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TIME Joe Biden
Azioni libro
Inizia a leggere- Editore:
- Meredith Corporation
- Pubblicato:
- Nov 13, 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781547855339
- Formato:
- Libro
Descrizione
Informazioni sul libro
TIME Joe Biden
Descrizione
- Editore:
- Meredith Corporation
- Pubblicato:
- Nov 13, 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781547855339
- Formato:
- Libro
Correlati a TIME Joe Biden
Anteprima del libro
TIME Joe Biden
COMMISSION
CHAPTER 1
Bound for Glory
Joe Biden’s life story is one of perseverance and optimism
‘YOU’VE GOT TO HAVE PURPOSE’
The spirit of Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign came from lessons learned in a lifetime of loss
BY MOLLY BALL
IT’S DARK INSIDE JOE BIDEN’S CAMPAIGN bus, a lumbering blue diesel emblazoned with the slogan BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE NATION. On this late January afternoon in Iowa, the former vice president is in the cramped back cabin, nursing a paper cup of Panera Bread coffee so the motion of the road and the drone of the motor don’t lull him to sleep.
He is talking about loss. The things he has lost are never far from Biden’s mind. Chief among them: his son Beau, a rising star in Democratic politics who died of brain cancer in 2015, a few months after his 46th birthday. I get up in the morning lots of times and ask myself if he’d be proud of me,
Biden says.
Beau’s death was the latest in the litany of losses and setbacks that have defined Biden’s life. The death of his wife and daughter in an auto accident in 1972. The 1988 presidential bid that ended in a plagiarism scandal. Life-threatening brain aneurysms. Another failed bid for the presidency in 2008. For nearly a half-century, the nation has watched Biden wrestle publicly with sorrow. At countless funerals, he has eulogized Americans great and ordinary, all while nursing his own barely concealed wounds. My mother used to say God never gives you a cross too heavy to carry,
his wife Jill says. But God got pretty close with Beau.
Yet Biden soldiers on: out of pride, out of duty, out of a deep-seated need to remain in the mix. To his boosters, he’s the last authentic man in American politics. To his critics, he’s a nostalgia act whose well-worn slogans about middle-class uplift and national unity are out of sync in this season of outrage.
No one in either party connects with voters in such an intensely personal way: hugging, gripping shoulders, planting kisses on foreheads. He’s got more compassion in his little finger than anyone I’ve met,
says Mary Luce, a 70-year-old bartender at an American Legion post who lingered to speak with Biden after a town hall in Ottumwa, Iowa. That’s what would make him such a good leader.
Politics has always been a cathartic exercise for Biden, a form of exuberant self-expression. It’s as if he has to prove to himself he’s still alive, and this is the only way he knows. Purpose,
he says. That’s how I got through it. I lost my wife and daughter; that’s how I got through it. When they told me Beau didn’t have a chance of making it, that’s how I got through it. You’ve got to have purpose.
This time is no different. Biden’s iPhone rests on the table in front of him, a platform bolted to the wall of the bus. The phone is open to a text-message conversation in enlarged type, the sender identified as HUNT: his younger son Hunter, the one with the soap-opera life and foreign entanglements that figure into President Trump’s impeachment. The only visible message reads, Love you Dad.
The bus pulls onto the campus of Iowa Central Community College in Fort Dodge, a city of 24,000 an hour and a half north of Des Moines. The sun has set by the time Biden finally gets started, nearly two hours late. Despite the venue, the crowd is elderly. As Biden speaks, students drift out of the adjacent library without stopping to listen.
Something in the front row catches Biden’s eye, inspiring a riff about the three times firefighters saved him and his family members, starting with the car crash that killed his wife Neilia and 13-month-old daughter Naomi but spared his two young sons. It’s been less than three minutes and already we’re talking about the Jaws of Life. Then the story ends, and Biden, who’s pacing the room with a microphone, left hand tucked in the pocket of his slim navy suit, moseys back to his lectern, scanning his notes for a rhetorical foothold. But look, folks, um, one of the things that, uh, that I think is pretty critical here is that, uh, you know, uh, I think the character of the nation is literally on the ballot this time around.
Biden spent his early years watching his father struggle in business. At one point the family had to live with his mother’s parents, a feuding, hard-drinking Irish clan. When Biden was 10, the family moved to Delaware, where his father worked as a car salesman. The Bidens never sank into poverty but were never comfortable either. Joe struggled to overcome a childhood stutter; his mother assured him it was because he was so smart his mouth couldn’t keep up with his
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