Even Biden’s umbrage about Trump’s rhetoric on race issues highlighted that he was also a white establishment figure, vying to lead a party whose energy comes from women, Black and Latino voters and young people. Talking so much about his family played into Trump’s efforts to sully Joe Biden and son Hunter as corrupt. Recalling decades on Capitol Hill meant reminiscing about the days of a Senate that still included old Southern segregationists, and it invited scrutiny of his votes for criminal justice laws, trade and tax deals, and war resolutions that are anathema to younger Democrats. His empathy - traced to a debilitating childhood stutter, a 1972 car crash that killed his first wife and infant daughter weeks after his election to the Senate, and then Beau’s death as an adult - wasn’t something he could easily marshal on a crowded debate stage. Though he eventually built out a policy agenda for an ambitious presidency, there was no signature proposal for a grand program like “Medicare for All.” Biden emphasized more personal traits. He was not the same figure who’d first gone to Iowa in the 1988 cycle as a young star in his party, a gifted orator whose booming speeches could fill a room while at the same time making a connection with the legacies of the Democratic coalition Franklin Roosevelt built. He was well-regarded, even beloved as his party’s “Uncle Joe,” a loyal deputy to Obama, but he faced a river of criticism as too old, too moderate, too white, too wistful, too senatorial. Saudis, Israel, India Join World Leaders in Congratulating Biden, Harrisīiden was immediately the presumed front-runner, something he had not been in 1987, when his first White House bid ended embarrassingly with a plagiarized speech or in 2008, when he was trounced in the Iowa caucuses by Obama and others or even in 2016, when the combination of his son Beau’s death in 2015 and Obama’s behind-the-scenes support for Clinton prompted him to decide not to run.
But his visceral, emotional appeal transcended party identity. Biden took an open lane, settling where he spent his 36 years as a Delaware senator: a mainstream liberal with an establishment, deal-making core. to unite, and to heal.”īiden first joined a Democratic primary race shaped by nearly two dozen rivals - most considerably younger - already deep into an ideological fight over issues from universal health care to taxation of billionaires. In his first public statement as president-elect Saturday, Biden acknowledged the tensions that surely will linger, but called on Americans “to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. State legislatures also did not flip even as Biden was winning the popular vote by about 5 percentage points. He did not bring along a clear Democratic Senate majority, and several Democratic House candidates lost, raising the prospect of a closely divided government likely to test his promise of bipartisanship. His victory, though, did not come with the usual trappings.
president-elect near the White House in Washington, Nov.
A president looks around the country and understands what’s happening.”īiden supporters celebrate his projection as U.S. “But when I saw his opening speech, talking about the fight for the soul of the country, I said, ‘He gets it.’ That’s what a president does. “A lot of people dismissed it,” said Karen Finney, a top aide to nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. Instead, from the launch of his campaign on April 25, 2019, Biden sold himself as the experienced, empathetic elder statesman particularly suited to defeat a “dangerous” and “divisive” president and then “restore the soul of the nation” in Trump’s wake. The president-elect’s allies, though, say it is that delayed, circuitous route that prepared him for 2020, when he could finally offer himself not just as another senator or governor with 10-point plans and outsize ambition. There are no sure paths to a post held by only 44 men in more than two centuries, but Biden’s is among the most unlikely - even for a man who had aspired to the job for more than three decades, twice running unsuccessfully and passing on a third bid to try to succeed Obama four years ago. Biden, on His Third Try, Makes It to Summit of US Political Life
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