Coulda, shoulda been Joe in saddle
Beau Biden, at the end of a life that ended far too soon, was right with a dying request for his father. His father should have run. The rousing speech Joe Biden gave Wednesday night should have been given Thursday night. He should not just have been talking to the country about what he and Barack Obama have done over the past eight years, about what they have accomplished even when the other side constantly dismisses them as weaklings and fools. He should have been talking, as his party’s nominee, about what he planned to do over the next four years as President. This should have been his week, not hers. He would run away with this thing in the fall.
“I made the right choice for my family,” Biden has said for months and is still saying in Philadelphia. It was just not the right choice for the rest of us.
The son of Scranton, Pa., and then Claymont, Del., maybe a half-hour down I-95, and the father of Beau Biden would not just have brought his own experience to this moment in Philadelphia, as if bringing it home. Biden would also have brought his decency to this city and this arena and this convention and this campaign. At this time when politics has turned into a knife fight, it would have mattered, and mightily.
But this speech Wednesday was not the real beginning of what should have been Joe Biden’s fight against Donald Trump. This was a kind of ending for him, as much as he plans to stump for Hillary Clinton over the next weeks and months. Obama is not the one who looks like the last Democrat. Neither did Bill Clinton on Tuesday night. Joe Biden does, 44 years after he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware at the age of 29.
This should have been Biden’s time, even at his age, a last, loud roar. Maybe he wasn’t ever going to excite the young and disenfranchised the way Bernie Sanders, another seventysomething, did. Certainly Biden doesn’t take himself seriously enough to ever discuss himself as the leader of a movement. But he should have been out there ahead of Bernie the way Bobby Kennedy should have been out there ahead of Eugene McCarthy in 1968.
If he had gotten in early the way Bernie did, everything would look different today, starting with the polls. Trump would have had to do a lot better than suggesting in a tweet, as he did Wednesday, that Biden isn’t very bright, all because Joe got tripped up trying to remember which Republican said which amazingly dumb thing about carpet-bombing Syria.
Here is something Biden said on “Morning Joe” Wednesday morning, when asked about middleclass voters who think they have been abandoned or ignored by the Democratic Party:
“Let me define what I mean by middle class: Being able to own your own house, not have to rent it. Being able to send your kid to a park; they can come home safe. Being able to take care of your geriatric parent after the other one dies. Being able to send your kid to a local school; if they do well, they get to college, and they get there, you can get ’em there, if they get in. That’s not asking too much.”
Biden restated all that 13 hours later, just with the volume turned up much higher, with more feeling. It is a vision of America you can still understand, and believe in, and even cheer, at this time when the country really is discussed by the other party as if it were the “Hunger Games,” or “Gotham City,” as Republican strategist and commentator Mike Murphy said on television the other night.
Of course, Hillary Clinton has served her country, despite the way she is constantly demonized. She has. Joe Biden has just done it longer. Biden is the populist his party so desperately wants Clinton to be, and was to the very end of his speech Wednesday night, when he shouted, “We are America!” And then, because he wasn’t quite done yet, Biden punctuated that by shouting, “Come on!”
He spoke of his son Beau on this night, and being strong in the broken places; how his son had placed his name in nomination for a second term four years ago. Joe Biden spoke optimistically of his country on this night, without embarrassment, talking about how “ordinary people like us can do extraordinary things.” And he spoke of the scare tactics of the other party, heard constantly last week in Cleveland, and not just from Donald Trump.
“We do not scare easily,” Joe Biden said in Philadelphia, his voice rising again and again. “We never bow, we never bend, we never break, we endure, we always, always move forward.”
He left the stage finally with his wife, Jill. It will be Hillary’s stage on Thursday night, and from now on. Her time. Her fight. Should have been his.