Elder Statesmen

Elder Statesmen

The two old men worried to their very cores about Trump came to opposite decisions: Mitt Romney quit, and Joe Biden is running again. Both may have chosen wrong.

Romney: A Reckoning
by McKay Coppins
Scribner, 2023, 416 pp.

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future
by Franklin Foer
Penguin Press, 2023, 432 pp.

At Easter time in 2022, Craig Romney took his family to Washington, D.C., to see the sights. Craig’s father, Mitt Romney, the junior senator from Utah, joined them for a trip to the White House that Mitt had arranged. Joe and Jill Biden appeared mid-tour to show the guests around, patiently bringing them to the swimming pool and the bowling alley and letting everyone pose for pictures at the Steinway grand piano. As they departed, the youngest Romney grandchild offered his thoughts on the president: “I thought he would be less old.”

Through the decades, Joe Biden and Mitt Romney never knew each other well. Now, still in public life only because of another old man—the one they loathe to their very cores—the president who defeated Trump and the would-be president who has become Trump’s most prominent Republican opponent have acquired a mutual respect. One Sunday morning, Biden called Romney out of the blue, reaching him at church. “I just wanted to call and tell you that I admire your character and your personal honor,” Biden told Romney. “We disagree on a lot of things, but I think highly of you as a person.” Romney replied that he felt the same way.

These men are the subjects of two of the more interesting insider journalistic accounts of American politics published in 2023. In The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, Franklin Foer offers a plodding blow-by-blow of Biden’s surprisingly successful first two years in office. In Romney: A Reckoning, McKay Coppins goes beyond the usual conventions of the genre to write a more revealing book about a less consequential politician. The perpetually underestimated Biden, after surpassing expectations in his first term, soldiers on toward an election he may lose as age catches up to him. Romney, four years younger, heads for the exits, full of harsh words for his party but still grappling with his own role in bringing the GOP to its present impasse.

The Last Politician is a long encomium to “the old hack who could.” Biden appears sharp and incisive, preening as ever but more comfortable in his own skin than the palpably insecure figure of decades past. Foer covers the spate of legislation Biden signed in the first years of his presidency, which sought both to address the exigencies of the moment and to move decisively beyond them. The American Rescue Plan (ARP) passed in March 2021, with no-strings-attached checks for individuals earning $75,000 a year or less and a commitment to full employment. The “fingertip politician” simultaneously moved left with his party and won bipartisan victories in the CHIPS and...