President Biden leaves the stage during NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington on July 11, 2024. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE – President Biden was in a wood-paneled conference room with civil rights leaders and elected officials, flying high over the country en route to Texas. About an hour into the flight, he glanced at the television playing in the background, where guests on MSNBC were speculating over who Vice President Harris would pick as her running mate.
“Kamala and I talked,” Biden remarked. “I said she could pick me.”
He waited a beat, then said he was joking, prompting laughter.
That moment last Monday was a telling one after a politically tumultuous few weeks. The president was aboard a plane that symbolized the almost unimaginable power at his fingertips, yet he was watching news coverage blanketed not by him but by his second-in-command, and the questions about who would become her own number two.
To some of those in the plane, who described the encounter afterward, the episode also illustrated a more basic reality - that Biden appears largely reconciled to his tortured decision to bow out of the race, and is now comfortable enough with it to crack jokes.
“I didn’t sense any regret at all,” said Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader who was sitting directly to Biden’s right on the flight. “He’s made his decision. He’s at peace with it. I sensed a man at peace with where he is and trying to move forward.”
Over the past few days, Biden has begun to recalibrate his presidency. His public schedule has become lighter, in what those close to him describe as a conscious attempt to allow Harris to seize the spotlight. He has been soliciting advice over how to spend the last six months of a 48-year career as a federal officeholder, and he has come to see Harris’s potential election as a cornerstone of his legacy.
The anger and bitterness from the lead-up to his decision to withdraw - when he felt cornered by members of his own party - seem to have given way to an attitude that is more accepting of the current moment. Biden is occasionally wistful, and he has engaged in lighter and even playful moments after a weeks-long period of intense stress, for example peeking through American flags and around columns near the Rose Garden to make faces at aides who had gathered to applaud him after his Oval Office address last week.
“He is reflecting. He’s in a reflective mood,” said Marc Morial, the head of the National Urban League, who was with Biden all day Monday. “It’s very natural and very human to be in such a reflective mood after such a long and unique career. Try to think of who has had a career of such length and breadth - I have trouble thinking of anyone else, because he got elected so young.”
Biden was elected to the New Castle County Council in Delaware in 1970 and catapulted to the U.S. Senate two years later, making him one of the youngest people ever to serve in that body. His career will end in about six months, when a new president takes office on Jan. 20, instead of the four additional years he thought he would have to burnish his legacy and add to his accomplishments.
In one sign that he is not in a score-settling mood, when Air Force One landed in Austin on Monday, the third person who greeted Biden on the tarmac was Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who weeks earlier had been the first congressional Democrat to call on him to end his reelection bid.
The interaction was not combative, and Doggett said he thanked the president for stepping down, telling him that he made a great sacrifice “and the country will be the better off for it.”
“Thank you for calling for it,” Biden replied, according to Doggett’s account to Austin-based KVUE, in a tone far more conciliatory than the one most of the president’s aides have used to describe the actions of the Texas congressman.
Biden has recently fallen into telling stories from his past. During a 25-minute speech at the LBJ Presidential Library on Monday, he spoke in lofty and sweeping terms about the civil rights movement, Supreme Court reforms and historic presidencies.
Ahead of the speech, Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) had joked with Biden that it was only 2,000 words long, a little short in his estimation. “That might please some people,” Clyburn recalled telling the president. “But is that all you’re going to say?”
It turned out it wasn’t. Upon completing the remarks he had come to give, Biden made an off-script digression - after he had said, “Let me close with this” - about the earliest days of his political career. A group of Democrats asked him to run for state Senate, he said, but he demurred - ultimately agreeing to run for New Castle County Council instead, since it held its meetings across the street from his law office.
“We picked a district that we couldn’t possibly win - no Democrat had ever won,” the president said. “But my problem was, I had my sister doing my campaign. And we won.”
Some two years later, he said, he was in a motel room at the Delaware Democratic convention. “I had my towel around me and the shaving cream on my face, and I heard, ‘Bam, bam, bam,’ on my door,” Biden recounted. “There was the former governor, a former Supreme Court justice - I swear to God - the state chairman, and the former congressman.”
They entered the room and urged Biden - who, after an unsuccessful scramble for clothing, was still in his towel - to run for U.S. Senate. “Next thing you know, I was running,” he said.
Biden narrowly won that race, launching a 36-year Senate career. But he largely skipped over that to focus on more recent accomplishments. “I was the vice president to the first African American president in American history. Now I’m president to our first woman vice president,” he said. “I’ve made clear how I feel about Kamala. And she has been an incredible partner to me.”
Biden has come to see Harris’s election as critical to his legacy, associates say: He could go down in history as providing a crucial springboard for the first woman president.
About an hour before he announced that he was dropping out of the race, Biden called Clyburn, one of his most important political allies, to read him the letter he planned to release. Clyburn said he told him it was a good statement, but that his legacy would be affected by what he said about Harris.
Clyburn told Biden it was vital that he have a role in ensuring that the first Black woman in history secure the nomination of a major party, then helping her win in November. Biden assured him there would be a second statement, one that backed Harris.
Now Harris is the likely nominee and attracting much of the attention that used to flow toward Biden, but Clyburn said Biden is okay with that. “I really think he’s comfortable with the decision,” Clyburn said. “His place, his legacy, is pretty much cemented. And if Kamala were to win this election, I think he will occupy a place in the annals of history unlike any president before him.”
The setting for Biden’s trip this week, his first major event since announcing he was ending his reelection bid, was significant. The president was flying to a commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Voting Right Act at the LBJ Presidential Library, an event reflecting the way Biden likes to think of himself - as a president who championed racial equity and pushed through an expansive social agenda.
About 40 minutes into the flight, Biden sat down with the elected officials and civil rights leaders who had joined him for the flight, around a table covered with disposable coffee cups and bottles of water, and asked for input on how he should spend the next six months.
Some of his guests raised the need to do more on affordable housing, while others brought up the rights of undocumented immigrants and criminal justice reform. Still others urged Biden to push the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, though they acknowledged the steep political hurdles.
“He was particularly focused on where to go from here,” Clyburn said. “Martin Luther King’s last book was ‘Where Do We Go From Here, Chaos or Community?’ That’s pretty much where we are today. Are we going to have chaos going forward or community going forward? That’s what’s on the president’s mind more than anything else.”
Biden looked around the room, participants say, and told them to put their plans into writing, including exactly what they wanted him to do and how he might do it.
He also told them how proud he was of the work they had all done. He nodded at Clyburn, who had encouraged Biden to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. He looked to Sharpton to reflect on some of the police reforms he had tried to institute. He took on the demeanor of a coach in a locker room, urging them to go out and help win the election for Harris.
“I think he’s looking at these six months as determined to prove his legacy by winning this election and being able to finish things he started,” Sharpton said. “I definitely think he’s now seeing himself in historic terms rather than tomorrow’s newspaper or this evening’s TV show.”
Liz Goodwin contributed to this report.
