Biographer: Biden ‘curiously well suited’ for what’s ahead

One of the most remarkable political comebacks of all time, and what appears to be the last act of a blazing political drama played out over the past week, as many Americans are left to question — what comes next? And what happens after all the votes are counted and the results become official?

Supporters of President Donald Trump are unwilling to concede defeat.

For former Vice President Joe Biden, who declared victory Saturday over President Donald

Trump in the presidential election, that recalcitrance may be a foretaste of what is to come.

“It’s going to be hugely uphill for him,” said an author and journalist who wrote a biography of Biden. The presumptive presidentelect will face an intensely divided nation and a potent Republican opposition in Washington that could make governing a challenge.

“This is a moment of almost impossible political complexity for any incoming president. And yet he is curiously well suited for it, because of his instincts and his experience,” said Evan Osnos, a Greenwich native who interviewed Biden extensively for his recent book, “Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now.”

Biden has been on “a journey of improbable turns, some spectacularly fortunate and others almost inconceivably cruel,” according to his biographer.

Osnos, who has written extensively about the political landscape of southern Connecticut in the pages of the New Yorker magazine, sees Biden as the ultimate survivor. He describes how close Biden came to dying of a brain aneurysm in 1988 at the age of 45, when a priest was put on standby to deliver the last rites to Biden, who recovered after a dangerous surgical operation.

“Here’s a person quite literally near the end, and claws his way back,” said Osnos, “That shapes him, too, because it becomes part of how he understands himself.”

Referring to the family tragedies that Biden has endured, and the loss of his first wife and his daughter in a car wreck, Osnos said, “The fascinating thing, is the fates have kind of humbled this guy, he’s had his ups and downs so much. He was the young, blustering man in Washington, and then he was reminded over and over again the fates can be cruel. It silenced him, quieted him. He’s a different person today.”

Biden’s ability to come back from the political oblivion has made him unique. His other signature skill as a deal-maker — working with the left wing of his own party and Republican adversaries — will also be tested in the months to come.

“He has to remain true to his belief in the possibility of compromise, and that an essential feature of American governance, while at the same time being prepared, as one of his advisers put it to me, to go to scorched earth when necessary,” said Osnos, a Washington D.C. resident.

Biden’s biographer said he would have to face a new generation of Republican adversaries, many of whom are now looking to adopt tactics from the Trump playbook.