A Candidate in Isolation: Inside Joe Biden’s Cloistered Campaign – By Alexander Burns, Shane Goldmacher and Katie Glueck (The New York Times) / April 26 2020
Joe Biden usually rises before 8 a.m. at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and starts his day with a workout in an upstairs gym that contains a Peloton bike, weights and a treadmill. He often enjoys a protein shake for breakfast and puts on a suit or blazer much of the time. In the evenings, he and his wife, Jill, sit down together for dinner, a ritual that was absent for much of the last frenzied year on the campaign trail.
In the intervening hours, Biden attempts to win the presidency without leaving his house.
With the coronavirus outbreak freezing the country’s public life, Biden has been forced to adapt to a cloistered mode of campaigning never before seen in modern American politics. He was unable to embark on a victory tour after the Democratic primaries or hold unity rallies with onetime rivals like Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Instead, the former vice president is in a distinctive kind of lockdown, walled off from voters, separated from his top strategists and yet leading in the polls.
For a famous backslapper like Biden, this open-ended period of captivity has tested both his patience and his political imagination. He has lamented being deprived of human contact, and he has expressed exasperation with media coverage critiquing his limited visibility compared with President Donald Trump’s daily performances in the White House briefing room. He does not make a habit of watching the president’s briefings in full; he is said to be fixated mainly on the eventual challenge — if he wins — of governing amid a pandemic.
Interviews with dozens of people in touch with the presumptive Democratic nominee and his advisers revealed a newly detailed picture of Biden’s life in seclusion, one spent in long-distance consultation with a wide array of coalition leaders helping him map out the fall campaign and a potential administration.
Biden has revived many of the rituals of the vice presidency, including similarly formatted briefing memos and tour d’horizon-style updates from aides on the virus and the economy — all aimed at giving him the information he would need to make the weighty decisions at hand if he were in charge, except that he is not.
Fran Person, who served for years as a Biden aide and speaks with him regularly, said the detached lifestyle was unnatural for Biden, an extrovert who spent virtually his entire adult life in government.
“I can imagine, for him, you’re watching this play out, you know what needs to get done,” Person said. “You want to be right in the middle of it.”
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