequential of any in 21st-century politics.” That claim would seem to be a strong one. What other political relationship of this century boasts two members who have occupied the White House for nearly half of it?

But Debenedetti’s hedge is evidence of his judiciousness. “The Long Alliance” is less an argument about the importance of the Obama-Biden partnership than it is a careful chronicling and insightful examination of it. As portrayed by Debenedetti, the relationship has been both productive and damaging, genuine and transactional. What it has never been is equal or reciprocal.

Biden was on the downslope of his long political career in 2008 when Obama tapped him as his vice-presidential nominee. The political argument for his selection was straightforward — a gray-haired white man to reassure voters who had qualms about backing a relatively inexperienced Black man. But Biden thought there was a governing case for him, as well — believing that “his legislative chops and realism were also downright necessary for a hope merchant to succeed,” Debenedetti writes. One of the “enduring” questions of their partnership, Debenedetti adds, was whether Obama ever shared that belief.

Biden’s goal as vice president was to be “deferential without debasing himself,” Debenedetti writes. In that, he succeeded. Although the Obama-Biden friendship may never have been as gooey as it was portrayed in the fan fiction promulgated by their supporters (and their campaign aides), Debenedetti concludes that it was, in fact, real.

The two spent up to seven hours a day with each other, and their weekly lunches, which Biden insisted upon as a condition for taking the job, consisted of “real-life conversations” that became a crucial tether to normalcy for Obama, who “enjoyed just getting to engage with another human outside his family without immediate decision points on discussion.” Debenedetti notes that Michelle Obama would eventually liken Biden to the “big brother” her husband had never had.

But while Obama valued Biden’s loyalty and his friendship, he didn’t put as much stock in his political judgment. Debenedetti documents the many times Obama ignored Biden’s counsel — sometimes for ill (as when Biden argued against sending more troops to Afghanistan), sometimes for good (as when Biden advised against the raid that killed Osama bin Laden).

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Who’s the Change Agent Now?

Joe biden is delivering breakthroughs that long eluded barack obama. who understands the presidency best.

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

Barack Obama has kept a vanishingly small circle of trust in his post-presidency, and for much of this summer, any visitors who got a moment with him and dared to ask about Joe Biden’s tanking administration tended to get no substantive answer. Ever since leaving the White House in 2017, Obama has been cautious to the point of introversion about wading into daily politics, but through June and deep into July, he was noticeably cagey even with buddies — wary that a leak about any level of concern on his part would create a hellish news cycle. Content to watch from afar on Martha’s Vineyard, where he and former First Lady Michelle have a 29-acre home and a personal chef, Obama followed the news closely as Biden’s agenda stalled out, then was ground down by inflation and gas prices and an unconvincing response to the demise of Roe v. Wade.

From his perch on an island 500 miles north of the White House, Obama spoke with Biden sporadically. As always, their calls were private and no aides listened in. But as the summer wore on, Obama’s small group of confidants gathered that Biden was impatient with his dismal approval numbers, which rivaled Donald Trump’s. They thought Biden seemed sensitive about the fact that among Democratic candidates running for office in November, the 44th president will be a far more coveted surrogate than the 46th. (One private party poll in the battleground state of Arizona showed Biden’s favorability at a putrid 26 percent.) And it seemed to them that the president was annoyed with some members of his own party, especially regarding what he saw as their fatalistic attitude about the midterms. (The White House disputes these impressions.)

Given the hit Biden took after the abortion ruling, some of Obama’s close allies were baffled by Biden’s similarly uninspiring reaction to the July 4 mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, that left seven people dead and dozens wounded. As a handful of ambitious Democrats made micromoves that could position them to run in Biden’s stead in 2024, Obama said nothing, either publicly or through back channels. He stayed mum when Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker visited the early-voting state of New Hampshire, and he didn’t reach out to bring Gavin Newsom in line after the California governor rather conspicuously began buying airtime in Florida and newspaper ads in Texas. Much of Obama’s reluctance to engage was tactical; he didn’t want to overshadow the sitting president or get dragged into a new role as Biden’s enforcer, and he’d already determined that he would be most effective as an advocate for the party if he lay low until just before the midterms. Still, coming from the most popular Democrat, Obama’s distancing had the effect of heightening Biden’s isolation, as an idea began to take hold in the public imagination that one of them knew how to be a successful president and the other didn’t.

And then, as if out of nowhere, came a very Washington version of deliverance. An agreement between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the fickle West Virginia senator Joe Manchin to make world-historic climate investments and deflate drug prices headlined a run of nearly miraculous news for Biden’s White House. It was the kind of concerted environmental effort Democrats had dreamed of for years, if not decades, and even progressives who wanted more conceded it would make for a genuine sea change in the government’s approach to the existential threat of climate change. The deal came on the heels of the bipartisan passage of a semiconductor-chip-manufacturing bill, and it cast in a better light a June compromise to enact limited gun-control measures, alongside other legislation of substance. (It didn’t hurt that in this stretch Biden had ordered the drone killing of Al Qaeda’s leader and gas prices fell by more than a dollar.) “There is no way to get around the fact the last month or so has been stellar for the administration,” Charles M. Blow declared in the New York Times. “Joe Biden’s Presidency Is Suddenly Back From the Dead,” Jonathan Chait wrote in this magazine. Bob Shrum compared him to Lyndon Johnson.

Nobody was under any illusion that Biden had personally crafted the climate deal or artfully twisted the right arms to get it done. More accurately, it fell into his lap — months after he’d last tried to cut a compromise on his Build Back Better plan with Manchin. If Biden could have made it happen sooner, he would have. But just as presidents can fall victim to external disasters over which they have little control (see gas prices), history remembers even indirect victories as their own, too. What Biden did was leave the door open to a bargain, recognizing the awkward reality that Schumer and Manchin had more space to maneuver without his voice in the mix complicating the politics that faced the prickly moderate from coal country. Biden and Schumer had also allowed Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell to believe the administration’s climate ambitions were toast; the prevailing theory in Washington is that the Kentuckian agreed to the chips bill only because he trusted that the big-ticket ones were dead.

If Biden’s abrupt turnaround can be attributed to a style of governance that is still emerging, that style is decidedly un-Obaman. The crown-jewel victory — the Inflation Reduction Act, containing the climate provisions — was painstakingly lashed together in secret by a crew of senators, including longtime denizens of Biden’s old stomping ground. The president’s own hand was nowhere to be seen in public until it was on the verge of passage, an echo of how the maximally precarious gun bill had moved through Congress a few weeks earlier. Whether because of changing times and opposition or recognition of their fundamentally distinct political strengths, Biden has veered far from the Obama model to get things done. It’s been months since he mounted a concerted effort to galvanize public opinion with the presidential bully pulpit, and he has never attempted to use an academic style of persuasion, as Obama often did.

Obama was elated to learn of the climate agreement. But as the ex- and current president celebrated, a telling gap began to open. Biden’s West Wing sold the Inflation Reduction Act as the largest climate investment ever, period. Publicly, Obama agreed, calling the law a “BFD” — a nod for nostalgists to Biden’s famous appraisal of Obamacare. Privately, however, Obama saw the legislation as a step forward — a bend in the long arc of history he often cites — and not a transformative leap. It was possible to read this as sour grapes, or at least wry analysis, from a retired president whose own grandest ambitions had been thwarted at almost every turn. Yet no one on earth understood what Biden was facing better than the man who’d held the job for eight years. The two simply saw change-making differently. Obama, in fact, had been getting updates from Schumer all summer and had been quietly musing that a climate plan might be revivable, fashioned from the surviving shreds of Biden’s Build Back Better platform. He just hadn’t necessarily seen the idea as an epochal one — more like a pragmatic concession that Biden’s original ambitions couldn’t work in this version of Washington. The difference in perspective speaks to one of the oldest lines of tension in Obama and Biden’s relationship and a question that is now more pressing than ever: What is the right way to be a Democratic president?

Neither man’s approach has been static, especially as Republican opposition has escalated from obstruction to nakedly anti-democratic sabotage. Obama entered office in 2009 with large partisan majorities, confident in his rhetorical abilities to unite the country and persuade voters to enact sweeping change, but GOP intransigence hardened his view of what was achievable and left him increasingly reliant on the unilateral powers of his office. He still used his megaphone to urge the electorate toward pluralism in moments of need, but by 2016, he was giving exit interviews about the difficulty of turning ocean liners more than a few degrees at a time. Biden observed all that from a closer vantage point than anyone, and in 2021, he took the oath of office with an altogether different strategy in mind. Although he had only a minuscule edge in Congress, he was convinced that his long decades in the Senate made deal-making possible again — both with members of his own party and with a small, theoretical group of Republicans eager to get some things done after the embarrassments and incompetence of the Trump years. Finding little success in trying to be the country’s protagonist or pastor, Biden settled into a significantly quieter and less confrontationally progressive posture even as he kept his faith in the legislative process to eventually deliver him big wins. Though his achievements were often overshadowed by a generalized perception of feebleness and unrelenting demonization from Republicans, he began to rack up major policy victories.

Seismic as it is, the climate law hardly rescues Biden from his doldrums. The presidency is about much more than legislation, and early polling suggests his approval rating has rebounded only modestly. Yet to a degree that would have been unthinkable in the depths of summer, when Biden seemed all but dead politically, it is now possible to debate whether his first two years or Obama’s were more substantively successful.

Today’s Obama-Biden dynamic would be unrecognizable to a voter from 2008, back when Obama was the change-maker and Biden his elder realist and fixer. Their roles haven’t exactly reversed, but it’s striking that Obama is now more identified with piecemeal progress and Biden with a process that can be ugly and lurching but does occasionally deliver dramatic breakthroughs. Back at the start of his presidency, Obama sought to enact the most dramatic reform of the American health-care system in history, and he overruled the advisers who told him that he was being unrealistic about the political window — none of them resisting so loudly as Biden. Universal access to medical insurance was a priority for the left, but the vice-president argued that voters would give Obama “a pass on this one” if he focused on the economy, which was still teetering on the brink of ruin in early 2009. Over a few weeks of meetings in the Roosevelt Room, Biden told Obama with increasing agitation that forcing a health-care overhaul could kneecap his presidency from the start. Insisting on this kind of historical loser — reforms had failed numerous times over the decades — in year one would swamp the rest of his agenda, Biden said. But Obama was unimpressed by Biden’s advice that he ought to focus on middle-class pocketbooks above all else. He figured, We’re already doing everything we know how to do for the economy , so all you’re proposing is giving up on health care. That was status quo D.C. thinking.

It was their first serious disagreement about how to surmount roadblocks to progress. Biden was joined by Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and his lead strategist, David Axelrod, who both tried to steer Obama to other priorities. But the president grew increasingly impatient with the arguments. “What are we supposed to do? Put our approval rating on the shelf and admire it for eight years?” he asked. “Or draw down on it and do things of lasting value?” On this much, Biden agreed; he just thought Obama should do health care in phases, not all at once. At one planning meeting, Biden listened to a procession of experts brief the president on a swath of policy changes, and eventually Biden tore into them for five excruciating minutes. This will never pass, we’ll get bogged down on it, and it will distract from everything else, he said, amazed that the room still couldn’t see what seemed obvious to him: They’d end up getting drubbed in the midterms with little or nothing to show for it. Obama shifted in his chair, his discomfort and impatience more obvious by the moment, as Biden’s voice rose to a yell. The president had already made his decision, and this wasn’t the cerebral way he wanted his policies determined.

Both Obama and Biden recognized the precariousness of the moment, but where the younger man saw opportunity for dramatic change that might yet shift the cynical culture of Washington and, more important, help Americans, the other feared his boss was missing a dire political reality. Biden came around once he saw that Obama wouldn’t be dissuaded. As the health-care push began in earnest, Obama took charge of the public-facing, political-slash-moral campaign and delegated vote wrangling to Emanuel, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Even as some conservative Democrats began to voice skepticism about the cause and whether they could support it, Obama mostly left them alone; he didn’t want to spend all his time schlepping to the Capitol or inviting thirsty lawmakers to the White House residence to hang out. And he was sure that when it came time to vote, the holdouts would come through for their party. He was unwilling to be the one to woo or strong-arm them so early, figuring his political influence should be held in reserve until it was absolutely needed.

Biden watched all of this with curiosity. His style of negotiation was different: Not only did he want a lot more face time with counterparties than Obama, but he also liked to start at a point of basic agreement and build, adding pieces that each side wanted. Obama, in contrast, usually started from his ideal spot and negotiated down to a place of mutual acceptance, and he didn’t much like doing it. Biden was starting to suspect that Obama didn’t enjoy negotiating — or members of Congress — at all. He wasn’t hanging around with guests at White House receptions, and he rarely had his former Senate colleagues over for strategy sessions. It was all stuff that Biden would’ve loved to do as president but that Obama thought was superfluous and, often, bullshit.

That summer of 2009, neither Obama nor Biden knew quite how to deal with the wave of organized conservative fury that arose in opposition to the health-care effort, as epitomized by Sarah Palin’s ludicrous but effective claims about “death panels.” The GOP pollster Frank Luntz had circulated a 28-page memo coaching the party’s representatives to describe the health-care plan as a “Washington takeover,” since “takeovers are like coups — they both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom. What Americans fear most is that Washington politicians will dictate what kind of care they can receive.” At one of their regular private lunches that year, Obama asked Biden how and why Republicans suddenly seemed to be in perfect lockstep against him. Biden gave an assessment that in time would become the conventional wisdom but then felt fresh: The sickness had begun with Newt Gingrich and his acolytes, who viewed comity with Democrats as per se unacceptable, and things had been worsened by reforms to the earmarking process and an explosion of outside money in politics. Obama listened and considered it all quietly. This was why he’d chosen Biden. But the explanation didn’t much alter his tactics.

As Washington got colder and negotiations with Capitol Hill dragged on, the senior White House staff gathered for strategy sessions and carefully went through a list of senators to make sure they knew where each one stood. Whenever they worried that one was wavering, they would turn to the front of the room and gauge Obama’s interest in engaging him or her. Quickly, they figured out that this wasn’t his preferred way to spend his time but that Biden was eager to be dispatched and he and Reid could coordinate an effective approach for his ex-colleagues. Biden managed to keep several wobbly centrists in the fold, calling them regularly to say he understood their political incentives.

Obama rarely drank in office, and Biden didn’t drink at all, but after the bill passed, the president gathered his VP and a small group of senior aides to celebrate over martinis in late March 2010. Obama was exhausted, and his outlook on the condition of Washington was calcifying, but that night his confidence was radiating and his glee was evident. Biden was downright impressed it had actually worked. This was the massive overhaul for millions of Americans that Democrats had been chasing since he was a baby. After Obama signed the bill into law at a public event, the pair walked off side by side, clasping each other’s backs, like nothing could separate them.

If reality and opposition have a way of ambushing presidents, it’s up to them whether to adapt or bulldoze — or whether to learn any lessons at all. Fresh off his reelection in 2012, Obama put aside his planned remarks at a Cabinet meeting and began to riff. He predicted that they were entering a new era. If the vote had shown anything, it was that the politics of obstruction had failed, Obama said, and Americans wanted to see Washington drop pure partisanship and tackle important issues. He’d told donors that he thought “the fever may break” once he won again “because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that.” Now, he continued, it was time for his Cabinet to think big.

Obama didn’t know that he was about to embark on a five-month slide that would turn his hope into the purest cynicism anyone had ever seen from him. Obama usually hid his anger or expressed it in sarcasm, but after the Sandy Hook massacre that December, and the failure to pass gun-control legislation the following April, he seethed. If the murder of 20 little kids wasn’t going to jar GOP lawmakers into cooperation, they were never going to get serious and work with him on anything, were they? No, he concluded. Nothing had changed.

This was the great inflection point for Obama: He saw the political earth as salted. For Biden, however, it was instructive but not decisive. He saw that even the Republicans he considered reasonable were drifting away faster than he’d realized, but he still thought he could get more done across the aisle if given slightly more time and room to maneuver. In his eyes, there was no choice. Even before that December’s horror, Biden’s faith on this point had begun to irritate many of his fellow Democrats, some of whom suspected that the Washington lifer was more interested in process than substance. Reid, for one, had spent the first term privately dismissing the idea that Biden was Obama’s true Senate whisperer. Reid and Biden were friendly but had never been especially close, and Reid considered Biden both overly talkative and overly self-assured. He sometimes told friends about the time he and Biden had faced each other on a plane from Dallas to D.C. Looking at a clock above Biden’s head, Reid timed him speaking for three hours and 18 minutes of the three-hour-and-20-minute flight.

McConnell had a comically similar story about Biden. (The main differences were that the flight had two legs and landed in Raleigh.) But he at least could stand Biden, whereas he plainly disdained Obama, describing his negotiation sessions with the president as visits to the principal where he’d get a condescending lecture about how wrong he was before he could say a word. The dislike went both ways. Obama understood, correctly, that McConnell would never negotiate in good faith. There was little Obama hated more than the common D.C.-insider-crowd insistence that he’d get more done legislatively if only he’d socialize more in town. As he put it at 2013’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, “Some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress. ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they ask. Really? Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?”

Biden didn’t like that joke. In the long list of Bidenisms, one of his favorites was his promise never to question his colleagues’ motives. He considered maintaining a good working relationship with McConnell an important part of his job. They disagreed on almost everything but thought they understood each other’s politics, even if Biden thought McConnell was overhyped as a tactician and McConnell considered Biden a bit buffoonish. The relationship rarely bore fruit, but it suited Biden and McConnell both; in 2011, Biden had even visited the McConnell Center in Louisville to give a speech about bipartisanship. To some in Obama’s inner circle, this was the whole problem. Biden fashioned himself too much of a conciliator, they thought, and McConnell — who in 2010 admitted his goal was to make Obama “a one-term president” — was playing him.

This conviction was hardly diluted by Biden’s insistence that the White House was always one deal away from breaking the obstruction. Yet in his negotiations, Biden was always clear that he wasn’t the final decision-maker — Obama was. That’s why he, too, was often frustrated: It was common to hear Biden gripe to his aides that Obama was missing opportunities on the Hill by refusing to talk to his former colleagues. “It’s like Obama is at a dinner table he’s never been at before and doesn’t know it’s appropriate to ask them to pass the salt,” he’d say in moments of candor. “There are just things he could do that he isn’t doing that are offending people. Obama’s view is they’re never going to move. But they’re people! They can be influenced!”

And in the final hours of 2012, it was Biden’s time to prove his point. The so-called fiscal cliff was looming — an ugly combination of painful slashes to government programs and tax increases that would automatically go into effect if the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress couldn’t agree on a fix. After weeks of wrangling, McConnell had walked away from Obama and Reid and — with barely a day before the deadline — asked for Biden. The VP was thrilled to oblige at this late hour, coming up with a plan with McConnell to maintain Bush-era cuts for people earning under $400,000 and to impose a small tax hike on the wealthiest Americans.

To many in the party, it was yet another handout to the rich and not worth pursuing if the alternative — going off the cliff — might make the public realize just how extreme the Republicans’ tactics had become. On Capitol Hill, liberals were incensed and some moderates struggled to understand why they shouldn’t hold out, figuring that McConnell had rolled Biden and that the Democratic Party would lose its leverage on pocketbook issues. Reid warned the caucus to treat Biden with respect but said he wouldn’t pressure them to go along with the VP. The measure passed — Obama wanted it to, and no one wanted to be blamed for yet another economic crisis — but Reid in particular struggled to move on.

Later that year, he listened, aghast, as Biden spoke up at an Oval Office negotiation that was intended to avert a government shutdown being forced by Senator Ted Cruz. “We don’t want you to lose; we want you to win,” the vice-president said to McConnell. He’d meant he wanted it all to be resolved in a way that was acceptable to the part of the GOP he could still deal with, but Reid called Obama after the session for some blunt talk. He still liked Biden, he said, but Obama needed to bar him from this negotiation. Reid knew he could call Republicans’ bluff and make the shutdown more politically painful for them than for Obama. The president listened as Reid continued: We can’t have Biden swooping in to make some deal with McConnell to reopen the government and let Republicans declare victory.

Biden thought this perspective misread their mandate. When they needed GOP cooperation to pass anything, or even to keep the government open, he had to engage his hyperactive deal-making mode. It would be a different conversation if Democrats had unified control of Washington with enough of a margin to pass whatever they liked, but they no longer did and he was skeptical of Obama’s faith in the power of public campaigning to create enough political pressure on the opposition to do much of anything. The real work had to happen between handshakes.

Obama agreed with Reid but stayed antsy and asked for regular updates. It took 16 days for the right-wingers to cave. Reid never let any of his aides disparage Biden in front of Obama. But the message he gave the president was the polite version of a refrain among some advisers in his office and some of the VP’s critics within the White House, too: “Biden’s too horny for a deal.”

It was impossible to miss how much space Obama took up in Biden’s mind as he began his own term as president. Biden was irritated by the idea, occasionally shared on cable and especially in some corners of the conservative press, that Obama had somehow carried him to electoral victory, that he was still pulling the strings, or that Biden would simply be Obama 2.0. Yet when he gathered aides for meetings in the Oval Office, Biden pointedly sat in the exact same spot Obama had for eight years, and for a while he referred to his predecessor’s accomplishments and remembered White House procedures as “the way we did it” in “our administration.” For his first few months in office, he spoke openly of learning the hard lessons of that tenure and leveraging them to far greater effect.

At the same time, he occasionally vented to allies that he was floored to learn how much of the Obama years’ progress had been unwound by Trump. He found himself occupied with the question of how to first restore it, then how to cement his own accomplishments to ensure they couldn’t be rolled back by the next Republican president. As a result, one of his most frequent contentions was that his administration had to be far more intentional about selling the stuff he was passing to keep it popular, a point he’d tried making to Obama about their first big bill back in 2009 — a stimulus to get the country out of the subprime-mortgage and financial crises, which they opted not to brag about as other crises arose.

He excitedly viewed the American Rescue Plan Act — his nearly $2 trillion COVID-targeted relief bill — as an opportunity to test the proposition. Biden welcomed the obvious comparisons to Obama’s stimulus, and he made sure the legislation was packed with purposely easy-to-understand and popular provisions designed to make an immediate impact. Shortly after it passed the House in late February 2021, he appeared virtually for a gathering of congressional Democrats and promised them that he wouldn’t repeat Obama’s error. “We didn’t adequately explain what we had done. Barack was so modest he didn’t want to take, as he said, a ‘victory lap.’ I kept saying, ‘Tell people what we did.’ He said, ‘We don’t have time. I’m not going to take a victory lap.’ And we paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility,” Biden recalled.

The American Rescue Plan’s passage was an almost ostentatious rapid-fire display of lessons learned. With the excruciatingly drawn-out Obamacare experience of 2009 and 2010 in mind, Biden took one meeting with Senate Republicans, listened to their proposal to cleave the plan to about a third of its size, and rejected it. One immense advantage Biden enjoys is that parliamentary norms have changed. Obama entered office in an era that demanded 60 votes in the Senate, but by now simple-majority legislating — the use of the once-obscure process known as reconciliation — is so common on major bills as to be unremarkable. Biden had embraced some progressive-policy aggression during the campaign, and he was unwilling to let Republican foot-dragging get in the way of progress if he didn’t need GOP votes in the first place. He also advocated for fitting as many programs as possible into this one bill. Biden was under no illusions that he could return to the drawing board for a second round of funding legislation if he needed to — another mistaken assumption more than a decade earlier. When the bill briefly appeared to be imperiled by last-minute hesitancy from Manchin, Biden called him directly and worked with Schumer to address his concerns, managing to keep all 50 Democratic senators onside.

It looked like Biden had cracked the governing code, improbably delivering the kind of widely celebrated change he’d campaigned on. But Biden’s bliss soon crashed. His chaotic exit from Afghanistan dovetailed with a resurgent COVID variant and ever more fevered Republican recalcitrance, and by late summer 2021, hardly anyone remembered the specifics of the relief bill Biden put so much stock into selling. The follow-up social-spending bill he proposed had a forbiddingly long road to being taken seriously by many lawmakers, let alone passing.

The parallels to Obama’s most frustrating moments were inescapable. Biden once liked to point out that McConnell had given a tribute to him on the Senate floor about their mutual trust and had even named a cancer-research-funding provision of a bill after Biden’s deceased son, Beau. Four months into Biden’s presidency, though, McConnell said that “100 percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” an echo of his 2010 pledge to ensure Obama served a single term. No one was too surprised a few weeks later when the third-ranking GOP senator, John Barrasso, raised the bar by arguing that Biden should be “a one-half-term president.”

At the same time, Biden was distracted by infighting on his own side with Democratic centrists threatening combat against progressives who wanted him to pursue even more massive social investments. For months, Biden seemed like both a victim of his own floridly set expectations of a new FDR-inspired era — an idea that blossomed back when he’d expected a more heavily Democratic Senate — and a man who could learn only so many new tricks as he approached the sixth decade of his life in elected office. Even among his supporters, it was possible to read Biden’s first 12 months as either a loose microcosm of the Obama years or, more likely, as their frustrating natural next step in the face of unrelenting right-wing attacks on the legitimacy of the democratic system itself.

Many around Biden didn’t know exactly how to feel this spring when Obama showed up at the White House for the first time since handing Trump the keys five years earlier. Biden understood that he simply wouldn’t be the center of anyone’s attention that Tuesday afternoon, and he settled into a familiar posture, half a step behind his former boss. When Obama stood at the microphones and promptly called the commander-in-chief “Vice-President Biden,” the sitting president waited half a beat before laughing rowdily, as if to signal to the cameras that he was in on the joke. Obama’s appearance was meant to be a mood booster, but not everyone in Biden’s immediate orbit found the gag all that funny, and some light grumbling about respect ensued within earshot of the White House press corps. Still, even the most fervent Biden loyalists seemed eager to soak in Obama’s nearly wistful glow for an afternoon to distract themselves from the president’s own sinking ratings and frustrations.

That was the context in which Obama watched his partner and successor on Martha’s Vineyard as the summer of 2022 began. They never spoke about what should come next — they still haven’t discussed 2024, as has been inaccurately reported. (Obama, though, is making initial plans to back candidates for governor and state-level offices that will administer that election.) But both have taken time to consider their joint and individual legacies, which sit at the edge of an anti-democratic abyss; each has privately admitted to feeling the weight of the moment as Trump acolytes amass primary wins and threaten the future of free elections.

As Biden’s polling sank on a Jimmy Carter–esque trajectory, it might have been reasonable to chalk up his initial legislative feats to a smart use of early but limited political capital — especially considering how quickly the Democratic coalition on the Hill then started to crack — and conclude all the other responsibilities of the Oval Office and the vectors of 2022’s unforgiving politics were simply swamping him. Yet that’s also why the climate-focused deal represented a genuine breakthrough for the 79-year-old president, who’d begun facing calls from some elected Democrats in Washington to retire. It appeared to reaffirm Biden’s essential approach to politics and his oft-contested theory of change: Dealmongering isn’t dead after all, no matter the president’s age or his political shortcomings and even if he isn’t the one directly negotiating the lines of legislative text. Presidents set the context.

Biden could well continue to suffer low approval ratings and the abandonment of factions of his party, even as he continues to deliver prizes of staggering scale. In late August, he said he would forgive hundreds of billions in student loans. Progressives complained loudly that he could have been even more generous; moderates expressed skepticism about the move’s political wisdom. It’s tempting to imagine what might have gone through Biden’s head after eight years at Obama’s side and now two on his own: Do you think the last Democrat would’ve done any better?

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The Long Alliance: The imperfect union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama   by Gabriel Debenedetti

Scribe, $35 pb, 429 pp

S ince crossing paths nearly two decades ago, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have forged one of the more potent partnerships in modern American politics – winning three of the last four presidential elections between them – and have built an enduring friendship. It is all the more remarkable for its rarity. The pressures of the White House, overlapping ambitions, and competing loyalties have soured the relationship between most presidents and their deputies (think of Richard Nixon’s notorious bitterness towards Dwight Eisenhower or the froideur between Al Gore and Bill Clinton). 

In The Long Alliance: The imperfect union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama , Gabriel Debenedetti (national political correspondent for New York Magazine ) aims to get beyond the ‘popular notion that they share some sort of uncomplicated bromance’ and explore the shifting contours of this complex, and sometimes fraught, relationship that nevertheless may be ‘the most consequential of any in twenty-first-century politics’.

Although they were initially rivals during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Obama was impressed by the older man’s seriousness on policy issues and recognised the political advantages that Biden’s experience and credibility with America’s middle class would bring. Importantly, the more experienced Biden was prepared to commit to the role of junior partner, stumping for the ticket through the Midwest and offering implicit reassurance to voters uncertain about Obama.

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Varun Ghosh

• Gabriel Debenedetti
• Barack Obama
• US Politics
• US Presidents

Varun Ghosh is a lawyer from Perth. He received degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Western Australia and was a Commonwealth Scholar in Law at the University of Cambridge. He previously worked as a finance attorney in New York and as a consultant for the World Bank in Washington, DC.

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Book details

The Long Alliance

The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama

Author: Gabriel Debenedetti

CHAPTER 1 2003–2004 Joe Biden knew better, but he couldn’t help himself. It was a warm, sunny day early in 2003, and once again he was thinking about running for president. Something like this happened more or less every four years since he’d first arrived in the Senate three decades earlier. The conversation would, invariably, start as a low whisper somewhere in his head, or in some aide’s notes, or some party boss’s late-night bullshitting sessions: Should Biden run for president this time? Then he’d let his mind wander. He rarely let the talk get this far, though, usually because his family would intervene before he turned his Delaware parlor into a protocampaign war room. His adult children, Beau, Hunter, and Ashley, were encouraging more often than not, but they’d want him to get the timing right. His sister, Val, would almost certainly be his campaign manager, officially or effectively, if he pulled the trigger—she’d run every one of his races since he first ran for class president at Archmere Academy—but she was a realist. His wife, Jill, an English teacher, was the straight-up skeptic. She was wary of a repeat of 1987’s disaster, and, well, Joe didn’t like to talk about what had happened then. None of them did. They were all right, of course, so Biden tended to come back with the same answer: No, probably not . Not this year. Except sometimes he’d still agree to hear the argument through. ( Can’t hurt! ) Then the messaging guru or pollster with the bright idea would get to talking, and Joe would get to thinking about what a campaign would sound like, what his presidential cabinet might look like, what his first bill might be … and he’d have to be reeled back in. That was usually Jill’s job. This time, though, the family had already had its discussion, and they’d agreed pretty easily that the moment wasn’t right for him to try to unseat George W. Bush, a wartime president. So Biden knew he shouldn’t have let this latest small group of strategists into his home to pitch him anyway. It was just that they had some good points. Didn’t they? He was sixty now and a senior senator, a heavy hitter in Washington. He was years separated from both his last embarrassing campaign and the Clarence Thomas mess, the two big dark marks on his record. He had the foreign policy chops and blue-collar cred to make Bush sweat, and he was no liberal compared to the other potential candidates, a fact that would probably help him in swing-state Ohio, say, or Virginia. Hell, maybe he was the only one who could beat Bush. It all sounded pretty good when you put it like that. No one here thought he was past his prime, or repeated the usual Washington insider “joke” that “nobody likes to hear Senator Biden speak more than Senator Biden himself.” So Joe, uncharacteristically, kept quiet and kept listening. So did Jill, who fumed as she sat out by the pool. The family had already decided this didn’t make sense. This had to stop before they all got hurt again. She got up and found a Sharpie in the kitchen, and made a decision she and other Biden inner circlers would later recount with reverence. (Jill even wrote about it years later in a memoir.) In big, unmistakable letters, she wrote NO on her stomach and, in her bikini, walked into the living room. And that was that. * * * One year later, Biden had another job in mind. This was typical for a man who had a way of convincing himself that this moment—really any moment—was right for him to make his move —any move—even though he’d then probably spend months wondering how, exactly, to make it. It wasn’t that he was tired of the Senate. He loved it, and had for basically all his thirty-one years there. He’d put the latest presidential talk behind him and thrown his support behind his friend John Kerry, a colleague he’d first met when they shared a political consultant in 1972. But thirty-one years was a long time. He’d already been the top Democrat on two of the chamber’s most important committees, first judiciary then foreign relations. And Secretary of State Joe Biden? Now, that sounded pretty good. Biden knew Kerry was considering giving him the job. They sat together on the Senate’s foreign relations panel and they talked about it sometimes when Kerry stole moments away from the campaign trail. So Biden started thinking about how he’d reroute the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq away from Bush’s path (which Biden had once backed enthusiastically), and he tried coming up with a list of Republican senators he might be able to enlist for help on the course-correction, since it would almost certainly be a politically delicate proposition. He leaned into Kerry’s campaign, too. On conference calls he offered Kerry, a Vietnam vet, advice on talking about Iraq—a war Biden had voted for and championed, but only after his plan to disarm Saddam Hussein had been squashed by political gamesmanship. He drafted his top foreign policy aide Antony Blinken to generate ideas for Kerry’s speeches on international affairs, too, and he even sometimes chimed in with strategies for winning Pennsylvania, where he grew up. And sure, he told Kerry’s aides that spring, he’d be happy to speak at the Democratic convention in Boston that July. In truth, this arrangement was basically an afterthought. Biden understood how these conventions worked by now—this would be his eighth. No one really cared what most of the speakers had to say, he knew, and certainly any undecided voter who tuned in would just be interested in hearing from Kerry or some celebrity he’d lined up for an endorsement. Those regular people weren’t paying attention to Senate committees or Biden’s recent work to avoid a debacle in Iraq. But Biden was all-in on supporting his old friend, and if he was being honest, he really liked the quadrennial schmoozefest. So of course he’d go. He always did. Boston was a quick flight away, and it was an easy favor to John. He just wouldn’t be a headliner, so would only have a few minutes to talk. Fine, he wasn’t in the cabinet yet. If nothing else, it would be good for a twelve-second clip on the six o’clock news back home. Something fun to remember when he was secretary. * * * Joe Biden was a political world away after midnight on the morning of Saturday, May 8, 2004, when Hillary Clinton got in the backseat of her car in Chicago and reached for her phone. The former first lady, now nearly halfway through her fourth year in the Senate, still had a few hours before she could sleep at home in northwest Washington. She was on her way back to the airport after a long, tiring evening of shaking hands and taking pictures. Ahead of her still was a flight back to Martin State Airport, north of Baltimore, with Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe—a dear friend but also the possessor of a motormouth powerful enough that Clinton obviously wouldn’t be sleeping much on the flight. It was late and she’d see her husband in the morning, but she knew Bill would want to hear about the night before she took off. The entire evening almost hadn’t happened. Thunderstorms in the Midwest that afternoon had threatened to cancel her trip before she’d even left for Chicago, but she was curious enough about the man who was expecting her in Illinois that she’d told the two aides on the Maryland tarmac with her and her Secret Service duo that she wanted to wait out the weather. It would be worth it, she figured, because of a project she and Bill had been working on for a few months. Ever since she’d decided not to run for president that year, they’d been trying to cultivate and elevate a group of promising pols a generation younger than them. Best-case scenario they’d become useful allies, worst they’d be grateful duds. The informal roster was coming along nicely. Anthony Weiner was a thirty-nine-year-old loudmouth Brooklynite making waves in the House of Representatives, and Harold Ford Jr. was a younger, smoother congressman from Memphis with big ambitions for the Senate and beyond. The Clintons were also watching John Edwards, a helmet-haired North Carolina senator who’d just ended his presidential campaign but looked like a good bet to join Kerry on the national ticket that summer. For a few weeks now, Clinton had been hearing murmurs about this Senate candidate in Illinois, too. His buzz sounded different, somehow more electric than the usual pundit-class rumors she was used to hearing. Dick Durbin, the state’s usually dry sitting Democratic senator, swore by him, and Jon Corzine, the Goldman Sachs exec turned New Jersey senator now in charge of the Democrats’ Senate fundraising operation, gushed about him, too. There was plenty of reason to be skeptical, and that was putting it nicely: This guy was just a state senator, and how could you get past his name? When Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin had first heard it, she’d written it down for her boss as “Barak Obama,” missing the c . Was his charisma really so overwhelming? Still, it looked like he’d be a US senator in a few months, and now he was in search of some campaign cash. And, it turned out, he wanted to use Clinton’s star power for a night. So sure, she was happy to fly out and headline a fundraiser with him at a private club, then another at a fancy hotel. She’d have to meet him eventually. A few hours later, she waited for the former president to pick up the phone as she sped through pitch-black Illinois. “Bill,” she said when his Arkansas drawl came on the line, “I just met our first African American president.” * * * Clinton was, if anything, atypically late to Barack Obama’s unlikely whisper network of DC insiders. Similar scenes of awe had quietly been popping up around town throughout the first half of the year. In February, liberal Chicago congresswoman Jan Schakowsky had tagged along with the Congressional Black Caucus on a trip to the White House to discuss the coup in Haiti. After the meeting, she went to shake Bush’s hand and saw him draw back in apparent shock, his eyes fixed on the OBAMA campaign button on her lapel. Figuring he thought it said OSAMA, Schakowsky assured him: “Mr. President, it’s Obama . Barack Obama , he’s running for United States Senate.” Bush, carefully, replied, “I never heard of him.” Schakowsky assured him, “You will, Mr. President.” In the House gym on Capitol Hill that spring, a former congressman approached Senator Harry Reid and told him, “I got somebody you should take a look at, a state senator from Illinois.” Reid, a quiet former boxer who brooked no bullshit and who was rising in the Senate—and who was therefore a useful man to know if you wanted a future there yourself—asked for this star’s name. Hearing it, he paused with a thought similar to Bush’s. “You gotta be kidding me,” he frowned. This was all, more or less, part of the plan. Obama and his campaign team back in Chicago’s Loop could deal with the disbelief about his name. It was the word-of-mouth they were interested in carefully nurturing. To some extent, they’d known it was coming. Obama himself had never exactly been short on confidence—no one who writes a memoir in his thirties is. He saw how people looked at him, talked about him ever since he’d been profiled in the New York Times as the first Black editor of the Harvard Law Review . He knew his academic brilliance was obvious, that, under the right circumstances, he could deliver a knockout speech, and that his personal story—Kansan mother, absent Kenyan father—was not just objectively interesting but clearly different. In 2002, at forty, and just two years after getting crushed in a congressional primary, he’d gathered about a dozen close allies and family members at his friend Valerie Jarrett’s Hyde Park condo to pitch them on a run for the Senate. It’d be a big step up, but he was getting painfully bored in the legislature, and he thought he’d have a decent shot at beating the Republican incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald, if he could raise the cash to do it. No one thought it was a great idea at first—his political advisor Dan Shomon refused to run a Senate campaign, and another political consultant, David Axelrod, urged him to think about waiting for Chicago’s mayoral race to open up instead—not least because he’d probably be entering a crowded field of famous locals in the Senate race and barely anyone had any clue who he was, even in Chicago. But Obama’s wife, Michelle, a rising lawyer in the city, OK’d it, and the candidate-to-be went ahead with the planning. He’d faced a crossroads almost immediately in the form of an invitation from his longtime supporter Bettylu Saltzman, an important activist, to an antiwar rally that October. The politics of the moment weren’t obvious for a young Democrat looking for a future beyond Springfield, Illinois. Bush was marching toward war in Iraq, and plenty of liberals were furious, but it wasn’t easy for national-level Democrats to oppose Bush openly without furious blowback and declarations of their lack of patriotism. On the other hand, the crowd would be made up of lefties, not triangulating senators. Obama told Axelrod, who spurned the advances of high-paying former Wall Street trader Blair Hull to join Obama’s campaign after recognizing his potential, that he wanted to use the opportunity to make the case for international alliances and against flimsy justifications for war. He’d be introducing himself as the left-leaning ex-organizer that many expected him to be, but also, he hoped, a pragmatist willing to buck political convenience. He set off to write the speech longhand—a sure sign that he was taking it seriously, since he usually spoke off the cuff or relied on staff to write his remarks if he didn’t much care about the speech of the day. Axelrod, who rarely escaped comparisons to a walrus because of his distinctive mustache, called fellow consultant Pete Giangreco to gauge the wisdom of the approach. Giangreco, who’d also turned down other candidates to join Obama, summed it up: The candidate would get points for honesty, but would he look too weak? Obama needed not just Black voters in Chicago and activist-adjacent liberals but cautious white suburbanites, too, and this was a national issue they were all watching closely. Obama opened the speech by insisting, three times, “I don’t oppose all wars,” before making the turn: “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.” In the moment, it wasn’t clear that he was onto something. “Did he really have to call it ‘dumb’?” Giangreco asked Axelrod. “We have people going over there and dying.” Obama, though, struck a nerve. A few months later, a focus group of white women in Northbrook, outside Chicago, effused over him, comparing him to liberal heroes Paul Simon, the former Illinois senator, and Bobby Kennedy. Obama’s support was growing, but he was still running behind both Hull and another better-known candidate, state comptroller Dan Hynes, with just months until the March 2004 Democratic primary. Copyright © 2022 by Gabriel Debenedetti

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New York Magazine national correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti reveals an inside look at the historically close, complicated, occasionally co-dependent, and at-times uncertain relationship...

Book Details

New York Magazine national correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti reveals an inside look at the historically close, complicated, occasionally co-dependent, and at-times uncertain relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Delving far deeper than the simplistic “bromance” narrative that’s long held the public eye, The Long Alliance reveals the past, present, and future of the unusual partnership, detailing its development, its twists and turns, its ruptures and reunions, and its path to this pivotal moment for each man’s legacy. The true story of this relationship, from 2003 into 2022, is significantly more layered and consequential than is widely understood. The original mismatch between the veteran Washington traditionalist and the once-in-a-generation outsider has transformed repeatedly in ways that have molded not just four different presidential campaigns and two different political parties, but also wars, a devastating near-depression, movements for social equality, and the fight for the future of American democracy. The bond between them has been, at various times over the past two decades, tense, affectionate, nonexistent, and ironclad — but it has always been surprising. Now it is shaping a second presidential administration, and the future of the world as we know it.

Imprint Publisher

Henry Holt and Co.

9781250829979

In The News

“[A] careful chronicling and insightful examination…[Debenedetti] is an excellent reporter and he provides a satisfyingly detailed account of the 2020 presidential campaign from both leaders’ perspectives.” — The New York Times Book Review “[A] treat… readers interested in behind-the-scenes details and vividly depicted moments from the past two decades of American politics, starring some of its most pivotal players, will be riveted.” — The Washington Post “Gabriel Debenedetti masters the crosscurrents of the Democratic party as well as relations between two presidents.” — The Guardian “Gabriel Debenedetti is simultaneously one of the smartest and most dogged reporters in Washington, and he has pieced together a master narrative of the complex relationship between two presidents whose partnership held together through a series of economic and political crises. The Obama-Biden dynasty has won three of the last four presidential elections, and Debenedetti’s story reveals the whole scope of its birth, growth, and struggle to save democracy.” —Jonathan Chait, New York Times bestselling author of Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail “Gabriel Debenedetti's reporting on the Biden-Obama relationship is a tour-de-force, weaving together the political and personal dynamics that have bonded these two presidents and, at times, led to significant tension. It is a gripping tale of power in modern America and how it really works, told by someone who knows the players and inside stories better than anyone.” — Robert Costa, #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Peril “What progress is possible in a country defined by partisan stalemate? This is the immersive, indelible account of a twenty-year working friendship almost precisely coincident with the emergence of a new and often maddening American politics. Barack Obama and Joe Biden assumed their presidencies with different political strengths, instincts, and ideals, but though each believed he could outmaneuver opposition and achieve lasting generational change, each also quickly found himself contemplating legacies which, though historic, could seem painfully piecemeal—including to the presidents themselves.” — David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth “Just when you thought there was nothing else to say about Biden and Obama, Washington's most thoughtful observer, Gabriel Debenedetti, sheds new light on the friendship, alliance and differences between the two men who helped shape modern America. The Long Alliance delivers illuminating insights and intimate, riveting, sometimes unsparing details, and takes you inside the corridors of power and the struggle for America's future.” —Kim Ghattas, author of New York Times bestselling The Secretary and New York Times 2020 Notable Book Black Wave “Gabriel Debenedetti has written the definitive account of one of the most important—and, until now, poorly understood—relationships in 21st Century American politics. With rich new reporting, Debenedetti details the machinations that helped Joe Biden to parlay a hopeless presidential bid into a spot on Barack Obama’s 2008 ticket and a level of national prominence he’d never before known. More importantly, he illustrates the rocky and uneven evolution of their partnership during the Obama presidency. We see a genuine personal bond develop and deepen even as the president remains skeptical, dismissive even, of his handpicked vice president’s actual political talent – arguably leading to the twist of history that makes Donald Trump president and leaves it to Biden, four years later, to prove to the world – and to his former boss – just what he is capable of.” — Steve Kornacki, NBC News National Political Correspondent and author of The Red and the Blue “[A]n engrossing study of the political and personal relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama…Doggedly reported and clear-eyed about its subjects’ strengths and weaknesses, this is an illuminating portrait of a consequential political partnership.” — Publishers Weekly “Carefully constructed…A readable portrait of a political partnership that may be seen as one of the most productive in U.S. history.” — Kirkus Reviews

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The Long Alliance: the imperfect union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama Paperback – 13 Oct. 2022

An in-depth look at the partnership between Barack Obama and Joe Biden that changed the face of American politics.

The ‘bromance’ between Obama and Biden has been much discussed, but this is the first time the full story of their relationship has been told: from their joint victory in 2008 to their disagreements over policy, and from the rift that formed after Obama supported Clinton’s 2015 presidential run to the present day with President Biden in the White House.

The Long Alliance examines the past, present, and future of the Obama–Biden legacy ― its twists and turns, ruptures and reunions, and how it has shaped and will continue to shape US politics.

• Print length 432 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Scribe UK
• Publication date 13 Oct. 2022
• Dimensions 15.3 x 3.03 x 23.4 cm
• ISBN-10 1913348199
• ISBN-13 978-1913348199
• See all details

Product description

‘[A] careful chronicling and insightful examination … [Debenedetti] is an excellent reporter and he provides a satisfyingly detailed account of the 2020 presidential campaign from both leaders’ perspectives.’

‘[A] treat … readers interested in behind-the-scenes details and vividly depicted moments from the past two decades of American politics, starring some of its most pivotal players, will be riveted.’

‘Gabriel Debenedetti is simultaneously one of the smartest and most dogged reporters in Washington, and he has pieced together a master narrative of the complex relationship between two presidents whose partnership held together through a series of economic and political crises. The Obama-Biden dynasty has won three of the last four presidential elections, and Debenedetti’s story reveals the whole scope of its birth, growth, and struggle to save democracy.’

‘Gabriel Debenedetti’s reporting on the Biden-Obama relationship is a tour-de-force, weaving together the political and personal dynamics that have bonded these two presidents and, at times, led to significant tension. It is a gripping tale of power in modern America and how it really works, told by someone who knows the players and inside stories better than anyone.’

‘What progress is possible in a country defined by partisan stalemate? This is the immersive, indelible account of a twenty-year working friendship almost precisely coincident with the emergence of a new and often maddening American politics. Barack Obama and Joe Biden assumed their presidencies with different political strengths, instincts, and ideals, but though each believed he could outmanoeuvre opposition and achieve lasting generational change, each also quickly found himself contemplating legacies which, though historic, could seem painfully piecemeal ― including to the presidents themselves.’

‘Just when you thought there was nothing else to say about Biden and Obama, Washington’s most thoughtful observer, Gabriel Debenedetti, sheds new light on the friendship, alliance and differences between the two men who helped shape modern America. The Long Alliance delivers illuminating insights and intimate, riveting, sometimes unsparing details, and takes you inside the corridors of power and the struggle for America's future.’

‘Gabriel Debenedetti has written the definitive account of one of the most important ― and, until now, poorly understood ― relationships in 21st Century American politics. With rich new reporting, Debenedetti details the machinations that helped Joe Biden to parlay a hopeless presidential bid into a spot on Barack Obama’s 2008 ticket and a level of national prominence he’d never before known. More importantly, he illustrates the rocky and uneven evolution of their partnership during the Obama presidency. We see a genuine personal bond develop and deepen even as the president remains skeptical, dismissive even, of his handpicked vice president’s actual political talent ― arguably leading to the twist of history that makes Donald Trump president and leaves it to Biden, four years later, to prove to the world ― and to his former boss ― just what he is capable of.’

‘Gabriel Debenedetti masters the crosscurrents of the Democratic party as well as relations between two presidents.’

‘[A]n engrossing study of the political and personal relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama … Doggedly reported and clear-eyed about its subjects’ strengths and weaknesses, this is an illuminating portrait of a consequential political partnership.’

‘Carefully constructed … A readable portrait of a political partnership that may be seen as one of the most productive in US history.’

‘Debenedetti has written an engaging and thorough book about the Obama–Biden bond – an underexplored but fascinating subject. By delving into the relationship between two presidents, and suggesting reasons for its success, The Long Alliance also offers insights into how political power may be managed and shared. It is a thought-provoking book.’

About the Author

Gabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent for New York Magazine , where he writes about politics and national affairs. Prior to joining the magazine in early 2018, he wrote about the 2016 campaign for Politico , traveling the country covering Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and the Democratic Party. Before that, he reported on the Obama White House, the 2012 presidential election, and Capitol Hill for Reuters. He frequently appears on MSNBC, CNN, CBS News, the BBC, and NPR, and writes political reviews for The New York Times Book Review . His writing has also appeared in The Economist and The New Republic .

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribe UK (13 Oct. 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1913348199
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1913348199
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.3 x 3.03 x 23.4 cm
• 173,743 in Society, Politics & Philosophy

About the author

Gabriel debenedetti.

Gabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent at New York Magazine, where he writes about politics and national affairs. Previously, he covered politics for Politico and Reuters. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Economist, Vanity Fair, Politico Magazine, and the New Republic. A New Jersey native, he graduated from Princeton University.

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The Long Alliance review: sure guide to Biden and Obama’s imperfect union

Gabriel Debenedetti masters the crosscurrents of the Democratic party as well as relations between two presidents

G abriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent for New York magazine. His first book brings depth and context to the near-two-decade relationship between the 44th and 46th presidents. Under a telling subtitle, The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama , Debenedetti captures the two men’s closeness – and distance.

The Long Alliance emphasizes that the pair’s time in power together was not a buddy movie. Obama was the star. Biden played a supporting role until he too seized the brass ring, to send Donald Trump into exile.

Obama was a first-term senator, just 47 years old, when he vanquished the Clintons, bulldozed John McCain and entered the White House. Biden’s trajectory was markedly different. Late in life, on his third quest for the presidency, he took down another septuagenarian amid a deadly pandemic.

The union of Obama and Biden was always moored in intergenerational convenience. Obama was the agent of change, Biden a relic of an older time. Obama’s aides cast a wary eye toward the senator from Delaware. To Biden, politics was tactile. He did not readily inspire.

Walloped by Obama in Iowa in 2008, Biden immediately withdrew. Over time, the two men bonded. There was greater warmth between them than between Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, let alone Bush and Dan Quayle. Obama always heard Biden out. On the other hand, the Obamas never invited the Bidens to the White House residence. Barack and Joe shared lunches, not dinners and movies with popcorn.

Hiccups and speed bumps left marks. Biden got ahead of Obama on gay marriage. Hunter Biden made headlines with his schemes and hustles. Confronted with the younger Biden boy’s foray into Ukraine and the energy business, Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, expressed discomfort . Like Trump, Hunter’s fate now rests with federal prosecutors.

Obama empathized with his vice-president. When Beau Biden, Biden’s older son, was dying, Obama offered a shoulder to lean on. He delivered a stirring eulogy. In their final days in office, Obama gave Biden the presidential medal of freedom. The honor, suffused with affection and tenderness, surprised its recipient. Biden’s successor as vice-president, Mike Pence, met a very different fate.

Yet for all Obama’s smarts, he could get things terribly wrong. He failed to anticipate the magnitude of the backlash to the Affordable Care Act, the resonance of birtherism, abhorrent as it was, and the depth and breadth of the emerging national chasm beneath him. Democratic losses in the 2010 and 2014 midterms and the Tea Party with its tricorn hats presaged a sustained demand for a return to the past, the rise of Trump and a tolerance for autocracy within the Republican party.

Obama also messed up by viewing Hillary Clinton as his rightful successor, if not his political heir. In 2008, competing against her for the nomination, he derided her as “likable enough”. In 2016, in hindsight, little had changed.

Clinton lacked her husband’s capacity to emote and connect. Like Ted Cruz, the Republican Texas senator, there was something awkward, off-putting, which she could not shake. Her comments on Trump’s “deplorables” hurt her much as Mitt Romney’s take on the “47%” did him in 2012. Looking back, Obama miscalculated – much as his brain trust would do in 2020 with Biden.

Under Trump, Romney showed a deeper appreciation of where the US stood. It wanted a president not named Trump. A shot at normalcy. Nothing else.

On the night of the 2018 midterms, Romney urged Biden to wage one more campaign. “You have to run,” Romney said in a call. Anti-Trump sentiment cost the Republicans the House but at the same moment Utah was sending Romney to the Senate.

During the 2020 primaries, Obama and Biden stayed in touch. But until the former vice-president emerged as the presumptive nominee, his president’s endorsement was not forthcoming. Biden lost Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada. Heading to South Carolina, he was low on cash and short on delegates. There, the backing of James Clyburn, the House whip, together with the state’s Black voters, righted Biden’s ship. Debenedetti shows mastery of the tugs and crosscurrents that shape the Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition.

African Americans could be among the most socially conservative components of the party. They were not clamoring for open borders or Medicare for All. Obamacare stood as the legacy of the first Black president. Their patrimony was the cruel lash of slavery, not the Harvard faculty lounge or the yoke of the tsar. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders did not speak to them or for them.

Obama aides badmouthed Biden in print and on TV. David Axelrod, a senior Obama campaign and White House hand, never cottoned to Biden, and Biden knew it. And yet, behind the scenes, Obama helped clear the field.

In the end, Covid and the need for national leadership put Biden over the top. No other Democrat could have beaten Trump.

A s president, Biden’s record is uneven. The withdrawal from Afghanistan put a dent in his standing from which he has not recovered. In contrast, US support for Ukraine appears the product of thoughtful conviction. As for the economy, Biden’s efforts to placate his base may well have heightened inflation. Gas prices are coming down but the rest remains stubbornly up.

Biden competes with Obama’s legacy and the ghost of FDR. The Democrats hold only 50 Senate seats, control on a knife-edge as the November election looms.

“I am confident that Barack is not happy with the coverage of this administration as more transformative than his,” Biden reportedly told one adviser , according to another big political book, This Will Not Pass by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, of the New York Times and CNN respectively.

The two men still talk, though.

The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama is published in the US by Macmillan

• Barack Obama
• Biden administration
• Obama administration
• US elections 2020

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The Long Alliance

The imperfect union of joe biden and barack obama.

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Publisher Description

New York Magazine national correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti reveals an inside look at the historically close, complicated, occasionally co-dependent, and at-times uncertain relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Delving far deeper than the simplistic “bromance” narrative that’s long held the public eye, The Long Alliance reveals the past, present, and future of the unusual partnership, detailing its development, its twists and turns, its ruptures and reunions, and its path to this pivotal moment for each man’s legacy. The true story of this relationship, from 2003 into 2022, is significantly more layered and consequential than is widely understood. The original mismatch between the veteran Washington traditionalist and the once-in-a-generation outsider has transformed repeatedly in ways that have molded not just four different presidential campaigns and two different political parties, but also wars, a devastating near-depression, movements for social equality, and the fight for the future of American democracy. The bond between them has been, at various times over the past two decades, tense, affectionate, nonexistent, and ironclad — but it has always been surprising. Now it is shaping a second presidential administration, and the future of the world as we know it.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUL 25, 2022

New York magazine correspondent Debenedetti debuts with an engrossing study of the political and personal relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama. The narrative starts in 2004, when Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic national convention. After the speech, which catapulted the U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois to national celebrity, Biden told one of Obama's advisers to "make sure... he's a workhorse, and not a show horse." From there, Debenedetti meticulously tracks the pair's evolving relationship, noting that Obama initially found Biden to be condescending and dismissive, but changed his mind when he got to know the Delaware senator during the 2008 presidential primary. Biden was at first reluctant to be vetted for vice president, but his family pushed him to reconsider. From the beginning of their time in the White House, Biden sought to assert his influence while projecting loyalty, staying behind after meetings to confer with Obama and helping to secure legislative victories such as the 2009 Recovery Act. Debenedetti also details personality clashes and policy disagreements, including over the size of the troop surge Afghanistan in 2009, and describes Obama's careful deliberations over how involved he should be in the 2020 Democratic primaries. Doggedly reported and clear-eyed about its subjects' strengths and weaknesses, this is an illuminating portrait of a consequential political partnership.

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THE LONG ALLIANCE

The imperfect union of joe biden and barack obama.

by Gabriel Debenedetti ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2022

A readable portrait of a political partnership that may be seen as one of the most productive in U.S. history.

Carefully constructed study of the alternately “tense, affectionate, nonexistent, and ironclad” bond between a president and his vice president.

By any measure, Barack Obama was less accomplished as a politician than Joe Biden when the former was elected senator. Despite inexperience, though, Obama had far more buzz around him as savior of a battered Democratic Party, for which reason he attracted attention, money, and a following large enough to win him the presidency. It must have rankled when that happened, but, as New York Magazine politics reporter Debenedetti shows, Biden easily adapted to the role of vice president. Over the next eight years, the relationship was sometimes stretched thin, in part because Biden was seen as the more willing negotiator on Capitol Hill than Obama, with Biden “always sure he could find common ground with GOP leaders he’d known for years,” leaders who often proved unwilling to work with Obama at all. Even there, Biden sometimes failed; in a particularly telling moment, Debenedetti analyzes the aftermath of the Sandy Hook mass shooting, when it seemed possible that gun control legislation might be passed quickly if Obama and Biden acted immediately. Always cautious and methodical, they didn’t. The GOP closed ranks, and Obama became more cynical in his remaining time in office: “If a heart-shredding national tragedy—twenty little kids murdered —wasn’t going to jar the GOP into cooperation, they were never going to get serious and work with him on anything, were they?” If Obama is now seen as a senior statesman, Biden is president—and not because Obama went out of his way to help during the primaries, when, Debenedetti writes, he was bent on being “free to candidate-surf.” The Obama-Biden alliance is healthier now, and while differences remain, both know that they speak to each other as “the only other person who could possibly begin to understand.”

Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-82997-9

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | U.S. GOVERNMENT | PUBLIC POLICY | POLITICS | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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New York Times Bestseller

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

The introduction is read by the author.

New York Magazine national correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti reveals an inside look at the historically close, complicated, occasionally co-dependent, and at-times uncertain relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

Delving far deeper than the simplistic “bromance” narrative that’s long held the public eye, The Long Alliance reveals the past, present, and future of the unusual partnership, detailing its development, its twists and turns, its ruptures and reunions, and its path to this pivotal moment for each man’s legacy.

The true story of this relationship, from 2003 into 2022, is significantly more layered and consequential than is widely understood. The original mismatch between the veteran Washington traditionalist and the once-in-a-generation outsider has transformed repeatedly in ways that have molded not just four different presidential campaigns and two different political parties, but also wars, a devastating near-depression, movements for social equality, and the fight for the future of American democracy. The bond between them has been, at various times over the past two decades, tense, affectionate, nonexistent, and ironclad—but it has always been surprising. Now it is shaping a second presidential administration, and the future of the world as we know it.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.

• Listening Length 15 hours and 44 minutes
• Author Gabriel Debenedetti
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• Audible release date September 13, 2022
• Language English
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The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama

Gabriel debenedetti. holt, $29.99 (432p) isbn 978-1-250-82997-9.

Reviewed on: 07/06/2022

Genre: Nonfiction

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New York Magazine national correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti reveals an inside look at the historically close, complicated, occasionally co-dependent, and at-times uncertain relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Delving far deeper than the simplistic "bromance" narrative that's long held the public eye, The Long Alliance reveals the past, present, and future of the unusual partnership, detailing its development,... Read Full Overview

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An in-depth look at the partnership between Barack Obama and Joe Biden that changed the face of American politics.

The ‘bromance’ between Obama and Biden has been much discussed, but this is the first time the full story of their relationship has been told: from their joint victory in 2008 to their disagreements over policy, and from the rift that formed after Obama supported Clinton’s 2015 presidential run to the present day with President Biden in the White House.

The Long Alliance examines the past, present, and future of the Obama–Biden legacy ― its twists and turns, ruptures and reunions, and how it has shaped and will continue to shape US politics.

• Print length 432 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Scribe Publications
• Publication date 13 October 2022
• Dimensions 15.3 x 3.03 x 23.4 cm
• ISBN-10 1913348199
• ISBN-13 978-1913348199
• See all details

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‘[A] careful chronicling and insightful examination … [Debenedetti] is an excellent reporter and he provides a satisfyingly detailed account of the 2020 presidential campaign from both leaders’ perspectives.’

‘[A] treat … readers interested in behind-the-scenes details and vividly depicted moments from the past two decades of American politics, starring some of its most pivotal players, will be riveted.’

‘Gabriel Debenedetti is simultaneously one of the smartest and most dogged reporters in Washington, and he has pieced together a master narrative of the complex relationship between two presidents whose partnership held together through a series of economic and political crises. The Obama-Biden dynasty has won three of the last four presidential elections, and Debenedetti’s story reveals the whole scope of its birth, growth, and struggle to save democracy.’

‘Gabriel Debenedetti’s reporting on the Biden-Obama relationship is a tour-de-force, weaving together the political and personal dynamics that have bonded these two presidents and, at times, led to significant tension. It is a gripping tale of power in modern America and how it really works, told by someone who knows the players and inside stories better than anyone.’

‘What progress is possible in a country defined by partisan stalemate? This is the immersive, indelible account of a twenty-year working friendship almost precisely coincident with the emergence of a new and often maddening American politics. Barack Obama and Joe Biden assumed their presidencies with different political strengths, instincts, and ideals, but though each believed he could outmanoeuvre opposition and achieve lasting generational change, each also quickly found himself contemplating legacies which, though historic, could seem painfully piecemeal ― including to the presidents themselves.’

‘Just when you thought there was nothing else to say about Biden and Obama, Washington’s most thoughtful observer, Gabriel Debenedetti, sheds new light on the friendship, alliance and differences between the two men who helped shape modern America. The Long Alliance delivers illuminating insights and intimate, riveting, sometimes unsparing details, and takes you inside the corridors of power and the struggle for America's future.’

‘Gabriel Debenedetti has written the definitive account of one of the most important ― and, until now, poorly understood ― relationships in 21st Century American politics. With rich new reporting, Debenedetti details the machinations that helped Joe Biden to parlay a hopeless presidential bid into a spot on Barack Obama’s 2008 ticket and a level of national prominence he’d never before known. More importantly, he illustrates the rocky and uneven evolution of their partnership during the Obama presidency. We see a genuine personal bond develop and deepen even as the president remains skeptical, dismissive even, of his handpicked vice president’s actual political talent ― arguably leading to the twist of history that makes Donald Trump president and leaves it to Biden, four years later, to prove to the world ― and to his former boss ― just what he is capable of.’

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About the Author

Gabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent for New York Magazine , where he writes about politics and national affairs. Prior to joining the magazine in early 2018, he wrote about the 2016 campaign for Politico , traveling the country covering Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and the Democratic Party. Before that, he reported on the Obama White House, the 2012 presidential election, and Capitol Hill for Reuters. He frequently appears on MSNBC, CNN, CBS News, the BBC, and NPR, and writes political reviews for The New York Times Book Review . His writing has also appeared in The Economist and The New Republic .

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribe Publications (13 October 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1913348199
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1913348199
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 530 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.3 x 3.03 x 23.4 cm
• Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ United Kingdom
• #769 in Political Parties (Books)
• #2,430 in Government (Books)
• #4,720 in Political Structure & Processes

About the author

Gabriel debenedetti.

Gabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent at New York Magazine, where he writes about politics and national affairs. Previously, he covered politics for Politico and Reuters. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Economist, Vanity Fair, Politico Magazine, and the New Republic. A New Jersey native, he graduated from Princeton University.

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Gabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent for New York…

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‘Real Shiv Vibes’

Welcome back to Beach Read Book Club ’s discussion of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise. Today, we’re talking about the character of Jenny, mother-daughter relationships, and leftist traditions within Judaism. (If you need a refresher, you can catch up on part one here , part two here , and part three here .)

Cat Zhang: Jenny is presented as the family anomaly. She’s the dissenter. She’s the only one who’s really competent, so she’s not squandering her inheritance through idiotic means and she does have a politics. She is really compelled toward Dr. Messinger. She desires a father figure who wants to talk about society and its ills. She’s a burgeoning leftist when she’s in Middle Rock. But later on, her identity crisis is that of a cloistered upper-middle-class kid who was trained her entire life to go to Yale and then went to Yale and had a crisis, like I didn’t know how to do anything but get good grades. I feel like that’s inconsistent with the version of Jenny we were initially presented. I feel, especially given the rich history of leftist Jewish activism, she would have learned a little bit of that through Dr. Messinger and then would have gone to Yale and been reading Vivian Gornick or something like that. So then later on when she’s just like, I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know what it means to be a scab — totally not believable to me. The only character who is presented as the sane one and the competent one in the family is the one who ends up being the most immobilized. And I just felt like she deserved better.

Julie Kosin: I don’t doubt that there are people like Jenny in the world, but her psychology is rendered in a very stereotypical way.

Zach Schiffman: It feels like Taffy knows the least about Jenny’s job. Taffy clearly knows a lot about Beamer — that’s why it’s the longest section. And then maybe she does happen to know a lot about this land-use stuff and that makes it really interesting. But it really feels like she glosses over the minutiae of Jenny’s job and just sort of waves her hand at the hunger strike. I don’t think Taffy actually understands what goes into that and I don’t either — I assume people who work for our union do, but I don’t. That’s why the Jenny section felt so vague.

Jason P. Frank: The term I want to throw into the mix with Jenny, because it’s in conversation, is Jewish American Princess. It feels like the specter of the Jewish American Princess is looming so large over the Jenny section and it’s all a reaction to that. But I don’t think anyone says the word “JAP” until her boyfriend, who does it during sex with her. It seemed like a pretty clear reference to “The Time of Her Time” by Norman Mailer, which is a short story in which a Jewish girl is in a relationship with an Irish guy and she can’t orgasm. Then finally he calls her Jewish slurs in bed and she has her first orgasm and then she breaks up with him. It was published in 1959, and it’s one of the definitional pieces in defining what Jewish American Princess is. I felt like Jenny’s story was largely in conversation with the specter of that figure.

Emily Gould: Just want to say real quickly that it’s okay for me to use the J-slur because I am one. There’s this sort of faded inescapability of that “JAP” identity, as much as Jenny struggles against it, that feels very predetermined or rote or by the book, like her refusal to get a nose job, her refusal to straighten her hair — these very sort of superficial things where she tries to differentiate herself from her high-school friends. But those are still her only actual friends by the end of her section, and by the end of the book she has fulfilled her birthright, for lack of a better word. And we’re never given any clue as to whether she is happy with it or whether she has just collapsed under the weight of her predetermined fate. I had really high hopes for the Jenny section, in part because Denise is my favorite of The Corrections characters, so I thought that she would be Denise. But she just doesn’t have any of Denise’s genuine desire to individuate from her family.

Kathryn VanArendonk: There’s pacing issues in Jenny as much as anything else. What we’re talking about is the descriptions of her time rather than scenes of what is actually happening. You’re sort of skipping past stuff quickly enough that you understand this outline, but you’re never actually seated enough in any of these scenes. There are very few of them that we actually get, like the sex scene and one exhausted union scene. From a pacing standpoint, you’re just sort of flying up until this moment and then when you get to that moment, it’s immobilization. That’s really the first point that you sit down and see who she is, when she loses her ability to do anything at all. I really was not sure whether she had a moral core or whether it was just that I was never able to fully grasp it, like I couldn’t access it enough because I was skimming too quickly over the surface of her. And at some point there’s not really a meaningful distinction between those two things. Is it that she doesn’t have one or is it just that I am not given it enough? I’m honestly not sure which one the author would say is the answer to that question.

Julie : The way that she’s like, What does having all this money mean to me? Having all this money doesn’t give me anything — I never for a second felt like there was a person on this Earth who felt that way, including Jenny. The most I ever got to feeling like Jenny was a person was when she and her friends called each other Norman, and I wonder now, Jason, if that is a reference to that Mailer short story. The end of this Jenny section overlaps with Ruth’s section because obviously Ruth was pregnant with her at the time of the kidnapping and then you get into Ruth’s whole thing about wanting to have an abortion but not realizing she could and feeling like the baby was cursed — that is the closest you ever get to understanding the psychology of any of these characters as children because it’s telling you Jenny sort of sensed that Ruth didn’t want her around. Is that the leap I’m expected to be making here?

Zach : One thing about the “JAP” thing, and I apologize for hanging on this point, but that is the only reference to Jenny’s Judaism, really. It’s not really relevant and I sort of was expecting, especially when she’s trying to get people to organize, that maybe she cares about the history of Judaism within organizing. And it’s like she doesn’t and I’m not saying that was a missed opportunity, but it’s interesting that her Judaism is so divorced from her until she’s called it in sex.

Jason : You would think also at a Yale econ program there would be opportunity to contrast her with someone who is like I care about tikkun olam , which is the Hebrew term for repairing the world. That would be interesting. What would happen if Jenny encountered someone who came at their leftism from genuine Judaism? That’s an interesting question that I think as a contrasting point would be more helpful to me than some of the others.

I do want to ask about the relationship between Ruth and Jenny. Did it feel believable? Do you feel like you know these characters?

Zach : I found Ruth to be very nothing until her chapter and then I found myself very moved.

Julie : I wish we had more of Ruth. There’s no reason you can’t establish that pied a terre dream earlier on. I just wanted more Ruth altogether, including when you get to the Arthur stuff. This book could have just been about Ruth.

Kathryn : In spite of how empty and sort of calcified Ruth is as a character until the later parts, it still felt like some of the most real elements of who Jenny was for me. It felt like the parts where I most understood the things that she felt like she had to rebel against, the most texture to her need to leave. In the sense that Nathan’s hang-ups and his stakes are proportional to what is happening around him, having a mother who’s constantly talking to you about body-issue stuff felt immediately like, that is a stake I get and makes complete sense to me. That she would be like fuck this I’m gonna pretend to be a leftist until it actually happens inside my head , right? Something about that I found much easier to comprehend and I think it also makes sense when you then get to the Ruth stuff, like you were able to kind of backward reconstruct yes, this is how this person turns into that kind of mother. Also the fact that she is pregnant at the time of the kidnapping, the fact that she has these feelings about sons versus daughters, like all of this stuff you can kind of fill in the gaps and it makes more sense to me. Ruth’s relationship with Phyllis — not even wealth focused, although that’s obviously here, not even kidnapped focused, although that’s obviously here, but just a mother-in-law to daughter-in-law lineage of how we impose identities on the people who are coming after us — it was an easier groove for me to be able to be like y ou don’t have to tell me the whole thing, I can kind of fill in gaps here and it made Jenny make more sense.

Cat: I’m curious to know what people’s read was on the brief conversation Jenny has with Max, Ike’s son. Is the point of that just to illuminate his resentment and the fact that they don’t actually have as chummy of a relationship with Ike as they imagine?

Kathryn : It’s the thing that sort of spurs her breakdown right? She needs a thing that creates a reason for her to be like shit, I’ve been reading all of this wrong for a while and that sort of fuels all the ground falling out from under her. It just feels like somebody who’s arrived with a sledgehammer and bonks her and then leaves.

Zach : I did find it interesting though how quickly she defends her family, because she’s so hateful of her family and then in that moment she’s immediately saying the family line and it’s like oh this was in her the whole time obviously .

Emily: Real Shiv vibes .

Jason : It had been established that she’d fooled around with Max, so I do think it’s interesting in the context of her relationships to men. Obviously it was played off as if she didn’t really care about Max, but we don’t fully know the emotions of both people involved in that moment. If it was charged with something behind the class resentments, I like that there was maybe some implied sexuality that was included in there as well. That helped me in that section.

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