The secret to Joe Biden’s resiliency
Joe Biden has just pulled off a remarkable, probably historic turnaround in his primary campaign, and analysis of his comeback sounds something like this: After losing the first three states, Biden retreated to his “firewall,” South Carolina. The dean of the state’s Democratic congressional delegation, Rep. Jim Clyburn, endorsed Biden. On Election Day, African-Americans backed him over Bernie Sanders fourto-one. Biden’s center-left rivals then decided to exit the race and throw their support to the vice president.
With millions in earned media, waves of black voter support, and the clearing of the field of moderate competitors, the former vice president notched what just a week earlier would have been unthinkable: victories in 10 of 14 Super Tuesday states.
Although Biden’s nomination is hardly assured, he is now, once again, the frontrunner. So how did he pull it off?
The common explanations — Clyburn’s endorsement was the gamechanger (“you brought me back,” Biden told him), the center-left coalescing behind his candidacy and AfricanAmericans recognizing his close ties to Barack Obama — all tell a big part of the story.
Equally important, yet sometimes overlooked in the punditry’s relentless nose-against-the-window focus on the news of the hour, is that in an era of nearly relentless nastiness, Biden exudes decency. And his biography makes him an almost uniquely sympathetic figure on the national stage. That enduring reality — the fact that so many voters who almost reflexively dislike all politicians have a reserve of affinity for Joe — must be central to almost any understanding of his remarkable Lazarus-like resurrection.
It is hard to think of another major political figure who lost both his first wife Neilia and two children 43 years apart: Neilia and baby daughter Naomi to a traffic accident in 1972, his adult son Beau to glioblastoma, a brain cancer, in 2015. His pain has enabled him to connect with people at a gut level, giving him the type of empathy that political leaders rarely manage to tap with so much poignancy.
And Biden’s life’s work — his calling to politics and public service — is something that he seems to need and feed off. Politics has given him an outlet and perhaps a hunger for personal connection where he has been able to channel his grief.
George W. Bush’s campaign manager Ken Mehlman once observed that presidential campaigns “are about attributes, not issues.”
Biden’s political resurgence has to do as much with his solace, compassion and pain as with his endorsements, experience and good political fortune. His traits also match up well with Trump, who, as president, has shown virtually no humanity. And they match up well with Bernie Sanders, whose bombastic thesis that Biden personifies a rigged system is belied by Biden’s life of service, tragedy and compassion.
At least some Americans see their stories and bits of themselves in Biden’s. Spouses fear losing their partners. And most parents harbor fears that one of their children will predecease them; most never have such fears come true, but Biden has twice endured a parent’s worst nightmare.
There’s also an archetypal quality about Biden’s appeal. His vast power as a U.S. senator, committee chairman, and two-term vice president has not safeguarded his family from the cruelest of life’s vicissitudes.
What we miss about the source of Biden’s political appeal in this moment is the hard-to-pin-down element of Biden’s grace — a sense that he has endured more than most. That personal perseverance gives people hope.
True, his flaws are real, and they have been well-trod. He’s a gaffe machine and has exaggerated tales such as being arrested in South Africa and even plagiarized language from a British Labour Party leader’s life story during his 1988 presidential campaign.
Biden’s record in the Senate has seen more than its share of bad moments. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he failed to give Anita Hill a fair and respectful hearing during the 1991 Clarence Thomas nomination hearings. Biden’s early anti-busing positions and cozying up to segregationist senators such as James Eastland, and his late-career Iraq War vote are all hard to reconcile with his leadership on gay marriage, gun safety, and, at times, civil rights and women’s rights.
The left wing of the party brands him an apologist for, if not a consistent ally of, corporate power. Some of that comes with the territory of representing Delaware, where many corporations are domiciled, in the Senate.
There was nothing inevitable about Biden’s comeback. Yet his capacity for sharing his story with the country in ways that leave him exposed as a human being ought to be part of any explanation of his success. Countless people such as Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter died at Parkland, and Iowa State Sen. Pam Jochum, who lost her daughter — have testified to Biden’s unique ability to offer consoling words