Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. Well, Barack Obama is back on the political stage. He's making appearances this year to promote democracy in the United States and around the world. He's been doing that. Now he's helping Democratic candidates in the midterm elections raise money, and in some cases, he's campaigning for them.

CNN reported last week that that will include candidates for secretary of state in various key states, an office of former president would hardly have paid attention to in the past, but this year is different with the way elections are certified being under attack. Here, for example, is Obama in a speech in April at Stanford University.

Barack Obama: We have to admit that at least in the years since the Cold War ended, democracies have grown dangerously complacent, but too often we've taken freedom for granted. What recent events remind us is that democracy is neither inevitable nor self-executing. Citizens like us have to nurture it.

Brian Lehrer: Former President Barack Obama on democracy. Obama is also supporting the Biden agenda in many of these appearances, of course. Biden, of course, was Obama's vice president for eight years, but their relationship is more complicated than you might imagine. A new book by New York Magazine national political correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti explores that relationship, including its implications for this fall's midterms and for 2024 in a new book called The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama. With us now is New York Magazine national political correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti. Gabe, always good to have you on and congratulations on the book.

Gabriel Debenedetti: Thanks so much, Brian. It is always a true pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Let me start on a few specifics from your book that might be newsworthy right now, then we'll pull back to the bigger picture of the Obama-Biden relationship. You do write about the role you think Obama will be playing in the midterm election campaigns from now to November. How would you describe it?

Gabriel Debenedetti: He's likely to be very helpful for Democrats broadly. He has really calculated that the best way for him to deploy his political strength in his post-presidency, but especially during the Biden years, is to lay back as much as possible until the final stretch, show up in-person, cut some ads, but to be careful about it, to make sure that his voice carries the most weight as possible. As you just heard, as you were just talking about, he has been watching closely some races for governor, for secretary of state that will have implications for how the election is carried out on a purely logistical level in 2024 because he's thinking a lot about threats to democracy right now.

Brian Lehrer: It is amazing, isn't it? Is campaigning for secretary of state in various states something you ever thought any former president would be doing?

Gabriel Debenedetti: No, and certainly that's not something that Barack Obama thought he would be doing when he first conceived of what his post-presidency would look like, but of course, the lesson of the last five years or so is that very little of this has looked exactly like what we thought it was going to look like.

Brian Lehrer: We played that clip of Obama from April. How much does that represent what he's most concerned with or spending his time on these days?

Gabriel Debenedetti: As far as politics is concerned, that's his big thing. He is also working on some climate initiatives. He's got his foundation. It's important to know-- I think there's a misperception about the way that he and Biden operate. They talk a decent amount every few weeks or so, but it's not as if Obama is a real adviser to Biden on day-to-day policy or day-to-day politics, even on strategy. They talk, they have check-ins, they have what someone once called it political therapy to me. No one else is on those calls, so it's not as if they're making major decisions between the two of them, but he is thinking about the biggest threats to democracy.

This all fits within the theme of when he talks to friends about what his post-presidency has been like, as I just said, it has very little to do with how he originally conceived of it, but it's because he doesn't think he gets to properly fully retire right now, not when the state of the American democracy is in such peril.

Brian Lehrer: You write it in the book about how Biden as president sometimes has misread the challenges ahead of him as president because of a sometimes unrealistic views of the Obama years. What unrealistic views are those?

Gabriel Debenedetti: Well, I think a really good example of this is when you looked early on in the Biden administration, he talked a lot about how in selling his COVID Relief Bill, which was a massive investment, he was going to learn from the Obama years and he was going to spend a lot of time trying to sell that bill to the American people to make sure that it was politically popular under the belief that one of the problems with what happened when Obama had his stimulus in 2009, the idea that Biden is sharing here is that that administration should have spent more time explaining that legislation to the American people.

His belief is that one needs to work harder with Capitol Hill to get a bigger coalition, but certainly that a president needs to explain what they're doing in very concrete, easy to understand in terms of the American people. In the short run, it certainly seemed that it was true, but it didn't take long before the American people totally forgot about what was in that bill. They didn't really give him much political credit for it and the idea that Biden had, which was that this was one simple trick that they weren't doing during the Obama years and that he would be able to pick up on.

That was belied by the real experience, where Republicans in particular had totally polarized against him and were completely unwilling to give him any credit. That's not just the elected officials, but also people at the local level.

Brian Lehrer: Not just in the Biden administration. It really jumped out at me your reporting and reminding us that Obama was convinced that his own reelection in 2012 would force Republicans to calm down and quit their obstructionism. Remind us about Republican obstructionism before Donald Trump ran for president. We're talking about 2012 and thereabouts and if we're seeing history repeat itself under Biden.

Gabriel Debenedetti: Well, famously, as soon as Obama was elected, there were meetings within the Republican leadership about how to obstruct him. Mitch McConnell said, "We want to make him a one-term president." All throughout the first term, there was this tension between Biden and Obama about how much time to actually spend trying to win over Republicans on various things.

Of course, they didn't have to during the first two years that much because they had control of the House and Senate, Democrats did, but then for the rest of Obama's term, they really did have to work with Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and reckon with the rise of the Tea Party and racist birtherism theories and things like that. We really saw the rise of this kind of obstructionism during the early days of the Obama years, but all that time, there was some tension internally about how much time to spend wooing Republicans. It didn't really come out until much later because for the most part, everyone was on the same page. You got to do what you got to do.

Obama didn't like spending a lot of time trying to win over votes. Biden was always willing to do that, even if it was going to be a little bit of a long shot. Things started to change after the reelection. Obama used to say, "The fever will break and Republicans will work with us because they have to and because this election proves that that's what the American people want." He stopped saying that after the gun control experience, after Sandy Hook, when they tried to pass the Manchin-Toomey legislation, tried to pass restrictions on gun control, and Republicans were just totally uninterested after a while in really getting anything done.

He really soured, Obama really soured on the idea of whether there was even any possibility of working across the aisle at that point. Biden wasn't so convinced. He was obviously shocked by the level of Republican obstruction, but he kept going. He was the one who always said, "There's always a deal to be made." Partially, that was just because he felt that that was his role within the administration, but also because he just felt that that was how Washington worked. To this day, there's still a little bit of a disagreement there and you see it.

We saw it early in the Trump era when Obama used to talk about Trump, once he had come around to what he truly thought of him. When Trump was president, privately, he would talk about Trump as this product of the warping of the modern Republican Party and a natural next step for these people who are getting more and more extreme. Biden always maintained that Trump was an aberration and not an outgrowth of republicanism.

It took some time for the two of them to really find some coherence in the way that they talked about it with each other, but you've seen this, essentially, tension transform, and not just tension, but discussion transform in many ways over the last 10 years or so, certainly 15.

Brian Lehrer: Would you say that Biden, with his relationships in the Senate, has been any more successful than Obama at getting things done across the aisle? We can point to a few examples, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the bit of gun control that they did get on a bipartisan basis. Anything?

Gabriel Debenedetti: Yes, absolutely. Those are massive accomplishments as far as the administration is concerned. They're on topics that Obama was not able to make that much progress on or certainly Democrats weren't during the Obama years. Of course, the biggest accomplishments of the Biden administration, if you look, for example, at the climate bill, that was done purely with Democratic support. Now, it did take a lot of Senate know-how to get there, but I do think that it's impossible to look at the shape of how Biden looks at Capitol Hill now versus how he did as vice president without acknowledging that the ground has shifted.

It's much more accepted to just get things done on a partisan basis than it was even 5 or 10 years ago because of the changing norms within the Senate, but also because of this broader understanding in the political landscape that by partisanism, while it is possible on some issues, it's just no longer the expectation.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking with Gabe Debenedetti, national politics correspondent for New York Magazine. He's got a new book called The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama. You write in this book about Obiden. Obiden, I've merged them into one person. See that? That's how close they actually are. About Biden's victory in the presidential election. By the way, he won the presidential election, for anybody [unintelligible 00:10:50] delaying a reckoning within the Democratic Party, even an internal civil war. What kind of reckoning do you see is coming?

Gabriel Debenedetti: If you look, for example, at what happened after Donald Trump won, there was a very large, the beginning of a war within the Democratic Party about its post-Obama identity. This feels like ancient history, but if you think back to 2019 and 2020, it wasn't totally obvious to anyone in the early days of that presidential campaign that Biden was actually offering a position in this side or a side in this fight for the future of the Democratic Party because what he was saying was essentially we can not explicitly restore the Obama years, but there is a middle way. We don't have to pretend that you can go all the way to the Bernie left or go all the way to centrism.

For a long time, it really felt like the Bernie left, for example, to put it in stark terms, or to oversimplify it, I should say, was on the upswing leading into that election. Certainly into the final days of the primary, it felt like Bernie Sanders was going to be the nominee. That was, of course, at a point where Obama looked in and said, "I'm not sure that Bernie can beat Trump." That's a slightly different story, but Biden all the while is offering this notion that real voters are not particularly interested in that kind of change as the Washington media might have it or voters in the earliest states.

Biden was always making the case that those were not representative as the result because he was able to win and because the threat of Trump was so large and looming. He really did put off this reckoning in the Democratic Party about what its identity is going to be. You see that with the fact that he's able to work well with Bernie Sanders, but also work well with Joe Manchin, but no one within the party currently thinks that those tensions have been put to rest forever, simply that because Biden is widely known and widely liked within the party and widely accepted as this figure who is the least offensive figure for so many people. He may not inspire immense positive passions, but everyone agrees that he's reasonable within the party. He's been able to put off some larger disagreement.

Brian Lehrer: Were you surprised then that he came into office and tried to be the next FDR, the next LBJ, as a lot of people said, in his first year, something maybe more Bernie Sanders-ish with the original version of the big Build Back Better, or American Families Plan as it was once called, with childcare programs that never existed before, universal pre-K at the national level, elder care programs, all these things that were really seen as the next steps in the social democracy that a Bernie Sanders might be enthusiastic about?

Gabriel Debenedetti: A few things here. I think the first thing to note that's very important to remember is when Biden started talking in these terms, and he's the one who first said the FDR ambitions line, that was in a different political reality. That was when he thought and most of us thought that he was going to beat Trump easily and the Democrats were going to have pretty wide control of the Senate and the House. Not this semi-split version of Washington than we have now where Democrats of course do have control of Washington, but it's a lot closer than anyone had anticipated at the time.

That said, you look forward, you fast forward a little bit from that spring and summer of 2020 to when Biden actually takes over. One of his skills for many, many years has been finding the exact center of the Democratic Party and occupying that on politics and on policy. That's what he thought he was doing by talking about all of these massive programs, because he felt, when he talked to his colleagues in the Senate especially, that is where the direction of the party was headed, that there was a lot of appetite for these massive changes, especially after he had been talking about them during the campaign and then won.

He was assaulted with this reality that he only had 50 votes, of course, in the Senate in particular and a small margin in the House and that there are plenty of Democrats who don't feel that the political will was going to be there to do that much massive change. It's important to remember that obviously Republicans were completely aligned against him. It's not as if he had massive political will in a overwhelming sense, but Democrats were not as aligned behind him as he thought.

In some ways, that was a miscalculation that he thought he was at the center of the party, where in reality, he was overreading some of the energy and some of the commentary that had gone his way during the election, but started to shift back, especially after he passed his first massive piece of legislation, which was at least a short-term success, and that was the COVID Relief Bill.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, do you think a massive reckoning within the Democratic Party is coming, being held off temporarily by the broad acceptability, even of lack of enthusiasm toward President Joe Biden among Democrats in the United States or any other reaction or question you have for Gabe Debenedetti as he presents content from his book, The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. On the Biden-Obama relationship, you report that it's been more combustible than widely known. How far back does that go? How did that combustibility get started?

Gabriel Debenedetti: That goes back to the first day they ever met. They, of course, start to get to know each other in 2005, which is when Obama first arrives to the Senate. This is an important piece of context that I think people often overlook when thinking about this relationship. At that time, Biden had thought that he was going to be John Kerry's secretary of state in 2004 and so had been thinking about coming years that way, but certainly was thinking of his time in the Senate as a senior leader, as the leading voice on Democratic foreign policy.

Obama was [unintelligible 00:16:58] seniority. He was a political star because of his star turn at the 2004 convention, but no one thought of him as one of the protagonists in Washington. When they first met up, they worked together on the Senate foreign relations committee, but it wasn't as if they had that sterling relationship. In fact, Obama thought that Biden was overly loquacious, wasn't really all that impressed with his politics, and Biden said, "I've seen celebrity senators come and go."

He had been impressed with the way that Obama talked. He was impressed, obviously, and understood the very big importance of Obama as the only Black senator at the time, but he didn't necessarily see Obama as a future president. The first time they actually met in the Senate, the first time they had a meeting one-on-one, it didn't end very well at all. That was when Biden invited Obama to join his committee after hearing the interest, and Biden ended the meeting. It was just a quick one, by saying, "This was great. Why don't we have a follow-up conversation over dinner at some cheap place here on Capitol Hill?"

Obama at the time, context that Biden didn't know, he had money for the first time in his life because of a book deal. Obama reads this as Biden being condescending and saying, "Who's this young senator? Let's just get a cheap dinner." He shoots back and says, "Well, we can get something nicer than that. I can afford it." Biden reads that as a presumption from Obama, who is working over his skis here. Biden sees this as this cocky guy who doesn't realize that Biden does not have that much money because, of course, he'd been in the Senate since he was 29.

There was just not a meeting of the minds for a long time. It took until their first year in the presidency before they really started to see super eye to eye, even if they agreed in the broadest terms on policy matters.

Brian Lehrer: Do they like each other today?

Gabriel Debenedetti: Oh, yes. I think that it's very important to understand that this is the closest relationship, genuinely, between a president and a former president or certainly a president and vice president that we've had in modern times. Certainly at least among those who aren't related to each other, and it might seem like a low bar, but it is a unbelievable relationship when you think about the fact that they are such different men with sometimes such different views of what today's politics looks like.

They still talk every few weeks. Those are private conversations and they really do mean a lot to both of them. That's something that we just haven't seen from other people in similar positions. That's one of the reasons that I really wanted to go into this relationship with writing this book, because it is so multifaceted. There are so many examples of times when they saw each other. They didn't see eye to eye politically. It was, in fact, very painful for each of them, but personally, they were still on the same page or they still appreciated each other.

It says a lot about the strength of the relationship that they still talk so much even after, for example, their partnership ended with the 2016 election when Obama's handpicked candidate Secretary Clinton, who, of course, did win that primary, but was supported behind the scenes by Obama. When she lost to Trump, even as Biden was watching in the sidelines, Biden had wanted to run in that race and personal circumstances didn't allow him, but at the same time, he also didn't get to do it because Obama dissuaded him from doing it.

Brian Lehrer: Gabe Debenedetti with us, author of The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Richard in Orange, you're on WNYC. Hi, Richard.

Richard: Yes. Good morning. Long time, first time. Thanks for having me. I finished reading a book by Lee Drutman called the Breaking of the Two Party Doom Loop. When we talk about moving America to a multi-party democracy, which will be a lot more representative for all voters because we have to address the voter advocacy problem in America, which causes this backlash going from Obama to Trump to Biden, it's really not very healthy to run a democracy that way.

I guess my question is, we hear a lot about ranked-choice voting popping up in elections all over the country. Seems to be a strong trend that will, hopefully, continue. Hopefully, in November, we'll see that the GOP will fraction hopefully into two parties. The MAGA Trumpers are not going anywhere. No matter how crazy they are, everybody deserves a seat at the table, unfortunately, but that's the way democracy works. Eventually, the Democrats will have to consider the same thing. AOC, Bernie, they don't necessarily belong in the same party as a Joe Manchin, Sinema.

I guess my question is what can we foresee for American democracy? If we continue in this two party system, we're probably going to end up with severe civil conflicts at some point.

Brian Lehrer: Richard, thank you for that interesting question. Gabe, do you think with the fractiousness within the Republican Party that's certainly being reported on a lot now and your description of the Democratic Party, Biden being the glue that's holding off something that's coming inevitably, that's something from a reckoning to a political civil war within the Democratic Party, you think we're headed for multi-party democracy instead of a two?

Gabriel Debenedetti: I think that there's a false equivalence here. It's true that Democrats have a lot of big disagreements about the future of the party, but there's nothing like what's happening on the Republican side, where they've been completely taken over by the Trumpist version of that party. As to the question of the fracturing of the parties, this is a conversation that's been going on for a long time, and there's no doubt that there are some serious, serious fractures there, but we're not in for a multiparty system because you can't win elections that way in the current American system.

Ranked-choice voting is a reform that is certainly being taken up and looked at in a number of different states. That has helped in some cases, but that doesn't create new parties. Neither Biden or Obama or any of them popular people in the Democratic Party, including, by the way, Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has expressed any interest whatsoever in supporting that thing.

On the Republican side, it's true that they have massive breaking points constantly, but that's because of a Trumpist takeover, not because of a split down the middle. It's not down the middle. Trump-endorsed candidates or Trump-like candidates are winning a lot of primaries all over the country, as we saw last night in New Hampshire. I don't mean to throw cold water on the idea of some reform or breakup here, but we do have two parties that do have a lot of institutional reason for existing just based on how our system is shaped up. I think that that, for the short term at least, is certainly not going to change.

Brian Lehrer: We'll see, to the caller's other point, if ranked-choice voting, as it spreads weakens partisan polarization and the parties themselves having as much power as they do today. Richard, thank you for your call. Gabriel Debenedetti from New York Magazine meet Gabriel from Georgia, who's calling in. Gabriel, you're on WNYC.

Gabriel: Hey, Brian, how you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Doing all right. What you got for us?

Gabriel: Excellent. I just wanted to dispatch from where I am down in Southern Georgia, it seems to me that, for one, there's something that's funny that relates to Biden down here, which is that people who are, needless to say, avid Trump supporters presume that anyone who's not a Trump supporter is actually a Biden supporter, which as a lifelong former New York City Democrat, I'm not. I'm more of a Bernie Sanders, Jumaane Williams kind of guy, but we voted Biden it in because it was like the obvious alternative to what we're still dealing with right now.

It seems to me, and I might be seeing things through red tinted Aviators from where I'm at, there's going to be a huge Republican wave and it's just going to push things a little more as it already has for the Democrats to the center.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting, Gabriel. Thank you very much. Please call us again. I think an opposite number to him, politically speaking, within the Democratic Party, Eric in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Hi, Eric.

Eric: Good morning. I wanted to express my, I guess you'd call it frustration with the Democratic Party and at the author, his explanation's why I feel so alienated. I've been a lifelong Democrat. I voted for Obama twice, I voted for Bill Clinton a couple of times. Then when it reached the point with around the time Trump came on the scene, I thought the guy was a clown at the beginning, but then I started to listen to his points of view and I realized that even though I'm a very strong environmentalist and I believe in human rights, I also believe in strong borders, strong military, strong immigration policy, more along the lines of what Ed Koch used to say on his radio show.

He used to describe himself as a liberal with sanity, and pretty much every Friday night, he would repeat that amnesty for illegal immigrants is a slap in the face to anyone who came here legally. They should get back on the line like everybody else.

Brian Lehrer: Just for time, you voted for Trump in 2016, you told our screener, but have you now come to think that the Republican Party, where it's going is too radically dangerous and coming back into the Democratic Party fault, or very briefly, where are you now?

Eric: I'm still with Trump because I feel like he's more in line along my views. I think there are radicals on both sides who are like loony-tunes extremists. I'm more of a centrist. I consider myself more of an independent at this point. I tell people all the time, "You give me a good Democratic candidate that I can believe in and I'll be happy to switch sides."

for the time being, the Schumers, the Pelosis' dream-- I'm not in love with Trump either, but if you just separate the personalities from their policies, I tend to agree with the-- I'm not religious, it's just I believe in law and order.

Brian Lehrer: You can overlook the big lie in January 6th.

Eric: I think anyone who studies politics knows that from the inception of this country, if you go see the [inaudible 00:28:18] that politics is a very dirty business and the inception of this country occurred back behind the door meetings. I think that's a really gray area as far as your view of what occurred with the absentee ballots and so on. I really don't feel that-- I tend to feel [inaudible 00:28:46]

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to leave it there for time, but I hear you on all of that. Gabe, a genuine swing voter, in case we thought there were none left. Last question for you and then we're at a time. You write about how the January 6th committee is shaping Biden's task of trying to get the country to move on. In our last 30 seconds, how is it influencing him?

Gabriel Debenedetti: He's someone who thinks a lot about his place in history and about the importance of maintaining democracy in this country. When he sees the work that's being done then, he's been very careful not to [unintelligible 00:29:24] because he wants to maintain lines of independence, but it shapes a lot how he thinks of his role and what he thinks of his task as he looks forward to 2024 and maintaining free and fair elections.

That's a joint [unintelligible 00:29:37] that he has with Obama, who, as we talked about earlier, is thinking about the 2024 election as well. One of the things here is that they have a joint legacy and both of them have been considering at this point what it looks like in the future for the two of them to be tasked with making sure not just that Democrats do well, but that the democracy survives.

Brian Lehrer: Gabriel Debenedetti, national political correspondent for New York Magazine and now the author of The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Congratulations on the book. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Gabriel Debenedetti: Thank you so much, Brian.

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