After a life of triumph over tragedy, age finally fells Biden
Once considered too young, now unequivocally too old, Joe Biden’s career of tragedy and triumph ends in an admission of defeat to his own infirmity.
It’s the end of the political road – on his terms – for a man whose political career has stretched over five decades, and taken him from Scranton, Pennsylvania to the White House.
Joe Biden was a 29-year-old lawyer when he became one of the youngest Americans to ever be elected into the US senate, in 1972.
The constitutional minimum age was 30 – and Biden caused a sensation by unseating a 63 year old Republican, Caleb Boggs.
He famously had trouble convincing people in the Capitol he really was a Senator.
Biden’s political experience before that was a couple of years on the local council in his home state, Delaware, and being junior and senior class president at high school.
He was charming and smooth – but he had not always been confident.
Joe Biden grew up with a stutter. He was ridiculed for the speech impediment by his teachers and peers.
“I learned so much from having to deal with stuttering,” Biden would later say.
“It gave me insight into other people’s pain, other people’s suffering. It made me understand that everyone, everyone has something they’re fighting to overcome.”
But suffering would soon become all too familiar.
Shortly after Joe Biden turned 30, his wife Neilia and children were involved in a car crash while Christmas shopping.
Biden’s wife and daughter Naomi, one, died and his sons suffered serious injuries.
“For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide.
“Not because they were deranged, but because they’d been to the top of the mountain and they just knew in their heart to never get there again.”
Biden suddenly found himself a single father to his young sons, Beau and Hunter.
The grief was immense, but Biden’s political career did not slow down.
He was elected to the senate seven consecutive times.
He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and again in 2008 before becoming Vice President under Barack Obama.
But in 2015 tragedy struck the family again, when 46-year-old Beau Biden died of brain cancer.
Joe Biden now had only one living child from his first marriage, Hunter – who, despite his father’s love, would become an enormous political liability.
Scandal after scandal finally culminated in June 2024 when Hunter Biden was convicted for lying about his illegal drug use in order to buy a gun some years earlier.
He was the first child of a sitting U.S. president to be convicted of a crime.
But despite Hunter Biden’s many controversies and concerns about Joe Biden’s age, in 2020 he became the President of the United States after winning a bitter campaign against Donald Trump.
In his 2020 victory speech, Biden sounds – even at 77 – youthful and dynamic.
“I’m proud of the coalition we put together – the broadest and most diverse coalition in history. Democrats. Republicans. Independents. Progressives. Moderates. Conservatives. Young. Old. Urban. Suburban. Rural. Gay. Straight. Transgender. White. Latino. Asian. Native American,” he said in his acceptance speech.
“Especially for those moments where this campaign was at its lowest ebb, the African-American community stood up again for me. You’ve always had my back and I’ll have yours.”
As a politician … Biden can be difficult to ideologically pin down.
In a 1974 profile Biden rejected the idea he was a progressive liberal, declaring: “When it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I’m about as liberal as your grandmother.”
The Supreme Court’s landmark Roe Vs Wade decision had been announced just the year before. Biden, who is a Catholic, did not agree with their finding.
“I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion,” he said.
“I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”
The accepted wisdom is that people become more conservative as they age.
In Biden’s case the opposite appears to be true.
Biden said in his 2020 presidential campaign that he would look to decriminalise marijuana at a federal level. He also said that people should not be behind bars on charges of simple possession or small-scale use.
While marijuana was not decriminalised in his term, there have been at least two rounds of mass pardons for people with federal possession convictions.
But it’s the politically divisive topic of abortion on which Biden has softened the most, declaring he would “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.”
In the 2024 campaign, Biden positioned himself as the only man standing between women and nationwide abortion bans.
When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he positioned himself as a unifier.
Former President Trump called the election stolen.
When Biden came to office, Covid was still raging and the economic situation in the United States was dire.
Mass layoffs meant unemployment was at 6.3 per cent and food banks were feeding millions.
Biden signed a $1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package in March 2021 … and the first twinges of inflation were felt worldwide a few months later. For the first time Biden’s popularity took a serious hit.
His popularity was tested again when he withdrew troops from Afghanistan in August 2021.
The Taliban took over almost immediately.
As people scrambled to evacuate, a bomb at Kabul airport killed thirteen American troops and nearly two hundred Afghans.
Many said this was an avoidable tragedy.
Biden’s popularity might have had time to recover had there not been more economic strain to come.
In February 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent the costs of energy and shipping soaring.
By June prices in America had increased by more than nine per cent, the steepest rise in four decades.
Economists’ predictions of a recession didn’t eventuate for America, but – as in Australia – the cost of living bit hard in the suburbs.
All this perhaps Biden could have survived – until the 2024 presidential debate sealed his fate.
Biden gave a performance so disastrous it may be the only thing some Americans remember about him.
As Trump watched on, barely concealing his amazement, Biden grasped for clarity.
“I should be with, dealing with everything we have to deal with. Look, if … We finally beat Medicare,” Biden said.
Trump was quick to reply: “He’s right. He did beat Medicaid, he beat it to death, and is destroying Medicare.”
In subsequent days, Biden compounded his mistake by introducing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin” and referred to Kamala Harris, as “Vice President Trump” at a news conference.
Senior Democrats, movie stars and millionaires began publicly calling for Biden to step down.
Trump, whose victory already seemed inevitable, then narrowly avoided an assassination attempt.
We’ve all seen that photo: Trump being whisked away by security, fist in the air, ear bleeding, with the American flag billowing behind him.
Trump was staunch under fire and was greeted as a hero at the Republican convention.
Biden came down with Covid and had to take a week off the campaign trail, as colleagues begged the man – once too young, now unequivocally too old – to perform one last act of service for his country … and step aside.
Now, the Democrats’ challenge is to seize this moment – and try to stop the flow of momentum from sweeping Donald Trump and the Republicans back to the White House.
This is an edited transcript of our daily news podcast The Front. Find it wherever you get podcasts.
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