A persona from an earlier era of politics
Biden never lost the persona he forged during an earlier era of politics, one in which compromise across party lines was a rule of the game.
From start to finish, he was Joe from Scranton, often referring to his Pennsylvania roots, mentioning his father even at that NATO news conference. Young Biden was an undistinguished student at the University of Delaware and graduated near the bottom of his law school class at Syracuse University.
He would forever have a chip on his shoulder toward Ivy Leaguers, the self-confident members of “the elite” he would decry when he rejected calls for him to withdraw from the Democratic ticket.
He was the guy who had won elections, he would note, starting with the upset when he narrowly defeated an incumbent Republican senator in Delaware.
Never far from the surface were his personal tragedies − from the deaths of his wife and young daughter in a car crash in 1972 to the demise of son Beau in 2015 of a brain tumor thought to be associated with his service in the Iraq war. His surviving son, Hunter, would struggle with drug addiction.
Biden held the Delaware Senate seat through six more elections − a 36-year tenure that would see him chair the Judiciary Committee and then the Foreign Relations Committee − until he moved into the vice president’s residence on Observatory Circle in 2009.
But he had defeats, too. He ended his bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination in the wake of a furor over plagiarizing a British politician’s stump speech. His 2008 bid went nowhere; he finished a humiliating fifth in the opening Iowa caucuses.
In 2020, he lost Iowa, too, then the New Hampshire primary, then the Nevada caucuses. But he won the South Carolina primary, and with that staged a comeback for the Democratic nomination. And then the presidential election, running as a uniter in a time of division.
He would carry more than 81 million votes, the most of any presidential candidate in history.
The lessons Biden took from that victory, and from a lifetime of taking a hit and then getting back up, made it harder for him to step back this time.
“He has seen this over and over again,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters as the debate over whether he should stay at the top of the ticket raged. “People count him out. People say he’s not going to win. People say, you know, all of the negative things that they want to put at his feet, and he proves them wrong over and over again.”
This time, though, he decided that it was time to go. That he had reached the end of the road.