The question of “Where is Joe Biden?” undoubtedly echoed through the halls of the Obama White House for eight years. That’s a popular question in politics again — though for entirely different reasons.
Sometimes, Barack Obama would deliberately hide Biden in an effort to avoid any embarrassment during high-stakes negotiations, such as the 2013 government shutdown. That year, the executive branch’s top diplomat to the Senate was seemingly missing for 16 days.
“Maybe we need to get Joe Biden out of the witness protection program,” said Sen. John McCain at the time, as talks between the two parties entered a stalemate.
It turns out that Biden’s absence wasn’t just demanded by Obama, but by then-Democratic floor leader Harry Reid as well. While GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell and the Nevada lawmaker hammered out deals in backrooms, Biden was denied entry.
To save face, Biden canceled other public appearances, such as a fundraiser with Nancy Pelosi and a campaign trip for then-Senate candidate Cory Booker. Biden was practically on a mandated vacation.
Fast-forward to his third White House bid, and many are once again searching for Biden’s whereabouts. The question isn’t necessarily literal — Biden has publicly retreated to his home in Wilmington, Delaware — but his campaign has come to a nearly complete standstill during the exact kind of crisis the president’s critics say they feared most.
This time, Biden’s disappearance isn’t so deliberate.
Biden has just pulled off one of the greatest political comebacks in generations with his Super Tuesday-and-beyond wins, but the global pandemic is what’s on the country’s mind now. He can’t change that, of course. But in the depths of the Great Recession, people still looked to Obama as a biblical hero, descending from the clouds on horseback with promises of lowering the ocean and healing the planet.
Biden can’t even get his endorsement against a president fixated on undoing Obama’s legacy.
At this point in the 2008 election cycle, Obama had just given his famous 40-minute-long “A More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia, which tackled the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination in the country, in addition to his relationship with the controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright. Those remarks were credited as some of the finest he ever gave, with Republicans ranging from Mike Huckabee to Newt Gingrich lauding the speech. From there on, his path to the presidency was clearly visible.
At the end of March 2020, Biden was communicating with his staff through masks and gloves. His grandchildren aren’t allowed into his home, despite living nearby, out of fear they could be harboring the novel coronavirus. During their visits, they chat from the front lawn as Biden stands on his porch as if under house arrest.
The campaign’s headquarters in Philadelphia has entirely shut down. Many staffers who rented apartments in the city have gone home to their parents or moved in with their romantic partners in other cities. No one is allowed to stay at Biden’s home overnight apart from his wife, a purgatory-like scene reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett play.
There are no historic speeches being streamed from his living room, but instead, shoddy interviews and “virtual” fundraisers regularly interrupted by tech problems or Biden struggling to read from a teleprompter.
In “A More Perfect Union,” Obama referenced the “snippets of … sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television sets and YouTube.” Earlier in March, Biden expressed surprise at the concept of video chatting. “They tell me there’s ways we can do teleconferencing via us all being in different locations,” he said in a call with press, noting that setting up a camera connected to a Wi-Fi network was “above his pay grade.”
After four days of virtual silence, Biden’s bunker operation is up and running. Although calling it an “operation” is probably an exaggeration.
Biden’s presidential campaign at this point probably looks a lot more like your home office than the billion-dollar behemoth behind Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run. He’s still in a suit, but there are no field organizers canvassing swing states on his behalf, and already, a few digital fundraisers have been canceled due to tech problems on his end, which will undoubtedly bring in fewer dollars than if donors had a chance to grab a photo with the Democratic nominee in the flesh. No contrast with President Trump is being drawn in any meaningful sense as Biden appears more like a retired vlogger than a serious presidential contender.
Meanwhile, Trump has revived the daily press briefing and is enjoying record-high approval ratings. Polls show Trump now leading a generic Democrat in the Electoral College, and Biden has yet to come up with a better plan to respond to the nation’s economic collapse than “give Americans free money.” News channels have opted to air New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s press conferences over Biden’s, making many Democrats ponder whether it should be Cuomo preparing to move to Washington.
Nor does it help that Bernie Sanders has yet to drop out of the race officially. The Vermont senator is no longer sending out email pleas for fundraising (although supporters can still donate to his campaign on his website, despite his apparent lack of a path to securing enough delegates to be the nominee) yet shows no signs of conceding any time soon.
When asked last week about another debate with Sanders, currently scheduled for April, Biden suggested that he would decline the invitation: “My focus is just dealing with this crisis right now. I haven’t thought about any more debates. I think we’ve had enough debates. I think we should get on with this.”
Yet it remains unclear what Biden means by “dealing with this crisis.” Clips of Sanders raving in the Senate against the recently passed relief bill continue to go viral, with hundreds of thousands of views, while a “virtual happy hour with young Americans” hosted by Biden received just 2,800 simultaneous attendees. Biden talks about having conversations with congressional leaders, but if the 2013 shutdown negotiations are any indication, his ability to get their attention is overstated.
And if Congress isn’t listening, the public isn’t listening either. Biden no longer has a physical presence in Pennsylvania and has yet to set foot in Wisconsin, two crucial swing states. Both of those states have delayed their primaries until June, just a month before the scheduled Democratic National Convention, which may have to be canceled anyway. His decisive win in Michigan temporarily gave Democrats confidence — until they remembered that Trump only needs to win one of those three to be reelected.
All of this could change, of course. Summer could come and give Americans reprieve from the plague that has forced more people in Europe to seek shelter inside than at any time since the bombing campaigns of World War II. The economy may never recover, giving Biden a line of attack against how Trump handled the crisis.
But the question of whether Biden is the man for the job will remain open. If his pitch continues to be “a return to normalcy,” Biden will have to confront what, exactly, is so normal about any of this — and how and why his manifestly abnormal campaign is best positioned to do that.
Joseph Simonson is a political reporter for the Washington Examiner.
