For Joseph R. Biden, Jr., the high point, if not of his career, then of his reputation, came on January 12, 2017. It was on that unseasonably warm Thursday afternoon that, in a surprise ceremony just days before the end of their second term, President Barack Obama awarded him the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“To know Joe Biden,” the president told a room full of friends, family and staff, “is to love without pretense, service without self-interest, and life lived to the fullest.”
After finally earning the goodwill of the American people with the dignity with which he handled the funeral of his eldest son Beau, Biden was deterred from running for the office he had long coveted. Obama believed Hillary Clinton was the safe bet in 2016.
And if Biden had been wise, he might have seen that moment in the East Room of the White House for what it surely was: a high point, the end of a long career that, let’s face it, wasn’t exactly marked by many particularities.
But barely two years later, ol’ Joe was back on the hustings. Yet the story goes that the tragic events that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017, prompted him to run for president for a fourth time was simply ridiculous — absurd even by Biden’s standards. And smarter politicians than he understood that his entry into the 2020 race was probably a mistake — a decision driven by a combination of arrogance and the demands of an aggressive, even gluttonous, greedy family. That smartest politician of them all, his old boss Obama, had his doubts. “Joe,” he told him, “you don’t have to do this.”
But in the end, party elders, including Obama (who reportedly convinced both Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Pete Buttigieg to drop out of the race on the eve of Super Tuesday), Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) (who delivered Biden the South Carolina primary), and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (the most powerful House speaker since Sam Rayburn), were persuaded (or acted upon as if Charlottesville had indeed touched the better angels of Biden’s nature, that the moment called for Joe Biden.
Yet there were warning signs all along – signs that Joe, Dr. Jill, and the rest of the clan weren’t really the answer to Trump (or, for that matter, to something).
Remember, when Joe and Jill learned of their son Hunter’s affair with Beau’s widow, they released a statement saying:
We are all so lucky that Hunter and Hallie found each other as they were getting their lives back on track after so much heartache. They have the full support of myself and Jill and we are so happy for them.
A more fitting response to the new intra-family arrangement, which was made in private but later leaked to the press, came from Obama himself, who reportedly described it as “weird shit.”
Even stranger was the now infamous June 2017 Corn Pop speech, in which Biden recounted a racially charged confrontation he had with an alleged gang member named Corn Pop in the early 1960s. The confrontation occurred when Joe was working as a lifeguard in Wilmington, a job that Washington Post told readers that the future president was going on the road to “learn more about the black community.”
That Biden’s presidency has been a disaster is abundantly clear. The key question now, after his stuttering, bewildered performance on the debate stage last week, is whether he can find a way to end the race gracefully.
While it is clear to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that he is unfit for office, let alone a grueling national campaign, there is reason to believe he will endure.
And the most cited reason that one hears both publicly and privately is: family.
The family. First there were the four Biden siblings, products of a postwar American boom that passed them by. But one of them, our Joey, made it to the big time, while the other three, Valerie, Jimmy and Frank, clung to him like parasites. Joey became their bread and butter, their passport to bigger and better things. The Bidens are emblematic of a certain subclass of postwar ethnic Catholic families forced, by circumstance or, in their case, bad luck, to walk a fine line between working-class and middle-class America.
Families like the Bidens are an instantly recognizable type: distrustful, clannish, greedy, obsessed with appearances, almost comically insecure. Every neighborhood along the I-95 corridor has its scheming, aspiring Joeys and Jimmys and Vals and Franks.
It is now the rigor that every account of the 46th president’s life includes the story of the mysterious, spendthrift father, whose career took a wrong turn on the road to prosperity. Joe Sr. nearly grabbed the brass ring, but it slipped through his fingers.
In 1946, chasing the dream of post-war prosperity, the Bidens moved to Garden City, New York. But within a short time, They landed back in Scranton. In 1953, the family settled in Clayton, Delaware. The brief interlude in Garden City represents an underrated but important “what if?” in the president’s life: what might have become of him if Dad had not been a neglected man and the family had been able to put down roots in that bedroom community of new rich lazy brothers?
Although they couldn’t have known it at the time, Biden Sr.’s accident was Biden Jr.’s own fault. He needed a platform that matched his talents, and he found it in Delaware. If the Bidens had stayed in Garden City, he might have become a stockbroker or an insurance salesman. Maybe even a car dealer, like Dad. But president of the united states? Unlikely.
Fate certainly intervened in Joey’s favor then, but was the outcome a happy one? Now look at Joe and Jill, up there in the stratosphere, next to the Clintons and the Obamas, amid the glitz and the glamour, among the good and the great of Hollywood and the Hamptons—and yet, because they Arehopelessly outmatched.
Whatever you think of them, it’s certainly true that Bill and Hillary and Barack and Michelle are each blessed in their own way with a combination of luck, intelligence and charisma. Jill and Joe have none of those (and you suspect they know it). But spurred on by The Family and dreams of greater things, they remain undaunted: one last sprint to the finish line, and then, hopefully, the big reward.
A story that Trump tells with any regularity on the stump must hurt – if Biden is aware of it – because this story, unlike so many other Trump anecdotes, has an undeniable kernel of truth.
Trump recalls asking his Palm Beach “friend” Teddy Kennedy who Kennedy thought was the smartest and dumbest members of the Senate. As for the smartest, Kennedy,
…gave me a name – I won’t name him, because he was a person I didn’t like very much, so I don’t want to name him….”
I asked: Who is the dumbest in the Senate?“
Let’s see, probably Joe…“
I said, “Joe who?”
Joe Biden.“
The family is back together. They have lined up the cars and are trying to weather the storm. The AP reports that both Jill and Hunter believe,
The president shouldn’t give up when he’s down and believe he can bounce back from what they see as a subpar performance. The family questioned how his staff prepared him for the debate and wondered if they could have done anything better, the people said.
The mythology that Biden and his hagiographers have carefully crafted over the years may help him get through the current difficult period. Time and again, the public has been treated to stories about Biden’s reputation for hard work and innate decency — stories designed to underscore the supposed contrast with Trump.
As for Biden’s work ethic, the Wall Street Journal informed readers last month that,
For much of his career, Biden enjoyed a reputation on Capitol Hill as a master negotiator of legislative deals, known for his detailed knowledge of issues and his understanding of the other side’s motives and needs, and his ability to navigate the pressure.
Winslow Wheeler is a veteran defense expert who was the only Senate staffer to ever work on the staff of a Republican and a Democrat at the same time. Wheeler watched Biden in action for years and tells me that the above assessment is: “Total, total, utter nonsense. He was known by everyone as a loudmouth. He always showed up to hearings unprepared and did it on spec.”
Biden’s reputation for decency may also be overblown. In his January 2021 speech from the White House Briefing Room, Biden was praised for establishing a kind of zero-tolerance policy for bad behavior among his staff,
I’m not kidding when I say this: If you ever work with me and I hear you treating another colleague with disdain, speaking down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot.”
But then again, Biden himself doesn’t exactly seem to have an honorable reputation as a boss either.
A senior official said Politics this week that White House aides are “absolutely afraid of him.” Longtime Clinton adviser James Carville recently told Axios that Biden “has no advisers. He has employees.”
And it is almost certain that at least some of those employees will be blamed for his actions on June 27.
A longtime Democratic operative tells me that Biden’s current campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon is not widely seen as “competent” enough to run a national campaign, while White House chief of staff Jeff Zients is a “nonfactor” among the Biden hierarchy’s top brass. If scapegoats must be found for June 27, those who actually groomed Biden for the debate—longtime Washington aide and PR figure Anita Dunn, her husband Bob Bauer, and former chief of staff Ron Klain—will likely escape the guillotine. In Biden’s world, they have tenure, while Dillon does not.
Biden’s debate performance also highlighted deep resentments—long simmering but ever-present—within the Democratic Party. It was no coincidence that just minutes into the debate, denizens of Obama world were among the first to suggest that Biden step aside. Through tears, former Obama adviser Van Jones urged Biden to consider resigning; a noticeably less upset David Axelrod agreed. Meanwhile, the Obama “Pod Bros,” the former wunderkinds now approaching middle age, attacked the president and his team.
What should we do with this now?
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One administration figure I spoke to shortly after the debate said the tantrums coming out of the Obama world “are going to have no impact — zero.” The Biden world, like many associated with the Clinton world, realizes that Kamala Harris is not up to the job — in fact, she may be the only one who can do it. worse against Trump on November 5.
“Who are we going to run?” they asked, “JB Pritzker?”
The bench is not deep. Time is running out. The Democratic Party knows it and so does The Family.
