Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. One thing that happened over Labor Day weekend, President Biden continued to argue the case to the American people that he and the Democrats, not Trump and other Republicans, are the real friends of the middle and working classes. Here's one stretch as an example.

President Biden: When the last guy was here, he looked at the world from Park Avenue. I look at it from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I look at it from Claymont, Delaware. Not a joke. Folks, all my time in public office, I've been referred to as Middle-Class Joe. I guess they thought that was somehow not very complimentary. Well, guess what? That's who I am. That doesn't mean you're not sophisticated because you're middle class. It means you've worked like hell, and you know what your family has to work like hell to be able to make it.

Brian Lehrer: Biden from his Labor Day speech, and here's one more clip, he did something in the context of that speech that he doesn't do all that much. He used Labor Day to take some direct swipes at the guy who's currently the leading Republican hoping to run against him.

President Biden: When the last guy was here, you were shipping jobs to China, now we're bringing jobs home from China. When the last guy was here, when the last guy was here, your pensions were at risk. We helped save millions of pensions with your help. When the last guy was here, he looked at the world from Park Avenue. I look at it from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I look at it from Clay on Delaware. Not a joke.

Brian Lehrer: So who's the candidate? Which is the party of working-class and middle-class America? Which one represents the elites in the bad sense of that word, the rich men north of Richmond? A major battleground for 2024. Whoever the nominee against Biden is and whether it's the same as the one he just called the last guy or somebody else.

With me now, Atlantic Magazine staff writer Franklin Foer, who has a new book about Biden called The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future. Franklin, good to have you on again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Franklin Foer: Always so great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask you right off the bat what the title means, The Last Politician?

Franklin Foer: We live in this age where the public has really lost faith in politics. The last two presidents that we elected, both Trump and Obama in different sort of ways ran as anti-politicians, people who came from outside the system. Joe Biden has been around so long, it would be implausible to argue that he came from outside the system, and he really defines himself as being a lifelong politician. He has faith in compromise, persuasion, they're almost like religious precepts to him. At various moments during his presidency, it felt as if nobody else in the country believed in these things other than Joe Biden.

I wanted to use the word 'Politician', which it's not a nice word for a lot of Americans, in order to capture some of the things that I consider to be Joe Biden's core strengths. That he has a very psychological view of the world. He's got a sense of how he can make deals and how he can deal with foreign leaders as fellow politicians. It's helped him, I think, to some of the high points of his presidency, the raft of legislation that he's been able to pass. It's been the way that he's navigated a lot of the foreign policy crises, and he's faced a considerable number of those as president.

Brian Lehrer: We'll getting into some details of course, as we go, but listeners, I wonder if you have a reaction to the title. Whether you just heard it for the first time right now as I said it, or if you've seen this before and given it any thought, The Last Politician, the name of the book by Franklin Foer about Joe Biden. What does the word politician mean to you? Is it necessarily an insult? Certainly, we see Trump running again as, "Oh, I'm not a politician. I come from business. They're politicians."

Ramaswamy in invoking Trump is doing the same thing. He's running. He identifies with Trump even though he is technically running against him. He says like Donald Trump, "I'm not a politician." Another way to think about politician rather than somebody who is seeking to have power over you or seeking to get over on you in some way is somebody who devotes their life to public service. Why do people go into politics? It's usually to represent the interest of their community at first, and then if they rise up to represent the interests of communities other than simply their own, kind of a broader vision of public services as people rise up, maybe to senator from a whole state or president of the United States or other things like that.

What does the word 'Politician' connote to you, good, bad, mixed, indifferent? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or you can text to that number or tweet @BrianLehrer, or anything else for Franklin Foer on his book about Joe Biden, or the ways that Biden has been in the news recently. Do you think Franklin, just continuing on this thread for another minute, that it'll be a battleground idea in 2024? Because I think one of the things we see going back, at least to Ronald Reagan, maybe further back than that, is Republicans trying to discredit the whole idea of government as being a force for good or even potentially a force for good, and so politician falls into that bucket in that political context.

Franklin Foer: Yes. So I think Joe Biden has not terribly successfully framed all of his accomplishments over the course of the last couple years. You ran that clip from the Labor Day speech that he just gave, and he was claiming that he was the real populist in the race. That when Donald Trump talks about helping the working person, it's really a lot of rhetoric, and then the substance is actually very elitist. Biden has a good claim, that he's actually managed to change the political ideological trajectory of the Democratic Party for a couple generations. Democrats embrace the idea that they should be deferential to markets. They were lukewarm towards unions.

They weren't especially rigorous and challenging monopoly, and Biden through the legislation, which has created industrial policy where the government is serving as an investment bank to try to speed the transition to a clean energy economy and is jumpstarting the semiconductor industry. Or you take something like antitrust in the battle against monopoly where he's just released some of the most aggressive merger guidelines that we've seen in generations. Or the rising prestige of unions in this country. We're having a president who feels some measure of solidarity, I think has helped somewhat turn around their fortunes. He's got to sell himself.

Joe Biden can't run away from who he is. He is a politician, and there's some wonderful stories. This is one of my favorites. It's not from his presidency, but I think it gives you a sense of who he is as a politician. Randi Weingarten, the Teachers Union head, was really upset with the Obama administration because Obama had celebrated a school district in Rhode Island for firing a bunch of pre teachers. Weingarten was complaining about this in a meeting in Miami of the executive committee of the AFL-CIO.

Biden is defending Obama, and he's walking in her direction. He's really angry, and she's worried that the Secret Service is going to have to intervene to stop because there could be fisticuffs. He gets into her face, and then he leans into her ear and says, "Don't worry, we're going to work this out in the end," and he did. He managed to diffuse that crisis.

You look at some of the things that had been these dramatic crises in past administrations like the debt ceiling or the collapse of a bank in Silicon Valley Bank where there was a risk of a financial crisis and Biden's managed to make deals and to get things dealt with in a relatively no drama sort of way because he's a politician. Because he's willing to make certain concessions when concessions are needed, and because he has a good sense of the psychology of the people he's sitting across from.

Brian Lehrer: This evolution that you were just describing as part of that answer that's in the book of Biden and his appointees, from a so-called neoliberal economic approach that we might associate with the Bill Clinton presidency in Democratic Party terms. More hands off the economy, more globalism in the economy, things like that, to something more America-first and more interventionists today, if you think I'm describing that fairly. How much do you think that's a response to Trump's and the Republican parties inroads with white working-class voters and to a lesser extent working-class people of color, and how much is it to the Democratic Party- -left, the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, which was also skeptical of Clintonomics?

Franklin Foer: Yes, so there are a couple things happening as you identify. You have elites in the Democratic Party. Jake Sullivan, who's a character in my book, who's the National Security Advisor and was Biden's primary architect of his domestic agenda during the campaign. Sullivan was somebody who'd worked for Hillary Clinton. I think over the course of his adult life, he saw both the way in which China had scrambled political economy, that they were abusing the global trading system, that capitalism was supposed to make China a better global citizen, and it didn't. Then there was the success of the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren wing of the party, and that in order to govern as a Democratic President, you have to take that seriously.

In my book, I tell the story of Biden's relationship to Bernie Sanders. Sanders always appreciated that Biden talked about the non-college voter, which was the voter he was most concerned about. He saw Biden as a politician he could work with. Biden understood that he had a symbiotic relationship with Bernie Sanders. That Sanders could apply pressure on his left, and that would help Biden achieve more. That it would create more political space for him to go bigger and to help fulfill vaster ambitions.

These things all combined, and I would say that economic conditions in the country just have changed since the 1990s and the early 2000s. Income inequality is an obvious problem. It fueled Trump's rise, but just as a matter of looking at the data, a lot of the old assumptions about economics that governed in the Clinton-Obama era just haven't proven out. Biden, who is this guy who was known as the senator from MBNA when he was from Delaware, who seemed--

Brian Lehrer: MBNA, the bank?

Franklin Foer: Yes. Extremely sympathetic to the financial services industry, has also found himself moving with the times in the way that you describe.

Brian Lehrer: Franklin Foer with us, Atlantic Magazine staff writer. His new book is called The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future. Let's take a few of the calls that are coming in on the idea of the word ‘Politician’ as you use it in the title. Rosemary in Stuyvesant Town. You're on WNYC. Hi, Rosemary.

Rosemary: Hi Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I do not regard the word ‘Politician’ as a bad word at all. The true politician, I think of Fiorello LaGuardia, who worked to make laws after the Triangle Fire for safety in peoples' working. I think of Al Smith, who made great laws for New York, and even Tammany Hall did things that we know that it has a bad reputation too for certain things, but it got jobs for its constituents, et cetera. Nowadays, ‘Politician’ is being used as a bad word, which it's not really, I think.

Brian Lehrer: Rosemary, thank you very much and reaching back a whole century for the LaGuardia and Al Smith references. I think Yakob in Brooklyn is going to cite a different New York City mayor and come to a different conclusion about the word ‘Politician’. Yakob, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

Yakob: Hi, Brian. Honestly, when I hear a politician, I think of somebody who really wants power and influence more than anything else. If you look at politicians who are multi-millionaires and multi-billionaires such as the former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, he wanted to get into politics because he wanted power, because he already has everything that any human being could want in terms of like finance. I just feel when somebody gets into politics, you got to question their intent. That's what I want to say.

Brian Lehrer: Although defenders of Bloomberg would say, he wasn't seeking power for power's sake. Yes, he had all the money to buy anything he wanted in the whole wide world, but then he wanted to use that luxury to try to perform public service. Whether or not we agree with all of Bloomberg's policies, he wasn't in it to have power, to control people, to be their king. He was applying the privilege of his wealth to what he saw as public service. Do you think that's unfair?

Yakob: Well, I was referring to, like when I say he was seeking public power in 2020, when he was seeking to become president of the United States, that's not back when he was mayor, but then also, some people might disagree with you and say, ''Well, he extended his term for another four--” what is it, was it like four years?

Brian Lehrer: Yeah, four years. Blasted the term limits law.

Yakob: Yes, you really got to-- Exactly, so it’s-- I just feel like-- I don’t know. It's what politicians do. You really have to look at their actions and just judge what they've done so far.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. One more on this thread. William in Astoria, you're on WNYC. Hi William.

William: Hi. I'd like to mention Huey Long. He said,'' Politics is a struggle over the future.'' Isn't that what politicians do? What's going to happen to Medicaid, global warming and healthcare and other issues? That's a critical choice in elections.

Brian Lehrer: William, thank you very much. All right. Franklin, before we move on to other aspects of your book and other Biden news from right now, any reaction to that little thread of callers?

Franklin Foer: Well, yes, I love all the historical callouts. In my book, I tell a story about these big pieces of legislation that have ruled through the Congress in the last couple years. The Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, you've got the infrastructure bill, really some of the most significant pieces of legislation that we've passed in some time. It's really a story about a troika of leaders. You have Nancy Pelosi, you have Chuck Schumer, you have Joe Biden, all of whom are-- not to put a too fine a point of it, we're getting up there in ages.

Schumer was the spring chicken in his 70s. They all came of age in mid-century America, when I think Rosemary had noted the political machines of that time. They have an idea of politics that connects back to that older idea that I think some of the callers were invoking. I have very mixed feelings, as I'm sure everybody does about American gerontocracy. They're clearly examples of people who are clinging on to power too long because they're afraid of letting go, because I think to some extent, letting go probably means confronting their own mortality.

On the other hand, power is not something that's easy to wield. It actually takes a lot of trial and error to be able to effectively use it in order to accomplish big things. Especially the Inflation Reduction Act, but just this whole suite of legislation that's going to leave this lasting imprint on the country that we don't talk about nearly enough, that wouldn't have happened if you didn't have people who knew how to apply the pressure, who knew when to back off from applying the pressure. That politics, it's about technique and it's about knowing when you take somebody into the Oval Office and you dress them down.

It's knowing how to-- Biden was wooing Pramila Jayapal, the leader of the Progressive Caucus, the congresswoman, knowing when to call her mother in India to wish her happy birthday. Politics is structural. It's about all of these big forces. At the end of the day in a closely divided Congress, it's also emotional and it's also psychological. There is some benefit to having experience in terms of using the force of higher office.

Brian Lehrer: I wonder how you see 2024 as different from 2020 in that context. Besides the description you just gave us, you refer to Biden as a father figure in your book. Maybe in 2020, coming out of the chaos of the Trump presidency, a lot of American voters were looking for that kind of calming father figure. Maybe in 2024, they're going to be looking for somebody who's more exciting. Of course, it does look like it's going to be the 80 year old against the 77 year old if we forget that Trump is also around the same age. Is turning the page, is it just a generational thing? Is it the younger generation always wants to overthrow the older generation?

Democratic Party voters are the ones who chose Biden for 2020 and all the primaries and caucuses of the year 2020. It wasn't like some ruling elite of 80 year- olds who made that decision on their own. I'm curious if you see 2024 different from 2020 in that particular respect.

Franklin Foer: It seems like voters have-- I mean, Biden is four years older, and for whatever reason, voters are concerned about his age in a different sort of way. Biden has made both a strategic decision to sit back during these last couple years, especially early on, where he felt like Trump had really pressurized the American system and that politics had overtaken every aspect of American life and you had the vaccine that you needed people to take, and so he didn't want to seem so partisan.

There is something about Biden's affect, the way that he walks or maybe the way that he talks, where the assumption that a lot of Americans seem to be making about him is that he's not terribly active as president, which is this is the Sleepy Joe line that Fox News and Trump have tried to slap on him. It's taken because he's not been very effective at narrating his own presidency and because of his age, because of the way that he speaks. He's always been a fairly limited communicator. He's just not done a great job of cultivating what I think is a fair impression that he's been a very activist president.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and I guess the way he speaks, which you just referenced, is important in context here, because Trump, though he's only a few years younger, does seem to present to many people's ears as more vigorous, and then we talk about voters and the gerontocracy, who was the favorite candidate of the youngest Democratic voters the last few cycles? It was Bernie Sanders, old man in his own right.

Franklin Foer: Right, and again, I do think that there is something stylistic about Biden. It's not just that he's old, and it's not just that he's always struggled a little bit, understandably so, with public communication, it's that he's not somebody who is filled with bombast. That Labor Day speech you gave was really one of the most rhetorically pugilistic speeches that I can remember him giving, where he's picking out an enemy. His inclination is not towards treating politics as an adversarial process. He's not about picking a fight with Park Avenue.

Even if you looked at his legislative accomplishments as they've rolled out, there's no redistribution of wealth, sadly, in my view, but in his agenda, it's a very capacious agenda where he's using the government to supercharge the economy to accomplish his progressive goals. It's a very broad tent. I think he's wisely in that speech navigating to a politics where he's picking a fight, and I think the best way to define yourself as a politician is to define your enemy.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and I guess some politicians, rather than coming out of their communities, do come out of elite backgrounds and feel that they're groomed for power. They're raised for power. They're trained for power. Whether they seek to use it just for the sake of their own power and their own egos or use it to try to do good, that's another type of politician. But a listener texts, “Those seeking a non-experienced politician would be the same that seek out the most experienced doctors to treat their ailments and the most experienced home builders to build their homes. I just don't get why no experience in politics is considered a boon to anyone we've seen that has failed over and over again.”

At least that's the opinion of one person texting in. We have a few minutes left with Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic, who has a new book called The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future. We've been talking so far about economic and domestic policy, but the excerpt from the book that ran in The Atlantic was about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, not Biden's best moment as it's generally thought of. Why pick that one for the widely read magazine excerpt from your book?

Franklin Foer: It's just such a momentous moment in the history of American foreign policy and was such a dramatic moment, and it was an opportunity to take readers inside a dramatic moment. What I tried to do in the book was to really give almost a day-by-day, inside the Situation Room, inside the Hamid Karzai International Airport view of what was happening. One of the things that I tried to accomplish in telling that story is that we think we know what happened, but in fact, it's all very complicated.

One of the things that I wanted to do in general with this book was to humanize the political process, to humanize the idea of governing, because it's so easy for everybody to scream, “Incompetence,” or to scream at people for making bad decisions. But here it felt to me not so much-- It's easy in retrospect to point the finger. I wanted to show how this was fundamentally a human decision made by human beings who had inherent psychological blind spots and also to show the arc of the crisis.

That there was a moment when you had people falling from airplanes in Kabul and the government sprang into action and started to implement a plan that it hadn't really fully hashed out, but they were able to in very, very short order set up a global network for extricating refugees, flying them all around the world to bases where they set up dorms in real time, and then had to deal with all of the problems that that entailed. Including at one point discovering a measles case and having to inoculate all the refugees, including having to deal with the fact that you had very traditional Afghans and that required creating dorms where you had to deal with those sensitivities.

In the end, there were 124,000 Afghans who were evacuated, and so you have two things happening simultaneously. One, you have this major American foreign policy disaster that arguably could have been anticipated, and better planned for, and thought through differently, and then you also had this act of improvisation, creativity, the government springing to do its best work happening side by side.

Brian Lehrer: Nathan in Great [unintelligible 00:27:24], you're on WNYC with Franklin Foer. Hi, Nathan.

Nathan: Yes, hi. I'd like Mr. Foer to discuss Biden's assessment of Kamala Harris. I read that Biden is running mainly because he thinks Kamala Harris would lose to Donald Trump, and in a staff meeting with his top advisors, he described Kamala Harris as a work in progress.

Brian Lehrer: Frank, do you write about Harris in the book?

Franklin Foer: Yes, I do. Every president and vice president have a complicated relationship. Joe Biden's relationship to Barack Obama was very complicated. That Obama would roll his eyes at Biden at the beginning of his presidency, and Biden felt like he was given some bum assignments. But by the end of their presidency, they developed this real friendship and they developed a relationship where in meetings, Obama would tip back his chair and Biden would take that as a signal to ask certain questions that Obama wanted asked, but felt like he couldn't raise himself.

On the one hand, Biden has structured his relationship with Vice President Harris to correct for some of the deficiencies that he felt like he had with Barack Obama. To give you an example, there's a phrase that Barack Obama would use. He would refer to Biden as my vice president, and Biden is very intentional about referring to Kamal Harris as the Vice President. He wants to treat her with respect. He's very insistent that her office get looped in to various decisions, but the relationship is fundamentally different because Obama needed Biden to fill certain gaps in his own resume. He needed Joe Biden's foreign policy experience. He needed Joe Biden's relationships on The Hill.

One of the things that comes with having the experience that Joe Biden has and the self-confidence that Joe Biden has about his own experience, is that he just doesn't feel like he needs Kamala Harris in that same way. I think it's something that breeds a lot of justifiable and understandable insecurity in the vice president, and the vice presidency, I like to point out, is the premise for a comic show on HBO. Every vice president we write about, whether it's Al Gore or George H. W. Bush, they all have these- -moments where they look terrible and they become the butt of jokes. It's been hard for Kamala Harris to find her footing. I think that you could say that maybe since my book closes at the midterm elections, she's had the abortion issue, which has helped her find her footing politically a bit, but it's just inherently hard.

Brian Lehrer: This is not the conversation where I thought we were going to refer to the sitcom Veep, but you just did. As we run out of time, I'll just throw in a few more responses to the idea of politician that are coming in. Somebody writes, "I feel like this has become a Republican-Democrat litmus test. Is ‘Politician’ a bad word or no?" Someone else writes. "Politician was not a bad word until Republicans rebranded it as such. Democrats are weak on branding and are too nuanced in their messaging to create sound bites." Someone else texts, "We need to take the money out of politics."

Let's end there because that used to be such a big issue and such a big Democratic policy centerpiece, trying to take the money out of politics in one way or another. You go back long enough to know there was the McCain-Feingold Bill, and that got struck down by the Supreme Court, that bipartisan campaign finance limit that gave rise to the Citizens United decision from the Supreme Court. It seems to me like, and maybe you're on these lists, too, I'm on a lot of lists, as you might imagine in the context of my job. It seems to me like both Donald Trump and Hakeem Jeffries are trying to get me to give them money about every 10 minutes.

We certainly haven't taken money out of politics. I think that breeds a lot of cynicism, too, from both left and right. They think the politicians are bought by the business class and then they divide up as to which party would be better to fight that. Maybe it's whether they're more worried about business being anti-union or business having diversity policies, but what about money in politics and Joe Biden, or just doesn't it matter in 2024?

Franklin Foer: I think you correctly point out that the Supreme Court has basically shattered any prospects for a reform movement to arise to tackle these issues. I think it cuts at something much larger, which is that Joe Biden is an institutionalist to his core, and the people around him are institutionalists to their core, and they came after Donald Trump had really run down the government and politicized various corners of the civil service. They saw it as their job to restore those institutions and to restore faith in those institutions. One could argue about the job that they've done doing that.

One of the things that's so fascinating to me is you look at something like the vaccine rollout. I tell the story of the vaccine rollout in my book. It's actually one of the most successful government programs of all time, that within a matter of months, this life-saving shot was available at every CVS, and every American citizen could walk up and get it for free.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, it's amazing. The debate over the vaccine deniers so overtook the narrative of, “Look what we did how quickly,” which is what you write about.

Franklin Foer: Exactly, and we lose track of these stories, and we don't celebrate these stories. That should have been a moment that should have restored our faith in government, our faith in institutions. We're just so polarized. We have these problems with our media ecosystem all stoked by that Citizens United decision you cite. Government doesn't get its credit at the end of the day, even when it's performing at an exceptionally high level.

Brian Lehrer: Franklin--

Franklin Foer: Yes, thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Franklin Foer, a staff writer for The Atlantic. Sorry to jump in, but we are out of time. His brand new book is called The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future. Thanks for all of this. There are so many things we could have kept going on, so come back during election season, okay?

Franklin Foer: It would be my pleasure.

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