His three presidential campaigns across three separate decades tells you everything you need to know about Joe Biden’s sense of himself and his role in history. Beneath Biden’s folksy, “aw-shucks demeanor,” Osita Nwanevu writes in this month’s Books & the Arts, is an “ego bigger than his mouth.” Yet, with that said, when it comes to the White House the question of who is in charge is far from clear. “To the surprise of many, Biden and the Democrats in Washington have managed to pull some real and even transformative policy victories,” Nwanevu observes. “He signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the nation’s first major climate bill, into law. Together with the CHIPS and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Bidenomics—the White House’s label for its industrial programs—has reasserted the federal government’s role in driving economic investment….and Biden has also used the powers of his office to push a pro-labor, pro-competition agenda through the executive agencies.” But what emerges from the portrait of the Biden White House found in Franklin Foer’s The Last Politician is that these “successes have often been achieved in spite of an evidently fickle and mercurial temperament” by a team of technocrats scrambling to ensure that Biden keep the promises he made in 2020. All of which leaves us many of us worried about 2020: “Technocrats and expertise may have been able to put Bidenomics into action.… But they will not help him at the polls.” Read “Who Is In Charge in the Biden White House?”