US election: Has Joe Biden got what it takes to be President?
When freshly minted Senator Barack Obama first encountered Joe Biden in action, in 2005, he passed a three-word note to an aide. It said: ‘Shoot. Me. Now.’
When freshly minted Senator Barack Obama first encountered Joe Biden in committee action on the Foreign Relations Committee in 2005, he passed a three-word note to an aide. It said: “Shoot. Me. Now.”
Even in the interstellar capital of windbaggery, Biden was astonishingly verbose. Yet just three years later, having thrashed Biden in the primaries, Obama chose the senator from Delaware to be his running mate for the presidency. Beneath the mawkish blather, Obama saw something in Biden, a vision that was echoed by Democratic primary voters this year and could well see Biden elected America’s 46th president in ten days’ time.
There’s just something about Joe, as this short biography from New Yorker writer Evan Osnos illustrates.
At 77, Biden has overcome unimaginable tribulation, multiple presidential primary humiliations, a potentially crippling speech impediment and his own mediocrity. Now he carries the hopes of billions upon his shoulders.
Biden was born into the “silent generation”, growing up in the shadow of the Second World War, first in Scranton, Pennsylvania, then in Wilmington, Delaware, where a precarious middle-class existence relied on his father “Big Joe’s” work selling cars and cleaning boilers. “Joe Impedimenta” was his school nickname, a reference to a stutter that has taken a lifetime to master.
As a child, he would recite passages from WB Yeats and Ralph Waldo Emerson and try to anticipate people’s inquiries in his quest to avoid sounding “like Morse code”.
Biden’s life was transformed in 1972, when this unremarkable lawyer took an impossibly long shot at winning a Delaware Senate seat from a well-established incumbent. His shocking victory was the first real indication of Biden’s considerable – and underrated – political skill.
Yet a month before he was due to be sworn in, Biden’s wife Neilia and daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash, which also hospitalised his young sons Beau and Hunter. “I felt God had played a horrible trick on me,” he wrote later, recalling that he contemplated suicide.
Buoyed by two women, his sister Valerie and his second wife, Jill, Biden built a long career in the Senate, where he prospered as a political weather vane. Wherever the consensus of the Democratic Party has moved in the past five decades, you can usually find Biden, planting his flag slap bang in the middle.
Biden is a man of many flaws – accusations of plagiarism, fabrication and inveterate gaffe-making among them. (Obama’s staff used to refer to his solecisms as “Joe Bombs”.) But he has great gifts too, not least, after the death of Beau in 2015 from brain cancer, an almost preternatural ability to share pain and grief, seeking emotional connection in every encounter. He is also categorically not a snob and is his party’s first presidential candidate without an Ivy League degree since Walter Mondale in 1984.
Right now, Biden’s most potent asset is that he is not Donald Trump. In a time of profound crisis “Sleepy Joe” offers millions of exhausted Americans a comforting vision of leadership, moderation and something approaching normality.
Osnos’s slim volume, spun out of two New Yorker profiles, is a good primer on the man who could soon be president. Yet it falls foul of the perils of access journalism, failing to ask any tough questions of Biden or his surrogates. Osnos doesn’t talk to any Republicans or conservatives about Biden, nor Anita Hill, whom Biden famously sidelined during Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas.
Nor Lucy Flores, the young politician whom he allegedly touched inappropriately at a rally in Nevada. (He has denied this.)
Osnos glosses over the Hunter Biden-Ukraine scandal in a matter of sentences, parroting the line that Joe Biden kept his distance from his errant son during various shady business endeavours that may have traded on his father’s position as vice-president. But is it really plausible that Biden had no idea what Hunter was up to? Or even desirable?
There’s something deeper going on here. It seems that many liberal journalists in America no longer see it as their duty to ask tough questions, if there’s any chance of them rebounding to Trump’s benefit. They believe too much is at stake.
Perhaps they are right, but it doesn’t make for compelling journalism. In this case, the result is 190 pages of eloquent and well-informed puffery that effectively doubles up as a campaign advert, and might as well have ended with the words: “I’m Joe Biden, and I endorse this message.”
Joe Biden: American Dream by Evan Osnos (Bloomsbury, pp192)
The Times
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