For Biden and Sanders, the fight’s not personal
Amicable opponents, the last two major Democratic presidential candidates standing regard each other with respect
In October 2015, Sen. Bernie Sanders was whisked into Joe Biden’s residence at the Naval Observatory for a breakfast of yogurt parfaits and caffeinated campaign advice from a vice president who had just announced his (temporary) retirement from presidential politics.
The meeting, according to aides, lasted longer than expected, nearly two hours, with Biden discoursing on campaign strategy and a range of policy issues, and expressing admiration for a Sanders political operation that was waging an unexpectedly tough fight against Hillary Clinton.
When Biden walked Sanders to his car, he clapped a hand on his shoulder and declared, “Good luck, buddy!”
The two septuagenarians will meet again Sunday night under much different circumstances for the first, and possibly final, one-on-one Democratic primary debate of 2020, in a nearempty CNN studio in Washington selected to replace an Arizona venue because of the coronavirus crisis. Depending on how the night goes, the confrontation could be either a swan song for Sanders, who has suffered a string of crushing primary defeats this month, or a chance for the onetime front-runner to reassert his rationale for extending the contest.
Sanders, speaking after last week’s losses in Michigan and three other states, telegraphed his intention to press Biden hard on health care, climate change and income inequality. Yet the actions of both men in the aftermath of Tuesday’s primaries — Biden set out a welcome mat for his rival rather than pressuring him to quit, and Sanders outlined tough terms for an eventual détente — also shed light on a personal relationship that has remained sturdy, amicable and functional, a far cry from the acrimony that defined Sanders’ relationship with Clinton after their bitter duel four years ago.
This no-frills personal connection, aides to both men say, could become an important factor in quickly uniting the party to confront President Donald Trump, despite the wide policy gulf between the moderate Biden and the progressive Sanders.
“I think both men know where this is likely going, and they both know how to approach one another,” said David Axelrod, a longtime adviser to President Barack Obama who worked closely with Biden in the White House. “Sanders, it seems to me, is a guy who wants to land the plane, and is asking Biden to show him some lights from the ground. There’s nothing personal standing in the way of them getting together.”
Sanders overlapped with Biden in the Senate for just two years, from January 2007, after his election, until Biden’s ascent to the vice presidency in 2009. Biden was not around all that much. Then a senator from Delaware and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he spent much of 2007 prepping for his unsuccessful presidential campaign, the latter part of 2008 running with Obama and the rest of the time focusing on committee work.
“They basically had zero interaction, but I can’t recall Bernie ever saying a bad word about Biden, or vice versa,” said David Krone, chief of staff to Harry Reid, the former Democratic Senate majority leader from Nevada, who was close to Sanders.
The two men have sparred, but not savaged each other, in previous debates. Biden recently told a person in his orbit that he thinks Sanders, while lacking an understanding of foreign policy, “is basically a good guy.” One longtime Biden staff member summed up the former vice president’s view in baby boomer cultural terms: In the 1960s, when both men were in college, Biden was a square, striving, law-school-bound ex-jock who would have seen Sanders as a noisy, strident, scraggly but basically benign campus archetype — “the hippie.”
Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats, has privately praised Biden as one of the few establishment senators to make him feel at home during his first few months in the Senate. (Obama, by contrast, later suggested in a memoir that Biden behaved a little arrogantly when he first arrived in 2005).
But Sanders has not been shy about highlighting their policy differences over the years, especially his opposition to the Biden-backed bailout of financial firms during the 2008 financial crisis and Biden’s initial support for the war in Iraq.
In brief remarks after his Super Tuesday defeats, Sanders slammed Biden on Iraq and on his support for “disastrous trade agreements” that he said had cost millions of jobs. “You cannot beat Trump with the same old, same old kind of politics,” he added. In subsequent days, he attacked Biden’s record on abortion, same-sex marriage and the former “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
Sanders’ aggressive approach has, at times, angered Biden, who felt that Sanders had not acted quickly enough to muzzle supporters who posted racist and sexist attacks on two female officials of a Nevada union for opposing Sanders’ signature “Medicare for All” plan in February. “Disown them, flat disown them,” Biden told an interviewer at the time. “It’s outrageous.”
But Sanders, ever the ideology-impelled candidate, has taken pains not to personalize the fight.
He has reiterated his belief that Biden can beat Trump and tempered his criticism on the trail, saying that “Joe is a decent guy” and referring to the former vice president as “my friend.”
Privately, he has vented his disgust over Trump’s attempts to make a campaign issue of the business activities of Biden’s son Hunter. Sanders has expressed his sympathy to the former vice president directly during joint appearances and to his own staff, people close to both men said.
He has also pushed back on the perception, leveled by many former opponents, that he has tacitly encouraged supporters to scorch them by proxy. In January, he sought to distance himself from Zephyr Teachout, an ally from New York, who published an op-ed during the impeachment proceedings that accused Biden of contributing to a “transactional, grossly corrupt” political culture by not blocking Hunter Biden from joining the board of an energy company in Ukraine.
“It is absolutely not my view that Joe is corrupt in any way,” Sanders said, and then offered a fuller apology to Biden directly when the two marched in a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration in South Carolina, according to a Biden aide.
“Thanks for acknowledging this, Bernie,” Biden replied on Twitter. “Let’s all keep our focus on making Donald Trump a oneterm president.”
The subtext of the BidenSanders relationship is the former vice president’s belief that he could have limited Trump to zero terms had he, and not Clinton, been the Democratic nominee in 2016.
In that regard, Biden — who waited for Obama to endorse Clinton in June 2016 before following suit — viewed Sanders as something of a stand-in for himself, according to a half-dozen people in his orbit. As the primaries dragged on, that feeling grew, and Biden became increasingly resentful of the fullcourt pressure to sit out the race that had been applied by Obama’s top advisers, at the president’s behest, according to several current and former advisers to Biden and Obama.
That lingering sense of grievance is one of the things that this time around motivate Biden.
And while Sanders is widely expected to be the aggressor at the debate, it is just as likely that Biden, who is feeling confident, will be the candidate who raises his voice the loudest on Sunday night, according to people who have worked with him over the years.
“Bernie, I think, knows that he has to strike a balance,” added Axelrod, who helped prepare Biden for his high-stakes vice-presidential debate with Paul Ryan in 2012. “But Biden is the one who really needs to shorten his horns to keep the tone of this thing positive.”