Bob Bauer remembers that once, after he ran a particularly aggressive legal attack on a Republican, a conservative magazine called him an “evil genius.” He took it as a compliment. “I was so proud,” he says. “I thought that was awesome.”
For decades, Democrats have turned to Mr. Bauer as their lawyer to take on the opposition: whether it was overturning a House election they thought they had lost? accusing the other side of criminal wrongdoing? going to court to cut off the flow of Republican money? finding legal justification for ethically questionable strategies. Mr. Bauer was their go-to person.
But now Bauer, President Biden’s personal lawyer and former White House counsel to President Barack Obama, is looking back and rethinking it all. Maybe a win-at-all-costs approach to politics isn’t very conducive to a healthy, functioning democracy, he says. Maybe if we were to take the “genius” part to heart, we should have cared more about the “evil” part.
In his new book, “Collapse: Reflections on Ethics-Free Politics and a Democracy in Crisis,” out Tuesday, Bauer examines what he sees as the coarsening of American politics and the tension between ethical decisions and the “warrior mentality” that dominates the world of government and campaigning today. And in the process of thinking about what went wrong, Bauer, who calls himself a “committed partisan warrior,” began pausing to consider his own role in the war.
“The stories I tell range from little mistakes I made when I was younger to more significant mistakes I may have made thinking about policy and what it means to win an election and how far I would go to do that,” he said at a recent lecture at the New-York Historical Society.
“How can we make politics better?” he asked. “How can we uphold democratic norms by focusing on the choices made by people in positions of public responsibility, and how can we make those choices in a way that respects those norms and institutions, as opposed to politics as a blood sport at all costs?”
This has been an era of political bloodsport, fueled by former President Donald J. Trump, who has accused opponents of treason, proposed the execution of those he deems disloyal, promised to pardon the violent looters of January 6, 2021, and vowed to make “retribution” his second-term mission if he won. Just last week, Trump sent out a fundraising email with the subject line “Plan for Revenge.”
But Bauer said that while Trump represents an extreme version of current politics, past attempts to push the boundaries of civility made it easier for “demagogues to rise” and threaten the political establishment. Long before Trump’s rise, people in both parties had begun to succumb to the urge to “treat your opponent as the enemy and destroy them,” he said in an interview.
Bauer doesn’t really come across as an evil genius. No one would confuse him with Lee Atwater. He’s thoughtful, polite and strong, but he’s not known for the kind of performative rage that’s so common in politics today. He’s bearded, he wears glasses and he serves as a professor at New York University’s law school. Those who have worked with him over the years regard him as a deeply ethical man.
He doesn’t remember what he did to earn him the nickname an evil genius, but he remembers feeling unusually pleased by the title. It was important. Winning was too important. “Someone has to be in these conversations and say, ‘We have to give more than this to our constituents,'” he said in an interview. “We don’t have to do this to win.”
Bauer speaks from experience. As Biden’s personal adviser, he plays a key role in the current power structure, along with his wife, Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser. Bauer has assisted the president in some of the most delicate moments of the past few years, most notably Special Counsel Robert K. Hur’s investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. Hur did not file criminal charges, but released a report describing Biden as “a caring, well-meaning old man with a poor memory.”
Bauer played a role in most of the major political and legal battles of the past few decades, representing Democratic Party organizations and candidates, advising Democratic leaders in the House and Senate during the impeachment fight of President Bill Clinton and serving as Obama’s campaign lawyer and later White House counsel.
But in recent years, Mr. Bauer, who left his law firm, Perkins Coie, has become increasingly focused on finding ways to fix the system, working with Republicans such as Benjamin Ginsburg and Jack L. Goldsmith. Among other projects, he advised lawmakers who changed electoral counting laws in 2022 to make clear that the vice president cannot singlehandedly overturn the election results, and led a bipartisan group that in April recommended amending the Insurrection Act to limit the president’s ability to send troops into American streets.
Ginsburg, a longtime election lawyer who represented the likes of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney before breaking with the Republican Party over his support for Trump, said Bauer had always been an “ethical, principled person” who represented his clients zealously without crossing any lines.
“We’ve been fighting each other on a lot of different things for 40 years, and he knew it was always important to fight hard for your candidate,” Ginsburg said, “but his concept of the rule of law was that even when there’s intense partisanship on both sides, the process works best if there’s respect for democratic processes, institutions and norms.”
Goldsmith, a former Justice Department official in the Bush administration who co-authored a 2020 book with Bauer called “After Trump” about how to reform the president, praised Bauer’s introspection. “What’s remarkable is his ability to move beyond his past assignments to diagnose some of the deepest problems in our politics with candor, introspection and keen insight,” he said.
Bauer’s new book recounts experiences that look different now: when he helped a Democratic congressman overturn Indiana’s certification of a Republican candidate, putting a Democrat in office; when he tried to get the IRS to interfere in the election by penalizing campaigns that ran negative ads; and when he accused a Republican congressman of fraud and his Democratic rival of election fraud.
“I intend to take responsibility for the statements I made publicly and for the courses of action I advocated that, in retrospect, while they demonstrated a strong determination to succeed, I realize were unwise,” Bauer said in an interview.
He has come to believe that politics doesn’t have to be this way. “I reject the premise that tough politics has to be politics that is indifferent to these ethical and institutional concerns,” he said. “It’s absurd to think that you have to do everything. It’s extremely dangerous.”
Bauer said none of this means Democrats, or even Republicans, should go soft. He’s not abandoning the war, he said, but he plans to fight it more ethically and engage the other side in between battles.
“I will always be a Democrat,” he said, “and I intend to play as active a role in the 2024 campaign as I can. But with that said, I’m trying to suggest that you work hard and be successful, but at the same time be thoughtful about the impact your choices have on democratic life and the health of our institutions.”
