Review: The Last Politician

 The Last Politician is an account of Biden's first two years of presidency. It begins with the inauguration (well, maybe a little before since there's supposed to be a transfer of power that never really happened, hello January 6th) and ends with the midterm elections of 2022.

The book starts off with a description of the challenges in making and distributing the vaccine, as well as the disaster that was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, something that I still support. Certainly the description of how weak and corrupt the Afghan government definitely leads me to believe that it's actually very rare that you get leaders who actually care about the people they're supposed to govern. It makes the post WW2 regime changes in Japan and West Germany from their previous regimes to democracy much more impressive.

To some extent a lot of the book is inside baseball. For instance, there's detailed accounts of the back-and-forth between Biden, Schumer, and Manchin about Build Back Better, with lots of places where Biden/Schumer and their aides had to basically kow tow to Manchin and stroke his ego. Those moments in the book explain why I would have hated being a politician and can't imagine why someone would enjoy the job, but clearly, Biden does enjoy his job.

Similarly, a lot of the stuff that went on behind the scenes in the build up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is in this book. Here's a description of Burns' attempt to dissuade Putin from invading Ukraine:

Rather than denying his intentions of invasion, it was as if Putin wanted to provide Burns with a glimpse of his own strategic thinking. He explained that conditions had never been more ripe for him to conquer Ukraine. For starters, there was Volodymyr Zelensky. Putin said he was the feeble leader of a hopelessly divided polity. Putin did not deign to describe Ukraine as a nation, since it wasn’t in his view. He said that he would be able to score a quick military victory, at a low cost. In the past, Putin had resisted the temptation to invade Ukraine, because he worried about the European reaction. But he figured that he didn’t have much to worry about on the Continent. Angela Merkel had vacated the scene, replaced by a relative novice. He said that recent elections in France exposed Emmanuel Macron’s political fragility. And even though the West blustered about the strength of sanctions, Putin bragged that he’d built his economy to withstand the blow. He had stockpiled an impressive reserve of foreign currency. Putin hadn’t quite delivered a point-blank confirmation of the intelligence, but he talked as if the decision to invade were a fait accompli. Burns felt that it was his mission to barrage Putin with the questions that his advisers lacked the courage to ask: How is this going to end? How are you going to occupy a country with forty million people who are bound to resist? “I know we live in a glass house,” Burns told him, “but we know how an occupation can start off successfully and then end badly.” But this was a Socratic exercise in futility, and Burns had no illusions about that. (kindle loc 3352)

A lot of this work was going on and of course, most of it was futile, as we now know. What wasn't futile was the work that went into getting Ukraine to take the threat of invasion seriously and the work that had been done over 10 years:

After it recovered from the staggering first punch that the Russians threw, the Ukrainian army began to benefit from a decade of deep cooperation with the American military. The Americans had instructed the Ukrainians to develop a decentralized command-and-control structure, where well-trained officers had the flexibility to maneuver without waiting around for approval. It was nearly the opposite of the sclerotic hierarchy that Russia imposed on its soldiers, who never understood their tasks until they were ordered to implement them. If Ukraine represented democracy—and Russia its opposite—then their armies were a fair reflection of the contrasting virtues of those systems. (kindle loc 4454)

 The book ends with the midterm elections, and here's the irony about being president --- it's undoubted that Biden was a much better president than Trump, but his poll numbers are still astonishingly low:

Only 38 percent of the nation approved of his performance—roughly the same response that Donald Trump consistently mustered. Klain saw something darkly humorous about the White House’s inability to move that number. Each time the public grew exercised about a problem—the lack of COVID tests, a shortage of baby formula, container ships unable to unload in ports—the administration would drop everything to solve it. These were the practical details of life, where the government touched the quotidian, and Biden obsessed over them, spending hours, say, sorting through the logistics of using the air force to import baby formula from abroad. But each time the Biden administration made progress fixing an issue, it suddenly disappeared from the public’s list of top concerns. The public only lashed the administration, never rewarded it. There was no glory in technocratic troubleshooting. Biden considered his poor approval rating a failure of the media, which somehow neglected to note all the ways in which his administration was superior to Trump’s. It was also a failure of his own White House to effectively communicate. (kindle loc 4689)

It's not clear to me now that Biden has a better than even chance of winning the 2024 election. But it's quite clear that the job itself is thankless and probably very frustrating. I enjoyed the book and learned quite a bit that while the sausage making might be interesting, there's a good reason I don't want to be anywhere near where the sausage is being made.