For decades, weekly lunches between the American president and his vice president have piqued the interest of D.C. insiders. We take a look at this unique tradition.
For decades, weekly lunches between the American president and his vice president have piqued the interest of D.C. insiders. Today, we take a look at this unique tradition and examine what the most exclusive meal in D.C. tells us about the evolution of the vice presidency. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times White House reporter Noah Bierman
More reading:
It’s not just a meal: Inside the nation’s most secretive and exclusive power lunch
Opinion: Obama and Biden do lunch
Gorbachev, Reagan, Bush to Lunch
Gustavo: The American Vice President. The person a heartbeat away from becoming the leader of the free world.
Pence: I, Michael Richard Pence
Biden: Joseph R Biden Jr
Al Gore video: Albert gore Jr.
HW: George Herbert Walker, Bush.
Harris: Do you solemnly swear
Pence: But I will support and defend
HW: the constitution of the United States
Biden: So help me god.
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Gustavo: For most of its history, though, the role was considered a constitutional afterthought, a ceremonial job that didn't come along with much power or authority or much of anything really.
But in recent decades, any American who imagined a version of the vice presidency somewhere between Julia Louis Dreyfus’ character on the hit comedy Veep…
tape: Sue, Sue, Sue…. Did the president call? Nope.
Gustavo: Or the menace of Dick Cheney and Mike Pence.
tape: We will build that wall one way or another.
Gustavo: But despite the jokes and roasts, the role does have one interesting thing in common, at least over the past 40 years. A lunch,
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Gustavo: I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to the times daily news from the LA times. It's Thursday, June 30, 2022. Today what the most exclusive meal in DC tells us about the evolution of the vice presidency.
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Gustavo: Noah Bierman covers the white house of Washington DC for the LA times. Noah, welcome to the times.
Noah: Thanks Gustavo.
Gustavo: So what's the origin story behind what you call the most secretive and exclusive power lunch DC?
Noah: Well, it starts with Walter Mondale.
Walter Mondale: Jimmy Carter picked me as his running mate….and in 1976, I was elected vice-president.
Noah: You may not hear much about Walter Mondale these days, but if you are into vice-presidents, he is the gold standard. He's credited with creating the modern vice presidency. Basically turning it from a joke or a political deathbed into something that had some power and some relevance. And to get this. He basically starts with a lunch. I mean, it doesn't really start with a lunch. It starts with an 11-page document that he gave to Jimmy Carter saying, here's what I want to do as vice president. And as part of it, I want to go into all the meetings and I also want to meet with you one-on-one, once a week, just you and me. And that later becomes a lunch that other vice presidents adopt.
Gustavo: Walter Mondale of all people. So before that, vice-presidents were like, I don't know, walking around the white house doing nothing?
Noah: You know, they were going to funerals. They were often just sort of purposefully marginalized by the president. It was not a popular job to get. It was not really a job that people talked about much as any kind of political launching ground.
Gustavo: There's a famous quote that we couldn't print, but we could say in this here podcast, about the worth of the vice presidency. So if you could say it, that would be very funny.
Noah: Yes, it's often sanitized to a warm bucket of spit, but the original quote was a warm bucket of piss.
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Noah: That was John Nance Garner. Not very well-known except for that quote, which gives you an idea of how valuable the vice presidency was. But he served under FDR who, uh, was obviously a much more consequential president than his vice president was a vice president.
Gustavo: Ha. So Mondale, why did he want to reform the vice presidency to give that power? And Why did he think a lunch of all things would help them do that?
Noah: You know, he was a veteran of Washington. He had been a senator. And you know iif he was going to take this job, he was going to be working for somebody who had a lot less experience in Washington. Jimmy Carter had been a governor of Georgia and he had been a peanut farmer, but he had not been somebody who was schooled in the ways of Washington.
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Noah: So Mondale // wanted a relevant job, but he also felt he could be of service to the president by being somebody who could give him the straight dope. Presidents are almost often surrounded by people who don't want to tell them no. Don't want to disagree with them. And of course a one-on-one meeting helps because you don't have somebody else in the room, who's going to be leaking it, which is a big deal in Washington, as all of us who've ever read anything that happens in Washington knows. But also there are people who are trying to enhance their own power, advance, their own position, and those people wouldn't be in the room and they wouldn't try to read, okay, here's where the president's going. Here's where the vice-president is going. How do I position myself or my idea to fit within that framework? So you would get rid of a lot of the sort of second-tier ambitions by doing that.
Gustavo: And a meal is always of course, one of the great equalizers, especially a one-on-one meal.
Noah: Yeah, exactly. You know, we break bread for holidays. We break bread for business. It's an important ritual and it also took away some of the formality.
Gustavo: And the history that you offered is really interesting because, you know, after Jimmy Carter, of course you have Ronald Reagan, and his vice president was the first George W. Bush, George H.W Bush. What role did those lunches that they had played In solidifying their relationship because they were really bitter rivals in the 1980 presidential campaign.
Noah: Yeah. I really liked this story because again, George Bush had way more Washington experience than Reagan, who had obviously been governor of California and an actor and a well-known person. But George Bush was one of the most experienced vice presidents in the history of vice presidents. But he didn't have a good personal relationship with Reagan, they had been rivals in the primary. He famously described Reagan's whole economic // theory as voodoo economics. So he needed to resurrect his personal relationship. And one of the things he did was Reagan loved jokes. You have Bush, George H.W. Bush especially, who's the patrician new Englander, not a guy known for his great sense of humor. So he knew a writer with the Tonight Show, a guy named Ray Siller. So he would call him and ask for jokes. He'd call his brother and ask for jokes. He called his staff and ask for jokes. He just wanted to make sure he had something to warm up the present every time. And if it was a really good joke, the president might steal it and use it himself, which was fine with Bush because then he knew he was in his ear.
Gustavo: Did that camaraderie continue when Bush became president and his vice-president became a Dan Quayle?
Noah: Well, you know, we think of Dan Quayle as sort of a punching bag among modern vice presidents. He did not have a good reputation.
tape: Lay off quail: That's the message from the Dan coil fan club of Peoria, which wants TV personalities to stop making fun of the vice-president. The group has drafted letters and sent them to Jay Leno, Johnny Carson, pet St. Jack and David Letterman, asking them to find somebody else to pick on…
Noah: There are a lot of historians who feel he actually gets a bum rap, but he did have the lunch regardless of what you think about his clout. And the lunch was very important and they're actually interviews, he recorded. After the vice presidency, where he talked in detail about the lunch, uh, because one of the things he did to make sure he stayed relevant and in the loop was he would take calls and requests from people, either aides in the white house or politically important people. And he would be very transparent with the President. He'd say, you know, this is what this cabinet secretary asked me to bring up. He says he's having trouble with another cabinet secretary. I just wanted this to be on your radar. And that was a real key for him. according to his own account, of giving him an extra level of relevancy and administration, really, which he was not known for being a central player.
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Gustavo: So Noah, after Bush and Quayle, of course, came Clinton-Gore...
Tape: Tonight Bill Clinton. And I offer ourselves as a bridge to the future.
Gustavo: How did their relationship and those weekly lunches change from, you know, that first term to where the second term for Clinton involved, the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment hearing.
Noah: Yeah. You get a real window into why these lunches tell the story of the relationship and really the administration in a lot of ways, because they come in. As this dynamic duo gore was really picked specifically for marketing, not just as somebody traditionally who can pick up a certain political constituency, but who could really be a fellow southerner of the same generation who understood governing.
Tape: We have to move step-by-step toward Harry S Truman's goal of universal health care for all of our people.
Noah: And so in the first term he comes in and he's always got a weekly memo and he's the only vice-president. And I heard of who, who did this, his staff would give him a one page of bullet points. These are the things we want you to bring up with the president to make sure that you have his side. And that nobody in the west wing is going to interfere because that's a big issue for vice presidents. There's always somebody trying to take their oxygen. So he did that and he had this weekly lunch and he would jot little notes down, you know, president agrees or, president would like us to alter this or // that. And then he'd come back and his staff would parse it over and say, okay, here's our marching orders. And here's where we can tell people to shove off. Cause we're in charge of this aspect of policy. Clinton gets impeached and Gore and him have some distance with each other.
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Noah: According to at least one staffer who worked closely with gore, they didn't have the lunches often. Uh, they happened to have it on the day that he was impeached. But it wasn't the same regular weekly thing that had happened in the first term. Cause Gore's positioning himself to run for president. And he's worried that the impeachment will weigh on him.
Tape: A poll by the pew research center for the people and the press shows Gore support has slipped below 50%.
Noah: Which it ultimately does and hurt his political prospects.
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Gustavo: Dick Cheney.
ambi fade in
AP Cheney: The only option for our security and survival is to go on the offensive, face the threat directly, patiently and systematically until the enemy is destroyed.
Gustavo: We're talking about vice-presidents. Some are powerful. Some are not. Cheney, arguably the most powerful vice-president ever. Did he need to have lunch with W?
Noah: He did have the lunch, but we don't really need to parse his lunch to find his power. I mean, he was the architect basically of the war on terror, post-9/11, very controversial. He was // definitely a key advocate for the, invasions in the middle east. and the records show. That the number of meetings he was in with the president, it was something like 80% of all of the president's meetings. you know, they were even theories at the time, which were rebuffed, but theories that, you know, he was really the power center in the white house, more so than even the president. But we do know whether that is an exaggeration or not, that he was certainly // a power center // more than any other vice president.
Gustavo: How about Obama and then vice president Biden. How was their lunch?
Noah: You know, that's an interesting one because, in a lot of ways, Biden was very traditional in the modern vice-presidential sense and that he had a lot more Washington experience than the president. But he didn't have that much of a history of a relationship.
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Noah: And he wrote really quite poignantly about the lunch in a memoir that was mostly about his son Bo and his struggle with cancer that eventually took his life.
tape: Look, I miss him every day bow is, was my soul bow is my conscience.
Noah : And he talked about the fact that he would speak with the president in really candid and raw terms about what he was going through and that the president even // came to tears one time when he was telling him about some experimental treatment that his son was getting at MD Anderson. You know, of course they talked about the policy, but the bond that they built really did happen over lunch for those two.
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Gustavo: Wow. That seemed to be really personable and important in the relationship. But if Obama and Bidens get togethers, put t he VP lunch on another level of power. What about vice president Pence? How did his lunches with Trump go?
Noah: Trump, again, you want to go back to a lunch sort of defining certain aspects of the presidency. This is another great example. Because the lunch is traditionally just the president and the vice-president one-on-one. Well, Trump did not like to do anything one-on-one. People were coming and going off and in his west wing and the same thing happened with the lunch.
Trump: I turned on the TV, open the newspapers, and I see stories of chaos, chaos yet. It is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine tuned machine.
noah: People would come in and out to mention things. Trump famously liked that atmosphere. But for Pence, it made it a little bit of a struggle because he would come in with a mental list of talking points. And according to one of his former advisors, he just didn't always get through it; probably rarely got through it because there were so many tangential discussions that the president would have //. So the lunch did persist, but it was not probably, traditional the way that some of these other lunches went.
Gustavo: And, then, of course, we have the current Vice President…. Kamala Harris.
tape: Black Latino and indigenous people are suffering and dying disproportionately. And this is not a coincidence. It is the effect of structural racism…
Gustavo: Noah like Bush and Reagan, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, They endured their own beef during the primary campaign in 2020.
tape: Vice-president Biden. Do you agree today? Do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America?
Gustavo: And they didn't know each other really well until they both got into the white house. How is she using the lunch to build that relationship with now-President Biden?
Noah: // you know, from what I've heard from advisors,// it is the same kind of mix of personal and professional. They often will have a screensaver running while they're talking that will show pictures of the events. The two did // during the week. Sometimes they'll go outside in the courtyard and do a walk and talk rather than a formal sit-down lunch. // and you know, they will occasionally have advisors in to discuss politics, things like that. and they'll eat sandwiches or salad. It's a very informal thing. // Biden has talked about wanting vice president Harris to have the same advantages and the same type of role that he had when he was vice-president. And he's mentioned lunch as being a centerpiece of that relationship.
Gustavo: But you reported that she’s having fewer lunches than some of her predecessors.
Noah: Yeah. That was a big surprise to me.
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Noah: In the first year on average, she only had lunch every other week or so. And then this year in the first half of the year // she's only had about three lunches. // So they really dropped off and, you know, it's coincided with a lot more questions about ,// how much clout she really has. And, you know, the lunch is one data point. It's not everything,
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Noah: But the fact that they're not having lunch is not necessarily a great sign for her.
Gustavo: Yeah. You also had COVID though, the past couple of years. So you want to give Kamala some break. On the other hand, though, what are insiders saying that those lack of lunches means for her role and influence in the Biden White House?
Noah: Well, first of all, it's up to the president // he's the one who sets the lunch, he's got the power. // it shows that he's not necessarily following through, on some of his promises to her. Uh, you will hear people in her orbit, // especially say, well, you know, the lunches and everything. They spent a lot of time together in the situation room, discussing Ukraine, things like that. But he's the one who made the big deal of the lunch. He said, it's really important to have it. And it's important that, nothing get in the way except for an absolute emergency. So the fact that they haven't had it again, it sends a signal to the world. Whether or not she has that one-on-one access, whether it's consistent, whether it's something that you can depend on rock solid so that signal's not there. The signal is not there to the foreign leaders to insiders who are vying for clout, things like that.
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Noah: So it is an issue and we'll see, you know, it's early well it's we're not even halfway through the term yet. There's plenty of time to resurrect a lot of things. much less the sandwich menu.
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Gustavo: More after a quick break.
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Gustavo: So pivoting slightly towards Harris. We're heading into these midterms in 2022. What role is Harris going to play?
Noah: I think she's expected to play a pretty big role because this is where you need your high-level messengers and the Democrats are facing a true uphill battle in these midterms. So her people have said that they do want her on the road quite a bit, domesticly from now till November to be just pounding the pavement with Democrats’ case.
Gustavo: When you say a big roll, do you think it's going to be in fundraising; just showing up? Do You expect her to be appearing side-by-side with Biden at these uhh rallies?
Noah: The idea is to, you know, spread your forces, get as many people out there as you can. And these midterm elections are typically they're fought with each side's core voters. You want to get them out. So she's going to probably be more in blue areas and blue states. And places where they think she can be helpful. // her polling is poor and she's particularly polarizing among conservatives.// You know, she's not going to go necessarily to Mississippi to try to rally votes, um, or reliably Republican areas. But she might go to areas within Republican dominated states where Democrats have a shot at a congressional seat.
Tape: We know…what we have at stake and we know our power and that’s why we will vote every day.
Noah: That's my expectation based on, you know, my knowledge of, of the playing field and talking to her people and a lot of Democrats over the last few months.
Gustavo: So the question on everyone's mind after the midterms: Is Biden running for reelection in 2024. And if he doesn't run, Noah is Harris, is Kamala Harris going to be the fron runner on the democratic side?
Noah: That's a huge question dominating Kamala Harris discussions since before she was even sworn in as vice-president, //, Biden is the oldest president in history. I was just on a trip with him in Asia where he, he looked tired and // we all were tired cause it was Asia and it was a huge jet lag, but know, he looked tired and. // You talk to Democrats and you hear both things you hear. Oh, no, he'll definitely want to run again. Somebody who spent their whole life wanting to be president doesn't give up on it. But then you'll hear from others who think, well, maybe after the midterms, you know, he wants to delay any kind of sense of being a lame duck. So maybe he doesn't run. He is, at some point, gonna recognize his age and it will be hard. //Where do we come out of that? I don't know. But I do think that, unlike most presidents, there is a greater chance that he won't run. And then your second question: Is Kamala Harris the frontrunner? I think she's still in the top tier. I don't think she's the prohibitive front runner that she would have hoped that her supporters would have hoped when she took office. She has not been a popular across-the-board vice-president; she has not necessarily, uh, impressed democratic elites that she is this great politician they were hoping for. So she's going to have challenges as one person was telling me recently as sort of an insider, if she's got a few months to really show strength, to scare some people off. And that's going to be hard. If she doesn't in the next few months, really show that strength. The list of challenges is going to grow and the list of formidable challenges is going to grow.
Gustavo: And finally, back to the VP power lunch; if Harris isn't taking advantage of it, as much as her predecessors, // what's the future of this kinda hidden institution?
Noah: That's a good question. I think vice-presidents, if they have any leverage whatsoever, will insist on having this lunch. It's really valuable to them. And you know what, there's another piece of this, too. It's valuable for presidents. They don't have a lot of people that they can just talk to who, yes, they might have some second agenda, but it's not the same as staffers. // It's the one person who was on the ballot with them. //And so that gives them a kind of clout that even a chief of staff doesn't have, in some sense. Presidents like that ability to unload, // sometimes talk about, // what a tough week it's been, what the politics are, why they're scared of what's going to happen in the midterms, all those things that they may not want to voice in a larger meeting. I think it will stay with us. And I think that Biden especially after our story and a couple of others have pointed out that they quit having this lodge. I think him and the people around him it's in their interest, not just for him to have the lunch, but also to, you know, show people that they're working hard to empower and help the career of Kamala Harris.
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Gustavo: Maybe it's a matter of the menu, like soup and salad and sandwiches. That's just boring. You've got to get some tacos in there. I mean, Kamala is from California for crying out loud.
Noah: I think she needs to take them to California, go on, go on the late Johnathan Gold eating tour and then they'll be having lunch, not just once a week, but probably twice a day. Give given the food that he, he exposed some of us to.
Gustavo: That's, that's a great way to end this. Noah, thank you so much for this conversation.
Noah: Thanks. Great. Being on the show. I'm a huge fan.
Gustavo: Oh, gracias.
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Gustavo: And that's it for this episode of the times, daily news from the LA times.
So Maria Hendry and David Goleta were the heifers on this episode in our show is produced by Shannon Lynn. Ashley Brown and angel goddess. Our editorial assistants are Madeline, a Moto and Carlos our internist Ceria, Henry who just started, Hey, what's up. Welcome. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, mark Nitto, Mike Heflin.
Our editors can see more. Lynn, our executive producers are histamine. I can let on Shani Hilton and our theme music is by Andrew, Ethan. Like what you're listening to then make sure to follow the times on whatever platform you use. Don't make us to put your podcast. I'm going to stop Ariana. We'll be back tomorrow with all the news and this Mazda gracias.
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