Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Biden’s life is one of recovery
Crushing losses on personal, political stages prepared him
Crushing losses on both personal and political stages prepared him to be Dem’s presidential nominee.
10A
WASHINGTON — Joe Biden’s journey to accepting the Democratic presidential nomination is a story about cycles of crushing loss and hard-won connection.
Most of all, it’s about the practice of recovery.
It’s a theme Biden’s allies say fits this anxious moment of health, racial and economic crisis in America. Biden’s experience and signature empathy form the core of the choice between him and President Donald Trump.
“Get up” was Biden’s father’s motto, and became Joe Jr.’s. through his childhood struggles with stuttering, the deaths of his first wife and baby daughter, two brain aneurysms and in 2015, his son Beau’s death from brain cancer. It helped him step past two failed presidential campaigns as well.
“After the surgery, Senator, you might lose the ability to speak? Get up!” Biden writes in “Promises to Keep,” his 2007 memoir. “The newspapers are calling you a plagiarist, Biden? Get up! Your wife and daughter — I’m sorry, Joe, there was nothing we could do to save them? Get up!”
When Biden, 77, officially became Trump’s opponent Tuesday, the occasion was far from the balloons-dropping affair he might have envisioned due to the pandemic.
But the event represented the ultimate recovery for a man who’s had a lifetime of staggering setbacks and who argues he wants to show the nation how to stand back up.
Biden at first had no interest in serving in the Senate seat to which he’d been elected. He’d ousted a sitting Republican incumbent in 1972. But before he could be sworn in, wife Neilia, 30, and daughter Naomi, 1, were killed when a truck hit the family car on the way to buy a Christmas tree. Beau and Hunter, 4 and 3, were injured.
The tragedy meant the Senate’s youngest member arrived on Capitol Hill saddled with pain and loss that came to define him. The combination would ground Biden’s operating philosophy in politics and in life of empathy and forging connections — even as it lived alongside his own presidential dreams.
Through 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president, Biden’s approach helped him identify people who were struggling, and informed his sense of how to call out opponents.
“People would have disagreements with him, but he was very likable,” recalls former Vice President Dan Quayle, a Republican senator from Indiana who served with Biden in the Senate. “Nobody really dislikes Joe Biden.”
But Biden’s style has gotten him in trouble, too. His habit as a hugger drew more serious accusations during the 2020 Democratic primaries when a series of women accused him of getting too close. One said Biden assaulted her during his time in the Senate, an accusation he has categorically denied.
Decades before President Bill Clinton said he could “feel your pain,” Biden already had lived it.
The Senate was Biden’s healing road. It’s where he matured as a father, a lawmaker and a politician.
Inside his personal life, and outside on the political stage, he had begun to rise.
In 1977, he married Jill Tracy Jacobs, an English professor at Delaware Technical and Community College. President Jimmy Carter chose him to lead a Senate delegation to Moscow for the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. In 1981 the Bidens welcomed a daughter, Ashley.
By 1987, he was traveling to early primary states and was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, running the confirmation hearings of President Ronald Reagan’s nominee, Judge Robert Bork Jr., to the Supreme Court.
In Iowa, Biden had used a British politician’s words without attribution. He dropped out of the race and pivoted to blocking Bork’s confirmation.
But there was another crisis — this time for Biden himself — and another recovery. In Rochester, New York, after a 1988 speech, he felt “lightning flashing inside” his head and collapsed in his hotel room. Biden was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm, then another, and endured two surgeries.
And his presidential dreams stayed with him. Biden thought 2008 was his year. That campaign cratered in a crowded field that included Hillary Clinton and Obama.
Biden initially turned down Obama’s offer to be his running mate. When he accepted, Biden had one key ask: to be the last person in the room at decision time.
He was named to oversee the massive stimulus plan to counter the Great Recession, helped muscle the Affordable Care Act through Congress, and had a seat to watch special forces take out Osama bin Laden.
All the while, he was struggling with personal pain. His son Beau Biden had brain cancer and died in 2015.
Throughout the funeral, Biden wrote that he sought to show millions “facing the same awful reality that it was possible to absorb real loss and make it through.”
Five years later, he is the Democratic presidential nominee.