Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

Sometimes a book is so eager to take readers behind the scenes that it neglects to spend enough time on the scenes themselves. This is often so with works chronicling presidential elections, obsessed as they are with the machinations of high-priced operatives, the strategizing of rival campaigns, or the “optics” of who stands where on a debate stage. Read enough of them and it gets hard to discern whether that is all the authors choose to emphasize, or if that is all there really is to see.

Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency ,a brisk and detailed account of the 2020 presidential race by political journalists Jonathan Allen of NBC News and Amie Parnes of is the first volume to tell the story of this unusual electoral contest, with several competing works scheduled later this year and into 2022. Allen and Parnes, who co-authored the best-selling book about Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign, are only slightly more generous with the Democratic nominee. Joe Biden won, of course, but mainly because he “caught every imaginable break.” He was the “process-of-elimination candidate,” emerging from a crowded set of more exciting Democratic contenders. He was “lousy in debates and lackluster on the trail,” prevailing despite “a bland message and a blank agenda.” Biden, they argue, got lucky.

The fiasco of the Iowa caucuses, where the app designed to report the results failed miserably, temporarily obscured Biden’s fourth-place showing. “This was a gift,” a campaign aide later explained. Luck returned when rival Democrats such as Pete Buttigieg (who ended up winning Iowa) and Mike Bloomberg (who won American Samoa) suffered debate night takedowns by Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren — and when Biden survived a hit from Kamala Harris over his past positions on school busing and desegregation. Fortune smiled again when the entire Democratic Party establishment rushed to Biden’s side after his victory in the South Carolina primary, even if it was less about devotion to him than panic that Bernie Sanders might secure the nomination. “On Super Tuesday, you got very lucky,” President Donald Trump told Biden at their first debate. The Democrat did not disagree.

But Trump offered his rival some luck, too, when the president failed to deal effectively or humanely with the coronavirus pandemic. Allen and Parnes quote then-senior campaign official Anita Dunn, now a White House adviser, discussing how the outbreak affected Biden’s prospects. “COVID is the best thing that ever happened to him,” she told an associate early in the crisis, according to the book. It’s a cynical way to regard a disease that would go on to take the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, even if it was, they write, what Biden campaign aides “believed but

I would never say in public.” Well, it’s public now.

Such blunt, insidery talk is the lifeblood of Biden campaign pollster John Anzalone, for instance, worries about the vagueness of his candidate’s speeches. “No one knows what this ‘soul of America’ bulls— means,” he complains. At a New York event with Black corporate leaders in the fall of 2019, Barack Obama praised Warren’s candidacy and listed several reasons Buttigieg couldn’t win. “He’s thirty-eight, but he looks thirty,” the former president said, eliciting laughs in the room. “He’s the mayor of a small town. He’s gay, and he’s short.” And top Sanders campaign adviser Jeff Weaver chewed out fellow adviser Chuck Rocha as the early Nevada primary results came in. “Where are the Latinos? You spent 3 million dollars. Where are the Latinos?”

A simplistic focus on identity is evident throughout the Democratic field, with new aides often hired to make staffs look young and more diverse — only to complicate things by having ideas of their own that diverged from those of entrenched advisers. Allen and Parnes portray a Biden campaign split along “deep fault lines mostly based on generation, race, ideology, and time in Bidenworld.” The nominee was in the middle of it, hewing to centrist positions on health care, racial justice, and law enforcement, no matter the pressures from his campaign team and his party. To beat Trump, they had to swallow their progressive values and push forward an old white man who simply promised to restore calm.”

That “simply” is a little deceptive. The 2020 race transpired against the backdrop of a deadly pandemic, widespread protests for racial justice, and threats to American democracy emanating from the presidency itself. In such context matters largely to the extent that it affects the candidates’ rhetoric and fundraising. (George Floyd’s death, for instance, required some “nimble positioning” by Biden, Allen and Parnes write, trying to keep both moderate White voters and party activists happy.) As a result, the moments of high drama in the book can feel small-bore. How do longtime Biden campaign staffers react when the interloping new campaign boss, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, receives a glowing write-up in opinion section, complete with a portrait-type photo? “The profile landed like the mother of all bombs in the civil war between the Obama veterans and Biden’s primary crew,” Allen and Parnes overwrite.

There are memorable and telling insider moments in revealing vital negotiations or highlighting simple truths that parties and campaigns would rather obfuscate. For example, planners of the Democratic Party’s virtual convention thought about featuring a national map that would highlight the locations of various speakers, thus countering the notion that the party was a club for coastal elites — only to can the idea when they realized multiple speakers would be broadcasting from Martha’s Vineyard. And the all-important endorsement of Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina was in play when Clyburn cornered Biden during a commercial break at a Charleston debate and urged him to promise to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court. “This wasn’t offered as a condition of Clyburn’s endorsement, but it was an expectation,” the authors write, parsing a bit too finely. Biden awkwardly complied.

Unfortunately, Allen and Parnes clutter their story with italicized descriptions of what various players are really thinking at particular moments, a tic that carries over from but that here grows more noticeable. “Obviously, we are not able to read minds,” they acknowledge in an author’s note, explaining that they divine such thoughts from firsthand or secondhand sources, or from “documents that suggest what a person was thinking.” Even so, these asides are distracting and often unnecessary.

Trump thought when Fox News called Arizona for Biden on election night. (Yes, we all heard he was upset.) And Warren’s supposed inner monologue before eviscerating Bloomberg on a Las Vegas debate stage closely resembled — no shock — what she said to Bloomberg’s face on national television.

The most persuasive case that Biden “barely won” the presidency, as the book’s subtitle states, is found not in the details of Allen and Parnes’ reporting but in their description of the election’s final tallies. Yes, Biden received 81 million votes, the most in U.S. presidential history, but “many voters didn’t realize how close the president had come to winning a second term.” Allen and Parnes note that Trump’s collective margin of defeat in three states that would have given him an electoral college victory — Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona — was 42,918 votes, less than the 77,000-plus votes that cost Clinton Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania four years earlier.

provides useful detail to understand Biden’s victory, even if the framing is not particularly novel. What candidate has not experienced some luck or misfortune during a long presidential bid? One time it might be a major health crisis, another time a self-righteous FBI director. Stuff happens, and the best candidates figure out how to react. “Knowing who he was, and where he wanted to be politically, allowed Biden’s campaign to capitalize when luck ran his way,” Allen and Parnes write in their final pages.

In other words, Biden was more than lucky. And for political reporters as for political candidates, spending too much time on optics is just not a good look. — Carlos Lozada/The

Wise improvising musicians sometimes impart wisdom by informing you that you already have that wisdom. They are used to creating a musical work without revision, and so they are comfortable with the notion that an answer can precede a question. The saxophonist Wayne Shorter, for example, once told me that a better question than “What has life taught you?” is “What can you teach life?”

Victor L. Wooten is this sort of musician. A founding member of the jazz-bluegrass group Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, he is a superb bassist, a high practitioner of technique, tone, and feel. Over the past few decades, he has also been known as an educator, starting (with his wife, Holly) the Victor Wooten Center for Music and Nature camp in Tennessee. He is also a writer. His first book, The

published in 2006, is narrated by a young bass player at a creative impasse — skilled, but easily frustrated, and more easily impressed. He wakes from a nap to find a tall man in his living room. The man’s name is Michael. Eventually, we learn that the student’s name is Victor. Michael will become Victor’s mentor in music.

Victor didn’t invite Michael. Or did he? “I teach nothing,” Michael proclaims in that book’s early pages, “because there is nothing to be taught. You already know everything you need to know, but you asked me to come, so here I am.” Still, the core of

proceeds systematically. Michael breaks down music into 10 elements, which serve as the basis for each chapter. These include notes (which he finds “overrated”), dynamics, and phrasing, but also space — the space between the notes — and listening.

The book’s sequel, is a kind of action-adventure fable involving Victor, Michael, and a number of other friends and teachers. There is Ali, a former minister from a “small African village” where he learned from an elite group called the Elders of Higher Learning; Seiko, a drummer from Japan who turned away from Taiko drumming to learn rock and roll; Uncle Clyde, who chose to live under a bridge in Nashville “to do his work undetected and unnoticed”; and Victor’s student, Jonathan, with whom Victor spends a few good pages early in the book breaking down Willie Weeks’ bass solo on “Voices Inside (Everything Is Everything),” from the Donny Hathaway live album.

Victor and his friends aren’t necessarily all virtuosos. What they have in common is that they perceive, feel, and communicate through music. They are in tune with what Ali defines as a more African than European attitude toward playing music, prioritizing the why of it before the what of it. “Anyone can play ‘cause everyone have Music inside,” Ali explains to Victor, “but with the Elders, you must show your calling before they take you further. If they accept you — if Music accept you — then you learn true power.”

Here is the premise: Music — always capitalized and given feminine pronouns, and understood as a living entity — is sick and may be dying.

Of what? Wooten doesn’t really specify. This is not that kind of book. What kind of book is it? It’s a bit like Carlos Castaneda’s shamanist tales, a bit like tween fiction, a bit like websites on, say, sonic healing through principles of sacred geometry and, at its best, an enactment of epiphanies told in the ping-pong dialogue of its predecessor.

Victor and his crew travel from Virginia to Nashville, evading and finally facing down a sinister force of silent enemies called the Phasers. The

Phasers wear dark glasses and dark suits and have the power to render music inaudible, in the manner of noise-canceling headphones. In one of many mini-lessons throughout the book, Michael remarks that “music brings people together, not only to feel, but to agree on what we feel.” This is why the Phasers must destroy it.

But the Phasers must be working for someone, right? Or perhaps they represent a system or process. Capitalism? Digitization? Algorithms?

Again, this is not that kind of book, because Wooten is not that kind of writer. Mostly (but not entirely) directed toward musicians, it’s a book that stands happily against traditional music pedagogy and canned notions of achievement. This is to its great credit. Your happiness as a reader will depend on how open you are to insights that recognize no coincidences, some of them from the crystal-indigo-rainbow file, as well as proposed, though not explained, secret-knowledge theories. If the metafictional Victor Wooten tends toward these theories, Ali tends toward them even more: For instance, he explains that a guitar is female because of its “head, neck, curves, slim waist, and a womb in the middle where vibrations grow” — and therefore, Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” is about his guitar. Or that the sixth note of the solfège scale is “la,” and the sixth note of the C major scale is A — so a-la — Allah!

Your enjoyment of the book may also depend on how wary you are when told that a cherished belief system is under secret attack, and around the phrases “real musicians” — but presumably Willie Weeks is among the good guys, as is Hendrix, and Wooten’s real-life cohort, and the visiting faculty at his music camps, who tend, like Wooten, to fall along the jazz-country-virtuoso spectrum. By the logic of this book, a lot of music made without “real” instruments — a lot of the music in the world right now, and some of the best — may start to look suspect. That’s too bad. Wooten is an includer, not a delimiter; he’s better at holistic teaching than veiled polemic.

— Ben Ratliff/For THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC: THE LESSON CONTINUES