Of all the standard Washington book genres, maybe none are as treacherous for a writer as the “first two years of the presidency” narrative. (Although that never stops editors from ordering them up.)

That’s because, for one thing, all the people you need to cooperate with such a project are in the epicenter of an unrelenting political storm. Securing their time is like trying to grab hold of the wing of an airplane mid-liftoff, and even when you succeed, you can pretty much assume that anything they tell you is being crafted with the next election in mind.

It’s also because those first two years of any president’s tenure — much of which is spent just figuring out who’s doing what inside the West Wing — usually bear little resemblance to the presidency that history will remember.

More than halfway through his lone term, for instance, George H.W. Bush looked like he might end up on Mount Rushmore, and we all know how that ended. After his first midterm election in 1994, Bill Clinton was seen as a colossal bust — the first Democrat in almost a half-century to fritter away both houses of Congress. There were myriad more turns to the story.

To undertake this type of chronicle in the case of the current administration — as Chris Whipple, an author and TV producer, has in The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House — is an especially tough assignment. Biden’s first two years, shadowed by persistent crises and his predecessor’s ongoing assault on reality, have yielded a confusing dissonance.

On the merits, by any objective measure, you’d have to say that Biden has authored a more successful opening chapter than any other modern president. He led the country out of the worst of the pandemic. His response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was remarkably skillful and balanced. He managed to pass several major spending bills despite the thinnest possible margins in Congress. America is rallying the international community, investing in silicon chips, building bridges, and charging stations.

The first Washington insider to hold the job in 30 years, Biden knows instinctively that, in any negotiation, you have to start the bidding audaciously high to end up where you really want to be. To the sanctimonious left, this always smacks of capitulation, but among actual dealmakers it’s known as “finding the ceiling,” and Biden has proved unusually adept at it.

And yet, Biden’s record has more often than not been eclipsed by the atmospherics of his presidency; if he was elected primarily on a promise to restore calm and normalcy, then he simply hasn’t delivered. Prices remain stubbornly high, hospitals remain overwhelmed, the political climate remains ugly and unstable. Polls show that the president is still unpopular with a solid majority of the country. His party avoided a calamitous outcome in the midterms mainly because Republicans seemed to recruit a lot of their candidates from a carnival tent.

The “why” of all this is a question worth exploring. Is Biden’s unpopularity simply a reflection of Donald Trump’s toxic legacy and the country’s unbridgeable divide? Or is it because the left has grown irrationally obsessed with identity and policing language? Does Biden, the oldest president ever, project frailty, or does he simply lack the celebrity persona we’ve unfortunately come to associate with dynamic leaders?

I don’t claim to have the answers, but any serious consideration of Biden’s opening years has to grapple honestly with this paradox. We can’t fully assess Biden with our faces pressed up against the West Wing’s reinforced glass. We have to step back and ask why this disconnect exists and which of these dueling measures of his presidency will ultimately win out: the litany of his accomplishments or the public’s unshakable anxiety.

Whipple nods briefly at these questions, but he’s really not here to wrestle with complexities. He’s traveling the well-worn path of a reconstructed narrative based on insider accounts — a methodology that’s been widely discredited in recent years, as political operatives have grown ever more savvy at manipulating it.

Whipple enjoys stunning access to some of the most senior policymakers in the country, including the secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but he seems duty-bound to faithfully relate their bland quotes and heroic recollections without detectable skepticism. (When the quotes aren’t bland, such as the one in which Biden is said to have described his vice president as “a work in progress,” the sources remain anonymous, so we can’t weigh their credibility.)

As for the actual writing, the book generally reads like a capable AI rendering of the formulaic reconstruction. The introduction begins: “Joe Biden was worried.” Chapter 1 begins: “Joe Biden was restless.” And so on. (Later, Whipple throws us a real curveball: “John Kerry was irritated.”)

Reading The Fight of His Life, I became convinced that Whipple actually had a better book in his voluminous notes. He appears to have talked constantly with Ron Klain, Biden’s shrewd chief of staff, who provides the book’s least-predictable passages. Whipple, who wrote a book on White House chiefs, has enough material here for a fascinating, close-up study of Klain’s tenure — something along the lines of William Greider’s small classic, The Education of David Stockman.

Whipple, though, goes the conventional route of profiling the administration as a whole — a choice made more dubious by the conspicuous absence of Biden himself, or at least on the record. The president granted Whipple a single interview by email, and his quotes sound suspiciously like snippets of speeches. (Whipple slams Trump for not writing all his own tweets, but it does not seem to occur to him that maybe Biden wasn’t typing out his own responses to questions by lamplight in the residence.)

That’s a loss, and not only because it would be reassuring to know that Biden could handle a thoughtful interview with a long-form writer, which is something he’s avoided like the flu. My gut tells me that the key to understanding Biden’s presidency, to this point, is less about the particulars of legislating and more about how he got to the White House in the first place.

As I wrote shortly before the 2020 election, Biden’s life and career are defined by an almost freakish persistence — not simply getting back up when you’re knocked down, as Biden likes to say, but pressing forward, ploddingly, and for years at a stretch, when everyone else has decided you’re inconsequential.

Unlike his former ticket-mate, Barack Obama, Biden exhibits no inclination toward fatalism. Experience has conditioned him to believe that all resistance will eventually be overcome.

And so Biden surely knows, better than any of us, that this first phase of his presidency is merely a long preface. And it wouldn’t surprise me — even though I initially considered him a placeholder and have doubted the wisdom of him running again — if Biden managed to get himself reelected as he turned 82 and willed himself into becoming a president for the ages.

That would be a story worth telling, and hopefully by someone with a bit more perspective

Author Chris Whipple enjoys stunning access to some of the most senior policymakers in the country ... but he seems duty-bound to faithfully relate their bland quotes and heroic recollections without detectable skepticism.