The ghosts of Joe Biden

Former US Vice President and Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden.

It’s likely that Joe Biden will be the Democrat candidate to challenge Trump. And as the panicked response of POTUS to this prospect attests, it’s likely Biden will win. So it’s time to know more about Joe.

I found a wealth of information and insight in a piece for The New York Review of Books by the formidable Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole – and a follow-up conversation on Radio National’s Late Night Live. O’Toole makes the fascinating observation that Biden’s vaunted Irish-Catholicism is an artefact – Biden is not an Irish name and Joe would be more entitled to emphasise his all-Americanness, belonging as he does to a family that was granted land in Pennsylvania by, yes, William Penn.

But being Irish fits better with the myth he’s long told about himself – one that links to his obsession with the Kennedys. Like patriarch Joe Kennedy, Biden saw his family providing a Democrat dynasty to occupy the White House. Joe would be the first of a series of Biden presidents. Although repeated campaigns to get himself elected POTUS failed, he would make it to the White House as VP to Obama. And president Obama would make Joe his “designated mourner”, using his genuine empathy for the grieving to bring official sympathy to the suffering. “When I talk to people in mourning,” Biden writes in his recent memoir, “they know I speak from experience”.

Joe Kennedy built his famous dynastic compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Joe Biden planned a similar compound to accommodate the family at Wilmington, Delaware. And, tragically, both families would be overwhelmed with tragedy. In 1972, Biden’s first wife Neilia and daughter Naomi died in a car accident that also injured sons Beau and Hunter. Beau died from a brain tumour in 2015, aged 46. Over and over again Joe has identified with the Kennedys, talking of his political career as a continuation of the work of Jack’s and Bobby’s. He seems to see himself as JFK reincarnated. As O’Toole says, Biden is the most haunted and gothic figure in US politics.

Like Ronald Reagan, who often confused his old movie scripts with real life, Biden blurs fact and fantasy, imagining himself marching with the civil rights leaders – he didn’t – or being close to Nelson Mandela – he wasn’t. And just as Melania Trump notoriously plagiarised a speech of Michelle Obama’s, Biden was caught lifting one of UK Labour’s Neil Kinnock’s pretty much in its entirety. Venial not mortal, but sins nonetheless. He became notorious in the Obama White House for his amiable blundering.

Joe’s weakness seems to be his insatiable need to be liked. No, more than that: loved. O’Toole reminds us of Biden’s confused role in the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill episode, in which he supported both of them. As a close observer of events said at the time: “Joe was trying to convince them both that he was their friend.” And Joe’s literally touchy-feely approach to the job gets him in trouble. His instinct to cuddle people is very problematic with women.

But his basic decency is unquestionable – and people respond to his authenticity. Hence Trump’s rising panic. Biden’s contrast with Trump’s grotesquely inflated “greatness” and “the toxic self-pity he has embodied” could not be more dramatic.

O’Toole wonders if Biden’s gift for grief is enough. No one argues that Biden is a great thinker (though compared to the incumbent he could be described as “a very stable genius”). “Can a politics of grief be adequate to a politics of grievance?” asks the Irishman. “Consolation is not social change. Solace is not enough.”