Book cover of Joe Biden: American Dreamer, by Evan Osnos
Joe Biden: American Dreamer, by Evan Osnos
Author: Evan Osnos. Review by Reg Naulty
Joe Biden was born in 1942. Evan Osnos says in this worthy biography that ‘He was a product of the Silent Generation, the cohort of Cautious Americans born between the Great Depression and the end of world war two’. He was true to type. He was to be a cautious politician, an instinctive centrist.
Unlike Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Biden was not Ivy League. He was educated in his native Delaware, with average results. Osnos remarks that he had intellectual insecurity, which lingers. At the age of thirty-one he decided, out of no great depth of motivation, to have a go at politics. He was voted in, by a narrow margin, as a senator for Delaware.
Several weeks before he was sworn in, in 1973, his wife and baby were killed in a car crash. Of his two sons, Beau suffered broken bones, and Hunter, the one whose business links in the Ukraine were later used to embarrass Biden, escaped with head injuries. The pattern of incredible luck and misfortune was to be repeated throughout Biden’s life. After the death of his wife, his sister moved in to look after his boys for four years, after which he re-married.
During his long years in the Senate, Biden came to chair the Senate foreign relations committee. Visiting politicians from overseas found it in their interests to make themselves known to him, so he was on first-name terms with visiting heads of state and members of their entourage when he was vice-president. On the down side, Senate speeches were not put under the public microscope, and Biden developed the habit of saying in public what was usually said in private, which was damaging when he was vice-president. When he held that office, though, he made sure that he was part of the most important committees.
In 1988, at the age of forty-six, one of Biden’s greatest disasters befell him: he had two aneurysms, a ballooning-out of an artery to the brain. It put him in hospital for three months and off work for seven months. Later, in 2015, when he was seventy-three, his beloved son Beau died from aggressive brain cancer at the age of forty-six. Beau’s death changed Biden. He lost his jauntiness, and became a humble, purposeful man.
In general, Democratic politicians fall into two camps: there are the liberal meliorists who take a long view and believe that humans can progress and improve. They stand for realism, coalition building, and practical politics. That’s where Biden fits in. His rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, took a more revolutionary approach. On his agenda were Medicare for all, free college education, better public housing, and police reform. Biden would probably choose less of all these, but in negotiations with the Sanders camp after the latter withdrew from the presidential race, he agreed to carbon-free electricity by 2035.
Biden believes in compromise and, at his age, has no time to lose. His obstacle could still be the Senate, which made life so difficult for Clinton and Obama.
