Former President Joe Biden defends his decision to run for reelection in 2024 with a vigor he could not typically muster during the race itself, in his memoir set for release on Tuesday, and downplays the impact of a disastrous debate performance while insisting his critics could “never point to something presidential I had failed to do.”
HuffPost obtained an advanced copy of the 465-page book, titled “Promise Me, America,” which Biden will likely be limited in promoting due to his ongoing battle with prostate cancer. The book contains no indications the Delawarean has any regrets from his presidency, whether it be how he addressed foreign crises in Ukraine and Gaza, how he handled recalcitrant senators in pursuing his domestic agenda or in his decision to mount a reelection bid at age 82.
“People say I was deluding myself that I could do the job at my age,” Biden writes of his decision to run again. “My answer to that is: I was doing the job.”
The final chapters of the book, which cover his decision to run again, his ultimate ouster as the party’s nominee and former Vice President Kamala Harris’ eventual loss after taking over as the Democratic candidate, function as a self-portrait of a man determined to snap back at his critics.
He lingers on his victories in the essentially uncontested Democratic primaries in 2024, viewing the results as something more than fait accompli acknowledgments of reality. He brushes aside the idea his age was a real handicap in office, instead portraying it as more of an aesthetic barrier — one he was trying to conquer with help from then-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who had told him to lengthen his stride in public. He claims perceptions of his debate performance were shaped more by the media and party elites than by his own incoherence onstage.
“The press and the pundits had decided my performance was fatal,” he writes, insisting polling data did not show him suffering in the race against Trump — even though internal Democratic polls from the time showed him in danger of losing the blue states of Virginia, New Jersey, New Mexico, Maine and New Hampshire. He adds: “But the data wasn’t the point. The narrative was. And the narrative was bad. There was a consensus that I had lost. Worse than that, there was a consensus that it couldn’t be fixed.”
Biden, whose self-image has always tended towards jovial grandfather, stays away from the harsh vitriol a different man might uncork in such a book. But his bitterness over what he feels is a lack of press respect for his accomplishments and treacherous behavior by fellow Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer nonetheless comes through.
Recounting a NATO summit he hosted in the days following the debate, he notes some press coverage focused more on a verbal gaffe — he had called Harris “Vice President Trump” by mistake — than on his accomplishment.
“It was a perfect example of what was happening to me. The fact that I was leading a stronger and more united NATO than the world had ever seen — and leading the effort to stand against the worst aggression seen in Europe since World War II — didn’t matter. But mixing up Harris and Trump?” he writes. “That was a big deal.”
Biden also repeatedly turns to Trump to justify his own actions, insisting there was no way the American public would ever choose Trumpian chaos over his steady leadership. And the threat of Trump is why he had no choice but to run again: “I was the only person who had ever beaten Donald Trump,” he writes. “And I felt I was the best person to do it again.”
Democrats largely kept their distance from Biden, who ended his time in office as the least popular Democratic president in four decades, as they swept both chambers of Congress during this year’s midterm elections. Many in the party were not-so-secretly happy Biden’s book was not arriving until well after Election Day.
But while almost everyone in the party now agrees Biden should not have tried to run again, other recollections are likely to restart intra-party disputes. He recounts how he felt, in the days following Hamas’ massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response would be “overwhelming” in order to “compensate for what was close to dereliction of duty on his part.”
But any regret about how his administration would handle the subsequent attack on Gaza is limited. “Too many innocent Palestinians were killed,” he writes. “Too much pain was inflicted on people with no connection to Hamas. Too little food and water and medicine and fuel got into Gaza for too long. And I carry that with me.”
“It was a tragedy,” he continues. “A tragedy that worsened under a new administration.”