Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Biden reaches summit via meandering route
White House win came in his own good time
Days before he left the White House in 2017, President Barack Obama surprised Joe Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, declaring his septuagenarian, white-haired lieutenant “the best vice president America’s ever had” and a “lion of American history.”
The tribute marked the presumed end of a long public life that put Biden in the orbit of the Oval Office for 45 years yet had never allowed him to sit behind the Resolute Desk himself.
It turns out the pinnacle would not elude Biden after all. His moment just hadn’t yet arrived.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., 77, was elected Saturday as the 46th president of the United States, defeating President Donald Trump in an election that played out against the backdrop of a pandemic, its economic fallout and a national reckoning on racism.
He becomes the oldest president-elect and brings with him a history-making vice president-elect in Kamala Harris, the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to win the nation’s second-highest office.
There are no sure paths to a post held by only 44 men, but Biden’s is among the most unlikely.
The president-elect’s allies say it is that delayed, circuitous route that prepared him for 2020, when he could finally offer himself not just as another senator or governor with 10-point plans and outsized ambition.
Instead, from his launch on April 25, 2019, Biden sold himself as the experienced, empathetic elder statesman particularly suited to defeat a “dangerous” and “divisive” president and then “restore the soul of the nation” in Trump’s wake.
“A lot of people dismissed it,” said Karen Finney, a top aide to nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. “But when I saw his opening speech, talking about the fight for the soul of the country, I said, ‘He gets it.’ That’s what a president does. A president looks around the country and understands what’s happening.”
Biden, she said, “met the moment.” His victory, though, did not come with the usual trappings.
He did not bring along a clear Democratic Senate majority, and several Democratic House candidates lost, raising the prospect of a closely divided government likely to test his promise of bipartisanship.
State legislatures also did not flip even as Biden was winning the popular vote by about 5 percentage points.
Biden first joined a Democratic primary race shaped by nearly two dozen rivals, most considerably younger, already deep into an ideological fight over issues from universal health care to taxation of billionaires.
Biden took an open lane, settling where he spent his 36 years in the Senate: a mainstream liberal with an establishment, deal-making core. But his visceral, emotional appeal transcended party identity.
Biden was the presumed front-runner he hadn’t been in 1987, when his first White House bid ended embarrassingly with a plagiarized speech; or in 2008, when he was trounced in the Iowa caucuses by Obama and others; or even in 2016, when the combination of his son Beau’s death in 2015 and Obama’s behind-the-scenes support for Clinton forced him to pass on the race.
Yet Biden was a wobbly 2020 favorite. He was well-regarded, even beloved as his party’s “Uncle Joe,” a loyal deputy to Obama, but he faced a river of criticism as too old, too moderate, too white, too wistful, too senatorial.
Biden’s core pitch, rooted in his political and personal biography, was the same when he launched his campaign in the spring of 2019 as it was when he won the South Carolina primary in February, as he closed out his campaign against Trump and when he addressed the nation Saturday night as president-elect.
Obama, awarding that rare civilian honor to a man he said in 2017 was headed to life as a private citizen, had one thing right: “He’s nowhere close to finished.”