Biden can read the direction of the tides
Former president Jospeh R Biden Jr has been called the luckiest man and the unluckiest – a fifty-year political career that reached the White House also marked by deep personal losses that he suffered. AS Biden’s life has been shaped by drama, powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of politics, to confront his shortcomings, errors, and reversal of fortune, His trials have forged in him in deep empathy for others in hardship an essential quality as he addresses a nation at its most dire hour in decades.
According to a British diplomat “ speaking to Joe Biden is like turning on a spigot that you cannot turn off. The former vice-president ‘s words “ inhabited a no man’s land between quality and quantity”
Biden once described meeting his first wife by saying “ I fell ass over the tin cup in love”.
His cash strapped campaign was spending less in a month than Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York, would spend on an average day, After Biden lost the first two contests – coming fourth in New Hampshire – the political obituaries started to come out. Jim Clyburn the South Carolina congressman, endorsed Biden from among the still dizzyingly crowded primary field. Biden’s win in that state, where the Democratic electorate is heavily African-American was a landslide as almost all his rivals dropped out and endorsed him.
Osnos has been writing about Biden for years in The New Yorker, believes he could be more radical in office than people who have tracked his career might believe during the 36-years in Senate he was seen as a liberal.
Osnos says, Biden is a “pol’s pol” a politician to his finger-tips, like a good hockey player, who anticipates where the puck is going rather than focusing on where it is now.
Biden beat the left only because it was fragmented among several candidates notably Saunders and Elizabeth Warren. Biden’s victory coincided with the pandemic as coronavirus has opened up a vast new political space for action. Osnos compares the conditions of Biden’s ascent to Franklin Delano Roosevelt inheriting the Great Depression, as the man who will save America and the world from fascism.
America after 220,000 have died from coronavirus is very different from a year ago, and Biden knows when to keep his mouth shut as the strategy has been to make this a referendum on Donald Trump, the president must be given enough rope to hand himself. “the more Trump talks, the better off I am” Biden told Osnos.
Biden’s career shows that he can read the direction of the tides.
Biden may finally have learned the value of silence.
Should Biden, who has reached the threshold of the most powerful job on earth, be elected as America’s 46th President 10 days from now, it will not be because of his soaring oratory nor, on the cusp of 79, will it be because of his youthful vigour.
Joe Biden: American Dreamer by Evan Osnos, Bloomsbury £18.99, 192 pages.