#The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future
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"[President] Biden's primary point of comparison wasn't really [Franklin D.] Roosevelt; it was [Barack] Obama. By the end of their Presidency, Biden was so in sync with his boss that the pair had what the journalist Jonathan Alter described as 'secret code.' When Obama tipped back his chair in meetings, Biden took that as a cue to ask provocative questions that Obama wanted answered but didn't want to raise himself for fear of shifting the tenor of a meeting.
But Biden also chafed at the constraints of his job -- and if Obama sometimes rolled his eyes at him, he would roll his own right back. There was the tinge of class rivalry to their gibes. The lunch-pail cornball and the effete professor culturally chafing each other. Biden told a friend that Obama didn't know how to say fuck you properly, with the right elongation of vowels and the necessary hardness of his consonants; it was how they must curse in the ivory tower."
-- Franklin Foer, on the unique dynamic of the relationship between then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden during the Obama Administration, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), available now via Penguin Press.
#Presidents#Presidential Relationships#Presidential Friendships#Presidential Partnerships#History#Politics#Barack Obama#President Obama#Obama Administration#Vice Presidents#Presidency#Joe Biden#Vice President Biden#President Biden#Biden Administration#Franklin Foer#The Last Politician#The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future#Penguin Press
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Comment:
So-called 'national interests' are always in the eye of the beholder, subject to different perceptions, interpretations - the 'fit' between the Biden administration's interests and those of Kyiv will always be shifting, uneasy. And then there's the play of personalities, and how well-briefed they are, and how skilled in making relevant arguments.
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30 August 2023
Martin Pengelly
Extract 1:
In a development likely to cause consternation in Washington and Kyiv, an eagerly awaited new book says Volodymyr Zelenskiy “bombed” his first Oval Office meeting with Joe Biden.
The two men reportedly failed to establish a rapport as the Ukrainian leader’s demand to join Nato and “absurd analysis” of alliance dynamics left the US president “pissed off”.
“Even Zelenskiy’s most ardent sympathisers in the [Biden] administration agreed that he had bombed,” Franklin Foer, author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, writes of the meeting in September 2021.
Extract 2:
The author also says Zelenskiy regarded Biden as weak, particularly over his decision earlier in 2021 to waive sanctions against a Russian company building Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline to Germany, a move Zelenskiy saw as undermining Ukrainian economic and security interests.
Biden granted Zelenskiy a meeting but “didn’t think much” of him, Foer reports, particularly over friendly relations the Ukrainian president had struck up with the hard-right Republican Texas senator Ted Cruz, over the Nord Stream decision.
Extract 3:
The official transcript of Biden and Zelenskiy’s remarks to reporters before their 1 September Oval Office meeting shows declarations of mutual respect and policy aims. But according to Foer, once the meeting began properly, Zelenskiy “seemed oblivious to Biden’s doubts” and “almost wilfully unaware of Biden’s moral code”.
Biden expected expressions of gratitude for US support, Foer writes. Zelenskiy “crammed his conversations with a long list of demands”. Chief among them: “He needed to join Nato.”
Extract 4:
Russia had been stoking fighting in Ukraine since 2014 and was widely thought to be preparing a full-scale invasion.
Foer writes: “Zelenskiy’s frustration occluded his capacity for logic. After begging to join Nato, he began to lecture that the organisation is, in fact, a historic relic, with waning significance. He told Biden that France and Germany were going to exit Nato.
“It was an absurd analysis – and a blatant contradiction. And it pissed Biden off.”
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Unveiling the Astonishing Truth: Joe Biden's Explosive Role in Afghanistan's Collapse, His Surprising Confession of Weariness, Detailed in New Book
According to a new book titled ‘The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future’ by Franklin Foer, US President Joe Biden had an explosive reaction when he was informed that then-Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani had fled Kabul prior to the Taliban’s takeover of the city. The book reveals that Biden was on vacation at Camp David when National Security…
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Unveiling the Astonishing Truth: Joe Biden's Explosive Role in Afghanistan's Collapse, His Surprising Confession of Weariness, Detailed in New Book
According to a new book titled ‘The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future’ by Franklin Foer, US President Joe Biden had an explosive reaction when he was informed that then-Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani had fled Kabul prior to the Taliban’s takeover of the city. The book reveals that Biden was on vacation at Camp David when National Security…
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Unveiling the Astonishing Truth: Joe Biden's Explosive Role in Afghanistan's Collapse, His Surprising Confession of Weariness, Detailed in New Book
According to a new book titled ‘The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future’ by Franklin Foer, US President Joe Biden had an explosive reaction when he was informed that then-Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani had fled Kabul prior to the Taliban’s takeover of the city. The book reveals that Biden was on vacation at Camp David when National Security…
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29 January 2021
Tragedy and statistics
The UK marked a grim milestone this week, recording more than 100,000 Covid deaths by every measure.
Various versions of the famous quote have it that one death is a tragedy, many merely a statistic. Newspapers tried to avoid that and humanise the sombre statistic in different ways. The front pages of The Times and the i focused on the individual tragedies, photographs highlighting the human beings behind the numbers.
Beyond their front pages, both tried to visualise the impact. The i used its paper form to give a double page spread to 100,000 dots, each representing a death. Online, The Times combined the human stories with a different use of dots and a 'narrative scroll', the act of having to move down the page helping illustrate the extent of the tragedy. It put me in mind of Ampp3d's story from 2014 (no longer online, analysis here and here) visualising migrant worker deaths in Qatar. The New York Times took a different approach to scrolling , using the density of dots to show how the pandemic unfolded in the US.
The FT, meanwhile, kept things simple, using a line chart to show the different measures of deaths all exceeding 100,000, and a simple bar chart to compare the UK's mortality rate to others.
Different approaches, but all important attempts to communicate the human cost of Covid and examples of how data visualisation can help make sense of tragedy on such a large scale, when words might fail us.
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In other news:
It's Data Bites this Wednesday at 6pm. Come!
Congratulations to my erstwhile IfG colleagues on the latest (terrific) edition of Whitehall Monitor. Read it here (some more links below), sign up for next week's launch event here.
I had a great time at this year's (virtual) UKGovCamp last week - thanks to the campmakers for making it work so well online. I made it to sessions on public trust; the state of (open) data; every move you make, every word you type...; data in regulation; silos beyond government; data service design; and digital exclusion. I ran a session on whether some sort of annual report on the state of government data could work and if so, what it should include - the notes are here, Jamboard here, and rest assured it's a subject I'll be returning to... Full grid of events and notes here.
The Atlantic had a rather good piece on narratives about the pandemic this week, and how a successful vaccination programme could dispel memories of 'a catastrophic failure of governance': 'The pandemic disaster that might not happen'. I wonder if focusing on how politicians can drive their own narrative overshadows the role of society's storytellers - the media - in shaping and questioning narratives, and absolves them of agency to hold the government to account. Not dissimilar to some narratives around data and technology that seem to forget the decisions around them are made by humans.
Have views on vaccine passports? Tony does. A reminder that the project I'm working with the Ada Lovelace Institute on is taking evidence until 19 February.
And I forgot to post this last week... President Biden's inaugural address grappled with some of the same tensions between unity and dissent in a democracy that some of the founding fathers did in The Federalist. I'm a particular fan of Alexander Hamilton's fourth and fifth paragraphs here, the fourth eloquent on the need to respect our opponents, and the fifth eloquent on the exact opposite ('no, not these opponents').
Have a good weekend
Gavin
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Today's links:
Graphic content
Macabre milestones
Boris Johnson ‘deeply sorry’ as UK’s Covid death toll passes 100,000* (FT)
How the UK reached 100,000 Covid deaths* (The Times)
100,162 lives (The i, via Matt Butler)
UK official Covid death toll has always undercounted fatalities, analysis shows (The Guardian)
How the world reached 100 million coronavirus cases* (New Statesman)
Covid-19 cases pass 100m* (The Economist)
How 425,000 Coronavirus Deaths Added Up* (New York Times)
Vax populi
Covid-19 vaccine tracker: the global race to vaccinate* (FT)
Vaccine nationalism means that poor countries will be left behind* (The Economist)
Vaccination rates in England are lower for older non-white people, study shows* (FT)
Viral content
UK Covid lockdown starting to work, say scientists* (FT)
Home page for an experimental website displaying COVID-19 statistics
New UK and South Africa Covid variants may spread more easily, so what does this mean for the fight against coronavirus? (The Guardian)
The Amazonian city that hatched the Brazil variant has been crushed by it* (Washington Post)
The march of the coronavirus across America* (The Economist)
See Covid-19 Risk in Your County and a Guide for Daily Life Near You* (New York Times)
We are now sharing previously hidden weekly COVID-19 state profile reports with the public (Cyrus Shahpar, White House COVID-19 Data Director)
Covid-19 Pandemic Could Be Source of Global Crises for Years: WEF* (Bloomberg)
US
Putting Kamala Harris as VP into perspective (Melissa Shusterman)
How popular is Joe Biden? (FiveThirtyEight)
Joe Biden is taking executive action at a record pace* (The Economist)
Full List: Where Every Senator Stands on Convicting Trump* (New York Times)
How The Frost Belt And Sun Belt Illustrate The Complexity Of America’s Urban-Rural Divide (FiveThirtyEight)
Our Radicalized Republic (FiveThirtyEight)
This is one of the most harrowing pictures I have seen about how we lost an entire generation (@marcusjdl)
UK
Whitehall Monitor 2021 (IfG)
Launch event next week (IfG)
Three ways that the coronavirus crisis has changed government (Alice for IfG)
Ministers overrode official advice more than ever in last year’s crisis* (Tim for Times Red Box)
We’ve calculated ward level EU Referendum estimates in England/Wales (James Kanagasooriam)
In data: the benefits squeeze* (Prospect)
Who's furloughed? (Resolution Foundation)
Cities Outlook 2021 (Centre for Cities)
Global
The uncounted: How many women die at the hands of their partners? We simply don’t know – and that needs to change* (Tortoise)
La Niña Roars, Unleashing Fire, Drought and Floods Worldwide* (Bloomberg)
How the Arab spring engulfed the Middle East – and changed the world (The Guardian)
Pessimism and Distrust Could Sway Elections Around the World* (Bloomberg)
Poland’s coal-fired home heating creates widespread pollution* (The Economist)
#dataviz
How to work with Facebook population density data (Alasdair Rae)
Check out this interesting cartography decision! (Gretchen Peterson)
Sport
How green are Premier League clubs? Tottenham top sustainability table (not entirely convinced by this graphic, BBC Sport - and not just because Spurs are top)
When GOATs meet: Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers, by the numbers* (Washington Post)
Everything else
The frenzied rise of GameStop* (The Economist)
Data Archeogram: mapping the datafication of work (Autonomy)
VIEW THE ARMADA MAPS (National Museum of the Royal Navy)
Spanish Armada maps 'saved for the nation' (BBC News)
Meta data
ICO baby
Our session with Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham (Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee)
Tory party illegally collected data on ethnicity of 10m voters, MPs told (The Guardian)
Covid contracts: Extend FoI act to cover private companies making millions says Information Commissioner (Evening Standard)
Adtech investigation resumes (ICO)
Information commissioner’s term extended to allow successor recruitment (Public Technology)
Shaking that pass
Exclusive: Tony Blair calls on Boris Johnson to lead drive for global vaccine passport* (Telegraph)
Vaccine passports and ID Cards (Phil Booth)
Tech companies are racing to build smart vaccine passports. But technology isn't the only problem (ZDNet)
Viral content
What Covid revealed about government’s legacy IT, and what to do next (Civil Service World)
What can wastewater tell us about COVID-19? (COG-UK)
Digital government
Our Syllabus: Here to help you teach Digital Era Government (Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age)
Respecting users’ privacy on GOV.UK accounts (Inside GOV.UK)
Two GDS projects to watch : GOV.UK Accounts and “Forms discovery” (David Durant)
Government Gateway at 20 – looking back at the UK’s most successful digital identity system (Computer Weekly)
No digital postal vote application service before May elections (Public Technology)
"Find your NHS number" (Tom Read and others)
Open government
The Path to the Future (Audrey Tang for CommonWealth)
We are thrilled to announce that #OpenGovWeek will take place May 17-21, 2021! (Open Government Partnership)
RECOMMENDATIONS TO STRENGTHEN CANADA’S RESPONSE TO NEW DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND REDUCE THE HARM CAUSED BY THEIR MISUSE (Public Policy Forum)
FOI* (Peter Geoghegan for the LRB)
AI got 'rithm
Government by Algorithm: The Myths, Challenges and Opportunities (Tony Blair Institute for Global Change)
What's your go-to document or paper that defines different types of algorithmic bias? (Rumman Chowdhury)
AI review: Transforming our world with AI (UKRI)
New – Amazon SageMaker Clarify Detects Bias and Increases the Transparency of Machine Learning Models (AWS)
Who Is Winning the AI Race: China, the EU, or the United States? — 2021 Update (Center for Data Innovation)
The City of New York has released an inventory of algorithms in use (Rumman Chowdhury)
A New AI Lexicon: Responses and Challenges to the Critical AI discourse- Call for Contributors (AI Now Institute)
Independent auditors are struggling to hold AI companies accountable (Fast Company)
Media
Fix information failures or risk lives: the Full Fact Report 2021 (Full Fact)
Facebook News feature launches in UK (BBC News)
How Participatory Media Promote Coverage of Social Movements (Nieman Reports)
‘It’s a reality’: Google threatens to stop search in Australia due to media code (Sydney Morning Herald)
Privacy
Exploring Design and Governance Challenges in the Development of Privacy-Preserving Computation (Nitin Agrawal, Reuben Binns, Max Van Kleek, Kim Laine, Nigel Shadbolt)
How Europe’s privacy laws are failing victims of sexual abuse (Politico)
Inside India’s booming dark data economy (Rest of World)
We're exploring the role of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) in enabling secure and trustworthy use of data (CDEI)
#DataProtectionDay
#DataPrivacyDay
Everything else
Microsoft is one of the largest contributors to the members of Congress who tried to subvert the Democratic process (Judd Legum)
Why does Big Tech want us to feel nostalgic?* (New Statesman)
Census 2021 will be taking place March 21 (ONS)
Opportunities
EVENT: Data Bites #16 (IfG)
JOB: Chair of Geospatial Commission (Cabinet Office)
JOB: Head of Open and Innovative Government Division (OECD)
JOB: Head of the Evaluation Task Force (Cabinet Office)
JOB: Product Manager (360Giving)
And finally...
Lady Gaga as diagrams about AI systems (thread). (Miles Brundage)
Infosec sea shanties (Rachel Tobac)
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BARACK OBAMA
•Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by David J. Garrow (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss (BOOK | KINDLE)
•A Promised Land by Barack Obama (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•Obama's Wars by Bob Woodward (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
DONALD TRUMP
•The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•Rage by Bob Woodward (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward's Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump by Bob Woodward (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control by Steven Hassan (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
JOE BIDEN
•The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama by Gabriel Debenedetti (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House by Chris Whipple (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
•Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption by Jules Witcover (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)
#History#Books#Book Suggestions#Book Recommendations#Presidents#Presidency#Presidential Books#POTUS Books#Books About Presidents#Barack Obama#President Obama#Donald Trump#President Trump#Joe Biden#President Biden
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