Joe Biden: A ‘lion of history’ who struck a blow for democracy
Joe Biden’s long career gave him an unrivalled view of how power works in America but, at the end, his experience weighed him down, writes Richard Hall
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Joe Biden entered politics as one of the youngest senators in American history, and he leaves as its oldest president.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” wrote Biden in a letter published Sunday, confirming the end of his political career. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
Few others have had such a sweeping view of what moves people and power in this country. He held a front-row seat to great shifts in America’s culture and identity, from the height of its post-Cold War strength to a nation in conflict with itself.
In the end, that experience weighed him down. At 81 years old, with more than 50 of those spent in frontline national politics, he was reluctant to pass on the torch because he believed those years mattered above all else.
“I have acquired a hell of a lot of wisdom and know more than the vast majority of people," Biden said in an interview last year when questions about his age were becoming harder to ignore. “And I’m more experienced than anybody that’s ever run for the office.”
But besides the physical and mental toll of aging, this long view of the world and his country blinded him to how much both had changed.
It showed in the last year in his handling of the war in Gaza, which seemed to be shaped by his relationship with an Israel that no longer existed — one where the US supported an ostensibly liberal state in wars against its autocratic Arab neighbors, not a far-right government against a largely defenseless population.
It showed in his belief that he could oversee a return to normalcy after the presidency of Donald Trump and an attempted insurrection, when the mood of much of the country had fundamentally shifted.
And it showed in his inability to notice that he had lost the support of his party in these last few weeks and months.
This was not always true. Biden’s experience was a superpower for much of his career and the beginning of his first term. In the first years of his presidency, he used it to great effect in passing a series of laws and delivering on key campaign promises, even with a razor-thin majority in the House and Senate.
He passed a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus legislation and a massive bipartisan infrastructure bill in 2021. The following year he passed sweeping climate and healthcare reform bills and the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocated some $53 billion in federal funding to manufacture semiconductor chips in the US.
On the international stage, too, Biden was quick to react to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He oversaw a reinvigoration of NATO’s mission and ensured that Ukraine received billions of dollars in US support.
Biden’s politics were guided by his personal experience, too. His life was marked by tragedy, so much so that it shaped how he was seen by his colleagues and the public.
He won his first Senate race in 1972. But shortly after, came a time that defined his character in the eyes of the country. A terrible car accident killed his first wife, Neilia, and their baby daughter Naomi. Biden took the oath of office from the hospital room of his toddler sons Beau and Hunter, who both survived the accident, but were injured.
He became known as “Amtrak Joe” for catching the train 100 miles every day from Wilmington, Delaware to Washington DC to be close to his boys while in the Senate, desperate for them to retain a sense of normalcy after such loss. And the pain of that experience gave him an incredible amount of empathy that allowed him to connect with people from all walks of life.
Biden would often frustrate his campaign staff by hanging around after events to speak with attendees and share stories about their families, and of loss. He would give his phone number to some of them and remain in contact long after their meeting.
Biden has always been driven by ambition and remains so. He reportedly had a detailed plan of how he would campaign for the presidency by the time he was in college.
That ambition was evident during his time in the Senate, where he was always trying to find the middle ground between Democrats and Republicans, no matter where it lay. It was as if he was constantly positioning himself for an eventual White House run that would require broad appeal.
But that willingness to bend to the political center left him with a voting record that was hard to explain to a new generation of Democrats when he ran for president in 2020.
He opposed school busing for desegregation in the 1970s and voted for a measure aimed at outlawing gay marriage in the 1990s. He claimed credit for a 1994 crime law that critics say contributed to mass incarceration.
Biden would run for the White House three times in total. He was 44 years old when he first ran for the Democratic nomination in the 1988 election, a time when he was viewed as a bright young hope. That first attempt ended in scandal when it emerged that he had plagiarized a speech from the British Labour Party’s Neil Kinnock, a quaint political error from a different era. Biden was also a candidate for president in 2008, but dropped out after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses.
He might have ended his political career as an also-ran — a two-time presidential candidate who never quite made it — had it not been for the very particular attributes that made him an ideal running mate for Barack Obama.
Obama was everything Biden was not. Obama was a young, transformational candidate who promised to upend the status quo. Biden was 66-years-old and viewed by many as middle-of-the-road, unthreatening.
The elder statesman’s blue-collar upbringing helped Obama in the Rust Belt states, where Obama struggled to drum up support, and his three decades in the Senate alleviated concerns about Obama’s lack of experience. Biden brought a balance to the 2008 presidential ticket and helped Obama to a sweeping victory.
That appeal to the middle ground, to a feeling of normalcy in uncertain times, would help propel him to the presidency years later in his third run for the White House.
Biden shone as vice president where previous holders of the office had shrunk into the background. He formed a deep, personal relationship with Obama, and served as his closest advisor. He was instrumental in helping Obama navigate Congress in order to pass health care reform.
This is an extraordinary man with an extraordinary career in public service
Upon the signing of that historic bill, Biden famously summed up the mood of his party when he whispered into the president’s ear: “This is a big f***ing deal.”
He famously publicly announced his support for same-sex marriage in 2012, without consulting Obama, who had previously been on the fence. His intervention was seen as instrumental in the administration recognizing same-sex marriage in 2015.
In his final days as president, Obama surprised Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, describing his friend as “the best vice president we have ever seen,” and “a lion of American history.”
“It was eight and a half years ago that I chose Joe to be my vice-president,” Obama said when awarding the medal. “There has not been a single moment since that time that I’ve doubted the wisdom of that decision. He was the best possible choice, not just for me, but for the American people. This is an extraordinary man with an extraordinary career in public service.”
During his time as vice-president, Biden’s second son, Beau, tragically died from brain cancer. That loss altered the course of his political career, and perhaps even the country.
Biden was arguably the best-placed candidate to continue Obama’s legacy in the 2016 election. But the pain caused by Beau’s death was too much to bear.
At a press conference in the White House Rose Garden in October 2015, with his wife Jill by his side, he announced that he would not seek the presidency the next year.
“As my family and I have worked through the grieving process, I’ve said all along ... It may very well be that that process, by the time we get through it, closes the window on mounting a realistic campaign for president,” Biden said. “I’ve concluded that it has closed.”
He told Vanity Fair in 2017 that he “just wasn’t ready.”
It took Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, and his embrace and acceptance of far-right ideas and groups, to convince Biden that the third time was a charm. In 2019, Biden spoke of the white supremacist march through Charlottesville, Virginia, that ended in the death of a counter-protester, and Trump’s comment that there were “very fine people on both sides,” as his reason for running.
“We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” Biden said in a video announcing his candidacy.
Biden warned that if Trump were to be reelected he would “forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
Running against Trump in 2020, all of Biden’s experience and skills seemed to match the moment. His famous empathy sought to heal a nation torn apart by a deadly pandemic. His middle-of-the-road positioning helped a country that had become divided. His appeals to normalcy broke through.
Biden found a winning message not just with his calls for the preservation of democracy, which he argued a second Trump term would threaten, but with an appeal to the working-class communities that Trump had been so successful in winning across the Rust Belt.
He drew on his childhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to pitch an economy that was built on the strength of the middle class — not trickle-down, but from the bottom up.
And when Biden became president at 78, he was in a rush to act on those promises. He passed more consequential legislation in his first two years than some presidents do in two terms.
But his lasting legacy will forever be tied to Trump. What happens in November will determine whether he struck a fatal blow to this country’s anti-democratic forces in 2020, or merely delayed their rise.
When Biden finally achieved his lifelong ambition after decades of planning and trying, he won on a message that distilled all of his political and personal philosophies into one simple message.
That message came in the words his mother Catherine “Jean” Biden used to tell him when he was a boy, which he repeated on small podiums and in grand halls across the country.
"No one’s better than you, but you’re better than nobody."
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