![]() Now, as Biden gets closer to a decision on whether to run in 2020, people who know him well, plus consultants and strategists, say this unique combination of political preeminence and lived experience would make Biden stand out in the disparate, growing field of Democrats who are or are about to be candidates. This sign-up form is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. You can unsubscribe at any time and you can contact us here. And has been.”īy signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or updates from POLITICO and you agree to our privacy policy and terms of service. “That tragedy of losing someone, especially a child-if you haven’t had that happen to you, as much as you can feel sympathy, you can’t begin to put yourself in their place unless you actually have been there,” said Fred Sears, who’s been friends with Biden since high school. “He does use his knowledge of the process of going through these things no one should really have to go through to try to help others do the same,” said Jeff Nussbaum, one of his former speechwriters. “Joe Biden,” Delaware Senator Chris Coons told me earlier this week, “has almost a superpower in his ability to comfort and listen and connect with people who have just suffered the greatest loss of their lives.” Overall, though, and over time, Biden has managed to turn his grief into a sort of interpersonal gift. It’s also possible, some of the same confidants acknowledge, that Biden’s grief contributed to his propensity for impolitic, loose-lipped gaffes-life is short, let it rip-including two public instances in which he altered the narrative of the deadly wreck by suggesting inaccurately the other driver was drunk. These traits, they say, were there already, instilled by his working-class roots and the teachings of the Catholic church, his mother’s tenets of social justice and his father’s mantra to get up, get up, after getting knocked down-but they were amplified by what Biden was made to learn about himself, and about life, as he fought through these ordeals. They made him more relatable, more authentic, more empathetic. And they defined him as a person as well, according to longtime friends, former aides and veteran politicos in his home state of Delaware. They influenced major decisions he made about his political career-first, his priorities in the Senate later, his decision to opt out of the presidential election of 2016. These wretched tentpoles are not only tragedies the 76-year-old Biden has had to endure. In 1972, his wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident in 2015, one of his two sons who had survived the crash died of a rare strain of brain cancer. ![]() The long arc of Biden’s career is all but bracketed by tragedy. ![]() There is no person in American politics today whose life has been so shaped by loss and grief. Biden, he believed, talked with “total credibility.” “You know that he’s speaking from life experience, you know he’s drawing from his emotional bank, and so it’s pretty real and pretty raw,” Barden said. “He said, ‘I think what you’ll find is the lows will always be just as low-but they’ll start to get farther apart.’” Barden knew enough of Biden’s backstory to know that Biden knew how he felt, and knew how to get through it, because otherwise he couldn’t have been a senator for 3½ decades, couldn’t have been the 47th vice president, and wouldn’t have been on the other end of the line, making this call. Biden granted he wouldn’t see a 10 for quite some time, Barden recalled, but he also offered a kernel of hope. ![]() “Tap into that.” And he gave him some practical advice, too: Keep a pad by your bed and rate each day, 1 being the worst, 10 being the best. “Lean on that,” Barden said Biden told him. “I felt,” Barden told me recently, “immediately connected to him.” They talked for more than an hour-about shared priorities, about their families. ![]() It cut through the fog of sorrow and shock. He held the phone up to his ear and heard the voice of Joe Biden. “The vice president,” his sister-in-law whispered. Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.ĭays after his 7-year-old son was murdered inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the phone rang at Mark Barden’s house. ![]()
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