Battered US president Joe Biden still thinks he’s the saviour

The US president will be nearly 82 at the election and faces a secret documents row. But he still reckons he is the only one to beat Donald Trump.

President Biden is facing an investigation after classified documents were found in a former office and the garage of his home. Picture: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters/The Times

As US president Joe Biden lay in his hospital bed about to be put under for the risky operation to fix a potentially fatal brain aneurysm, he grabbed the neurosurgeon’s arm.

“He looked me in the eye and he said, Doc, do a good job because some day I’m going to be president,” recalled Neal Kassell, one of two surgeons who performed the operation in May 1988.

Biden was not joking. This brush with his own mortality shortly after the failure of his first run for the White House only cemented the sense of destiny he felt from at least his early twenties, when he told his first wife’s bemused parents that he aimed to be a senator and then go on to the presidency.

This iron-clad self-belief is propelling Biden to run for re-election despite the fact that he will turn 82 next year and polling by YouGov shows only a minority of Democrat voters want him to carry on.

“During his [2020] campaign for the presidency, Biden said that he wanted to be a bridge to the next generation of leaders and many people interpreted that as an implicit promise that he would only run one term,” said Gabriel Debenedetti, author of The Long Alliance, a book about the relationship between Biden and Barack Obama.

“Biden never saw that as a one-term promise, and, in fact, hated that people did think as much, but wasn’t going to say so out loud at the time.”

Debenedetti said one of Biden’s advisers put it like this: “This is a man who has essentially been running for president for 50 years. It would be impossible for him to suddenly say, after four years of doing it, and as he sees it doing it pretty successfully, ‘You know what, you’re right. I am old. Forget it. Let’s move on. I won’t run for a second term.’ Why would he stop?”

However, Biden’s prospects took a hammering last week from the drip, drip of revelations about classified documents, dating back to his time as vice-president, being discovered at a former office and his family home, the latest coming to light on Saturday.

The initial discovery came shortly before the midterm elections but was kept quiet, reeking of dirty politics at a time when Biden was voicing outrage at the way that Donald Trump, his chaotic predecessor, kept bundles of secret papers.

The attorney-general has appointed a special counsel to investigate (as he has done in Trump’s case) and Republicans have leapt on a PR gift after months of steadily improving headlines for Biden and the Democrats.

Biden’s wife, Jill, is believed to have cast her doubts aside and now fully supports another election campaign. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images/The Times

Allies say the debacle is unlikely to deflect Biden nor dissuade Democrats from falling in line behind him.

“There’s a growing feeling he’s going to run again and we’re all going to be with him,” said Richard Neal, a veteran Democratic congressman and Biden confidant.

Trump’s decision to run seems to have hardened Biden’s resolve. As one former West Wing staffer put it: “Biden knows he is the only person that has beaten Donald Trump. He believes he is the only one who can save the country.”

That appears to go for Trump or a younger Republican rival pitching a similar populist message to the same base.

In August, Biden referred to the “entire philosophy” underpinning the Trump wing of the party as “like semi-fascism”.

The president said he would take Christmas with his family to chew over his intention to run for re-election. The smoke signals emerging after new year in the US Virgin Islands suggest they support his ambitions, with the most crucial voice of all, his wife Jill, said to have been converted from her doubts to be “all in”.

The same goes for his extended family, the team of half a dozen close advisers who have been with him for decades.

According to Debenedetti, they were never really in much doubt.

“In 2015, when Biden was agonising over the wisdom of a run after the death of his son Beau, his counsellor Steve Ricchetti occasionally floated the question of whether they should consider a one-term pledge, as it might appeal to voters concerned about Biden’s age,” he said.

Biden dismissed it as a gimmick. “It wasn’t just the conventional wisdom that he would be making himself a lame duck from day one. It was that Biden wanted to govern for as long as he could.”

Biden has good genes: his father Joe Sr died aged 86 and his mother Jean reached 92. No one in his immediate orbit will admit openly that his faculties are declining, despite his muddles over names and numbers and moments of confusion such as calling from the podium for a congresswoman who he was told a few weeks earlier had died.

Biden and Barack Obama campaigning in Philadelphia before the midterm elections in November, in which the Democrats performed better than expected. Picture: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters/The Times

Insiders point to Biden’s readiness to delegate and refusal to micromanage as ways of coping with the pressure of the presidency – but is he really up to a re-election battle that will require more hours on the road than the infamous “basement campaign” he was able to wage during the pandemic?

He is already answering this question, taking Air Force One to Arizona and Michigan for presidential business since the midterms, with Georgia to follow this week.

At the same time Biden knows better than most how cruel fate can be, having endured the losses of his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash in 1972 and then his eldest son in 2015 from brain cancer. His first two tilts at the White House ended in failure and, both times, he was written off for good.

Biden’s underestimated characteristic is his resilience, Neal said, recalling his comeback in the 2020 primaries from defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“He’s seen the ups and downs. He came in on the edge of the tumultuous period in the Sixties and Vietnam … If you watched the returns on the night of the [2020] Iowa caucuses, there were very few people around him. But that resiliency – a lot of people would have folded their tent. Instead, he said, ‘Onward’.”

Biden turned the primaries around with a stunning win in South Carolina and one by one his rivals swung behind him. Many left-wingers who remained sceptical have been won over in recent months.

“President Biden was able to get a bipartisan infrastructure law passed that’s going to rebuild America – that was something that former President Trump talked about incessantly and couldn’t get done,” said Ted Lieu, a California member of the House Progressive Caucus, who discounted the possibility of any serious challenger to Biden.

Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, is among the big names who have declared they will not run against the president.

“President Biden was able to get the American Rescue Plan passed that helped stabilise our economy during the pandemic,” Lieu added.

“He also got the Chips and Science Act passed to bring back manufacturing to America. And towards the end of last year, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant investment in climate change projects in world history. There is no one that can beat him.”

The legislative achievements were rewarded with a better-than-expected performance by Democrats in the midterm elections. Biden’s average approval rating of 43.9 per cent (which does not reflect voters’ response to the document discoveries) is close to his highest since October 2021 and better at this stage of the presidency than Ronald Reagan’s.

Biden was seen stumbling three times while boarding Air Force One in March 2021. Picture: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images/The Times

It is not just Democrats who see him as increasingly formidable. Newt Gingrich, a right-wing former house speaker, said: “Republicans must learn to quit underestimating President Biden.” He has waged war against Russia “with no American troops” and took “an amazingly narrow four-vote majority in the US House and a 50-50 tie in the Senate and turned it into trillions of dollars in spending – and a series of radical bills” followed by “one of the best first term off-year elections in history,” Gingrich wrote in a blog.

Kassell, 77, who after saving Biden’s life became a friend and an adviser to his Cancer Moonshot initiative, is among those who see no reason why he should step aside.

“You’ve got your chronological age and your biological age. And his level of energy and cognition and judgment are just fine,” he said.

“I mean, he’s spent his life preparing for this job. He’s got the knowledge and the experience. He’s got an extraordinary ability to convene and motivate people. Am I as sharp as I was when I was 30 years old? Probably not. But I’ve got more wisdom.”

The Sunday Times