Anger, fear, pride and regret

The seeds of the president Joe Biden‘s response to the Democratic Party’s crisis of confidence in him was planned years ago.

Biden has resisted an extraordinary push from his friends and allies to end his political career. For three weeks, he has dogged himself, denying polls and vowing to stay in the race, claiming he is the only one who can beat the former president. Donald TrumpOnly in recent days have people close to him said they believe he is more open to stepping down.

To many of his allies, he is a surprise candidate for a politician who has based his identity on service to the country rather than himself.

But those who have been close to him for years say Biden’s response is a culmination of the regret, pride, anger and fear that have been building inside him for at least the last decade. All of that is painfully clear, they added, from his own words.

It was in October 2015 that Biden, then vice president and mourning the loss of his son Beau five months earlier, announced in the White House Rose Garden that he would not run for president Hillary Clinton and senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. A few months later, he looked back on the decision and said, “I regret it every day.”

Publicly, he explained his decision not to run by saying that the grieving process was unpredictable and that there was “no respect or interest in things like filing deadlines or debates, primaries and caucuses.”

With the president Barack Obama With Biden’s wife Jill at his side, Joe said that “it’s entirely possible that by the time we get through that process, the window for mounting a realistic presidential campaign will close.” He concluded, “it’s closed.”

But privately, people close to him said he was furious at what he saw as a concerted effort to push him aside in favor of the other candidate, a harbinger of the kind of pressure he now faces from fellow Democrats.

Then, as now, his friends argued he would lose — to Clinton and Sanders, and later to Trump. David Plouffe, Obama’s top political advisor at the time, sat down with Biden and showed him polls, The Atlantic reported. “Do you really want this to end in a hotel room in Des Moines, where he finishes third to Bernie Sanders?” (Eight years earlier, Biden had finished fifth in the Iowa caucuses and dropped out of the race.)

For Biden, the message was clear: Obama wanted him to stay on the sidelines. So did Obama’s advisors. And Clinton. The grief for his son was real. But so was the sense, according to several people who spoke to him at the time, that he was being run over by people to whom he had been nothing but loyal for years. He deserved better, he told allies, and he thought he would have proven them wrong if he had run.

David Axelrod, who as a senior advisor to Obama kept a close eye on Biden for years, said the president was angry about the decision, fueled in part by anger about being thrown out of the race by people who never really respected him the way he felt they should.

“That chip,” Axelrod said, “is the battery that has powered him his entire life.”

The president has rarely shown that anger since then, but once Trump was in the White House, Biden was more open about his regrets and his belief that he could have won in 2016.

“I regret not being president because I think there are so many possibilities,” Biden told Oprah Winfrey in an interview in late 2017. Asked whether he thought he would have won the nomination if he had run, Biden said yes, though he also said he was confident at the time that Clinton was qualified.

“So I didn’t feel like I was leaving the field and because I was leaving the field, there was nobody there to, you know, run the country,” he said. “I didn’t feel that way.”

Now everything is different.

Since his stumbling, unsteady debate with Trump on June 27, Biden has said publicly that only he can beat the former president in November. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, his campaign manager, insisted that MSNBC’s “Good morning JoeFriday that Biden is “out to win.” But privately, Biden has spent the past few days asking how Vice President Kamala Harris could win, according to Democrats with knowledge of his conversations.

Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos two weeks ago, “I don’t think there’s anybody better qualified to be president or to win this race than me.” Last week on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” he mocked those trying to tell him what to do, saying, “I don’t care what these big names think” he should do after the debate.

“I get so frustrated, but with the elites,” he said, his voice rising, his anger clear. “I’m not talking about you guys, I’m talking about the elites in the party; they know so much more. But if one of these guys thinks I shouldn’t run? Then run. Go ahead and announce yourself for president. Challenge me at the convention.”

Biden’s 2020 victory may have assured some of the regret and anger he felt about not running in 2016. If he had decided to serve just one term, his lasting legacy might well be that he was the one who prevented Trump from winning a second term in the White House.

But those who know him say Biden is driven by a deep source of pride and a desire not to be seen as a one-term president, less successful — at least in that sense — than Obama or his former president. President Bill Clintonboth of whom received the approval of voters to serve another four-year term. In modern times, Jimmy Carter was the only Democratic president to attempt and fail to earn a second term.

It is also fear, said one who worked closely with him for years, that haunts him: the fear of becoming irrelevant after so many decades at the center of the national debate.

In a 2017 Vanity Fair interview: Jill Biden indicated that her husband was afraid of becoming irrelevant.

When asked if she would ever tell him to just enjoy life, she replied, “Do you understand what ‘enjoy life’ means to Joe?”

She suggested it was unthinkable for him to remain on the sidelines for long. Spending the Trump years as the namesake of an academic institution at the University of Delaware (staffed with people who would later fill his White House and Cabinet) was not the same as being the center of attention. As 2020 approached, almost no one close to Biden was surprised that he wanted to try again.

“President Biden is motivated to ‘finish the job’ on behalf of the American people — by making wealthy special interests pay their fair share in taxes, strengthening and expanding Social Security, restoring Roe, and bringing the country together,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Friday.

There is now little doubt among those who knew him that his story about this moment — of being sent away against his better judgment — was at the heart of his decision-making.

“They were wrong in 2020,” Biden said on “Morning Joe.” “They were wrong in 2022 on the red wave. They’re wrong in 2024.”

c. 2024 The New York Times Company