Why this is Joe Biden’s hour
WASHINGTON » The last presidential candidate to win the White House on his third try was Ronald Reagan in 1980. How Joe Biden brought himself to the verge of repeating that feat explains a lot about who he is.
One clue as to how he has executed what even Republicans concede is one of the most focused and disciplined presidential campaigns in recent memory can be found in his poignant explanation for why he did not seek the presidency in 2016.
“I don't think any man or woman should run for president,” Biden told Stephen Colbert in 2015, “unless, number one, they know exactly why they would want to be president and, two, they can look at folks out there and say, ‘I promise you, you have my whole heart, my whole soul, my energy and my passion to do this.'”
He added: “And I'd be lying if I said that I knew I was there.”
He wasn't there because the death of his son Beau from cancer had, for the moment, rendered grieving more important than his burning ambitions. It says a lot about Biden that those who know him did not view his talk about family as a political contrivance.
In fact, his focus on family and personal suffering — his first wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident shortly after he was first elected to the Senate in 1972 — gave substance to a campaign rooted in empathy for a country laid low by a pandemic. His case to the electorate was thus consistently personal, inflected by his own biography. “As one of Joe's favorite quotes reminds us,” his wife Jill Biden says in an ad released last week, “‘Faith sees best in the dark.'”
But his 2015 comment to Colbert was revealing in another way: This time, far more than in his first two presidential attempts, Biden knows “exactly why” he wants to be president. Biden announced his candidacy by describing his horror over Trump's 2017 claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after white supremacists clashed with protestors defending racial justice in Charlottesville, Va.
“With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden declared in a video released on April 25, 2019, sounding the theme that would carry him through early primary struggles and, ultimately, to his party's nomination: “We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.”
He is making the same argument as Election Day nears. “Who we are, what we stand for, maybe most importantly, who we're going to be, it's all at stake,” Biden said in one of his final commercials.
You can run a disciplined campaign when you know the point of the whole thing.
It's often said by Biden's critics that he is a party guy who floats with the Democratic consensus. Yes, he is a party guy, one reason why he has brought Democrats together (with a lot of help from Trump) from the farthest left reaches to its most conservative quarters.
But the last-ditch argument by Trump's defenders that Biden will be browbeaten by progressives into some imaginary program of radical socialism is absurd on its face. So what defines Biden? He's a communitarian through and through. “For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community,” he said — in 1987, when he announced his first run for the presidency. This helps explain his longstanding sympathies for both unions and religious groups, for both racial justice and White working-class voters like those he grew up with.
His program is decidedly progressive, but it has won much better reviews from business groups than you might expect. Even ardent friends of free markets recognize that righting the economy after the pandemic-induced downturn and the long rise of economic inequality will require robust government action.
Like Reagan, a victorious Biden could thus inaugurate a new long-term policy consensus — but he'd do so by reversing the rightward shift that Reagan set in motion. New Deal-ish ideas, which helped save capitalism before, will get another run.
There's one other consistent aspect to Biden's worldview: a red-white-and-blue Americanism that directly refutes Trump's ersatz American Greatness.
In a classic Biden aside during an interview I did with him a decade ago, he blurted out: “Give me a break. So many people have bet on our demise that it absolutely drives me crazy … We will continue to be the most significant and dominant influence in the world as long as our economy is strong, growing and responsive to 21st-century needs.”
Many who have never voted Democratic in their lives are voting for Biden this time. They're voting against American decline, which is what will happen if we lose our soul.