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At a time of extraordinary tumult and pain, America has chosen a man racked with pain, with a seemingly limitless capacity for resilience, to be the next president of the country.
Joe Biden sought the presidency twice before serving as vice president for eight years in the Obama administration, a role that could have been the cornerstone of his decades in public life.
But after the election of Donald Trump four years ago, Biden believed he had one last mission. By calling the 2020 election a “battle for the soul of the nation,” he challenged the incumbent and the country by force of character.
“Character is on the ballot,” Biden told voters over and over again, as he promised to be a decent and empathetic leader, traits his opponent saw as weaknesses. Biden told the nation that his life and career had taken him through extraordinary ups and downs and unimaginable lows, and what he had learned from those experiences made him the right man to face this moment.
“The Bible tells us that there is a time to tear down and a time to build. A time to heal, this is the moment, ”he said, quoting Ecclesiastes in one of the closing speeches of his campaign last week. “God and history have called us to this moment and to this mission.”
Biden became the second-youngest senator in American history when he was elected days before his 30th birthday, upsetting a longtime Republican few believed to be vulnerable. Now, nearly half a century later, the 77-year-old will be sworn in as the oldest president in U.S. history, while former California Sen. Kamala Harris will be the first woman and the first woman of color to serve as president. vice president. .
Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a former coal mining town that would later serve as the backdrop for the American version of The Office. Although Biden’s father, out of work, moved with the family to Delaware when he was just 10 years old, his hometown roots have defined his political persona as an “average citizen” and a man of the people.
Barack Obama, in his former vice president’s election campaign last month, featured Biden as the “sloppy boy from Scranton.”
“I came to admire Joe as a man who learned early on to treat everyone he meets with dignity and respect, living by the words his parents taught him: ‘No one is better than you, Joe, but you are better than nobody’.
During a visit to Scranton before the polls closed on Election Day, the current occupant of Biden’s childhood home asked him to sign the wall of the room. “From this house to the White House with the grace of God,” he wrote. “Joe Biden, 3-11-2020”.
Despite his reputation as a “bug machine,” Biden can also be incredibly disciplined. As a child, he stood in front of a mirror reciting poetry for hours to overcome a stutter that still plagues his speech today. Despite his nostalgia for a bygone political era of bipartisan socialization, the Democrat has never had a drink in his life, citing a family history of alcoholism.
Days after Biden won his first election to the United States Senate in 1972, his wife, Neilia, and their young daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident. His sons, Beau and Hunter, were injured. Tormented and unsure whether to move on, Biden was persuaded to serve his term and was sworn in from the hospital, at his children’s bedside.
As a single father raising just two young children, Biden took the Amtrak train from Washington DC to Delaware every night. He soon fell in love with Jill Jacobs, an educator who, according to him, made his little family “whole again.” They married in 1977 and had a daughter, Ashley.
Decades later, he would lose Beau to brain cancer at just 46 years old. After the death of his eldest son, Biden announced that he would not run for president despite pressure to challenge Hillary Clinton in 2016. It was widely believed that his decision ultimately closed the door on his presidential ambitions.
“When most politicians say to the voter, ‘I feel your pain,’ it feels corny or artificial,” said Jeff Wilser, author of Joe’s Book. “With Biden it’s real, because he really feels it. Much of Biden’s life has been defined by tragedy, and right now the nation is experiencing a tragedy. “
More than 225,000 people have died from the coronavirus and millions have lost their jobs due to the economic consequences. For months this summer, the streets of the United States were filled with protesters demanding an end to the deaths of black men and women at the hands of law enforcement.
“I think I know what they are feeling,” Biden said, speaking to the families of those killed by coronavirus. “You feel like you are being sucked into a black hole in the middle of your chest. It’s suffocating. Your heart is broken and there is nothing but a feeling of emptiness right now. “
When Donald Trump won in 2016, Biden said he felt compelled to run again. The campaign was his third attempt to win the presidency. On his first try, Biden ran as the generational change candidate, but quickly fell apart amid a plagiarism scandal involving British Labor leader Neil Kinnock. (Now he’s annoying about his quote, whether it’s quoting his mother or the Bible.)
In his second career, Biden ran for statesman, but was overshadowed by a candidate many decades his junior who inspired “hope and change”: Barack Obama.
Many questioned the wisdom of his third attempt. His party, and his country, had changed, but he had not.
Biden clung to that bygone era of bipartisanship, long after his friends in Washington DC had retreated to their political corners. And he was a white centrist in his 70s seeking the nomination of an increasingly young, diverse, and progressive party.
In light of the #MeToo movement, Biden has recently apologized for his treatment of Anita Hill in 1991, when he presided over the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, in which Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment.
He has also expressed regret for the 1994 crime bill that he helped draft, which experts and critics say laid the foundation for an era of mass incarceration that has disproportionately penalized black and brown people. He also called his support for the Iraq war a “mistake.”
Yet despite a turbulent start and a formidable Democratic camp of ideological warriors and rising stars promoting progressive policies, Biden stood firm in his moderate positions and his calls for bipartisanship, defying the odds.
He constantly described himself as the anti-Trump: where the president sought division, he would find unity; where the president advocated isolationism, Biden would forge alliances; where Trump ignored the science, Biden would be guided by experts. It was part, as Obama put it, of Biden’s commitment to protect Americans from all “foreign, domestic and microscopic” threats.
Promising to be a healer at a grave time for the nation, Biden brought together a coalition of longtime Black, Hispanic and White voters, progressives, independents and Republicans, young voters and older voters to succeed a president who warned that he would “change fundamentally forever the character of this nation ”.
The next four years may be even more difficult for the United States, which has just survived one of the most divisive presidential campaigns in history. But Biden was confident that he had finally reached the moment when, to quote the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, “hope and history rhyme.”
