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But what about journalists working in the White House? Most of the writers in this group are generations younger than the 78-year-old Mr. Biden. They may not have read all of Mr. Meacham’s books. And the president-elect seems to have learned from his campaign that he can mostly ignore the news media and make fun of Twitter.
It also has the advantage that Mr. Trump has raised the bar on presidential scandals and gaffs so high that even his most cowardly speech or his most questionable hiring cannot scandalize. But Mr. Trump has also accustomed us to an extraordinary, albeit unintended, level of transparency. He rarely resisted responding shouted, timely questions, and his leaky White House has offered journalists and their audiences an x-ray portrait of a derailed government. The internet, meanwhile, is noisier and even more polarized than when Mr Biden and Mr Obama left office four years ago.
Former Obama aide Tommy Vietor recently advised Mr Biden to focus on direct access to social media and work closely with sympathetic left-wing online media. “Give them scoops and access,” he wrote, “and grow their audience and influence how the Trump team nurtured fringe rags like Newsmax and OAN,” a reference to One America News .
It doesn’t sound like Biden’s playbook. In fact, when I told Shailagh Murray, former senior advisor to Mr. Biden, that I was writing about Mr. Biden and the media, she asked why. He had always been that way by the book, working with the staff, pretty much the same for reporters as everyone else. “I mean, it’s important… but boring,” she said of this column.
It wasn’t always boring. The only place to start is a legendary 1974 profile of then-Senator Biden in the Washingtonian by future celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley, “Death and the All-American Boy,” which goes viral every time it is posted. on Twitter for a level of openness. it’s still shocking in 2020. He is aware of others’ fascination with him, a handsome 31-year-old senator whose wife has just died and is raising two boys as a suddenly single father. He’s surprisingly open about the way he dresses, about every aspect of his relationship with his late wife, about the woman he’s dating – a Capitol Hill reporter from The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Francie Barnard. “Why should someone like Francie marry a guy like me who is still in love with his wife?” he asks Mrs. Kelley. (Ms Barnard died last year at the age of 73. Her obituary notes her journalism, a sex discrimination lawsuit, and four marriages, including one to Bob Woodward.)
It was a bit too much in 1974, and Mr. Biden later said he felt like a “sucker” frankly. He never spoke about his personal life to a journalist like that again, although he allowed one, Richard Ben Cramer, deep within his political world during the 1988 presidential campaign. And Mr. Cramer transformed Biden’s loud and fast-paced internal monologue, his loyalty to family, spaghetti and little real estate deals that never really made him rich, into the most memorable chapters of the 1992 classic “What It Takes.” There, Mr. Biden was “a wild stallion who had never felt the bridle,” with a knack for “connection” but a maddening lack of focus.
Many politicians would be hurt by this kind of representation. But Mr. Biden doesn’t really seem to hold a grudge. He gave Times columnist Maureen Dowd as much time as any other reporter in recent years – even though she exposed the plagiarism that helped derail that 1988 campaign. And he absorbed the portrait. of Mr. Cramer and even appeared to allow him to shape his public identity.
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