32 years after first presidential run, Biden gets his chance
Joe Biden gave the speech on Thursday night that he had hoped to give in 1988. But a man on whom life has inflicted much pain can count himself blessed for having had to wait 32 years before finally claiming the Democratic nomination for president.
The phrase “the man meets the moment,” ignores the importance of its analogue. Often, the moment meets the person. Suddenly, a set of skills, impulses and instincts that might have been out of step with any other era match an urgent public need.
This is what Democratic primary voters sensed instinctively in the South Carolina primary last February and on Super Tuesday three days later when 10 of the 14 states at stake embraced the former vice president and sent him toward victory.
Biden’s moderation was a problem for the party’s progressive wing, but the plurality of Democrats (including some progressives wanted to take no chances on ideological adventures because they saw defeating President Donald Trump as a matter of national survival.
Biden’s warm past relationships with many Republicans seemed out of tune not only with the transformation of the GOP into a radical, Trumpist party, but also with its resolute obstructionism during the Obama years in office. Yet, it is precisely Biden’s love for making friends that allowed him to build the heterogeneous coalition that is putting him well ahead in the polls.
Twice this week, the Democratic convention paid indirect homage to Biden’s irrepressible gregariousness. He won the valuable support of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., partly because Biden reached out to him soon after the gruff socialist’s 2007 arrival in the Senate. And a video Tuesday night highlighted Biden’s deep friendship with the late senator John McCain, another maverick of a different stripe.
Biden’s age, discussed with concern even among his allies, opened political doors that would have been closed to others. He convinced all who supported him reluctantly – from Republicans fed up with Trump to progressives playing a long game – that his would be a transitional presidency.
And a lifetime of pain and suffering, beginning with the death of his first wife in a car crash shortly after he first won his Senate seat, allowed Democrats to portray him, without a hint of embellishment, as a man of empathy, compassion and old-fashioned decency.
Perhaps I should confess at this point that, as a long time sucker for Irish Americans, I couldn’t help having affection for Biden since first encountering him during that 1987 campaign, which ended ignominiously after accusations of plagiarism.
I once joked with Biden that I was getting old enough to have covered him when he ran as the voice of the new generation. I could tell I liked the line far more than he did. It was my version, perhaps, of a Biden gaffe.
What I saw in Biden was the son of a family that inhabited the space between the working and middle classes that was so important in the post-World War II period. It gave him a feel for the voters who most felt alienated from Democrats. In some cases they viewed the party as elitist. In others, they were reacting against its support for racial equality.
So even as he supported civil rights and won the support of Black voters, Biden has been obsessed with the idea that Democrats just didn’t know how to talk with the families like the one he grew up in.
He had a deep admiration for Robert Kennedy as someone who brought Black and White working class Americans together. Biden’s attempt to channel Kennedy in his first race failed, but some of his themes from that campaign have stayed with him.
“For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community,” he said in announcing his candidacy in Wilmington, Del., in June, 1987, challenging Americans to rise above “the mere accumulation of material things.”
He has been part of the social learning that has moved many people of his age in more progressive directions. He made a hash of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, but he was also the sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act – and picked Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., to be the first Black woman on a national ticket.
An old-fashioned Catholic guy in so many ways, Biden was also a bit ahead of Obama (to the latter’s annoyance at the time in endorsing same-sex marriage.
Yes, Biden is garrulous to the point where he can keep talking to a group even as the elevator door closes to whisk him away. He can be prickly and impatient and, occasionally, a know-it-all.
But by dint of his virtues, his instincts, and his experiences, Biden may turn out to be the most dangerous opponent to the most dangerous president in our history. His personal identification with some of the very voters who put Trump in office will make it easier for them to decide to rectify their mistake.
And he’ll be advancing an aspiration that is the precise opposite of Trumpism, the same cause he outlined as a 44-year-old in 1987 when he first told the country he wanted to be president. “We must reassert the oneness of America,” he said then. “America has been and must once again be the seamless web of caring and community.”