What we don't learn in "Original Sin"

Who was driving the Biden administration's controversial policy choices?

Like everyone in Washington, I’ve read the new Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson book, “Original Sin.” At this point, it’s been so widely discussed that I don’t think the world needs my takes on its main points.

What I want to talk about instead is what I didn’t learn reading the book.

And I say this not in the spirit of criticism — the book is a monumental piece of reporting and also short and readable, and I think the authors understandably wanted to get it out into the world.

But I had a lot of questions about the Biden administration and what actually happened, and I was hoping the book might answer some of them. Unfortunately, it mostly doesn’t. Readers learn a great deal about the extent to which Covid served as a shield for Biden’s limited stamina in 2020 and 2021, about how Democrats’ overperformance in the 2022 midterms helped rationalize his decision to run for reelection, and about how quickly the wheels fell off the wagon once Biden needed to step up his pace of activity for the 2024 campaign.

The book also casts Mike Donilon as the prime villain, a point I want to return to.

But one part of the book is really not like the others. Michael Bennet recounts seeing Biden flub the name of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas at an immigration debate, and he reflects that maybe Biden’s age explains why the administration’s actual immigration policy is so muddled and murky. Bennet decides that the problem is that the Democratic Party is in a state of disagreement about what to do here, and that without a full-time president, there just isn’t a clear choice or direction. This sounds plausible to me, and I’ve heard other members of Congress offer similar speculation.

Critically, though, Bennet by his own admission is just spitballing. And the book does not answer the question of whether Bennet is right. You can tell in Tapper’s interview with Ezra Klein that Tapper thinks Bennet is right. I also think Bennet is right. People ask me sometimes what I think about things, and that is what I think. But I don’t really know, and I can’t prove it. Not just because I haven’t reported out an original scoop (I don’t do much of that), but because nobody has.

And that is the central enigma of the Biden administration: What was going on as they made policy decisions? The Bush, Obama, and First Trump administrations all generated plentiful tick-tock reporting on what happened at various key moments. With Biden, we never really got that. And there’s so much we still don’t know.

“The Politburo”

Tapper and Thompson describe decisions in the Biden White House as dominated by a small group of senior advisors — Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Ron Klain, Bruce Reed, and Anthony Bernal (Jill Biden’s chief of staff) — that they dub The Politburo. Or, rather, they say that this inner circle group was called The Politburo inside the administration. This may be true, though I always heard it described as “the inner circle,” and sometimes Anita Dunn and/or Annie Tomasini were also regarded as members of the inner circle.

Regardless, the thing that even in retrospect I find puzzling is that with the exception of Bernal, who many people dislike, these are pretty seasoned Democratic Party operatives.

And they are very decidedly from the moderate wing of the party.