Six Takeaways From the Magazine’s Profile of Joe Biden

Joe Biden dreamed of one day becoming president nearly all his life. By the time he did, he was the oldest ever to hold the office. The Biden presidency became that of a man racing the clock of his own mortal frailty. Here’s what to know about Biden’s journey to and through the presidency — and his attempts to lay the groundwork for Kamala Harris:

Becoming chief sausage-maker for President Obama

Biden was wary of the offer to be Barack Obama’s running mate. He accepted it only after making clear that he wanted the same deal that Walter Mondale told Biden he had gotten from Jimmy Carter: not a narrow portfolio but rather an imprint on all major issues, and being the last person the president would talk to about a policy decision before making it.

Biden’s decades of experience in the Senate were an asset to the new president, who leaned on him as a legislative sausage-maker. “He was willing to do something Obama wasn’t always eager to do — which was go to the Hill, work the members, have the dinners,” said the former deputy chief of staff Jim Messina. Biden became a trusted confidant who, according to one White House adviser, frequently urged the more deliberative Obama to “go with your gut.”

Plotting a 2016 presidential run, only to be discouraged by Obama

With the start of Obama’s second term in 2013 — earlier than has been previously reported — Biden and his advisers began plotting his own presidential run, according to one of them. Their efforts continued even after his son Beau died of brain cancer in May 2015.

But throughout that period, Obama discouraged the vice president’s candidacy — out of concern for his grieving friend, according to two Obama aides.  Biden suspected other motives and later wrote that Obama was “putting a finger on the scale” for Hillary Clinton. Biden would recall in 2023, exposing a lasting wound, that “a lot of people” encouraged him to run for the 2016 Democratic nomination — “except the president.”

Running as a moderate, but governing as a progressive

According to those close to him, Biden believed he had become president because of his instincts, honed in the Senate, to build a winning coalition — in this case, with the progressive wing of his party that felt disrespected by the Hillary Clinton campaign four years earlier. “When he became president, he felt compelled to govern with them being a part of it,” said Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, who added: “I also think Biden went through this metamorphosis.”

“For an older white man who most people would call a moderate,” said Pramila Jayapal, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, “I certainly didn’t think he was going to be a progressive.”

But Biden came to see Bernie Sanders, his chief opponent in the 2020 Democratic primaries, as the standard-bearer of a movement that would be necessary for his own success as a president. When Sanders visited the White House in early 2021, he told Biden he wanted to see the bill that would become the Inflation Reduction Act funded to the tune of $5 trillion to $6 trillion. “Bernie,” the president replied, “I want to go as big as we can possibly get.”

Signs of slipping concerned allies

Even amid the Biden administration’s string of legislative successes, Democrats privately shared their worries about the aging president. Two Democratic legislators involved in the 2021 negotiations in the White House for what would become the I.R.A. later said the president seemed at times to lose the conversational thread. By the end of 2023, members of the diplomatic corps were privately sharing concerns with one former member of Congress that the president’s memory appeared to be slipping in meetings with foreign leaders.

David Plouffe, the Obama campaign guru and now the senior adviser of Kamala Harris’s campaign, said Biden’s campaign team had been confidently predicting victory to him and other Democrats all the way up to the day of his disastrous debate with Donald Trump in June.

Trying to salvage his candidacy, Biden appeared on a Zoom conference call with hundreds of donors. The president insisted that things were going to be fine. The concerned viewers could clearly see him looking down as if reading from a script. According to one listener, a Biden staff member selected conspicuously softball questions for him to answer. After the call, several donors complained to Biden allies that it had been a waste of their time.

A legacy now tied to his own vice president’s candidacy

Hours before Biden announced on social media that he was ending his campaign for a second term, he called his chief of staff, Jeff Zients. The president told Zients he wanted to construct a final, 180-day agenda that “would plant stakes in very important terrain,” as Zients later put it. Those stakes would help guide a Harris presidency and in turn shape Biden’s legacy, now tethered to her candidacy.

A few minutes after his speech to the nation explaining his decision not to run, Biden spoke to his emotional staff in the Rose Garden, according to a video obtained afterward. “We can start to help lay the groundwork for Kamala,” Biden told them, sharing that 180-day agenda. He ended with a last call to arms: “Let’s elect Kamala!”