Biden offers reassurance when it’s needed most

I was wrong about Joe Biden. In an April 26, 2019, column for the San Antonio ExpressNews, I predicted Biden’s third presidential campaign — which he had officially launched the day before — would end just like his two previous bids, in failure.

On Wednesday, Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States.

When I doubted Biden’s prospects in 2019, it wasn’t that I thought he would be unable to beat Donald Trump in a general election. It was clear, even before the emergence of a pandemic that has taken nearly 400,000 American lives in 10 months and wrecked our nation’s economy, that Trump would be politically vulnerable.

I thought the question of who would win a Biden-Trump contest was moot, however, because I never expected Biden to capture the Democratic nomination.

By the time Biden entered the race, 21 other Democrats, covering the ideological and demographic spectrum of the party, had declared their candidacy.

You had Bernie Sanders, the Vermont democratic socialist who electrified young voters during his 2016 presidential campaign.

You had Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator who combined supreme policy-wonk chops with a nerdy professorial folksiness.

There was Kamala Harris, whose combination of charisma, warmth and prosecutorial incisiveness prompted many Democratic operatives to view her as the candidate with the highest ceiling.

You had promising young up-and-comers (Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Julián Castro and Pete Buttigieg); solid, middle-ofthe-road veterans (Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bennet) and entrepreneurial eccentrics (Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson).

Biden, by virtue of the name recognition he built during his eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president, entered the race as a presumptive front-runner. At the same time, he appeared to be vaguely superfluous.

Biden seemed too gaffe-prone to be the steady elder statesman that some of the party’s older moderates craved.

At the same time, he had little hope of exciting young progressives who saw the 2020 election not merely as a chance to unseat Trump, but to carry forward a platform for fundamental change on the issues of income equality, health care, criminaljustice reform and climate change.

Biden always had proven persuasive when he could lock eyes with a voter, shake their hand and make the case for himself.

It had worked in his small state of Delaware. Biden won seven statewide elections there, beginning in 1972, when, at the remarkably young age of 29, he knocked off Republican Sen. J. Caleb Boggs.

His limitations, however, had been exposed in his 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns. Yes, an embarrassing plagiarism scandal doomed his first bid. Even before that, however, he seemed strangely adrift on the national stage.

In the early months of his 2020 campaign, Biden offered little evidence that he was better equipped this time around.

He struggled, in a tense debate exchange with Harris, to defend his 1970s opposition to school busing. He bungled his description of his own health care plan during a back-andforth with Castro, prompting the former San Antonio mayor to pointedly ask him, “Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago?”

Increasingly, Biden looked like the epitome of the kind of candidate that sends Democrats to a November defeat.

When Democrats have succeeded over the past century, it’s been with youngish candidates who burst on the scene and promised sweeping change

( John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama).

When the party has failed, it’s been with compromise choices, establishment figures who won the nomination on the basis of familiarity or perceived electability (Walter Mondale, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton).

Biden, however, managed to turn things around with a combination of luck and tenacity.

Neither Harris nor O’Rourke ever found their footing, and Warren couldn’t translate her strong debate performances into primary support.

With Sanders looking like he might run away with the Democratic race, U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., threw his support behind Biden, an old friend with whom he served in Congress for 16 years.

Biden’s win in South Carolina united Democratic voters who feared that Sanders would send the party to defeat. Within a couple of weeks, the primary race essentially was over.

As the pandemic forced the country into semi-quarantine, Biden’s strengths seemed to align with the nation’s needs.

His innate empathy and relentless optimism conveyed a pre-Trump sense of what it meant to be presidential, a form of no-drama leadership that millions of Americans missed.

Biden didn’t excite voters. He didn’t necessarily inspire them either. But he reassured them. In 2020, that’s what was needed.