Advertisement

Joe Biden by Evan Osnos review – a story of survival

<span>Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

With the US election nearly upon us, Joe Biden has such a significant lead nationwide and in the battleground states that in normal times he would be virtually assured of becoming the nation’s 46th president. But these are far from normal times and the Democratic camp is on edge. They remember Hillary Clinton’s seemingly commanding lead four years ago that turned to dust on election day.

And this time there are also serious concerns over whether the incumbent will admit defeat and surrender the presidency. Donald Trump has refused to give that guarantee and has questioned whether postal ballots should be counted. “I feel good about where we are,” Biden tells Evan Osnos. “But I know that it’s going to get really, really ugly.”

It is not just the Democratic nightmare of 2016 and Trump’s dark threats that keep Biden’s supporters up at night – there is the candidate himself, He will soon turn 78, and would be the nation’s oldest president. The contender “has parted with youth grudgingly”, Osnos notes drily, pointing to his “reforested” hairline and his “becalmed” forehead.

As this strange campaign has unfurled under the shadow of a pandemic, his frailty has sometimes broken through the surface gloss. When Biden walked out under the lights for his first debate with Trump in Cleveland on 29 September, he looked thin and sickly pale, a pallor only enhanced by the bright orange glow of his opponent.

Donald Trump, left, and Joe Biden during the televised presidential debate last month.
Donald Trump, left, and Joe Biden during the televised presidential debate last month. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Now that Trump appears to have bounced back from his Covid-19 infection, any sign that his adversary is less resilient could be damaging in this gerontocratic contest. And with Biden there is always the possibility of self-inflicted damage.

Osnos’s concise biography treads back along the trail of horrendous tragedies, dashed hopes and dramatic implosions that preceded Biden’s improbable third run at the presidency, and gives at least some clues to the kind of leader he will become if he wins. Throughout his career, he has followed his gut and adapted to circumstances. If elected, his inclination to build partnerships across the aisle will be at odds with the expectations of a new generation of voters impatient with incremental change. Since winning the nomination he has set up an array of policy working groups, who are cautiously optimistic they are exerting influence on the party programme, but ultimately the trajectory of a Biden presidency will depend on whether the Democrats can win control of the Senate and by how many seats.

It is impossible to come away from the Osnos’s biography without a sense of awe at what Biden has overcome to arrive at this point, so late in life and so close to achieving a prize he had assumed was lost.His youth was dominated by a struggle to overcome a severe stutter, and the battle left its mark, shaping his approach to life and politics. “He never entirely shed the insecurity,” Osnos writes, noting that seven decades on, he still remembers the names of the schoolmates who humiliated him. “Over the years, I’ve heard him return over and over to matters of respect and vulnerability.”

Having slain that demon, he rose fast in Delaware politics and scored an extraordinary upset winning a senate seat in 1972, at the age of 40. But the triumph was almost immediately overwhelmed by catastrophe. While he was away setting up his office in Washington, a truck drove into the family car, killing his wife, Neilia and their baby daughter, Naomi. His sons, Beau and Hunter were badly injured, and the newly elected senator was sworn in at their hospital bedside.

Biden’s first run for president in 1988 collapsed under the weight of his own flaws. An emotive campaign speech about his roots turned out to have been substantially borrowed from British Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. When journalists starting digging further, he was found to have exaggerated his academic achievements and participation in the civil rights movement.

A portrait of then Senator Joe Biden in his office on Capitol Hill, September, 1988.
A portrait of then Senator Joe Biden in his office on Capitol Hill, September, 1988. Photograph: Joe McNally/Getty Images

His second presidential run collapsed on take-off in 2007; it is remembered chiefly for another gaffe, his description of Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”. Having won the Democratic nomination, Obama took almost everyone by surprise in choosing Biden as his running mate, looking past the condescension, the blunders and the rambling loquaciousness to his virtues, his contacts on Capitol Hill and his substantial political talents.

Biden’s particular charisma is at the other end of the spectrum from Trump’s crowd-pleasing. The challenger is at his best at close quarters where personal connection and empathy matter. Osnos suggests plausibly that this gift is rooted in Biden’s own history of mistakes, perseverance and sheer suffering.

While serving as vice president, Biden lost his eldest son, Beau, an Iraq war veteran and rising political star with whom he had an unusually strong bond, to a brain tumour. Americans can sense Biden has come back from dark places and remembers what it is like to be there. His experiences have helped cement friendships and alliances, in particular among black leaders, who forgave him his patchy record on race and came to his rescue in South Carolina in February, when he was on the point of being knocked out of the primaries.

Osnos has written a fast-paced biography that draws on extensive interviews with his subject, as well as with Obama and a host of Democratic party heavyweights. In pursuit of brevity it races through the many personal dramas of a tumultuous life and deals only perfunctorily with Biden’s surviving son, Hunter, whose personal life has been the challenger’s greatest weakness – the target painted on his back by the Trump campaign.

Hunter Biden’s struggle with drug addiction and his business dealings have become a staple of the Republican attack machine, which has focused on his role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his father was vice-president and running relations between Washington and Kyiv. Trump’s effort to strongarm the Ukrainian government into supplying evidence of Biden family corruption led to his impeachment, though that has not stopped the attacks.

Biden’s first run for president in 1988 collapsed under the weight of his own flaws. The second collapsed on take-off in 2007


No proof of illegality was ever produced but the affair raised questions of judgment and whether Biden could have stopped his son profiting from their connection. Biden does not appear to address the issue in his conversations with Osnos. The only direct quote on the matter is taken from an earlier New Yorker interview with Hunter, who said his father had raised it once, telling his son: “I hope you know what you are doing.”
Hunter assured him that he did, wrongly as it turned out. He has since apologised and promised to have no foreign business dealings if his father becomes president. For a while the scandal threatened to derail Biden’s run for the presidency, but – as so often in his career – he rebounded and it was Trump who paid a price for his overreach.

Yet the episode deepened suspicion among progressives that a Biden administration would be a return to business as usual. He claims to have moved with the times and now recognises the need for real change, to address the climate crisis, social inequality and political dysfunction. This book suggests Biden has the capacity for self-reinvention. The next two weeks will determine whether he, and America, will have that opportunity.

Joe Biden: American Dreamer is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). not on gbkshop yet