- Hello, and thank you for joining us.

I'm Mark Baumgarten managing editor for Crosscut and your host for this, the inaugural edition of our at large series, where we talk about the biggest issues with the journalists that know them best tonight that journalist is Evan Osnos.

And the issue is the Biden presidency.

A couple of quick notes before we begin there'll be an audience Q and A at the end of the event you can submit a question in the chat that you'll see on the right-hand side of your screen.

Also, before we get going, I'd like to say thank you to BECU for sponsoring this series, events such as these are not possible without the support of our sponsors so thank you.

Okay, now I would like to welcome Evan Osnos.

Evan is a staff writer at the New Yorker a contributor to CNN, a fellow at the Brookings Institute and the author of, "Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now" which I should note came out before the election in this book, Evan tells us about president Biden's personal and political life in an effort to understand the man, he details the obstacles he's overcome and the tragedies he's endured.

But what I found most compelling is the attention that Evan paid to the last decade or so of Biden's political life.

In Evans telling we see a man in the white house, a vice-president being forged by the forces of history forming a kind of theory of the presidency being prepared for a role that it appeared he would never realize.

Then he did realize that role.

And now he's at the outset of an unprecedented presidency where the pressures are unlike those that any president in our lifetime has known.

And we are so fortunate to have Evan with us to talk about what kind of a presidency that might be.

Evan, thank you so much for joining us.

- My pleasure, Mark, great to be with you.

Thanks everybody for tuning in.

- So I'm coming at you from the KCTS 9 studios in Seattle.

You are at your home in Washington DC.

I wanted to just open with a question about what life has been like for you, everyday life in these last three weeks.

When we have seen in your hometown now, an insurrection, an impeachment and an inauguration.

And I was wondering if you could just share with us what that experience has been like.

- I mean, utterly surreal, let's be honest.

I mean, completely, completely bizarre.

Any one of these events, I mean, set aside the inauguration which is sort of the stock and trade of Washington, that is that's like Thanksgiving dinner here we know how to do that but the other things are the kinds of events that are you're supposed to be able to look back on once or twice in a career.

And they're supposed to be these, I mean an impeachment is supposed to be a moment of sort of acute reflection and meditation on the nature of the Republic and how did we get to this?

And instead it sort of passed like that, it was like Wednesday before noon.

And then of course we had the insurrection, which was depressing I mean, that's, I was there on the Capitol, I went over to cover it.

And, I will say though that the, it was really quite it was alarming for some obvious reasons.

I mean, the sort of, I've been a foreign correspondent a lot in my career and I've been in those kinds of environments and sort of feel like I understand the rhythms of a riot and to have it here a couple miles from my house where my wife and kids are was disorienting.

But honestly, the thing that I think was, or disorienting the part that really felt more that felt like we're at the beginning of something not the end of something was the fact that it was not the young guys breaking down windows, that I feel like I recognize you could find that almost in any place in any society at any time to some degree what really was alarming was the number of grandmothers.

I mean, literally grandmothers who were looking on approvingly and were part of this and they were participating in a delusion.

That's what I mean, they were participating in a fantasy, a kind of poisoned fantasy about overturning the election that made me realize just how deep the problem lies and how much it has really kind of gone down into the groundwater of our shared mental life as a political society and that's, I think what we're gonna be spending a lot of time dealing with over the course of the next few years is beginning to unpack how that happened.

And now what do we do about it?

- And yet there are so many other problems right now that the nation needs to deal with, right?

And so if we look at the last week, I mean it's only been a week since inauguration, which just feels crazy because 'cause so much has happened and we've seen the Biden administration really kick into high gear, lots of executive orders a lot of signaling different policies and plans that are being put into place.

But I'm wondering for you, what's the one thing in the last week that you've seen that's been the most revealing about what direction this presidency is going?

Something that showed us really, what kind of a leader we can expect, Joe Biden to be?

- The surprise thing for me, Mark was, I spent a fair amount of time kind of mapping out talking to people, talking to Biden and talking to people around them about what were they going to do right away and one thing I got a 100% wrong.

I had no idea that they were going to plan out an immigration bill as early as they did the idea that they were going to go in, as you've heard, they have this plan for a dramatic innovation reform which would create, sorry, an immigration reform which would create a pathway to citizenship would essentially do some of the things that had been off the table entirely for four years, obviously really all the way back to 2013 arguably, when you had the failure of the gang of eight bill the reason why I thought that's fascinating is a lot of people would say, that's politically radioactive.

Why are you going after an immigration bill now?

And also is that something that is really do you think you can find a bipartisan compromise on that?

And what's interesting is that it's for two reasons that they're doing this number one it's a kind of moral rebuttal to everything that we just went through for four years.

Very moment, Donald Trump descended that escalator his candidacy was rooted in a new kind of really explicit hostility to immigration.

And it carried him to the presidency to put it in the shortest terms possible.

And what Biden came in was and so this is a message partly to Americans and it's partly to the rest of the world to say, no I'm putting that in a box and we're declaring that a perversion of our basic idea.

And then there's the question the political question, which is okay, is that then does that mean it's just purely symbolic or do they actually think they can strike something on this?

And that's where I think it gets kind of interesting because doing, is he saying I get it that in Washington, over the last four years a bunch of Republicans have gravitated to this Trump has conception of immigration, but what I what my administration sees is that there is this other thing going on, which is that if you look at the S on the data about immigration that is actually an area where there is a huge amount of bipartisan agreement, that two thirds of Americans 64% believe that immigration makes this country stronger and that number has been going up for a generation.

So even though Donald Trump managed to exploit the short-term political energy of generating fear and hostility around immigration, it was in fact out of step with the long running trend in American politics and what Biden and his administration are betting is that that's actually where the river flows.

That's the main course of events.

And that surprise, I did not expect that they were going to try that.

- So this is interesting because it is sort of a return of normalcy is actually returning to the trajectory that was interrupted in 2013 then is what you're saying.

- Yeah, I think I look it failed in 2013 partly because there was this growing energy this kind of hostility towards immigration and the world is a different place today than it was in 2013, just demographically the country today is younger and more diverse than it was then.

And then of course, politically we've gone through we are scorched by the experience of the last four years where people essentially got to see, well, what happens if you take the hostility of immigration and you give it a political form?

Well, what happens is Donald Trump and everything that flowed from that.

And so I think the reason why I found it kind of an interesting early indicator of something that surprised me made me sort of, recalibrate some of my instruments was that I think like a lot of us, I see Joe Biden as cautious in his basic political orientation and that drives some people nuts.

I mean, it drives a lot of progressive crazy, and it has in used poorly it has the makings of a non-consequential presidency.

And I think what you're seeing is actually that there may be a little bit more kicking beneath the surface of the water than we have assumed at the outset.

- Well and that's interesting, I think that one of the things that's so remarkable about Joe Biden over the last year is just that he has made this interesting shift where and you note this in the book, usually you see democratic candidates go left for the primary and then towards the center for the general.

And actually we've seen Joe Biden while we saw Joe Biden do the exact opposite, where as the campaign wore on he became more and more of a progressive figure, or at least saying things that were in line with progressive thought and so you, at the beginning of his Cassie he assured voters that nothing would fundamentally change, right?

That's the correct quote and then a year later, he was saying the exact opposite that America is due for and again, this is a direct quote, "Some revolutionary evolutionary change."

And now, I mean, it's not just in immigration, you're also seeing, this big major spending to fight the pandemic and its economic fallout.

You're seeing today, he's spent signing executive orders to address racial inequity.

You've witnessed this shift firsthand, right?

You've been interviewing and reporting on this man for the last decade in the last year.

You've seen him really transform and I'm wondering if it was surprising to you what you've seen in the last year and seeing it come to fruition now or appear to be going that direction.

- Well, I think what's interesting about it is, is that it made people on both sides of the political spectrum really suspicious of him because you had progressives who said wait a second, you started this campaign saying nothing will fundamentally change.

And in fact, you remember, they made pretty good fun of it.

At the time, there were people made up posters like in the style of Obama's hope poster that said nothing will fundamentally change.

And then you fast forward a year and he says that America needs transformative institutional change.

And so that everybody's head exploded 'cause they're like, well, which is it?

And I had a really interesting conversation with president Obama for the book about this actually about really about their relationship and about how he thinks of Biden's politics.

But one of the questions I said was how do you square these two things?

And what president Obama said was the honest answer is, "Joe Biden hasn't changed but the circumstances have changed so profoundly" that anybody who is as alert to politics as he is sensed that this is actually a moment in which incremental centrism was not up to the task.

It was be a failure of a presidency.

And that's why he recognized that there had to be fundamental change, meaning that the COVID epidemic and the movement for racial justice had a way of crystallizing these underlying facts, which had been very clear to some people but not clear to everyone, it was this, as we know now, I think a kind of dramatic exhibition of the inequities in American life.

The fact that the essential workers who were needed to be able to get through the pandemic were in fact, some of the people who are sort of the least respected in the economic system.

And so on that all of those facts which were the underlying reality of American politics were suddenly inescapably clear and in fact, what Biden sense, Biden has a kind of mind-meld with the cautious voter and what he sensed was that, in a moment of crisis like that when the United States was had just more or less been kicked in the face by reality that people were prepared to acknowledge the need for real change that something had to change.

Now, then it gets into the interesting hard political questions of, okay, how far do we go?

And on that's actually an area where I think, Biden's conception of transformative institutional change will not always match up, in fact, we'll probably not with what AOC thinks that means what Bernie Sanders thinks that means.

But as Bernie said, and this is, I think like one of the most important sentences of American politics over the last couple of years, Bernie said, "Look the reason why I coalesced around Joe Biden is not because I agree with him on everything.

In fact, I have deep disagreements with him, but I agreed but I know is that he is gonna listen to me, he's gonna like he's going to at least give me the serious respect of a real consideration of my ideas.

And that was one of the sort of turns out to be.

I think one of the little critical pieces of politics is the degree to which it matters if somebody is willing to hear you out in a serious way not lip service, but actually like hear you out.

- So that's really the conversation that Joe Biden's having with the left, but there's also a conversation with the other side of the aisle and this is something that I really wanted to dig into with you.

When you wrote about the inauguration for the New Yorker, you really keyed in on an aspect of that speech that president Biden gave that a lot of people have focused on in the days since and that is unity.

You quote the president saying without unity there is no peace only bitterness in theory, no progress only exhausting outrage, no nation, only a state of chaos.

So rhetoric around unity, especially at inaugural addresses is nothing new, but the nature of our division right now is so different from the divide that say president Obama spoke about so often, right?

What we've seen in Charlottesville in 2017, which it was the event that really catalyzed the Biden candidacy and then earlier this month during the insurrection is so much more troubling than anything that we've seen before.

It's rooted in white supremacy, it's anti-democratic and violent, Biden acknowledged all of this, of course.

And he's since ordered a threat assessment of violent domestic extremists, but it's complicated, right?

Those extremists do appear to have a political home in the Republican party.

And so how can this president achieve unity across the aisle while also addressing this element of his opposition?

- Well it's worth reminding ourselves that unity just announced isn't worth much.

If you go back to 1861, Abraham Lincoln, stood on the steps of the Capitol back then they used to do the inauguration on the other side of the building on the East steps.

And I have to tell you, I thought of this when I was there on January 6th, when it was being overrun.

I mean, I'm seeing guys with Confederate flags standing on the East steps of the Capitol, where Abraham Lincoln stood for his inauguration and that year, what did he say?

He appealed to people he said, we are not enemies.

He appealed to what he called the mystic chords of memory.

These, this kind of, he was appealing.

This imagined sense that we are a nation that can transcend these boundaries.

And six weeks later, the United States was at war.

So there's something right I found very kind of in its own way, sort of haunting about Biden's appeals to unity, because it is only as strong as people are willing to make it.

And the moment it feels very, very thin but why does it matter?

I happen to think it matters a huge amount.

I think it matters a huge amount is if we've learned anything over the last four years it's that the words of a president have a way of setting the moral tale temperature of the country.

And even an inarticulate president like the one who just left office who had a way of just pulling people, over time gradually in a direction.

And those people didn't, they couldn't have been pulled if they didn't want already go.

But what he did, in his sort of strange sensibility, Trump recognized that there was this possibility out there that people want it to be angry.

They want it to be disunified this.

They wanted a sense of disillusion in their lives and he pulled them and in the same way Biden is saying in his own kind of, let's face it sort of unglamorous way.

No, we're actually going to pull you the other direction and he said this thing to me over the summer it was in an interview at his house when he said that he had learned a lesson as a result of the Trump presidency.

And what he said was I always thought that the country was moving in this kind of general direction towards justice the arc of the moral universe was bending ultimately in the direction that we all thought it was and he said, and what I realized if I'm being honest with myself was that I was wrong.

He had said, look I grew up in segregated Wilmington.

I ended up becoming the vice president of the first African-American president.

I thought, clearly things are moving in the right direction.

And then Donald Trump happened and he said and I realized that you can't extinguish hate.

And just pretend that you vanquished it that what'll happen is it just kind of goes under the rocks.

And it waits for a president to come along and give it oxygen.

And then it comes roaring back out and in that sense, he said, a president and in his words, he said, even a bad president can make the markets rise, make them fall.

He can take you to war and he can give hate oxygen.

And for that reason, on the flip side a president who is as he put it, my whole soul is in the idea that unity is possible.

And for me, I have to, I'll tell you the words that I came out of that in with kind of sustained by was a very simple idea, which is, he said, "Don't tell me that change is impossible."

And I think that is actually sort of a big idea because part of our exhaustion at the moment, part of our I think for people of a certain political persuasion, part of the sense of bleakness over the last few years has been this feeling that we're locked in this paralysis.

It's like Congress can't do anything.

The presidency is this sort of defunct, moral farce.

So what are we doing here?

And what he's saying is don't tell me that we're stuck.

And in fact, that that is the course of history.

It does tell you that things get unstuck and Barack Obama, after all I think all of us have heard him say a version of this over the last few years, but one of the things he had to learn in the presidency was that history, as he puts, it will Zig and zag and there will be moments where it goes forward and it goes back but it you have to have the basic belief that it is a work in progress.

And that I found I've found that to be ultimately kind of a humble conclusion.

And I think humility is pretty much what's required at the moment in American politics.

- So this is really what you're seeing is an argument that words matter, right?

The rhetoric actually has its own political power.

and I think that the big question is, Joe Biden seems to be someone who's pretty confident that he can change the chemistry within our national politics and changing the way that Americans feel is very different from changing the way that Congress works or doesn't work.

And I wanted to actually bring up a quote from the book where you're actually talking to president Obama about his administration.

And he says, "if you ask Joe and I, what regrets we might have or what lessons we learned from my administration, it's not that we were insufficiently bold in what we proposed it's that we continue to believe in the capacity of Republicans in Congress to play by the rules and to be willing to negotiate and compromise."

And I guess I'm just curious if you feel like Joe Biden learned that lesson as well, or is that just the lesson that Obama is hoping the Joe Biden won.

- That's a really interesting question, Mark.

I actually think, you're onto something there partly because I got the sense when I was talking to Obama about Biden, Obama doesn't give very many interviews and he knew what he was doing, we're, it was a for a long piece in the New Yorker and in effect this is a way for him to speak to Biden too to say in no uncertain terms, don't allow yourself to be captive to the memory of what the Senate once was and what Congress once was.

And I think there is in a lot of moments actually in that interview with president Obama, he was in effect communicating to Biden a couple of other points well one of the things he said was, "It has been painful for Joe to part, with the memory of when the Congress was what it was when he joined."

And I think if you were going to identify the clearest point of disagreement between the two of them it's over exactly where you were getting at, which is these kinds of democratic innovations which a lot of people feel are the only path forward.

If you're going to get the Congress moving again you have to get rid of the filibuster.

You have to do things like expand the franchise make sure that there's voting on a national holiday, things like that revive the Voting Rights Act all of these kinds of steps and Biden if I'm being honest about it is not there yet.

And I think he probably in the end, I think he probably look predictions are cheap, so I'll make one, but I think he'll probably end up getting rid of the filibuster, but he doesn't want to.

And he's gonna come to it with, I think sort of in a mode of grief rather than of joy 'cause he really does see it as a step down in the functioning of American deliberation.

But one thing that I think is important, Mark is, look, he's probably a one-term president.

We don't know that for sure, it's not.

And I, and I mean that seriously, like he has not actually decided.

- Right.

- But that means that his bid for history is right now he is not a guy who spent 50 years wanting to be president so that he could have a kind of, nah, we got stymied by the Republicans kind of presidency.

And if it comes to it, for my money if I'm looking for somebody who's going to get rid of, make sort of kick through some of the crust on the surface of democracy, it might be somebody who's at the end of their career who has already run for all the offices he ever wants to run for and is and cares most of all for the fact that history will regard them as somebody who contributed to small deed democracy, so that's my plan.

- Well, I mean, so there, so if he only has four years and there's a tremendous amount of work that he wants to do he may be only has two years, right?

I mean, we're looking at slim, slim majorities in both houses of Congress and then there is this other issue which is one of accountability for the previous four years, where you entertain the idea of having a COVID-19 commission in your book and gave some space to that since the books come out there also has been an insurrection.

So there have been calls for some accountability there, so you can understand Biden maybe like not wanting to get mired in that, in those issues, because just wants to look forward.

But I get the sense that the lessons of the Obama presidency are that like you need to deal with with what you inherit.

You can't just look past it.

And I just wonder if you have a read on how you think Biden is going to deal with these calls for accountability when it comes to the Trump presidency.

- Well, he's in a very tough spot, I mean as you describe it I think really correctly, on the one hand he wants to be able to focus on the a hundred days.

He wants to start passing legislation.

He wants to get all of his nominees approved and so on.

But if there is one lesson from his time in the white house with Barack Obama, it's do not allow people to skate because if you let them skate, particularly for instance after the financial crisis, they'll go back to doing exactly what it was that they did in the first place and he knows that.

And more importantly, perhaps the people around him know it, you can't we sometimes will talk about it as Biden Biden.

It's also this team of Ron Klain, I mean we'll just leave it right there for one day.

I mean, Ron Klain, who is really arguably along with Kamala Harris, the other most important person in this white house they are all very mindful of not only the you could all the moral hazard problem of not holding enough people accountable at wall street, after the financial crisis, but also the political problem.

It disenchanted a lot of Democrats who then wanted to stay home were not enthusiastic about the party.

They felt like it had kind of sold them out.

So he's mindful of that, what he's trying to do.

And this is where I think it took a whole another, we'll need a whole another hour someday to talk about this.

But separating accountability from vengeance is actually there's a whole literature surrounding it.

I mean, there's actually like really interesting fill out.

There's a whole philosophical school around the idea that it's possible to separate the doer from the deed.

And to say, what I'm trying to do is punish Donald Trump but I'm not trying to punish all of these Americans who put their lot in with them.

And that is a subtle, that's a subtle bit of business.

And I think in functional terms, Mark, I mean to be really concrete about it, Biden believes there are we have institutions that are pretty good at the business of crime and punishment and with presidents that's what the impeachment process is designed for so it's possible that the DOJ will end up being the ones responsible, but in his view it should be Congress deals with his presidency.

And then you've got at least two jurisdictions in Manhattan in New York state that are already looking into his businesses, let's let them do their work.

And I think any honest accounting of the future of Donald Trump as private citizen involves him being in and out of a courtroom a fair amount over the course of his life.

I think that's probably likely, and I'm not as inclined to see him as a potent political threat in 2024.

I think Donald Trump will be surprised how fast the air exits the balloon.

- So let's talk about these two men a little bit.

I don't want to get into comparisons too much.

We're only a week into the new presidency but one thing that I wanted to just hear you talk about a little bit and you talk about it in your book, it really is a, it's kind of a sub theme that runs throughout is that of Joe Biden's emotional presence.

And we're exiting a presidency that was driven by a kind of masculinity that some might call toxic.

- I think the two of us can call it toxic.

I'm willing to on, I think that's a fair description.

- So Biden has a very different relationship with masculine relationship with masculinity.

It's kind of a confusing relationship sometimes he's doing pushups and threatening to beat people up.

And then the next minute he's openly, he's openly crying.

He kisses his sons.

He is a very emotionally available person, it seems like.

And not only is that counter to what we've seen from president Trump.

It really is something that I don't know if we've seen in the white house at all.

I mean, the only comparison I can think of is the contrast that was created when you saw the Obama's as this sort of like very loving couple in the white house.

And that kind of changed the sort of the environment around the presidency in those terms, but how is Joe Biden's approach to emotional life going to shape this present presidency and impact the country do you think?

- I think that's such an interesting question, Mark.

I find this sort of, I think that the we don't talk enough actually about the, some of the kind of very sort of animalistic elements of the presidency like the physicality and the emotional energy that they give off.

Very small things, I mean, just take, for example anybody who watched Joe Biden and his wife walking in towards the white house and sort of just even the small stuff like the distance or lack thereof between them the way that they look at each other, or don't look at each other, the kind of unspoken newness of it you see anybody who has any experience of marriage will look at that and say, "okay, that's a real marriage."

And those are people who have probably been through hell.

And we happen to know that they've been through hell.

I mean, we just, we know that as a factual matter but you could read it even if you don't speak English, you could see that and I had a fascinating, honestly, one of the most interesting interviews I had about Biden was with Stephen Colbert and Colbert and Biden have this unusual relationship because Colbert has some people know he lost his father and in a plane crash when he was a kid and his brother, I think to and they're also both Catholics and they're also both people who were their emotional lives kind of visibly but they didn't always know each other.

And when they met for the first time, they was it was after Beau Biden died in 2015 and Biden was making one of his first steps back out into public I think people might remember when he was on that show.

It was kind of an unusual appearance on a late night show is unusually sorrowful, but they met backstage beforehand.

Biden had said to Colbert people I wanna meet him beforehand, I want to talk to them.

And they met and I asked Colbert, I said, what was that?

What did you talk about?

And Colbert said, it was honestly it was one of the most, this is his term, he said it was one of the most effecting conversations I've ever had because we'd both been through this thing this horrible thing, the worst thing.

And we talked about our mothers and we talked about the rosary and we talked about grief.

And he said, the thing that you don't understand unless you are a grieving person.

I mean, a person who's been through something like that is the grief is this strange force in public life that people are afraid of it, they don't want to talk about it, they don't want to go near it.

And if they know you're grieving they'll kind of give you, give you a wide berth it's like, it's radioactive is what he said it's like, it's contagious.

And he said, Biden, doesn't allow that he forces the grief out in front of you.

And he forces people to contend with it.

He says like, no, no this is part of life.

And I think, actually it was Colbert who used the term.

He said, the thing about Biden that I find interesting is he's like here's a guy born in 1942.

He's out the push-ups and the Corvette and the whole bit.

And yet he's like the opposite.

He doesn't have the toxic masculinity gene.

It's like, he had it at one point perhaps but it's kind of been sort of kind of beaten out of him by the blunt force of life and I think the awareness, if you were really going to distill the difference of life experience between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Donald Trump has lived a life of total artificial unimpeded pleasure.

I mean, he was born into a fortune and he had the pleasure of pretending he wasn't.

And then he was rewarded from one failure to the next, each one of them this kind of holiday from accountability, right?

That is the ultimate toxic masculine experience.

And the result is the man that we all saw for four years and Biden as this other person, he screwed up and he had to drop out of the 87, 88 presidential race because he plagiarized, he then made mistakes that we can go through each one and he also suffered along the way.

And it's the combination of those things that kind of robbed him of the luxury of being a jerk.

- All right, so we are nearing the end of the conversation.

I just want to remind the viewers that if you want to ask a question, pop it into that chat box and we'll be doing the Q and A in five minutes.

I wanted to end this portion of the conversation Evan talking about relationships, Biden is big on relationships, I mean, it's very very clear in your book, excuse me.

And I wanted to ask about three people and I'm hoping that you can keep it short with each one.

But I think that these are three very very important relationships to this presidency.

So let's start off with what will Barack Obama's role in this presidency be?

I'll give you a minute and a half for each one of them.

- Well those two, have they have an unusual relationship because as somebody said to me, at one point, he worked with both of them.

And he said, the reason it worked is because each one thought he was the mentor to the other.

And there's some real truth to that that each one thought he's pretty good at politics.

And they actually discovered that it was sort of only in combination that they were at their strongest.

I think Obama is going to be permanently available and I bet you he'll play more.

I know they, they talked a lot during the campaign but they didn't advertise that partly because they didn't want to sustain the idea that Biden president Biden presidency would be kind of Obama 2.0.

So I think you could describe Obama as being he'll be a sort of Consigliere who can be just off screen.

But one thing that I wouldn't underestimate is that there are, these are both very competitive and quite sort of prideful men.

And I don't think I put it in the book, but I if I remember this story correctly the they right after Biden, right after Obama became president, he invited Biden to play golf with him and they went off, they played golf and Biden won and then he was never invited back to play golf with him again.

Now I think that story, maybe a little out of date I suspect they may have played again if that's somebody else will know the answer but that gives you a little flavor.

You don't get to where they are by being shy and retiring.

- Yeah, all right, next one.

Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.

- Well, I will like to announce with great pleasure that he is only the minority leader of the Senate.

As of now, other than the majority leader.

Look, they, they do know each other for they go back a very long way.

Mitch McConnell was in fact, the only Republican Senator who attended Beau Biden's funeral in 2015 which is a remarkable fact, if you really think about it.

And yet they also are really far apart on some core issues.

Number one, the fact that Mitch McConnell's overwhelming interest on any given day is what is going to help me, Mitch McConnell and the Republican caucus succeed in Senate and Biden has very little interest very little overlapping interest there.

I think they are going to be fiercely at odds on, on matters of substance.

And I also think that that baseline level of communication is really important and it, you have to listen in a sense what I'm not saying that it means that suddenly McConnell's going to become, a real friendly promoter of democratic interests.

He won't ever, but it means that he will at least they will be able to talk to each other without some of the static that got between McConnell and Obama.

Somebody said something really interesting to me which I think is true.

Somebody who works very closely with Biden, which is and Obama that even to the end even after Obama had been president of the United States and a United States, Senator he still more or less looked at politics as kind of a grubby business.

I mean, he's like the kind of people that are grabbed that are attracted to that are not great and Biden doesn't feel that way.

Biden is it sort of looks across at Mitch McConnell.

And even though a lot of people find him odious he looks at Mitch McConnell and he's like, not out but he's doing his job.

So I'm going to try to figure out now how I can make my job fit with his job and see if we can actually do something productive.

- All right, the final one is actually also going to be our first reader question.

So we had readers send in questions in advance and Cynthia Wheaton asked how close of a collaboration seems to be happening between president Biden and Kamala Harris?

Does she have a real effect on his thoughts and plans and then Cynthia adds for good measure that she would rather have Kamala as president.

- Fair enough, I think probably there are a fair number of people out there who would feel that way and you got the next best thing which is that she is vice-president, look it is a real vice presidency.

And I think it's important to remember that like part of the reason why it's a real vice presidency is the Biden glories in having figured out how to make the vice presidency matter.

And what he discovered was as he put it to me, it is only what the president's he wants it to be.

If he wants you to be Nelson Rockefeller cutting ribbons, then you can do that it's meaningless, but that's not what he wants and what he needs desperately from Kamala Harris is an understanding of what it feels like to be anybody in America who doesn't look like Joe Biden.

And that's really important.

I mean, Biden in his own way is kind of, we sometimes he doesn't look like the most self-aware guy but he has a real sense of history.

And he understands that the country every minute of every day is becoming more diverse.

It's becoming younger.

I mean, I sometimes remind myself of one key fact which is the median age in America right now is 38 years old, it's not 78, it's even I mean the average Senator is 68 years old and Kamala Harris helped him understand what that feels like, what are the interests, the concerns, the anxieties and he needs that in order to succeed.

- All right, so we're moving into more audience questions here, this one's interesting.

'Cause I think that it's in the news.

It's not actually about Joe Biden, but I want to get your take on it.

There's been talk of certain Pete, there's been talk from certain people of some Republicans breaking off and starting a third party.

I believe that Trump poured some cold water on this idea recently, but do you think that this will happen or that has any traction?

What's your read on this?

This is from Mar S. - Well, I will tell you there's you hear talk about it from various parts.

There are parts of the Republican party that, there's the far right end, which might want to peel off and become a kind of Trumpist Patriots party or something.

And then there's something more like a centrist Republican party a kind of Romney wing.

And I will tell you, I think, I don't think any of them will formally compose a new party, I think and this is a, this that's not a healthy thing.

I think actually it is an unhealthy fact of American politics that we've created these institutional barriers that prevent the natural lifecycle of parties, parties are supposed to thrive and they're supposed to die, that's how it's supposed to work.

But one of my core frustrations with politics it's actually like one of the things I'm writing about in my next book is this idea that we become it's we're sclerotic in ways we don't fully appreciate it.

Like we used to have a constitutional amendment on average about once a decade for the first couple of hundred years.

And we stopped, we haven't had a meaningful congressional constitutional amendment since before 1972 the last one we had was about the pay for members of Congress.

So our whole system has become kind of trapped in Amber.

And part of that is the way that the parties have become these permanent institutions and that's not healthy and you see a lot of the kind of toxicity set in it's like sepsis in a body and it shouldn't be the way it is.

So I think in answer to the question, I don't think you'll see a new party, but I think you should.

- All right, moving in another direction.

And this is something that I wanted to ask you about but a number of people want to know about how your reporting on China has impacted the way that you view Joe Biden.

And of course, you lived and reported in China for a while.

You wrote a book, I know that Joe Biden's nominee for secretary of state said that he believed that Trump was right to take on China but that he did it in the wrong way.

How do you think that Joe Biden will take on China?

I think it's a, this is an interesting case in which there are elements of the Trump policy that even though Biden and his foreign policy team, they think that they were these were misconceived ideas from Trump it was more of an attitude than it was a policy.

It was a, just a sort of, general posture of confrontation, but there was no meat behind it.

They didn't have really, they didn't do the hard thinking and they didn't come up with actually substantive ways of building relationships in the region to make these things happen.

But even though that's the case, they will hold on to some elements of it because if it's useful.

So for instance, they're not going to relieve tariffs on Chinese goods overnight, they're gonna hold onto these as long as they need to and then sort of peel them back individually and return for concessions from China.

But I think the core difference and really the sort of most meaningful long running difference is that as we know that one of the things that Trump administration did was it had this fantasy, that it could go out and do these things by itself, and that it could waige trade Wars with Canada and Mexico and then also somehow appeal to them in a concert of powers to go against China and that never worked.

And so what you're likely to see is that Biden really does believe that the United States is facing a fundamental strategic competition with China, which is very different than what he thought as recently as five years ago, when he thought it was fundamentally cooperative.

But his belief is that the way that you do it is by having it essentially be all of the United States allies coordinating to check China's behavior rather than allowing China to sort of make one-on-one deals.

So look, I think Mark, 10 years from now, 20 years from now you and I will probably be looking back on this period.

And it may be that the Biden presidency is less important than this period in US China relations.

That's sort of how big, a fundamental it's like a kind of political climate change that's happening in the world is organized.

And so I think the way that this administration deals with China is probably going to turn out to be one of the most important things they contend with.

- Interesting, we've got another question from Sadat Felder and this is another thing, I'm glad we're able to get to it.

He says I'm African-American.

And I think that a way to heal from our past would be to create a Memorial to slavery.

What is your opinion on that idea?

And I'd like to use that as a way to talk about how you believe Biden is going to approach the issues of reconciling with America's past and also current inequities, which we see a lot of egos being signed today on, but what's your read on what his approach to this will be?

- That's a really interesting question.

I would say, I think we are sort of as a culture we're moving towards a period of a much more explicit and overt awareness of the ways in which the history of slavery informs us, informs the culture we live in today.

And that it is this is not obviously some piece of history that we closed the door on and can walk away from that any one of us myself included is shaped by the advantages or disadvantages that grew out in some form from slavery.

I was obviously, by virtue of the fact that I'm a white male, I am on the, I've had privileges that I wouldn't have if I was born into other circumstances.

I think people are kind of coming to terms with that, Biden I think what's interesting about Biden is that he has a view that he has a view, that history is a part of who we are and he talks about the fact that you need to acknowledge history.

You need to centrally mourn in order to know yourself but I don't know if I actually couldn't tell you, if I think he was going to how far he will go down the path, for instance, like would he want a truth and reconciliation commission?

I don't think so actually I think that's probably would clash with his perception of the path to unity.

And at the same time, he is a person who is, he does sort of like to talk about the sweep of American history.

As I mentioned earlier, he really does believe that you have to acknowledge the crimes of the past in order to understand the direction we're traveling he hopes and what it requires, so what I would expect is that know part of his tapping Kamala Harris is a reflection of his belief that we need to reflect in our day-to-day politics the full diversity of experience.

I think that's gonna be a part of his legacy but I couldn't tell you about whether he would want to have a Memorial to slavery or not.

It's a really interesting question.

- All right, so we've got one more question and it's actually I'm going to ask you the question that you started to answer just then this comes from Alessandra and she asks, what will Biden's legacy be, immigration, environment or fighting COVID?

And we haven't even talked and talked about environment or climate, which is a major piece of what Joe Biden is doing right now, but what will the president's legacy be do you think?

- Well, I think, look in the short term he has to contend with what is the most spectacular failure of governance in modern American history.

The inability to deal with the COVID pandemic which for all of Donald Trump's incompetence that will be the one that is I think perhaps most indelible on his record, the death of more Americans now than died in world war II, in peace time here now in the United States.

So that's what Biden has to deal with first of all.

But my own view is that actually in the grand sweep of things, his ability or inability to make a real break in America's approach to climate change is the fact of our time, I mean, that is the thing that will determine whether he is remembered as a president who was up to the moment and who recognized what he says, which is that I am the person as he remembered he called himself a transition president meaning that he wanted to open the doors to future generations of leadership and anybody who's paying attention knows that future generations of leadership are gonna be overwhelmingly beset by the realities of climate change and the challenges that will pose to us economically, politically not to mention ecologically.

And just as a sheer fact of how we live, migration patterns within the country.

I mean, it is really like we are right now in this period this kind of strange interregnum before the full brunt of reality sets in.

And I think I have been surprised and encouraged to be honest, that Joe Biden in his eighth decade really does seem to get the idea that climate change is a matter of defining historical importance and that if he fails that then he will have failed as a president.

But can I have one other thing Mark I think about legacy is if we've learned anything too, it's that the things that may define his legacy may not have even presented themselves yet.

And if we are in fact at the beginning of what I am afraid is a kind of long running period of deep stress on the American experiment something which may well run for another 25 years as a sort of essentially as kind of white majority America comes to terms with the idea that is becoming a more diverse place.

If that's in fact what Biden is presiding over then that might become his political legacy alongside the importance of climate change.

- All right, Evan, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us tonight, I really appreciate it.

You have such great perspective.

You're such a wonderful storyteller and reporter just really, really appreciate.

- Okay, my pleasure Mark, it was fun to be with you and I hope we can do it again in a little further down the Biden presidency.

- Sure that'd be great, so to our series sponsor, BECU thank you for making tonight's event possible and to everyone watching at home, thanks for joining us.

We hope to see you at future Crosscut events including the next edition of Northwest Newsmakers, on February 9th with Seattle school superintendent Denise Juno, you can learn more about what's coming up at crosscut.com/events.

All right, thanks again, Evan.

Thank you everybody and have a great night.