Barack and Joe
The Making of an Extraordinary Partnership
by Steven Levingston
Review by Mike Billings

The story of how an aging Senator Joe Biden teamed up with a young Senator Barack Obama, well told by Washington Post book editor Steven Levingston, will do much to explain the mix of affection and unease that many Democrats feel about Biden and his current run for president. There is affection for this obviously big-hearted man, intolerant of bigots and bullies, impatient since his youth to be a force for decency. This was evident when he was elected to the senate at age 29. The same impulses motivate Biden today, at age 77. The kid from Scranton always dreamed heroic dreams. In a 1987 interview, he talks of seething about Bull Connor, and his fire hoses and police dogs, used against people seeking basic human rights.

The unease does not flow from any doubt about Biden’s sincerity. With the stakes so high, the unease flows from doubts about whether Biden is up to it.

For three years, Biden has led Trump in public opinion polls, sometimes comfortably, and always by more than any of his Democratic rivals. Only Bernie Sanders approaches this show of strength. Sanders is older than Biden, and has just had a heart attack. Yet it is Biden’s mental quickness and vitality that are widely questioned. More than that, from Biden’s youthful introduction to national politics until today, he has been so accident prone that even people who love him doubt whether he has the discipline and focus required for this fight.

The public knows Biden’s story. His father was compelled to change jobs, and moved his close knit family from Scranton to Delaware, and started over. After his underwhelming passage through Syracuse Law School, and election to a modest local office, Biden charmed his way to election to the US Senate. Just before he took office, he lost his wife and daughter in a horrific traffic accident. The senate became a family to him. He matured there. His colleagues nursed him through his grief. He developed close personal friendships with people he strongly differed with. He remarried. His two boys, almost killed in the 1972 accident, grew to manhood. A brain aneurysm almost killed the Senator in 1988. He chaired the important Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees.

Biden’s notions of comity must flow from that journey, but in more recent years, civility and comity have vanished. Obama’s treatment at the hands of senate Republicans, and their treatment of Biden’s only surviving son, underscore this. Many Democrats doubt that comity is possible at this moment in history, as well as whether Biden’s relatively conservative Democratic positions, fashionable for most of his senate career, match the moment.

There is also the question of capacity. Twice Biden reached for the presidency. In 1987, plagiarism in law school, and on the stump, did him in. Twenty years later, his bid was barely noticed. When Obama took him on as VP, it was assumed Biden would be too old to run for president in 2016, let alone 2020.

And then there are the gaffes, from his youth to his dotage. There was 1987. There was his goofy baseball cap wearing and kibitzing at a confirmation hearing for a judge. “Kill me now,” Obama wrote in a note he passed to a friend, as Biden bloviated at a hearing. There was his well intended but tone deaf description of Obama as clean and articulate. He might as well have said he was very musical, and had fine white teeth. He drove Obama to distraction with gaffes in the sprint to November 2008. It was also a Biden “gaffe,” that nudged Obama to accept gay marriage.

He remains gaffe prone. More recently Uncle Joe seemed to muse about taking Trump out behind the high school to duke it out with him. He challenged a hostile questioner to a push-up contest. Levingston paints a moving picture of Obama and Biden becoming close, bonding over the loss of Beau Biden, among other things, as Obama gently nudged Biden away from running for president in 2016.

Shortest Way Home
by Pete Buttigieg
Review by Lester Barnett

It seems a tad nervy for Pete Buttigieg to run for president. Didn’t you used to have to be a war hero, or have won a statewide election, or served with some distinction in the cabinet?

Buttigieg has just concluded his second term as mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He was a solid but not spectacular mayor. Part of his time as mayor was spent overseas. A navy reservist, he deployed to Afghanistan in 2014, as an intelligence officer, also busy driving his commander around famously dangerous roads. He makes greater use of this in his campaign than of his mayoralty. His father taught at Note Dame, located in South Bend. At 18, the precocious Pete won a Profiles in Courage essay contest, sponsored by the Kennedy Library. His topic: Bernie Sanders! He was a Rhodes Scholar, studied at Oxford, graduated from Harvard, and was a McKinsey consultant.

So, to sum up, he went to college, was a military reservist, worked as a McKinsey smarty pants, and was mayor of a city the size of Manch-Vegas. He lost races for DNC chair, and Indiana state treasurer, the latter to Richard Mourdock, the political genius who handed a safe GOP senate seat to a Democrat, after holding forth on the topic of rape as “a gift from God.” Mayor Pete is also reputed to speak several foreign languages, and play a mean piano. As part of his strategy to win back the culturally conservative “shot and a beer” midwest Dems who tilted the last election to The Donald,

Pete and his male spouse graced the cover of Time magazine. Can’t handle a woman  president, Goober? Try this! Running for president is seldom a modest act, but if the Kennedy Library handed out a Brass Balls Award, the ex mayor would be a top tier contender.

The interesting thing is, Pete Buttigieg has a sporting chance to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, and if Biden collapses, he is as well situated as anybody to become the Great Incrementalist Hope. It is a remarkable political achievement. It is owed largely to his own moxie. His ability to sell himself, to handle verbal brickbats, make the most of a scant resume, and fashion a generational appeal, has carried him a long way. Interestingly, Pete does well with aging Boomers, while Bernie is strong with younger folks. OK, Boomer.

Buttigieg’s s skills are reflected in his book. Most books by active politicians are self serving drivel. Boring. Cloying. This is the story of how I became wonderful. Buttigieg writes the same way he speaks. He is exceptionally bright, disarming, nuanced, confidence inspiring, and not at all what you would expect from the gay mayor of a small Indiana city.

In 2011, Newsweek magazine (while not doing so well itself) labeled South Bend a “dying city.” Mayor Pete’s book does not claim to have solved that. Instead he wrote movingly about Studebaker’s departure from South Bend, 19 years before he was born. Studebaker and South Bend failed to embrace change, to prepare for it, to harness it. Don’t make that mistake America. This is a rare political autobiography worth reading.

The Senator Next Door
by Amy Klobuchar
Review by Natalie Blumenstock

Midwest Nice. Minnesota Nice. Think of the movie Fargo (the non criminals). Amy Klobuchar was dismissed as boring, plain, and middle of the road. She outlasted charismatic women, who had mastered the politics of New York and California, but to little avail. Elizabeth Warren was taking all the trophies for substance. Party centrists held fast for Biden, or defected to Mayor Pete. Now, at just the right time, Amy Klobuchar’s hour, or at least her fifteen minutes, have arrived. Warren had to share her New York Times endorsement with Amy. The Manchester Union Leader endorsed Amy. A poll in Iowa had Amy pulling a head of Warren and Buttigieg. They are so 2019.

The public may be tiring of the chaos and conflict that dominates American politics in the 21st Century, turbo charged in the Trump era. Klobuchar has been endorsed by another Minnesotan, who she once interned for, Walter Mondale. His Secret Service code name was Norwegian Wood. When Mario Cuomo was trying to compliment Mondale, he said that his mother said Mondale was like polenta. That would be a bland, mushy, corn meal. Cuomo was soon heatedly insisting that it was very good for you.

Senator Klobuchar’s book recounts a middle class, late baby boomer experience growing up. Her father was a popular Twin Cities sports writer, with a drinking problem. Her parents divorced. Amy became an attorney, was elected prosecutor of the largest county in her state, and has been elected senator from Minnesota three times by large margins. She won 60% of the vote in a state Trump nearly won, a state much like other once Democratic Rust Belt states, turning Red in the age of Trump.

Not surprisingly, Klobuchar has some ideas about how to win these places back. In a time of intense partisan feeling, Klobuchar has passed a lot of legislation by reaching out to GOP colleagues. She insists that smash mouth politics from the far left, as well as pie in the sky socialism, will fail. It may be emotionally satisfying but you won’t get elected, and can’t govern that way if you do. She calls Medicare for All “a pipe dream.” She says the world leader she most admires is Angela Merkel of Germany, admiring her progressive, steady, realistic, no nonsense style. She also enjoys the TV show Madam Secretary. She may emerge as the alternative to Sanders or Warren, in a showdown over which approach the Democratic party must take.

Parties often turn sharply left or right after a traumatic defeat. It used to be widely accepted that this compounds their problems. A narrow loss in 1960 led to a sharp right turn with Goldwater, and a Democratic landslide. Nixon won narrowly in 1968. Traumatized Democrats moved left with McGovern and got crushed. In more recent years the center has shrunk. Partisan feeling is high. Media that comforts people in pre-existing biases dominates. Carter won narrowly in 1976, but a sharp right turn with Reagan resulted in three GOP landslides. Obama was a risky person to nominate, according to the old rules. He expanded the electorate and won. Clinton, the Sanders/Warren argument goes, made no effort to excite the base, and lost to Trump, of all people.

Klobuchar supporters insist that argument is flawed. Clinton had liabilities Klobuchar does not. Contrast Klobuchar’s calm handling of Bret Kavenaugh, as he snarled at her about whether she had a drinking problem, with Clinton’s bursts of temper and entitlement. Contrast Klobuchar’s matter of fact suggestion that, no, Sanders would not be an effective nominee, with Clinton’s unhinged “nobody likes” Sanders, which sounded like something out of Mean Girls.

There is a counter argument to this. If one leans as heavily as Klobuchar does on personality and temperament, it is reasonable to ask that the image not be fake.

Last winter the New York Times broke a story about Klobuchar being abusive to staff. “I am a tough boss,” Klobuchar shrugged. There was a particularly jarring story about Klobuchar going off on a staffer for not providing for a fork, with which to eat a salad, one busy day. The Senator was said to have then eaten the salad with a comb. Minnesota nice? The New York Times expressed concern about this, as they endorsed Klobuchar. The Times stressed the need for a president to retain quality people, and that is not how this is done. The “Take Away” is this. Klobuchar has solid qualities the public may find refreshing after the last four years. Polenta is good for you! Don’t try eating it with a comb.

Desk 88
by Sherrod Brown
Review by Tom Brennan

A recent reviewer called it the best book written by a sitting senator since JFK put his name to Profiles in Courage. It may be, and I suspect Senator Sherrod Brown actually wrote this book. His wife is a journalist, but the language was that which I have often heard the Ohio Democrat use. Gore Vidal observed that politics and good writing are conflicting drives. The writer must tell the truth, the pol must never give away the game.

Brown was considered a formidable presidential prospect. He has been elected senator from Ohio three times, and been winning elections in Ohio since he went to the state legislature at a age 22, fresh off of volunteering for the McGovern campaign. It is very hard for Republicans to win the presidency without Ohio. Brown won his first statewide race in 1982, for secretary of state, an office vital to the integrity of state electoral process. He went to congress in 1992, the senate in 2006, unseating incumbent Mike DeWine, the current governor. Younger than Bernie, Liz, or Joe — lanky, raspy voiced, and curly haired– Brown has the ability to unite the supporters of all three. He is credible on economic justice, trade, labor, health care and living wage issues. He is socially tolerant without being self righteous or tribal. In that period when all politics junkies speculate about who might run, who might pull it all together, my long shot hunch was Brown. When he tested the waters with a “dignity of work” tour, I awaited the launch.

Senator Brown announced he would not run. Plenty of good candidates, he explained. Fundraising demands were daunting, and that has kept many quality individuals out of the arena. There was important work to do in the senate, and in Ohio. Free of that, he wrote a remarkable book.

There is a tradition in the senate of members carving their names in the desk they occupy while serving. Brown had Desk 88. Among the names carved in that desk were Robert Kennedy, George McGovern, Albert Gore, Sr., Herbert Lehman, Glen Taylor, Hugo Black, Theodore Green, and Bill Proxmire. Brown tells the story of these eight mid twentieth century progressives, of their different struggles and shared commitment to social justice, and weaves his own experiences into it.

This device was imaginative and illuminating. By comparing what these senators faced, with what we face now, we are reminded that some battles must be fought over and over again, and that “despair is the conclusion of fools.” McGovern, Kennedy, and the father of former Vice President Gore are well known stories, well told again here. Of the remaining five, I found Glen Taylor and Hugo Black particularly compelling. Bowing to political necessity in 1920s Alabama, Black was a nominal member of the KKK. President Franklin D. Roosevelt named the Alabama senator to the the US Supreme Court in 1937. FDR knew what he was doing. Black went on to be one of the most progressive members of the court, until he retired in 1971.

A popular joke about Black was that he started out wearing white robes to scare black people, then switched to wearing black robes to scare white people.

Glen Taylor and his family were a travelling musical act during the depression. A perennial unsuccessful populist candidate for senator from Idaho, he was finally elected to the senate in 1944. His most heroic act came in the context of a quixotic political campaign that probably destroyed any chance he had for an actual political career. He agreed to being the vice presidential candidate on a ticket with Henry Wallace. Wallace was FDR’s vice president during the second World War. He was replaced by Harry Truman in 1944, and when Roosevelt died months after starting his fourth term, Truman became president. Wallace felt Truman was escalating the Cold War needlessly. Taylor agreed. The Wallace/Taylor ticket had no chance of success. It was Taylor’s commitment to desegregation that created the greatest drama. Alabama had laws prohibiting integrated public gatherings. Taylor went to Alabama and defied this, was roughed up by Bull Connor’s police, driven off, and jailed. A sitting US Senator! This is the sort of thing you might expect in a banana republic. There was no real push back about this. 1948 was not that long ago.

Taylor was unseated in 1950. His last failed attempt to return to the senate was in 1956. He narrowly lost a primary to a young man named Frank Church, who then had a long senate career, opposed the war in Vietnam, investigated abuses by our intelligence agencies, and ran for president in 1976. Sherrod Brown did not run for president, but his book demonstrates that there other useful endeavors.