Fans of the US version of ‘The Office’ remember their hometown of Scranton well. Biden grew up there in the Green Ridge neighborhood. From his serious personality today, you wouldn’t guess that he was quite a sassy boy. “You couldn’t challenge him to do anything, because the problem was, he would,” his childhood friend Jim Kennedy told the Associated Press for a 2008 story.
His childhood adventures included climbing on a pile of hot coal and running under heavy moving machinery. “I never saw anyone bleed as much as he did,” Kennedy said.
Biden was tough in other ways too. He stuttered badly. One of the teachers at his school coined the name “Bi Bi Blackbird” to make fun of him. Biden endured the insults bravely until he learned to speak for himself without stuttering and shone as a public speaker.
There was something else young Biden learned in Scranton: politics. In his memoirs, ‘Promises to Keep’, he says he was educated in politics at his grandfather’s “staunchly Democratic” kitchen table.
His father’s work separated Biden from Scranton at the age of 10. It quickly took root in Delaware, your new home. He flourished as a leader, became an expert on policy matters, was elected to the Senate six times, and headed to Washington DC with Barack Obama.
Part of that was his own worth, the rest was inherited from his parents. His mother Jean instilled in him good Irish sense early on, teaching him how to use nuts and bolts for cufflinks at a school dance without shame, and make others covet them too.
Biden says he “learned life” by watching his father “get up every morning and go to a job he never liked.” The old Joseph Biden He taught him: “The art of living is simply getting up after being knocked down.”
Taking down Biden was, seriously, in 1972, the year he came to the United States Senate age 29, becoming the fifth youngest US senator in history. Before he could take a seat in Washington, his wife Neilia and their young daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident while driving to pick up a Christmas tree. His sons Beau and Hunter were seriously injured.
Biden lost all ambition for a time. “For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” he said later.
But Biden “got up,” as his father had taught him, and continued. By day he was a senator, by night a loving father to his children. “The new senator would go home to Delaware (150 km) every night to kiss them good night,” says an AP report released last year.
It was not the last blow. In 1988, he suffered two life-threatening aneurysms and his facial muscles were paralyzed for a time. Beau died of brain cancer in 2015. Hunter battled addiction and was discharged from the United States Navy for using cocaine.
“He is the most unfortunate person I have ever met personally,” Biden’s longtime friend Ted Kaufman told the AP. “And he is the luckiest person I have ever met personally.”
When Beau died, Biden was in his second term as vice president of the United States. A Politico article of the time reads: “Biden can sit in the Oval Office every morning, and he does it often, but insiders say he has begun to accept that he will probably never make it to the other side of the desk. “In October 2015, he dropped out of the 2016 presidential race, citing his family’s grief over the loss of Beau.
The presidency had been Biden’s lifelong dream.
He seriously considered an offer in 1980, signed the papers but failed to present them in 1984, threw his hat into the ring in 1988, only to be baffled by a plagiarism scandal. He tried again in 2008 and surprised everyone by being chosen as Barack Obama’s running mate.
When he took a step back in 2015, experts wrote his epitaph. “Uncle Joe” already looked too old to make an offer. No one thought that he would return four years later. But here it is. Perhaps you have returned to find answers to the two questions asked by your friend John Martilla to dissuade you from running in 1980: Why are you running for president and what will you do when you are president?
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