A strong believer in fate
Joe Biden has suffered so many painful losses, said Michael Kruse in Politico.com. Now he is the president-elect, in one of the most extraordinary comebacks in American political history.
IT’S BEEN BARELY more than eight months since Joe Biden’s presidential campaign looked all but done. It’s been five years since the wrenching death of his oldest son derailed his shot to pursue the presidency from the vice presidential slot—which looked at the time like the best chance he would have. And it’s been a dozen years since his last failed White House run, more than 30 since his first, and close to half a century since a car crash killed his wife and baby daughter weeks after he was elected to the United States Senate—nearly causing him to resign before he had cast a single vote.
The life of Biden, defined by cosmic swings of fortune, crushing personal tragedies, and career-saving resurrections, has culminated with this: He is now, at 77 years old, the president-elect.
In any other year, with any outgoing president other than the headline-hogging Donald Trump, this would be a piercing storyline. Even though polls seldom pointed to a different outcome, this victory stands as maybe the most remarkable twist of Biden’s long public arc—at once colossally improbable and profoundly apt.
It’s hard, after all, to imagine a Biden win in 2020 without a combination of two events that no oddsmaker could have predicted, even just a few years back—an outlier of an incumbent utterly committed to blowing up American politics to serve his own interests, and a pandemic that has left the country reeling and uncertain about its own health, economy, moral rudder, and even its basic capacity for competence. And it happened that in the collision of those two unique sources of such angst, Biden’s focal qualities—a sense of nearly banal stability, a powerful empathy forged by misfortune—were precisely what the situation at hand seemed to demand.
It is, longtime top Biden aide Tony Blinken told me, an “almost...fated meeting of the man and the moment.”
Politicians long have acknowledged the need for events to align in fortuitous ways to foster bids for higher office. Biden himself long has talked of the power of fate— unusually so in a business more frequently driven by the need to take and claim constant personal credit.
“I have,” Biden said to a reporter from Congressional Quarterly in 1989, “an incredibly high regard for fate.” He often has described himself as “a great respecter of fate.”
“I’ve come to realize it’s all about fate,” he said a couple years back. “It’s not about anything else. There’s a plan, and there’s fate.”
THE UPS AND downs of the entirety of his existence, judging if only from his own words, imbued Biden with not only that extraordinary empathy but also a keen sense of what can and cannot be controlled, an awareness of some larger force at play—not a nothing matters sort of fatalism, but a humbled understanding that
thing has intervened.” the line is so thin between the good and the bad and that to be fully human is to know it and go on.
Throughout his career, moments that looked like they were his to seize turned dark, and those that felt so grim proved in the end to be paths to new light. “I have never been able to plan my life,” Biden, a practicing Roman Catholic, told Congressional Quarterly. “Every time my personal life has been how I wanted it, some
In 1972, two weeks before he turned
30, Biden in Delaware was elected to the Senate in a shock, beating a two-term Republican by a few thousand votes in a year in which the top of the ticket was a re-elected Richard Nixon. The next day, he looked at his wife, according to the reporting of the late Richard Ben Cramer in the classic What It Takes. “It’s too perfect,” Biden said. “Can’t be like this,” he said. “Something’s gonna happen.” He was in Washington setting up and hiring staff when a truck full of corncobs plowed into the Chevrolet station wagon in which the rest of his family was picking up a Christmas tree. Biden, not yet sworn in, now a single dad of two grievously hurt young sons, spoke at the memorial service.
“We had decided not to have a fourth child because of a fear that something would happen,” he said, according to the coverage in the News Journal of Wilmington, Del. “Things were just too good.” A grief-wracked Biden quoted John Milton: “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.”
Fifteen years later, remarried to the former Jill Jacobs, the father of a new daughter, by then in his middle 40s, in his third term
avoided dying from a brain aneurysm. He was lucky to have been elected senator at the almost unprecedented age of 29—but then shortly afterward had his wonderful wife and daughter killed in an auto accident and his two boys put in the hospital. But he was extraordinarily lucky to have convinced Jill Biden to marry him, and then have their daughter Ashley.”
“I’d like nothing better if my son were alive to be the nominee for president,” Biden told Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air in the summer of ’17. “He was a hell of a lot better than I was.” is luck. Switch a few tens of thousands of votes in Ohio and John Kerry is president of the United States. Have an orderly voting process in Florida and Al Gore not only gets elected—he gets inaugurated. Luck really matters.”
For Biden, for these last eight-plus months, his luck has looked like this: Because of the level of the threat Donald Trump posed to this country and its democracy, Democrats on either side of Super Tuesday consolidated their support—Biden’s intraparty foes dropping out and lining up behind him, first Pete Buttigieg, then Amy Klobuchar, then Mike Bloomberg, and ultimately Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Whereas Biden pre-pandemic had been hobbled at times by conspicuously scarce schedules and small crowds, the onset of the scourge scrambled what that meant. Staying home, judicious campaigning, socially distanced convenings—it made him seem no longer comparatively feeble but for the most part prudent about public health.
And while the persistent coronavirus crisis stripped him of the ability to employ his noted tactile, rope-line politicking skills, it elevated arguably his even better asset: In this year of sickness and death, in what already was such a difficult, divisive stretch, Biden’s broadly conciliatory, unassuming air and unfathomably hard-earned facility to feel other people’s pain proved to be not just a vivid point of contrast with his generalelection opponent but what a good portion of a rattled, wounded, weakened country wanted.
“It’s almost,” as a Buttigieg campaign higher-up put it when we talked a couple of months ago, “like the seas have parted for him.”
“Here’s the deal. Anything can happen,” Biden said on CNN in September. “I have seen too much of it in my family.”
And in this odd, unnerving, and interminable week, facing the always disruptive Trump along with the prospect of an unsupportive Senate and the certainty of a riven nation—the good with the bad, like his mother always said—Biden won Wisconsin, and he won Michigan, and to clinch he won Pennsylvania, the state in which he was born, a poetic note to this latest turn of fate.