Ex-VP offers himself as a balm — and a bridge
Joe Biden, six-term senator and twice-failed presidential candidate, seeks to soothe the hurt of an ailing nation and serve as a conduit to the future,
When Joe Biden stepped to the podium Thursday night as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, he offered himself to a wounded, meandering nation as balm — and as a bridge.
A 77-year-old steeped in the American political establishment for a half-century, Biden cannot himself embody the kind of generational change that Presidents John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton represented. Even with wide-ranging proposals for government action on health care, taxation and the climate crisis, he will never be the face of a burgeoning progressive movement. As a white man, Biden cannot know personally the systemic racism now at the forefront of a national reckoning over centuries-old social and economic inequities.
But the former vice president, six-term senator and twice failed presidential candidate draws plenty on lived experience — two generations spent on each end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a record that mixes partisan street-fighting with bipartisan deal-making and bonhomie, and a personal journey of middle-class mores, individual struggle and family heartbreak.
That is how he is presenting himself as the person to lead the country beyond the tumultuous tenure of President Donald Trump.
“There’s great seriousness of purpose here,” said Valerie Biden Owens, the candidate’s younger sister and, until his current White House bid, perennial campaign manager. “We are in a time of struggle. We are in a time a grief,” she continued, nodding to the novel coronavirus, its economic fallout and the reckoning on race. “All of this has come together. My brother appreciates it. He can feel it.”
The electorate ultimately will decide whether Biden in fact offers a bridge back to a pre-Trump version of normal, a path forward to a more equitable society or some combination. Voters’ most immediate consideration, though, may be that he is not the incumbent.
“Everything that Donald Trump is, my brother is the polar opposite. I don’t have to make him bigger than he is,” said sister Val. “Joe’s the right person at the right time for all the right reasons.”
Biden has used his convention to showcase what his campaign hopes will be a winning coalition.
Prime-time hours have been generously sprinkled with Republicans. A video highlighted Biden’s friendship with the late Sen. John McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee. Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich endorsed Biden and assured anti-Trump Republicans that he had no worries Biden might make a “sharp left turn” in office.
Biden, though, spent recent months working with primary runner-up Bernie Sanders and other progressives tweaking his policy slate leftward. Those moves reflect
Biden’s increasing emphasis on wide wealth and opportunity gaps he says have been “laid bare” by the pandemic’s economic effects.
Sanders repeated his support for Biden on Monday and emphasized Biden’s agenda as he urged skeptical progressives to vote affirmatively for the Democratic nominee, not just against Trump.
Younger Democrats to Biden’s left, several who are non-white, have helped fill out the program. It’s a public projection of what Biden tells top Democrats privately in frank acknowledgment of his age: He wants to elevate a new generation, one that looks wholly different from the all-male, nearly all-white Senate Democratic Caucus he joined in 1973.
He underscored the point by selecting California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, making her the first Black woman to join a major party’s national ticket.
Biden sees no inherent conflicts in his wide-net approach, arguing over nearly 16 months of campaigning that the country must relearn how to govern by some semblance of consensus, and that starts with bringing varied voices to the negotiating table.