Will This Be Joe Biden’s F.D.R. Moment?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Books, Society & Culture, Remnick, Storytelling, Wnyc, News, David, Yorker, Arts, Politics, New

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

Joe Biden has been playing it safe during the coronavirus pandemic, but Evan Osnos got the chance to sit down with the nominee in person. It was too hot to sit outside, but the campaign staff didn’t want an outsider in Biden’s home, so the interview took place in a small house on the property that Biden’s late mother stayed in. In a wide-ranging conversation, Biden compares his position—should he win—to that of Franklin Roosevelt: taking office during a disaster, he argues, he would have an opportunity to effect a hugely ambitious agenda, but driven by pragmatism rather than ideology. (He was not comparing himself to Roosevelt, he hastened to add.) While the country is ever more partisan, Biden describes his centrism and his propensity for off-the-cuff remarks as an advantage. “The good news is the bad news,” he told Osnos. “Everybody knows me, and you guys know me, the good and bad. . . . It’s kind of hard to pin a label on someone that’s inconsistent with who they are. To make me out to be a revolutionary, it’s awful hard to do. Conversely, it’s awful hard to make me out to be a right-wing, very conservative Democrat.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm sitting here, sort of, virtually,
0:05.3	with my colleague Evan Osnose, who's been covering politics for us since 2008, hard to believe.
0:11.7	Now, Evan, you've been working on a profile of Joe Biden for quite some time, and at the end of July,
0:16.8	you went to meet him at his home in Delaware. What was, what were the circumstances? What was it
0:21.4	like to talk to him in person at that moment? Well, as you can imagine, frankly, he was sort of
0:28.2	glad to see another human being because they have him under very tight restrictions. There's
0:33.9	basically two aides that go in and out of the house, one of his assistants and one of Jill Biden's assistants.
0:40.1	And then there's this secret service detail.
0:42.3	But other than that, they really don't have a lot of people coming in and out.
0:46.2	And so they said, first of all, you've got to wear a mask.
0:50.4	And they said, we're not going to be in the main house because we don't want you potentially
0:56.0	contaminating where he lives. So they put us in a kind of carriage house at the foot of the property
1:01.6	and we sat across from each other in a room. It was too hot to sit outside. It was somewhere
1:07.5	in the mid-90s. And they said, so we're going to sit across from each other and don't touch and wear masks.
1:14.8	It's kind of amazing.
1:15.9	And so he's not having any meetings at all.
1:18.4	Not in person.
1:19.8	It's all on Zoom.
1:21.3	It's all on Zoom.
1:22.3	I mean, they really, to be honest about it, they are very concerned that a 77-year-old man who's had a complicated
1:28.8	medical history would be very vulnerable to the virus, and they don't want to take any risks.
1:35.3	Doesn't at least some of the public see that as a vulnerability?
	...

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