After Years in Government, Biden Has a New Perk:
Air Force One
On Friday, he flew home for the first time as
president. But it was not on the plane that has so delighted his predecessors.
Annie Karni
By Annie
Karni
Published
Feb. 5, 2021
Updated
Feb. 6, 2021, 12:24 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON
— President Biden has served in elected office for almost four decades. He has
interacted with nine presidents. He is accustomed to staff waiting on him,
traveling by motorcade, and knew his way around the Oval Office and the
mazelike layout of the West Wing from eight years as vice president.
“It feels
like I am going home,” he said on Inauguration Day, as he approached the White
House along the parade route.
But not all
of the accouterments of power are old hat for the country’s oldest president.
When he flies on Air Force One on Friday afternoon to go home to Wilmington,
Del., for the weekend, it will be his first flight aboard the presidential jet
in more than two decades, according to more than a half-dozen administration
officials and former Biden aides.
As
President Barack Obama’s vice president, Mr. Biden was prohibited from flying
on the Boeing VC-25 that is known as Air Force One. For security reasons, the
vice president and the president never fly together. Air Force Two, a Boeing
757, is a smaller, much more cramped and much more modest plane.
Despite his
decades in public office, the last trip aboard Air Force One that anyone in the
White House or Mr. Biden’s circle could recall him taking was in the summer of
2000. Back then, Mr. Biden traveled to Colombia as part of a delegation with
President Bill Clinton, helping unveil an emergency aid program to fight the
narcotics trade and prop up the country’s democracy. Late Friday night, a
former Clinton administration official recalled Mr. Biden also riding on Air
Force One during a 1997 trip to Bosnia.
That means
that Jill Biden, the first lady, who accompanied Mr. Obama to a community
college in Michigan aboard Air Force One in 2015, has been aboard more recently
than her husband. (At the time, Dr. Biden said she spent her time on the flight
grading papers.)
Mr. Biden
rode on Air Force One on Friday afternoon, but not the one that has so
delighted his predecessors. He jogged up the stairs of the Boeing 757-200,
which is a smaller, narrow-body jet used for smaller airports like the one Mr.
Biden was set to arrive at in Wilmington.
“It’s a
great plane,” he told reporters traveling with him. “It’s the same plane that
we had as vice president, only it’s much nicer.”
The trip
that has typically left the commander in chief, whoever he is, giddy and
gawking at his new perk will have to be postponed.
“When that
747 lands, it’s a sight to behold,” said John D. Podesta, a former White House
chief of staff to Mr. Clinton. “When the president walks down those steps, you
feel the power of that. He will feel the power of that. It’s a little different
from the 757.”
“This is a
very special plane,” he told reporters after taking them to his front cabin for
a rare peek en route to Philadelphia. He had been in office for only six days
when he showed off a navy blue Air Force One jacket. His press secretary at the
time, Sean Spicer, described him as “in awe of the splendor of this plane.”
In 2018,
Mr. Trump bragged that the plane, equipped to act as a mobile White House, had
“about 20 televisions.” Still, he had plans for a makeover for the plane, plans
that never came to fruition and that the Biden administration has made clear
could not be lower on its list of priorities.
Mr. Obama
appeared equally captivated by his new ride when he took his first flight in
the third week of his presidency, traveling a short distance to Williamsburg,
Va., to attend a retreat for House Democrats.
“What do
you think of this spiffy ride here? It’s not bad,” Mr. Obama said to reporters
sitting in the back of the plane. Like Mr. Trump, he also made a show of his
crew jacket, which had his name stitched on it.
Mr. Clinton
took his first flight 22 days after taking office in 1993. He flew to Detroit
for a nationally broadcast town hall event to lay the groundwork for the
economic policies he was set to unveil, while his staff made jokes about how
relieved he was to give up his rickety campaign plane, nicknamed “Air Elvis.”
President
George W. Bush’s first trip aboard Air Force One after moving into the White
House came less than a month into his presidency, when he visited military
families and troops at Fort Stewart, in Georgia, part of a slate of trips
intended to promote his national security policies.
White House
officials would not say when Mr. Biden would take his first domestic trip, but
said that a typical presidential travel schedule was on hold because of the
coronavirus pandemic. “Certainly, his preference would be to get on a plane and
fly around the country, but that’s not the step we’re planning currently,” the
White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said during a briefing last month.
Other
senior administration officials insisted that Mr. Biden was not grounded and
would travel domestically soon, pointing to the fact that he safely made two
trips to Georgia during the transition to campaign for Democratic Senate
candidates.
Presidential
travel is expensive and time-consuming, but it is also essential to the job,
former White House officials said.
“It’s
critical for people to feel the presence and be aware of the fact that the
president took the time to come to the place where they are,” Mr. Podesta said.
“One of the things that underlies the deep divisions in the country is people
feeling like, ‘You forgot about me.’ Showing up changes that dynamic.”
Mr. Podesta
said it would be critical for Mr. Biden to travel after addressing a joint
session of Congress this month, even if it meant taking on some health risks.
“He’s going to lay down a lot of ideas of what needs to get built and he’s got
to go to some places where those things will get built,” he said.
But given
the pandemic and the politically fragile moment the country is in, Michael
Beschloss, the presidential historian, said that staying in Washington more
often may work better for Mr. Biden.
“After John
Kennedy’s assassination, the country was so agitated that the new President,
Lyndon Johnson, made a commitment not to travel abroad for a period of time,”
he said. “Although for different reasons, Biden’s staying close to the White
House has reminded me of that. I believe that right now, seeing Biden in the
State Dining Room, announcing how he’s dealing with one supreme problem after
another, is more reassuring than it would be to see him on the road, in the
middle of a pandemic, trying to find a crowd to speak to.”
Mr. Biden,
however, may not agree once he has been on the plane.
Annie Karni
is a White House correspondent. She previously covered the White House and
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign for Politico, and covered local
news and politics in New York City for the New York Post and the New York Daily
News. @AnnieKarni
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