For Biden, politics are often framed by the personal

When grieving with those who lost loved ones in a building collapse, President Joe Biden invoked the car crash that claimed members of his own family decades ago. When explaining his decision to pull troops from Afghanistan, he remembered his veteran son. When discussing the importance of education, he recalled the teachers who helped him overcome his childhood stutter.

And when he met with Queen Elizabeth and then Vladimir Putin on a recent trip abroad, he couldn’t resist bringing up his mother with both of them.

The personal has always been the political for Biden. Far more than his recent predecessors, the president publicly draws on his

own experiences when he makes connections with voters and considers his decisions. Many politicians make their background a central component of their political identity, but Biden is particularly prone to draw links between his own life story and the day-to-day workings of his presidency.

And the strongest connection is often the saddest one.

Few public figures speak as powerfully on grief as Biden, who lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash and later his adult son Beau to brain cancer. In the first months of his term, he has drawn on that empathy to console those who have lost loved ones, including the more than 600,000 who have died in the COVID-19 pandemic.

And it was on vivid display recently when he spent more than three hours in private with people mourning the loss of loved ones in the building collapse in Surfside, Florida, going from family to family to hear the stories of those still missing in the debris. Biden spoke of wanting to switch places with a lost or missing loved one and lamented that “the waiting, the waiting, is unbearable.”

“The people you may have lost — they’re going to be with you your whole life,” he told the families. “A part of your soul, a part of who you are.”

Biden carries with him an index card that lists the total number of Americans who have died from COVID-19 and in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has been known to quietly send notes to people, including lawmakers and journalists, affected by cancer, referring to his own family’s struggles with the affliction.

“Cynical people say, ‘OK, this is a calculator, these are crocodile tears, this is something he turns on and off for the cameras.’ ... That is total balderdash,” said Dick Harpootlian, a Democratic South Carolina state lawmaker who’s known and advised Biden for 40 years.

Harpootlian said that when his own mother died, Biden called with condolences. The lawmaker added: “Empathy is sort of the wrong word. I mean, it’s not strong enough. It was just, he felt my loss.

“I could tell it’s sincere, genuine caring for people that are hurt or have lost loved ones,” he continued.

Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015, looms large in the president’s life.

He said that his dying son made him promise to keep going and, the day before he was sworn in as president, he tearfully told a crowd in Delaware that his “only regret” was that Beau couldn’t be there.