Joe Biden beats Donald Trump to become America’s 46th president
Joe Biden’s third run at the presidency has paid off. His victory after a bruising primary race had more than a touch of Steven Bradbury to it.
World
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After 47 years in public life and three tilts at the presidency, Joe Biden has finally achieved what he was told would not happen.
In becoming the 46th president, Mr Biden has beaten the odds, the pundits and those in his own party who were so slow to get behind him this time around.
The oldest elected president at 77, he will be 78 by Inauguration Day next January.
It’s a remarkable bookend of records, given when he was first elected in 1972 he was 29 years old and the sixth youngest senator in history.
Mr Biden wasn’t the candidate who many Democrats wanted to run against the incumbent Mr Trump.
His victory after a bruising primary race had more than a touch of Steven Bradbury to it.
His age, long history as an establishment figure in Washington and studiously moderate agenda paled in comparison to the captivating revolution being steered by the progressive frontrunner Bernie Sanders.
Popular as he was and fondly recognised for serving as Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years, Biden’s lack of razzmatazz also came up short when stacked against the showbiz pop of Mr Trump.
He flagged in initial debates and came fourth and fifth in early primaries before a key, late endorsement from a powerful civil rights leader helped snare the black vote in South Carolina and turn the race his way in late February.
As the Democratic Party machine swung behind Mr Biden, his moderate challengers dropped out and offered their endorsements. By April he was the presumptive nominee.
Then came the virus and the shutdowns, and although Mr Biden was often accused of doing not much more than “hiding in his basement” for the remaining months, he surged ahead of Mr Trump in not just national polling but all six of the swing states the president needed in order to win.
These states tightened in recent weeks, but Americans chose Mr Biden’s dignity over Mr Trump in one of the most stunning rejections of a first term president in history.
Disgusted by Mr Trump’s cavalier approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly late in the campaign when he became stridently anti-science and fought a PR war against his diseases chief Anthony Fauci, they turned towards a traditional leader.
Trump fatigue was growing and it was real.
Even though Mr Trump retained the solid 40 per cent support that he has held since assuming the role, disapproval built among the moderates he needed and in the states which swept him to power in 2016.
FAMILY TRAGEDY SHAPED EMPATHETIC BIDEN
Born in the blue-collar Pennsylvania city of Scranton, Mr Biden overcame many personal challenges, starting with a childhood stutter that saw him bullied mercilessly and which continued in some form throughout his life.
Mr Biden’s verbal missteps also gave ammunition to his detractors who said they were indicative of mental decline.
Mr Biden’s stutter, which often makes him pause before speaking, was regularly derided by Mr Trump.
Known for a strong sense of empathy, Mr Biden’s personal tragedies are central to his story.
Just a month after he was first elected a senator in 1972, Biden’s wife Neilia and their one-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident that seriously injured their sons, Beau and Hunter.
He often referred to this loss on the campaign trail and spoke about the horror in a 2015 address at Yale University.
“While I was in Washington hiring staff, I got a phone call,” he said.
“My wife and three children were Christmas shopping. A tractor-trailer broadsided them and killed my wife and killed my daughter.”
Mr Biden continued on, raising his boys alone after they were released from hospital, commuting three hours each day by train from Delaware to Washington for his 36 years in the Senate.
Earning the nickname Amtrak Joe, it wasn’t until 2008 that he moved to Washington to take on the role of VP, making the veteran politician a social newcomer in the city.
Legendary DC socialite Sally Quinn and journalist said at the time: “I’ve never seen Joe Biden at a party in Washington”, an anomaly for a senior political figure.
Known for being a committed single father, Mr Biden married his second wife Jill only after his boys suggested it.
By chance, the now Dr Jill Biden had met Neilia Biden a month before she died, and recounted the tragedy in her autobiography, Where the Light Enters.
“She had an easy, natural beauty,” Dr Biden recalled of her predecessor.
“It was profoundly unfair. To take a mother from her children; to take a daughter from her father. Joe Biden had had everything, and in a horrible second, it was gone.”
Later, eldest son Beau Biden followed his father into politics and was often described as his best friend.
An army veteran and lawyer who ran for governor of Delaware, he died aged 46 from brain cancer in 2015 after a five-year battle.
It was a devastating loss for Biden, and he still becomes emotional when he speaks about his son.
“Beau should be the one running for president, not me,” Biden said in tears during a January interview with TV host Joe Scarborough.
“Every morning I get up Joe, not a joke, and I think to myself, ‘Is he proud of me?”
Biden’s youngest son Hunter has struggled for decades with substance abuse and through several scandals.
Revelations about his controversial role on the board of corrupt Ukraine energy Burisma, for which he was paid tens of millions of dollars over five years until 2019 despite having no relevant experience also threatened to up-end his father’s presidency.
Mr Biden’s candidacy was rocked in the final weeks of the campaign by revelations in the New York Post from an email cache in an old laptop belonging to Hunter.
Mr Biden was for part of this time responsible for US outreach with Ukraine, and Republicans have repeatedly accused the Bidens of corruption.
Mr Biden denies any wrongdoing and in January said that despite the “attacks”, he felt compelled to keep working towards the leadership.
“I can’t let my anger overcome the desire and the need to have to unite, heal this country,” he said.
“I’ve got to move beyond me and beyond my family. Because it’s about your family, it’s about everybody else’s family, not mine.”
After a lifetime in politics, this was Mr Biden’s third run for president.
The first ended with humiliation in 1988 after he was found to have plagiarised parts of speeches, a claim which continues to haunt him.
His second was in 2008 and he bowed out after a disappointing showing in the first primary contest, the Iowa caucuses.
But even that short-lived campaign was marked by a verbal misstep, when he cringingly referred to Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy”.
There were echoes of this statement in a comment Mr Biden made last year while campaigning that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids”.
His claim during an interview in May that “if you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or for Trump, then you ain’t black” also caused shockwaves.
Mr Biden is best known to Americans as the popular “Uncle Joe” figure who served as Barack Obama’s deputy for eight years, but it wasn’t until relatively late in the campaign Mr Obama gave his overt support to his bid.
COVID CRISIS TOP OF BIDEN'S AGENDA
On his first day in office, Mr Biden has said he would roll back Donald Trump’s tax cuts and raise the corporate tax rate, rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and sign “a series of executive orders”.
But he has said his first priority will be confronting the dual crises stalking America, the coronavirus and its associated fallout.
Mr Biden pledged during his campaign to reach out ahead of his inauguration to infectious diseases chief Anthony Fauci and ask his advice for the best path forward.
He also plans to establish a “pandemic board” which would steer resources to fight COVID and improve testing.
Mr Biden would also rejoin the World Health Organisation and begin outreach to the peeved traditional US allies whom Mr Trump alienated.
“Day 1, if I win, I’m going to be on the phone with our NATO allies saying ‘we’re back’,” Mr Biden said in July.
“We’re back and you can count on us again.”
He has also pledged to address racism on his first day and establish a task force that within 100 days would be asked to provide a plan to end homelessness.
And he plans to send to Congress a bill that would repeal protections for gun manufacturers that prevent them from being liable for deaths caused by their weapons.
Also within his first 100 days, Mr Biden has promised to unroll a raft of immigration policies introduced by Mr Trump, who imposed new restrictions in his first days in the White House.
The controversial “Muslim ban” which Mr Trump introduced days after being sworn in and prevented travel from several Muslim-majority countries, would also be rescinded.
A Biden administration would immediately stop the family separation policy for illegal immigrants on the border with Mexico, roll back Trump’s restrictions on immigration, increase the number of applications processed each day and “surge humanitarian resources” to the border.
The rights of the 11 million “dreamers”, who were brought to America as children by their undocumented migrant parents, would also face a clearer path to citizenship and be protected from deportation.
Undocumented migrants who serve in the military would also be protected from deportation and families who have been separated under the Trump regime would be reunited.
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