It took about a day after Joe Biden was finally declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election for one particular story line to grate on me. I heard it everywhere, occasionally stated outright and sometimes just in the subtext of the TV chatter and op-eds: the commentariat seemed convinced that Biden would restore the Barack Obama years. Welcome to the third term!
It wasn’t just that I knew this was an incomplete—maybe outright inaccurate—way to look at the incoming Biden administration. I also knew that it wasn’t how Biden, or most of the people he worked with, saw their task ahead. The truth was significantly more complicated, both because of all that had changed during the Donald Trump years, and also because there had never been anything straightforward about the Obama-Biden relationship.
