2 years ago
It was a key theme of Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, unstated but powerful, and a vivid contrast with the public-train-wreck incumbent: If elected, he was going to be boring.
Promise kept.
But 18 months into Biden’s weekends-in-Wilmington, nana-and-pop, no-superspreader- events-at-the-White-House presidency, the drawbacks of that style are also becoming clear: A boring presidency is, um, boring. Which carries a political cost in a Permanent Washington that, for better or worse, thrills to displays of executive-branch social fireworks.
Early in their administrations, Biden’s two predecessors seemed to be everywhere, if not in person, then in spirit; if not individually, then represented by exciting-seeming members of their new teams. The 46th president seems oddly absent.
Since his inauguration, Biden has spent only 12 weekends in the capital, according to the former CBS correspondent Mark Knoller, who tracks such things. In the same period, he’s spent 31 weekends back home in Delaware and 16 at Camp David. He’s hosted no state dinners. Sightings around town are few, and often involve a quiet trip to church. He was a no-show at last weekend’s Gridiron Dinner, a traditional station of the cross in elite Washington circles where pols dress in white tie to deliver stand-up yuks and make nice with reporters. Every president since Benjamin Harrison has attended the event at least once.
It’s not just the boss, either. Biden’s coterie of insiders is not particularly newsy. Close aides like White House Counselor Steve Ricchetti could likely walk down a street without being recognized. Early on, one of the few cabinet members with independent star power, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, was regularly popping up on social media, spotted around town biking or buying bagels. A year later, he’s the father of 6-month-old twins, a change that makes it much harder to get out. So when Biden sent his regrets to the Gridiron, he wound up dispatching as an official substitute … Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. During her monologue, she riffed about how no one knows anything about the commerce secretary.
Likewise, there’s little by way of presidential trend-setting. Barack Obama could send a book climbing up the bestseller list by being photographed with it. It’s hard to test whether Biden has the same juice because there haven’t been pictures of Biden buying books. The Kennedy White House spurred a national embrace of French food by hiring a White House chef from France. Biden is known for liking ice cream — though the pandemic-era paucity of big White House events have kept him from serving it to too many people. There’s no restaurant or neighborhood that the new in-crowd has put on the map.
The major reason for this, of course, is out of anyone’s control: the pandemic, an environment where it’s politically and medically unwise to throw a state dinner or step out to a restaurant or visit a highbrow bookstore. That same Gridiron gala Biden skipped was at the center of an elite Covid outbreak that hit official substitute Raimondo, among numerous other top media and political figures. For a 79-year-old man, it wasn’t a great place to be. (Though a glance around the room at the venerable organization suggested that plenty of other septuagenarians weren’t deterred.)
All the same, the cumulative effect is downright disorienting in a place that treats presidencies as cultural eras as well as political ones.
“You can’t call it the Biden era because of Covid,” says Sally Quinn, the longtime chronicler and convener of social Washington — and someone who’s historically been willing to throw shade at presidents’ local impact. “We don’t know what the Biden era would have been if there hadn’t been Covid. There’s no category into which this fits in terms of judging Washington and whether it’s interesting or not.”
Nowhere was Biden’s implicit promise of dullness more popular than inside the Beltway, a place traumatized by Donald Trump. But it turns out that what the city wanted was less back-to-sleep than back-to-normal. And normal, in the folkways of political Washington, includes a number of things the locals find quite exciting: Presidential sightings at local restaurants! Zingers at black-tie banquets! Glamorous new aides, preferably with active social schedules and newsworthy romantic lives! Laugh if you will, but they’re all part of how an administration can command attention and project energy.
An ideal chief executive, in this universe, might also introduce a new culinary trend or help popularize some unlikely author. A truly transformational one could kick-start a fashion, like the fedora-free JFK did.
Ironically, Biden’s status as a veteran Washington hand may be responsible for the same things that are causing some of Washington’s own ennui. In prior administrations, one thing that traditionally captivated the capital’s imagination was the new cast of characters who accompanied the new chief executive to town: FDR’s New Dealers, JFK’s Irish Mafia, Trump’s cadre of plutocrats. But Biden hasn’t brought many exciting and new folks to town because, after 36 years, his people are mostly here already. And they’re not that exciting. (This is no knock on any of Biden’s intimates: Even the most glamorous of JFK’s Harvard Yard pals became old hat after a few years, too.)
Is any of this actually bad? Washingtonians have an erratic relationship with presidential glamor. When not complaining about White House dullness, we’re constantly crowing about how we’re more than just a pokey old government town. By those standards, there’s something a mite embarrassing about having a great city’s menus or reading lists or social calendar shaped by a mere head of state. Do Parisians evaluate their city’s cultural cachet based on the tastes of Emmanuel Macron?
Whether or not it’s good for a city, or a republic, to pay so much attention to how a president does or doesn’t interact socially, it’s historically been good for presidents. The majesty of the White House, the star power of the inner circle — these are tools that can be harnessed to charm decision-makers and narrative-writers. Covid, age, familiarity and an apparent taste for recharging in Wilmington have, for now at least, given the Biden administration less access to those tools.
Some of the more energetic contemporary social figures of the political city told me that there’s nothing wrong with Biden’s D.C. that a little gumption can’t fix. The new socializing is smaller and away from the radar.
“The president could be a Cardboard Box and I think Washington wouldn't be boring,” says Jamie Weinstein, known for putting together soirees with high-profile guests. “There will always be a certain number of really interesting and iconoclastic people in media and politics, of all political stripes, and if you assemble a dinner party with just the right number of them, as my wife and I try to do, you'll regularly produce memorable evenings. If you depend on who occupies the Oval Office to define whether D.C. has a great social scene, you are doing something wrong.”
“You either get into D.C. and you’re passive and you wait for everyone else to make a wave, or you make your own wave,” says Steve Clemons, a longtime media-political fixture who just joined the forthcoming Semafor News startup. Clemons, who says he used to have a great time at Vice President’s Biden’s events, also says he thinks the White House will become a lot livelier in the coming year.
In fact, the real impact of having an elderly, not-here-on-weekends president during a pandemic may be to hustle up other trends that were already happening, a move away from big events and formal dinners to socializing that’s more low-key — befitting a place where the power class tends to be full of two-career couples too busy to primp for fancy events even if they wanted to spend big on them. But if the cool kids are meeting on someone’s roof deck somewhere, it’s not a thing that is designed to be covered in the media where it can flatter the city’s sense of itself.
Which also leaves the venerable A-list events feeling a bit lower-wattage. “I get invited to these embassy events and I sometimes forget to go,” is how one of my pals, a longtime local partygoer, puts it. “And then I’ll look on social media to see who was there and it’s like, ‘Eeew.’”
“You didn’t have the President, you didn’t have the Vice President, you didn’t have the Secretary of State, you didn’t have the Secretary of Defense, you didn’t have the Treasury Secretary. And you had two Republicans,” Quinn says of the Gridiron. “None of those people saw a reason to be there. It’s over.”
For the record, Quinn, who has proclaimed the demise of social Washington multiple times over the years, says she’s not mourning the traditional calendar. Society has changed, and she says she welcomes a less phony type of interaction. “If you’re looking for the kind of excitement there was in the Kennedy years or the Clinton years, it’s not going to happen. I mean, maybe there will be some young person who brings exciting young people to town, but I don’t think so. It’s not the way it works. It has nothing to do with Biden.”
English (US)