From young senator to aging president
When Joseph Robinette Biden was first elected to the Senate at age 30 and skeptics asked about his age, he had a standard response. “Watch me,” he would say.
That was the same rejoinder he would use a halfcentury later, when skeptics asked about his age in an entirely different context.
Few figures in American history have filled as many political roles as he has, from one of the youngest senators ever when he was elected in 1972 to the nation’s oldest president at 81. Early on, he was a Democratic centrist on abortion, civil rights and crime. Later, as president, he would enact the most far-reaching progressive agenda since Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society.
As Barack Obama’s running mate, he would be a crucial partner in electing the nation’s first Black president.
Then, against the predictions of pundits, he won the Democratic presidential nomination himself on his third try, in 2020. Facing a field of contenders a generation younger, he prevailed in his party and then with the country, ousting President Trump in an election that both sides depicted as an existential test of democracy.
In office, despite slender Democratic majorities in Congress, he pursued a strikingly ambitious agenda.
“As great a legislative record as any first-term president since at least FDR,” said Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “Led the country through the bulk of its greatest domestic crisis – COVID – since the Great Depression, and its greatest health crisis since the Spanish flu. Record-high stock markets and record low unemployment. Kept the nation out of war despite wars erupting around the world.
“Oh, and entered office without his predecessor on hand to peacefully hand over power for the first time since Reconstruction, a mark of the divided nation he inherited.”
Aides would complain Biden never got credit for the results, including avoiding the recession that most economists had forecast. He suffered setbacks, too, including a disastrous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan that contributed to a sense of a world that was spinning out of control, with U.S. influence on the wane.