Lessons for Courtiers

On the snowy night of Friday, January 3, 2020, Joe Biden found himself at a farm equipment museum in Independence, Iowa. It was three days after the first reports from Wuhan of a new pneumonia, thirty-one days before Biden came in fourth place in the state’s caucuses, 369 days before insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress prepared to certify his election, and 383 days before he took the oath of office as President of the United States. “There’s two ways people get inspired,” he told the small crowd: “one by the John Kennedys of the world who genuinely inspire and lift us up, Abraham Lincolns, who appeal to our better angels. And another way is we have a really bad president—no I’m not being facetious. A president who, in fact, when you learn what they’ve done and how they’ve done it, we say, ‘No, no, enough of that.’”

Just how Joe Biden emerged from a vast Democratic field and found enough Americans to say “enough of that” is the topic of Battle for the Soul, Edward-Isaac Dovere’s doorstop of a campaign book. Dovere, a writer for the Atlantic, has talked to well-nigh everyone in the higher reaches of Democratic politics, and the book is a contemporaneous account of the campaign told from their eyes, with capsule portraits of all the candidates and longer sections on the big players.

This is journalism from the top down, the story not of grassroots resistance or of shifting voter blocs but of politicians and their leading courtiers. They’re constantly sizing one another up, poking and prodding to assess strengths and weaknesses, motivations and foibles. Everybody’s chewing the fat about everybody. Because Battle for the Soul is structured chronologically, voices and themes come and go. The more interesting material—to be clear, this a book for political junkies only—comes in the nomination fight. By the time things barrel on, amid pandemic and protest, to the contest between Biden and Donald Trump, the elite interviews lose their distinctive advantage, and one wishes for a painting on a broader canvas.

The title comes from an essay Biden wrote for the magazine where Dovere works, just after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017. For Biden, the battle against Trump as he began to conceive it then was more than the old warhorse’s last hurrah. Instead, Dovere writes, “It felt like a mission. A calling. Beyond politics. Fate.” That narrative arc ties the 2020 campaign together with the classic Biden themes of grief and resilience. An old politician’s claim that a campaign is about more than politics is always hokum, no matter how earnestly he and all the political professionals around him make it. But in 2020, it proved broad enough to unify the Democratic Party behind it.

The central mystery of the 2020 nomination is why Biden, after a dismal 2019—with an underfunded campaign and a rusty candidate—consolidated so much support so fast following his big win in the South Carolina primary, including rapid-fire endorsements from Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg. Dovere emphasizes the contingency of it all, noting, for instance, how Mike Bloomberg provided a convenient moderate target at an opportune moment. But there’s more than one route to the same destination. Without exactly saying so, which would vitiate the retrospective suspense in Dovere’s narrative, the blow-by-blows collectively suggest that the outcome shouldn’t have been so surprising. No other candidate had a plausible route to nomination, or anything much like it. (The political scientist Seth Masket offers an excellent account, based on the preferences of party donors and activists, in Learning from Loss: The Democrats, 2016–2020.) None of them, whatever their core appeal, could prove themselves down the stretch with the voters Biden conjured up in words that say much about how he sees the Democratic electorate: “hard-working folks, ethnics, and Blacks.” For that matter, even if...