Half a century of politics has equipped Biden for this moment

Shortly after a young Joe Biden stunned Delaware by toppling one of its political giants with a rambling, out-of-the-way Senate campaign, he was already planning a quick exit from Washington.

Biden was too distressed for the job. His wife and baby daughter were killed in a car crash just weeks after winning the election. Her boys were still in the hospital. He wanted to resign before being sworn in.

Yet Biden would experience a phenomenon in the Senate that prompted him to return: Almost five decades later, this would serve as the basis for his presidential race.

Ideological opponents showed him relentless empathy and became lifelong friends. They dragged him to the Senate gym and made a place for him for comfortable weekly dinners. They helped launch Biden into the kind of working relationships across the aisle that have become the hallmark of his career.

In recent years, that affinity for the center has nearly knocked off Biden. In 2008, when he launched his second nomination contest – his first in 1988 – voters quickly dismissed him in favor of a man nearly two decades younger, Barack Obama. Earlier in this campaign cycle, his rivals in the party’s primaries called his approach anachronistic and naïve.

He has been ridiculed as a 77-year-old flashback, a distraught Beltway insider and two-time presidential campaign loser.

But Biden made a bet that the years of patient consensus building, the lessons he learned from his many missteps, and the personal tragedies that shaped his iconic empathy would attract millions of voters exhausted by four years of partisan warfare and chaos in the White House.

In particular, he and his advisers believed his centrist style would allow him to win back voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the three “blue walls” Trump won in 2016, which has become a focal point of the campaign. by Biden.

Now that he’s won, he’s betting again – this time his approach will allow him to bring the nation together after the crisis Trump era.

Biden calls this approach the “Delaware Way” – a sort of consensus-driven politics that has guided lawmakers in a small state where moderation dominates politics. This is the path he will follow as he attempts to push the nation in a new direction despite likely opposition from Republicans, who may hold control of the Senate.

Biden’s many years in this institution – and his eight years working with her as vice president – offer a glimpse of how he will carry out his task.

On climate change, for example, Biden prefers to frame the political debate around the jobs that can be generated by new investments in areas such as solar energy. Democrats say he’s likely to push for a large-scale infrastructure repair that would aim to dramatically increase the U.S. supply of renewable energy. On health care, he lobbied for a public option that would give Americans additional choice and resisted “Medicare for all” proposals that would eliminate employer-provided insurance.

Even if Democrats manage to win a majority in the Senate, he is unlikely to embrace progressive ideas like expanding the Supreme Court.

Pete Buttigieg, a former main Democratic rival who is half Biden’s age and who had advocated for a generational change in political leadership, says the development of the 2020 crises has now made Biden more than ever before. man of the moment.

“Not only has the need to build consensus become even more urgent … so has the need to console, to heal, those instincts that are so deliciously part of what makes Joe Biden what he is. is, ”Buttigieg said in an interview. “The fact that he’s been through so much in terms of the Senate and vice-presidential process also makes it more of his moment than we might have guessed.

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Shortly after the tragic 1972 car crash, then Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana began calling Biden every day to urge him not to leave the Senate. He persuaded Biden to give him six months. He remained 36 years.

The empathy shown for Biden across party lines upon his arrival left a lasting impression.

“When I look back I realize how lucky I was to work in a place where so many people looked out for me,” he wrote in his 2007 memoir, “Promises to Keep” .

Biden was already inclined to reach the other side of the aisle, but early connections pushed him to go further – even with segregationists in the South – as he strengthened his influence. He wooed Senator James Eastland (D-Miss.) To secure a seat on the Judicial Committee. He lined up with opponents of the bus during his first term as white suburban voters angrily protested federal orders to integrate schools.

Mansfield helped him refine his political instinct with advice that Biden continued to quote even in this fall’s campaign: “It’s always appropriate to question another man’s judgment, but never appropriate to question. question his motives.

Biden’s mantra was that the character would always eclipse ideology.

“I don’t think problems mean much to whether you win or lose,” Biden said in a 1974 talk to the Democratic Forum, a liberal group, as reported that year in Washingtonian magazine. “I think problems are just a way to present your intellectual ability to voters … a vehicle by which voters will determine your honesty and frankness.”

In 1980, Biden was already considering a presidential candidacy. But at 37, he felt he lacked a compelling reason to be in the presidential race. He wrote in his autobiography that he felt the same when advisers raised the issue four years later.

In 1988, however, as the Reagan administration drew to a close and Democrats sought to take over the White House, Biden felt his sensible approach to governance would bring his party back to power. The moment turned out to be premature and the politician unprepared.

His loose discipline has become his downfall. Biden commented on the march in the civil rights movement; they gave way to revelations that it had not worked. His inability to attribute lines of debate he borrowed from a British politician sparked a plagiarism scandal that chased him out of the race after reporters learned that Biden’s law school file was also clouded by an accusation of plagiarism.

Restoring his reputation would take years, but Biden worked on it. The blunders would continue to advance rapidly in the decades that followed – an indelible part of Biden’s political identity – but he avoided catastrophic failures and became adept at maneuvering through the smaller ones.

He rose regularly to the Senate, becoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, where he presided over two of the most controversial political battles of the 1980s and 1990s, the Supreme Court appointments of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. He then joined the External Relations Committee, where he acquired expertise in national security.

By the time he ran for president a second time in 2007, Biden was no longer the young upstart calling for generational change. He told reporters when announcing his second candidacy that he was presenting himself on “my experience and background – both foreign and domestic.”

Voters were not interested. Instead, they were inspired by Obama’s message of hope and change, which was barely two years after his first term in the Senate. But Biden’s experience was exactly what drew Obama to him as a running mate. Older and more Washington-style savvy, Biden was seen as a reassuring addition to the revolutionary change that Obama represented.

Initially, Biden balked at the offer because he wasn’t sure that being a vice president – the butt of many impotence jokes – would be a better job than being chairman of the relations committee. Foreign Affairs of the Senate. He later wrote that after discussing the decision with his family, his mother put it back in order and he agreed.

Obama, who is no fan of legislative bargaining, often tasked his vice president with working on Capitol Hill when particularly thorny negotiations were needed. When a debt crisis looms, tax cuts lapse or an economic stimulus package must cross the finish line – Biden was the man on the point.

This has given him extensive – and now particularly valuable – experience dealing with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Biden became known in the White House as the “McConnell whisperer”.

Among some liberals, however, Biden has a less positive reputation. On the left, many worried that he had given too much to the negotiating table and that McConnell was looking for him as a negotiating partner because he was an easy mark.

The coming months will test that relationship and Biden’s ability to navigate a capital where most lawmakers have no experience of the kind of two-party politics Biden remembers. Of the Republicans who will be in the Senate in 2021, only 15 have served with Biden.

In the eight years since Biden struck his last big budget deal with McConnell, partisan lines have hardened. McConnell perfected the art of filibustering and used his power to help Trump remake the Supreme Court, starting with his refusal to allow a 2016 vote on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland and through to the Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation the day before the election last month.

The kind of pragmatic Republican Biden needs now is a dying breed. Twenty-four hours after the Associated Press and TV stations called Biden the race, only two Senate Republicans – Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah – had congratulated Biden on his victory.

The central question for Biden is whether he is, once again, correct in saying his long-standing mark of deal negotiation is what the public demands. Some Democrats are optimistic his bet will bear fruit again; the success of his administration might depend on their reason.

“Biden has a vision that is supported by the House and by the public,” Buttigieg said. “The public is underestimated right now.”