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Tragedy, Senate tenure shape Biden's mettle
By BOB DEANS
Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service
Sunday, November 25, 2007
WASHINGTON — It was just before Christmas 1972, weeks after the improbable upset victory that sent Joe Biden to the U.S. Senate.
As he sat in a borrowed Capitol Hill office poring over staff résumés, tragic word arrived by phone. His wife and infant daughter had been killed in a car crash. His two surviving sons were in a Delaware hospital. Biden was 30 years old.
"He was sworn in, literally, at my bedside," recalled Beau Biden, who was 4 at the time. "And he's never not been there."
In the 35 years since then, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., has remained at the side of his family, commuting nearly two hours each morning from his Wilmington home to Washington, then returning each night after work, at first by car and later by train.
"He went down, did his job, voted and came home," said Beau, 38, who last year was elected Delaware's attorney general. "He did it to just be there. To be there when we woke up in the morning, to scratch our back when we fell asleep at night, to be there if we had a bad dream. I used to think that's what all dads did. But it's not."
The daily commute, the Senate career spent combating crime, defending abused women and mastering foreign policy, an ill-fated 1988 presidential bid and a nearly fatal brain aneurysm the same year - all have been part of a process that has steeled Joe Biden, supporters say, preparing him for what may be his greatest challenge yet: his struggling campaign to become the next president.
"It is a test, it's a gigantic test, and the ultimate test will be, if I'm elected, am I going to be a successful president?" Biden said in a telephone interview from a fund-raising stop in Coral Gables this month. "But it is not a test in the sense that I'm having to study real hard for it. I've taken this test."
Decades of learning
As measured by polls and funding, Biden's campaign is gasping for air. Surveys show him tied with New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson for fourth place in his bid for the Democratic nomination, with support in the low single digits.
He has collected $6.2 million in campaign contributions and spent all but $1.9 million of that, the Federal Election Commission's October filings show. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the party front-runner, has hauled in $80.4 million, with $50.6 million still in the bank.
Biden, though, is clinging to the belief that his political instincts and foreign policy expertise make him the best candidate for the White House at a historic moment, when the war in Iraq has undermined U.S. influence abroad, leaving rivals emboldened and partners confused.
"The next president has, literally, the greatest opportunity since Franklin Roosevelt to ... shape the world, to change the direction of the country," Biden said.
"The world's waiting - it's like pushing on an open door - for some real leadership," Biden said. "I know why I want to be president, I know what I would attempt to do as president, and I believe I'm prepared."
There are 100 U.S. senators. Each makes up 1 percent of the body's collective judgment and voice. There have been fewer than 2,000 in the nation's history. Only the 19th-century Kentucky orator Henry Clay and three others were younger than Biden when they started there. Only 20 have served longer than he has.
Biden, who turned 65 on Tuesday, has used his time in the Senate to learn at the feet of the masters: comity from Mike Mansfield, D-Mont., who spent 16 years as majority leader; decency from Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., who crossed the aisle with tears in his eyes to hug his lifetime political opponent on the Senate floor, as cancer closed in on Sen. Hubert Humphrey, D-Minn.; and the primacy of the Constitution from Sen. Samuel Ervin, D-N.C., whose leadership of the nationally televised Watergate hearings helped bring down the presidency of Richard Nixon.
He was informally tutored in diplomacy by Ambassador Averell Harriman, a leading architect of U.S. Cold War strategy. He talked Middle East security with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, held Kremlin arms control talks with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin and journeyed to Belgrade at the height of the Balkans war to call Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic "a damn war criminal" to his face.
He has watched seven presidents - from Nixon to George W. Bush - up close, and taken lessons from each of them.
"When you speak with the backing of the United States, modesty is not as important as candor," Biden wrote in his autobiography, Promises to Keep. And, learning from what he regards as Jimmy Carter's mistakes, "on-the-job training for a president can be a dangerous thing."
Focus on Iraq war
Biden's résumé, backers assert, attests to his fitness for the job.
"This is not about winning some prize," said Ted Kaufman, his senior campaign adviser, who spent 25 years as Biden's chief of staff. "He thinks that at a time when we can change the world, and he has spent his whole life preparing to do that, for him not to run, for him not to put his heart and soul into this thing, would not be consistent with who he is."
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden has focused intently on what has been the largest issue in the campaign: the Iraq war, in which 3,875 U.S. troops have died and 28,530 have been wounded.
Biden was one of 77 senators who voted to authorize Bush's going to war against Iraq five months before he launched the invasion in March 2003. As the mission there stumbled, Biden has been unstinting in his criticism of the way Bush has handled the war.
"I think tragedies are defined as horrible outcomes that could have been avoided or could be ended sooner. And the ultimate tragedy is overwhelming loss that is possible to avoid," Biden said. "The part that to me is so, so frustrating is at every stage in the last five years that the president had an opportunity to cauterize this wound, had an opportunity to mitigate the damage. ... He squandered it."
Biden co-wrote a plan he says would help bring the fighting to an end by creating separate autonomous regions for ethnic Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, an approach the Bush administration has resisted as de facto partition.
Biden, though, doesn't shrink from a White House scrap. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he led the Democratic fight to defeat President Reagan's 1987 Supreme Court nomination of conservative judge and legal scholar Robert Bork.
In the midst of presiding over the Bork hearings, Biden was juggling his first presidential bid. During the closing comments of a debate at the Iowa State Fair in August 1988, Biden quoted from a speech written by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. He'd quoted from the speech before, but this time he did so without attributing the passage to Kinnock. Political writers tagged him a plagiarist, the label stuck, and Biden bowed out of the campaign.
"I just screwed up," Biden explained a few weeks ago on the Late Show With David Letterman. "It was a flat mistake on my part."
Aides say he's laid the ghost of that flap to rest.
"There's nobody who questions Joe Biden's integrity," campaign communications director Larry Rasky said. "He is generally recognized as the truth-teller in this campaign - and particularly in the debates."
Verbosity leads to stumbles
Certainly Biden calls it as he sees it.
"Rudy Giuliani is probably the most underqualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency," Biden said during last month's Philadelphia debate, drawing some of the loudest applause of the night. "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11."
There are times, though, that Biden's aides must wish he might hew to a similar structure.
Invariably anecdotal, unfailingly folksy and altogether rhetorically unchaste, Biden has a reputation for being long-winded that borders on legend.
"The only thing standing between Joe Biden and the presidency is his mouth," left-leaning Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote early this year. "That, though, is no small matter. It is a Himalayan barrier."
Or, as Cohen's colleague Dana Milbank wrote: "For Biden, verbosity frequently tramples what might otherwise be profound points. Friends have urged him to put a sock in it."
That expansiveness has gotten Biden in trouble, as when he trampled over the announcement of his candidacy in January by describing Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" to seek the presidency.
"What we live with is the perception of verbal excess, and that becomes a target, that somehow that's some great flaw in Joe Biden's character," Rasky said. "The premise is sort of ridiculous, that you should be in politics and be penalized for talking."
The great question before Biden, as for most would-be presidents, is whether he'll eventually rise to the top through the electoral process - the months spent wooing primary voters; the endless stream of contentious debates; the necessity of raising million-dollar sacks of cash; the long arc of partisan punches and counter jabs - or whether, rightly or wrongly, he'll be winnowed out by it.
Leaning on family
In his own calculus, it's still possible to finish in the top four in January in Iowa, do at least as well in New Hampshire and score strongly in South Carolina.
Win or lose, Biden will first look to his family - whether to quietly set aside a Quixotic dream or to celebrate a political miracle. After losing his first wife, he married Jill Tracy Jacobs. They celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary this year. In addition to Beau, he has another son, Hunter, a daughter, Ashley, and four granddaughters.
"I'm so extraordinarily proud of my brother, not because he makes such good speeches or he got the right answer or because he's smart. I am extraordinarily proud of him because he's such a man of dignity," said the candidate's younger sister, Valerie Biden Owens, national chair for the campaign. "I watch him still and he continues with dignity and wisdom and judgment and he moves along with grace."
Then the sister Biden often calls his best friend, the one who moved into his house to help raise his sons after their mother's death, the one who can, to this day, complete his sentences, paused to add a concluding thought.
"If he doesn't hear Hail to the Chief," she said, "he'll die a very happy man."
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