Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden campaigns in Florida
Credit: Tom Brenner/REUTERS
US Election Article Bar
The house is indistinguishable from others on the row. Two floors tall with a converted attic, its grey-blue paint is peeling near the roof. A row of neat bushes and a square of lawn lie out front. A rocking chair sits on the porch. The only clue as to who once lived here is an A4 paper flapping in the wind. It is a photo of a smiling boy wielding a baseball bat. Some lines of text reveal his identity: Joe Biden.
This leafy corner of Scranton, Pennsylvania, is where the man who could be elected president in a little over one week spent his early years. It is the embodiment of Middle America – so much so that it was picked as the location for the US remake of British comedy The Office, which sends up the drudgery of work life.
But the city stands at the centre of the story that Mr Biden tells about himself; a man with working class origins and Irish Catholic roots.
Anne Kearns, 84, a retired teacher, first moved into the Biden family’s former home in the 1960s. One day in 2008, she was babysitting her grandchildren, dolls strewn across the floor, when Mr Biden turned up at her door. He was in town for a funeral and wanted to see the old place. He has since returned roughly 10 times.
A Joe Biden-Kamala Harris presidential campaign sign is staked on the front lawn of a residential house in October 2020 in Throop, Pennsylvania. The sign is located in the politically strategic northeast Lackawanna County, near Joe Biden's hometown of Scranton,
Credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
Anne Kearns now considers him a friend. She recounts stories he has shared of playing games with his three siblings, and of his father looming at the top of those stairs. During one visit, her sons took Mr Biden upstairs to see his old bedroom and urged him to sign his name on the wall. “Mother, can I do that?” he asked her. She agreed. His words are still scrawled there in black ink: “I am home.”
“He is the nicest person you will ever meet,” she says. “The person you see on the TV is the same in real life.”
A ‘born leader’
Mr Biden’s old schoolmate Tom Bell tells a similar story. The pair sat together in first grade (aged seven) and Bell remembers him fondly, though as something of a daredevil. Once Mr Biden led their little gang of friends around a local building site, balancing on girders 80 feet above the ground and swinging from ropes.
Another time, Mr Biden was bet he could not sprint up a huge pile of smouldering coal waste, a common sight in the industrial city. “It was chancey and iffy,” recalls Mr Bell. “[But] it was made in heaven for Joe Biden” who scampered to the top, even though it could have collapsed at any moment. “His desire [was] to take charge of an event, or an idea, or a decision. He was a born leader.”
Now Mr Biden is a candidate for the top job. After a bruising primary process, he emerged triumphant and as the Democratic presidential nominee in the US election on 3 November. Only he stands between Donald Trump and a second term.
Ahead in the polls
Polls indicate that Mr Biden is ahead in the race and has been since the start of the year, with his lead bouncing between five and 10 percentage points. At the time of publication, he was at 51 per cent of the vote, compared with Mr Trump’s 43 per cent, according to leading US political site, Real Clear Politics.
Of course there is a chance that Mr Biden could win the popular vote, as Hillary Clinton did, and still fall short by losing the battleground states thanks to the electoral college system. So, to secure a victory, he must sway the swing voters in states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina.
Joe Biden’s poll lead over Donald Trump in six key swing states
“You would much rather be Joe Biden than Donald Trump,” said US polling expert Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Centre for Politics. “[But] as we all learned four years ago, when it was much better to be Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump, that doesn’t mean a damn thing.”
Countless column inches have been dedicated to deciphering the mind of the 45th US president: his tweets, his flaws, his impulses and motivations. But what about the man who could be his successor? What type of leader would he be?
Not particularly academic
Certainly nobody could have predicted this when he was growing up. Mr Biden was not a superstar academic, by his own admission. His school grades were unremarkable. He had such a pronounced stutter (‘Joe Bi-bi-bi Biden’) that the nuns at St Paul’s School in Scranton nicknamed him ‘bye bye blackbird’.
At college he spent his time playing American football, and at law school in New York state he was more interested in hanging out with his girlfriend Neilia Hunter, whom he had chatted up by a pool during a summer holiday with friends in the Bahamas. In fact, it was not until he was in his late 20s – by which time he was married to Neilia and living as a lawyer and family man in Delaware – that it became clear he was destined for high office.
A young senator
As party officials searched for someone to challenge for a US Senate seat against a safer-than-safe Republican incumbent, they turned to Mr Biden, who by then had won a seat in a council. He was just 28. He would be 29 on election day in November 1972 and, if he won, he would be barely 30 (the minimum age for becoming a senator) by the time he was sworn in the following year.
It seemed like a no-hoper. His brother Jim ran the fundraising, his sister Valerie helped lead the campaign. And yet, unbelievably, he won, becoming one of the youngest senators ever elected in American history. Within days a local paper tipped him as a future president.
The Biden family certainly looked the part; the classic all-American power couple. She had blond hair and a striking smile, he had been a college jock. There were differences: Neilia came from money, her father having had success in the restaurant industry, while Mr Biden did not. He was Catholic, a point of initial tension with his Protestant future in-laws, but they settled down and went on to have three children, Beau, Hunter and Naomi, hoping one day to move into a Tudor-style house surrounded by trees.
Contemplating suicide
But a tragedy that took place just weeks after the election would change the course of Mr Biden’s future and see him overcome by grief, contemplating suicide and willing to walk away from politics altogether.
On 18 December 1972, while Mr Biden was in Washington DC, Neilia had taken their children out shopping for a Christmas tree. There was a car crash. Neilia and one-year-old Naomi were killed. Their sons Beau, 4, and Hunter, 3, were seriously injured but survived.
In his 2008 autobiography, Promises To Keep, Mr Biden recalls the moment he heard the news. He was with Valerie, talking to a US senator, still high from his shock victory, then their brother called. Valerie picked up. He remembers her turning to him, her face suddenly white. “There’s been a slight accident,” she said. Somehow Mr Biden knew. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
In the days that followed he recalls being mostly numb. “But there were moments when the pain cut through like a shard of broken glass,” he wrote. “I began to understand how despair led people to just cash it in; how suicide wasn’t just an option but a rational option.” Then he would look at Beau and Hunter, recovering in hospital, and “wonder who would explain to my sons my being gone”.
He did not want to take up his Senate seat, and only did because colleagues persuaded him. He took the oath of office in the hospital room at Beau’s bedside.
Shaped by tragedy
Jeff Nussbaum, a speech-writer for Mr Biden decades later, said the tragedy shaped his approach to politics. When he met with relatives of fallen soldiers or police officers, as vice president, he addressed them from the same place of deep pain. “He would say ‘the tough time isn’t those first weeks and months. People show up, they bring casserole. But then they go on with their lives and you can’t go on with yours’," said Mr Nussbaum.
Mr Biden would give them his personal phone number and say ‘call me any time’. Mr Nussbaum continues, “A lot of people offer platitudes when someone has experienced something tragic. Joe Biden offered something much more meaningful to people from his own experience. He had an emotional roadmap.”
Five years later, he went on to marry again. Jill Jacobs, an English teacher. She too had been married once before. They were set up by a friend and her first words, when he called, were: “How did you get this number?” Today, he still credits her with rebuilding his shattered family life. They have a daughter, Ashley, 39, a social worker.
He also remains close to Hunter, who has struggled for decades with an alcohol addiction and drug abuse. Today his grandchildren joke about how he always eats ice cream straight from the tub and calls them too much.
Then US Vice President Joe Biden (right) in 2009, points to some faces in the crowd with his son Hunter as they walk down Pennsylvania Avenue following the inauguration ceremony of President Barack Obama in Washington
Credit: Carlos Barria/REUTERS
Death of Beau Biden
But the car crash would not be the last family tragedy. In 2015, as he contemplated a presidential run in 2016 after two terms as US vice president, his eldest son Beau, who was the attorney general of Delaware and a rising star in politics, died of brain cancer. Mr Biden’s grief returned; he has described it as that “deep black hole that opens up in your chest”.
He set aside a White House bid and mourned the loss of his eldest son.
“When he lost Beau I watched him handle it rooted in his profound and deep faith,” said Moe Vela, who served as director of administration for Mr Biden during his vice presidency. Mr Biden remains a devout Catholic.
“And also combined with this ability to stare loss in the face [is his ability to] use that faith to get back up and know that in honour of those you lose – I think that’s how he views it – you have to go on and have a purpose.
“It makes him so real, it makes him relatable, it makes him a human being that we can all connect with. Anyone of us who have lost a loved one can really relate to Joe Biden and connect with him in that shared loss.”
Showing empathy
Throughout the four-day Democratic convention in August, one of the biggest moments of the election race, one word was used repeatedly: empathy.
“I know how it feels to lose someone you love,” he said during his keynote address, speaking to a nation now reeling from more than 200,000 Covid-19 deaths. His empathy is considered, by his camp at least, a key point of difference with Mr Trump.
Before the speech, it was Beau who introduced his father through an old clip from a past convention before his death. It is no coincidence that Mr Biden’s vice presidential running mate, Kamala Harris, is Beau’s friend.
Mr Biden talks often about his stutter to show another way he has faced personal challenges. To overcome it he tried putting 10 pebbles in his mouth while speaking, a method used by ancient Greek orator Demosthenes. When that failed, he began reciting poetry night after night, staring into a mirror and pausing when his jaw clenched. This is what finally helped.
He has been similarly open about his family’s financial struggles when he was growing up. When he was 10, the Bidens uprooted from Scranton to Delaware, as his father, Joe Sr, bounced between jobs. Joe Sr spent time cleaning boilers and selling knick-knacks at a market on weekends for extra money.
Mr Biden has recalled how his father once quit as a manager for an auto dealership during a Christmas party when the owner tossed a bucket of silver coins onto the dance floor and watched staff scramble for them. Such stories have been retold to emphasise his blue-collar credentials.
Running for the presidency
This is not the first time Mr Biden has run for president. His first presidential bid was in 1988, but he crashed out after being accused of plagiarising a speech from then-Labour leader Neil Kinnock. (The pair have since become friends.)
He ran again in 2008 and lost again. In both races he won less than one per cent in the first voting state.
This time round Mr Biden appears refreshed. The whiteness of his teeth and the fullness of his hair compared with his 1980s balding scalp has led to speculation of artificial help, though never proven. But fundamentally his pitch today is a continuation of his five decades in Washington rather than deviation from it: a man of experience and decency.
His transformation from “one per cent Joe”, as Mr Trump called him before the primaries, to the Democratic nominee with more than a shot at winning has a lot to do with Barack Obama. The former president admitted he did not know Mr Biden well when he picked him as his running mate.
The VP pick
But politically Mr Biden fit the bill. He was older and had decades of Washington and foreign policy experience. Mr Obama was then in his late 40s and only three years into his Senate career. But after their landslide victory they developed a close friendship.
Mr Biden took the job on the condition he would be the last person in the room before major decisions, a promise he has now given to his own running mate. He was handed weighty briefs, including getting economic recovery legislation through Congress after the 2008 crash and countering Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Historians see their bond as one of the closest between a president and their deputy in the modern era. And yet before the 2016 election, Mr Obama is said to have privately discouraged his deputy from seeking the Democratic nomination.
Barack Obama’s influence
In his 2017 book, "Promise Me, Dad," Mr Biden wrote that Mr Obama “was convinced I could not beat Hillary”, long seen as the front-runner with allies across the party. He recalls a lunch where Mr Obama told him the presidency was “the most confining thing in the world”.
At another lunch Mr Biden shot back that he understood if the president had made a ‘commitment’ to the Clintons. After a briefing from a former Obama pollster, Mr Biden summed up the message being pushed: “I had no real path to the nomination, so why rock the boat and complicate things for the party?”
Mr Obama’s failure to endorse Mr Biden at the very start of the 2020 Democratic primaries is similarly fascinating, a point Trump has flagged up. Is it personal? Will Marshall, president of think tank Progressive Policy Institute, thinks not.
“Ex-presidents usually avoid endorsing candidates in the early stages of a battle for the nomination,” he said. “They don’t want to diminish their hard-earned stature as elder statesmen or be accused of trying to pick their successor. And they don’t want to risk embarrassment if their endorsement doesn’t have much impact on the race.”
So, if he wins, would President Biden be a bold reformer or a gradualist? It is a point much debated in Washington.
Building coalitions
On one side, his career has been defined by coalition-building, an essential skill to pass legislation in the Senate, where he held a seat for 36 years. He was known to work across the aisle and even with old segregationists in his party, which drew criticism in the primaries race. The entire framing of his bid for the Democratic nomination was that – in contrast to Bernie Sanders, the left-wing Vermont senator who was his strongest opponent – it was not time for ‘revolution’.
Mr Biden’s centrism has proved a thorn in the side of Republican strategists desperate to declare him an extreme socialist. Trump now accepts he is not a radical, instead arguing he would be controlled by radicals, a tougher attack to land.
But Mr Biden’s backers on the Left declare he will be the most progressive president since Franklin D Roosevelt, the wartime leader hallowed in Democratic circles for creating America’s modern-day welfare system.
Structural change
Some leading party figures are calling for this hat-trick of crises (a raging pandemic, see below, triggering a historically deep recession, overlapped with nationwide anti-racism protests) to be turned into a moment of vast structural change.
Coronavirus USA Spotlight Chart — cases default
Mr Biden’s proposals include raising the minimum wage to $15; ending cash bail to reform the justice system; a $2 trillion of climate change action; and an expansion of the ‘Obamacare’ health care law passed when he was vice president, which Mr Trump is still trying to scrap.
But for proponents of government-funded health care for all Americans and those in favour of a wealth tax to tackle economic inequality, Mr Biden’s reforms do not go far enough.
Age, health and mental agility
And then there are the more personal doubts. His age is foremost among them. Mr Biden would be 78 on the first day of his presidency, older than anyone ever elected to the office. Mr Trump, though just four years his junior at 74, has nicknamed him Sleepy Joe. Mr Trump’s supporters have repeatedly cast Biden as fading mentally, circulating footage of him tripping over words and a series of Facebook ads in Trump’s reelection campaign also nodded to his opponent’s age: “Geriatric mental health is no laughing matter.”
Last December Mr Biden’s physician Dr Kevin O’Connor released a medical summary calling him a ‘healthy, vigorous, 77-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency’. But the questions persist.
Tara Reade
Mr Biden’s campaign also saw scandal in March with an allegation of sexual assault dating back to 1993. Former aide Tara Reade (see video below, from May this year) claimed Mr Biden pinned her against a wall in a Senate building, reached under clothing and penetrated her with his fingers.
Mr Biden has denied the allegation in the strongest terms. "It is not true. I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened," he told MSNBC. Reade filed a police report in Washington DC in April but the case is now labelled ‘inactive’.
Other women have come forward to say they were uncomfortable at times with how he touched them at public events, claiming he rubbed their shoulders unprompted. Mr Biden has vowed to be ‘more mindful’ of personal space.
Mr Biden’s stance on Brexit and a trade deal is also being watched closely in Whitehall. He opposed Brexit and recently issued a shot across the bows over Boris Johnson’s EU talks strategy, warning that any undermining of Northern Irish peace would kill a trade deal.
His deeply felt Irish roots will shape thinking there. He has recalled how his grandfather would tell him: “Joe, remember, the best drop of blood in you is Irish.”
Cautious predictions
Sir Peter Westmacott was UK ambassador to the US during Mr Biden’s vice presidency and, with their residences next to each other, got to know him well. “Biden believes it is in the US interest to have a strong, close relationship with the UK,” Sir Peter said. But issues like Brexit differences must be resolved. “Biden does not bear grudges. But London will have to work hard to realise the considerable potential for British interests in a Joe Biden victory.”
Will that victory come to pass? Pollsters are cautious to make predictions. Their surveys, they often say, are snapshots of the present and not forecasts of the future. But Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute in New Jersey, said the numbers will give Team Biden confidence.
“Biden’s lead has been both historically large and unprecedentedly consistent for a challenger taking on an incumbent president. Furthermore, there is much less potential for volatility in the polls versus four years ago," said Mr Murray. “In a normal year in a contest decided by the popular vote, it would not be outrageous to say this race is Biden’s to lose.”
Then he adds the killer caveat, one everyone watching on knows all too well: “But nothing is normal about this election.”
Свежие комментарии