Days before leaving the White House in 2017, President Barack Obama surprised Joe Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, declaring his gray-haired, septuagenarian lieutenant “the best vice president the United States has ever had,” a “lion of American history. “
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The tribute marked the alleged end of a long public life that put Biden in the orbit of the Oval Office for 45 years; however, through a combination of family and personal tragedy, his own political missteps, and a bad timing, he had never been allowed to do so. sit behind the desk Resolute yourself.
Turns out the pinnacle wouldn’t elude Biden after all. His moment had not yet come.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., 77, was elected the 46th president of the United States on Saturday, defeating President Donald Trump in an election that unfolded in the context of a pandemic, its economic consequences and a national recognition of the racism. He becomes the oldest president-elect and brings with him a historic vice president-elect in Kamala Harris, the first black woman and person of South Asian descent to serve in the nation’s second-highest office.
There are no sure paths to a position held by just 44 men in more than two centuries, but Biden’s is one of the most unlikely, even for a man who had aspired to the job for more than three decades, twice without success and passing. a third bet to try to succeed Obama four years ago.
However, the president-elect’s allies say it was that delayed and tortuous route that prepared him for 2020, when he could finally offer himself not just another senator or governor with 10-point plans and outsized ambition. Instead, since launch on April 25, 2019, Biden sold himself as the seasoned and empathetic elder statesman, particularly suited to defeating a “dangerous” and “divisive” president and then “restoring the soul of the nation. “after Trump.
“A lot of people dismissed it,” said Karen Finney, one of nominee Hillary Clinton’s top aides in 2016. “But when I saw her keynote speech, talking about the fight for the soul of the country, I said, ‘You get it. That’s what a president does. A president looks around the country and understands what is happening ”.
“Biden knew the moment,” he said.
However, his victory did not come with the usual frills. He did not get a clear Democratic majority in the Senate, and several Democratic House candidates lost, raising the possibility of a narrowly divided government that is likely to test his promise of bipartisanship. State legislatures also did not change even when Biden was winning the popular vote by about 5 percentage points.
Biden first joined a Democratic primary race made up of nearly two dozen rivals, most considerably younger, already mired in an ideological struggle on issues ranging from universal health care to taxes on billionaires. Biden took an open path, settling where he spent his 36 years as a senator from Delaware: a mainstream liberal with an established nucleus for making deals. But his visceral and emotional appeal transcended the identity of the party.
When he warned that Trump’s reelection would “forever alter the character” of America, Biden drew on life and political experience to tell his fellow Democrats that they were having a premature debate. In their estimation, they were arguing about where the metaphorical train should go when, in fact, the train was, and still is, derailed.
Biden was the presumed favorite who hadn’t been in 1987, when his first run for the White House shamefully ended with a plagiarized speech; or in 2008, when Obama and others defeated him in the Iowa caucuses; or even in 2016, when the combination of his son Beau’s death in 2015 and Obama’s behind-the-scenes support for Clinton forced him to drop out of the race.
Yet Biden was a shaky 2020 favorite. He was well regarded, even loved, as his party’s “Uncle Joe”, a loyal Obama MP, but faced a stream of criticism for being too old, too moderate, too white. , too melancholic, too senatorial.
He was not the same figure who had first come to Iowa in the 1988 cycle as a young star of his party, a talented speaker whose booming speeches could fill a room while also establishing a connection to the coalition’s legacies. democrat. Franklin Roosevelt built.
Although he eventually crafted a political agenda for an ambitious presidency, there was no distinctive proposal for a great program like “Medicare for All.” Biden emphasized more personal traits.
His empathy, which dates back to a debilitating childhood stutter, a 1972 car accident that killed his first wife and young daughter weeks after his election to the Senate, and then Beau’s death as an adult, was not something that could easily meet in a crowded debate stage.
Recalling decades on Capitol Hill was reminiscent of the days of a Senate that still included old Southern segregationists, and invited scrutiny of their votes for criminal justice laws, trade and tax deals, and war resolutions that are anathema to younger Democrats. .
Talking so much about his family influenced Trump’s efforts to brand Joe Biden and his son Hunter as corrupt. Even Biden’s resentment of Trump’s racist rhetoric highlighted that he too was a white establishment figure, vying to lead a party whose energy comes from women, black and Latino voters and young people.
When the nomination process began, Biden lost badly in both Iowa and New Hampshire, prompting talk about how he could make a graceful exit from the race.
He found emphatic redemption, driven by black voters, so vital to any Democratic candidate, by winning the South Carolina primary and restarting the race in his favor. That victory sent a message to Democratic voters in key states that Biden could build a winning coalition.
“I endorsed Joe Biden as soon as he announced it because I thought he was the only candidate who would win” battle states, said Gwen Graham, a former Florida congresswoman and candidate for governor in 2018. Graham, whose father served with Biden in the Senate, He cited the “centrism and experience” of the president-elect as main reasons, but added another trait that he said was critical in the Trump era.
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“Joe Biden is a fundamentally decent man,” he said.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, the highest-ranking black member of Congress and South Carolina’s most influential Democrat, leaned on the same assessment when he made his seminal endorsement in February, days before what would become Biden’s first primary victory in his 32-year presidential term. Bells
“We know Joe,” Clyburn said excitedly. “But most importantly, Joe knows us.”
It’s an open question whether the bond that Biden formed first with black voters and then with moderate white Democrats would have expanded to a general election victory if the Covid-19 pandemic, and Trump’s repeated rejection of his economic threats and for health, they would not have. It will come to dominate 2020. And the president-elect now surely faces a different challenge as he seeks to turn his November coalition into a government alliance.
But it’s not debatable that Biden’s central speech, rooted in his political and personal biography, was the same when he launched his campaign in the spring of 2019 as when he won the South Carolina primary in February 2020 and when he closed his campaign. against Trump.
Obama, in bestowing that rare civil honor on a man who said in 2017 was heading to life as a private citizen, had one thing right: “It is nowhere near done.”
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