Joe Biden pulls the strings of the Democratic convention. Last night, accepting the nomination for the White House, he presented himself as the leader of the most difficult rescue mission: ridding America of Donald Trump. Biden has moved, and could not have done otherwise, in the wake of the disruptive speech given by Barack Obama on Wednesday 19 August. The former president dramatized the scenario: “If Trump wins again, he will raze the Constitution.” Obama addressed the young, but above all the uncertain, the skeptical and the disappointed. “Our democracy and the possibility of improving it are at stake in the next elections.” Trump replied via Twitter in real time: “Obama was caught spying on our campaign.” And then again: “If I’m here, it’s because Obama was a failure.”
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Joe’s version also refers to the founding values, to the “soul of the nation”. It is no coincidence that Biden first publicly alluded to his candidacy on February 26, 2019 at a meeting at the University of Delaware. It was a conversation with the historian Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Soul of America, a book also appreciated by Nancy Pelosi.
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Since that moment Biden has appropriated this concept, actually of Hegelian origin, and transformed it into the slogan of his campaign. It is an apparent deviation from his personal history, marked by the constant search for mediation, compromise, pragmatic solutions.
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Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of a small business owner with Irish roots, Joe is experiencing the tumultuous growth of the American middle class. He graduated from law school, getting bored at Syracuse University, New York State. It is 1968. Many of his peers animate the student protest and, later, the protests against the war in Vietnam. Biden, on the other hand, stays in a suit and tie and plans his political career. At 30 he was already a senator for the state of Delaware. He enters Capitol Hill for the first time on January 3, 1973, and will remain there until January 15, 2009, when he becomes Obama’s deputy.
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For at least thirty years Biden imagined himself in the Oval Office, “Commander in Chief” of the United States. He tried in 1988, then in 2008, when he was walled up by Hillary Clinton and the emerging Obama. In 2016 he had to give up, because the establishment had already chosen Hillary. And now here he is at the top, at the most difficult time for the United States.
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Biden offers voters his political experience and also his “character”, his “soul”, marked by the loss of his first wife Neilia and his one-year-old daughter Naomi, killed in a car accident in 1972. And then by the disappearance of another son Beau, struck down by a brain tumor in 2015.
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He is the politician who takes the train every day to go home to his two young children. The man capable of identifying himself with the sufferings of others and therefore also in those of America today. In the picture, however, the most controversial aspects are missing: the accusations of sexual harassment made by Tara Reade, an assistant of his in 1993; doubts about his son Hunter’s activities in Ukraine. All of this will re-emerge in the fierce confrontation with Trump.
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20 August 2020 (change August 20, 2020 | 22:35)
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