Joe Biden

by Beatrice Gormley

  Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, seriously challenged only by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. During the summer and fall of 2016, public opinion polls seemed to show that she would win the general election. And Trump continued to behave in ways that would seem to doom his election chances.

  Donald Trump made openly racist remarks. During a rally in Iowa, he belittled Senator John McCain, a decorated war hero. Later, Trump disrespected the father of a soldier who had died in combat. A video was discovered in which he’d bragged about sexually assaulting women, and it went viral. Some political observers thought that the Republican Party, represented by a candidate as unqualified for the presidency and as divisive as Trump, was doomed.

  And yet Donald Trump’s message had a strong appeal, especially to white working-class voters. They felt disrespected by politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the “liberal elite.” They felt uneasy about the way American culture was changing, and Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” promised to restore the good old days.

  Most important, Trump promised to bring back the decent jobs that these workers used to count on, such as in manufacturing and coal mining. He promised a trillion-dollar infrastructure program to provide hundreds of thousands of new construction jobs. He promised to protect US borders from Latin American immigrants. In fact, he promised to find and remove all undocumented immigrants from the US.

  On election night, November 8, even as Hillary Clinton’s followers gathered for a huge victory party, the returns came in for Donald Trump. Very early on November 9, the TV networks declared Trump the winner. The final electoral vote was Trump 306, Clinton 232. Donald Trump would become the forty-fifth president of the United States.

  The Electoral College

  In the United States, the president is not elected by the popular vote, the total of all votes cast throughout the country. Instead the president is actually elected by the Electoral College, established in 1789 by the Constitution. The Constitution provides that each state has a certain number of electoral votes, which equals that state’s number of representatives (different for each state) plus the number of senators (always two).

  The results of the popular vote and the electoral vote are usually the same, but not always. Five times in the history of the US, the winner of the popular vote for president has lost the election. In the election of 2000, the decision between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down to the twenty-five electoral votes of one state, Florida. And the popular vote in Florida was so close that the Supreme Court finally decided the election.

  Election 2016 was a hard year for Joe Biden. It was the first year after Beau’s death. Joe didn’t have the exciting challenge of running for president. And the Obama administration struggled to accomplish their goals. Since the 2014 congressional elections, the Republicans had had majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and they were determined to block Obama at every turn.

  In March 2016, Obama had nominated Judge Merrick Garland to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Judge Garland was considered highly qualified, and he was politically moderate, which Obama thought would make him acceptable to the conservatives. But the Republican Senate refused to consider the nomination, claiming that a president should not appoint a new justice during his last year in office.

  And when Hillary Clinton lost the election in November, it was the crowning blow to Obama and Biden. If Clinton had been the next president, they could have been sure that she would carry forward their work. With Donald Trump in the White House, they could be sure he would not.

  * * *

  One of Barack Obama’s last acts as president was to throw a surprise party for Joe Biden. It was January 12, 2017, eight days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Biden was told that he and Jill were invited to meet Barack and Michelle for a quiet toast to their eight-year partnership. But when Joe saw the spacious White House State Dining Room filled with guests and TV cameras, he knew something was up.

  However, even when Obama called him up to the podium, even when he named Joe Biden “the best vice president America’s ever had,” Biden still didn’t know what Obama was going to do. After an affectionate, teasing speech full of praise for Joe as a friend and a public servant, Barack sprung the real surprise. He was awarding Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

  As Obama hung the medal around his neck, Joe looked stunned. He knew he was supposed to say something, but for once he was speechless. It took him several minutes to pull himself together. Finally he answered the president’s tribute with a heartfelt reply.

  In the long history of US presidents and their vice presidents, there had never been a pair like Barack and Joe. They were not just two politicians yoked together to balance the Democratic or Republican ticket. They were working partners—but not only partners, either. They were close and loving friends.

  “Promise Me, Dad”

  Was Joe Biden’s political career at an end? In January 2017, as Joe and Jill left the vice president’s residence, many people assumed so. After all, the next election was in 2020, the year that Biden would turn seventy-eight. If elected, he would be the oldest president in US history by several years.

  But he still wanted the job. Biden thought—and even said publicly—that he believed he could have won the 2016 election: “I thought I was a great candidate.” He said frankly that he never thought Hillary Clinton was a great candidate, although he thought she would have been a good president.

  In November 2017, Joe Biden published a new book, Promise Me, Dad, about Beau’s illness and death. “Promise me, Dad,” was what Beau had demanded of his father. Beau wanted to know that whatever happened to him, his father would be “all right.” And Joe had promised, giving “my word as a Biden.”

  What did “all right” mean? Joe believed it meant that he could not give up on life. And the two most important things in his life had always been his family and his work. His life’s work, in government, might not be over. He could run for president one more time, in 2020.

  * * *

  During the next four years, the Trump administration set about to roll back all the achievements of the eight Obama-Biden years. He immediately announced his intention to destroy the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). He called the danger of global climate change a “hoax,” and he threatened to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement, in which the nations of the world had agreed to reduce their greenhouse gases. President Trump seemed determined to push away America’s closest allies. He talked of leaving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a key alliance between the US and western Europe since 1949.

  With the help of the Republican-majority Congress, President Trump passed legislation giving large tax breaks to the wealthy. He appointed two conservative judges to the Supreme Court. He replaced federal officials with ones who would favor private schools over public schools, or remove regulations on water pollution. He encouraged harsh treatment, such as separating children from their parents, of immigrants from Latin America.

  Russia, it turned out, had tried to interfere in the 2016 US election. This was the conclusion of the FBI and the CIA, but Trump pooh-poohed it. At a summit meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Trump asked if they had tried to interfere. Putin said no, and Trump seemed to take his word for it. President Trump acted friendly, even admiringly, toward Putin. He also praised the brutal dictators Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.

  * * *

  In 2017 the Republicans had majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and this seemed like their chance to accomplish all their conservative goals at once. Soon after Trump’s inauguration, the Republicans in Congress launched a bill meant to kill the Affordable Care Act. They called the legislation “Repeal and Replace,” but in fact it would take medical insurance away from many millions of Americans. When a pared-down version of “Repeal and Replace” came up for approval in the Senate in
July, it seemed sure to pass. Biden’s Republican friend Senator John McCain didn’t like the bill, but he was home in Arizona, undergoing surgery.

  But McCain, like the Bidens, was a tough man to keep down. After the surgery, he flew to Washington and walked onto the Senate floor with stitches over his right eye—and voted thumbs-down on “Repeal and Replace” to break a tie vote. Biden must have appreciated his friend’s dramatic moment in the political spotlight, but he also felt the pain of his bad news. John McCain, like Joe’s son Beau, had an especially malignant form of brain cancer, and he would die the next year.

  * * *

  In the congressional elections of 2018, a strong reaction against President Trump’s policies helped Democrats, especially women, take back the House of Representatives. But Senator Mitch McConnell, who had worked tirelessly for the previous ten years against the goals of Obama’s administration, was still majority leader of the Senate. When the House sent bills to the Senate for approval, McConnell refused to even let them come up for debate. Because he killed so many bills this way, he got the nickname “the Grim Reaper.”

  On April 25, 2019, Joe Biden announced that he was running for president in 2020. He was joining an already crowded Democratic field: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Senator Kamala Harris of California, to name only a few. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was also running again. In total, twenty-nine Democratic candidates would declare.

  As soon as Biden declared, questions arose about whether he was physically fit, at his age, to run for president. He got a dubious endorsement from Dr. Neal Kassell, the brain surgeon who had operated on Biden’s aneurysms in 1988. He joked, “Joe Biden of all of the politicians in Washington is the only one that I’m certain has a brain, because I have seen it. That’s more than I can say about all the other candidates or the incumbents.”

  The Democratic debates began on June 26, 2019, when the polls showed Joe Biden as the Democratic front-runner. In that debate, Senator Kamala Harris of California made news for her dramatic attack on Biden. “I do not believe you are a racist,” she began. But she went on to reproach him for voting in the Senate in the 1970s against public-school busing. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

  Biden looked shocked, and when he answered Harris, he seemed defensive and off-balance. Jill was shocked too. It “felt like a punch in the gut,” she said later.

  Over the course of the following debates, other candidates accused Biden of clinging to Obamacare, a flawed health care program; of being beholden to the credit card industries in Delaware for donations; of voting for the Iraq War in 2002; and in general of not being the “new blood” that the Democratic Party needed.

  They pointed out the harm done by the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act and the crime reform laws of 1994. And Biden had to admit that the harsh drug laws, resulting in huge prison populations, had been a mistake. The critics brought up many of Biden’s numerous slips of the tongue, including the time he called Obama “clean” and “articulate.”

  * * *

  In spite of all these attacks, Biden remained the Democratic front-runner through the rest of 2019. And Donald Trump must have believed that Joe Biden was his most dangerous rival, because he tried to slander Biden as corrupt, as using his political power to benefit himself. During the summer of 2019, Trump pressured the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Joe and his son Hunter for supposed wrongdoing in that country.

  It was true that Hunter Biden had served on the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, from 2014 to April 2019. It was true that Burisma had paid Hunter as much as $50,000 a month. But it was not true that Joe Biden had used his influence in Ukraine to protect his son from investigation.

  Trump’s effort to pressure a foreign government to harm a political rival became public in September 2019. The Democratic-majority House of Representatives began an investigation that led to President Trump’s impeachment on December 18. The House accused him of “abuse of power”—asking a foreign government to help his reelection—and “obstruction of Congress”—refusing to let White House officials testify or turn over documents. The case then moved to the Senate for trial, and without calling witnesses, the Republican-majority Senate voted on February 5, 2020, to acquit the president on both charges.

  Impeachment

  The Constitution states that the House of Representatives may impeach a president—bring charges against him—for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” If they do, the charges are sent to the Senate, which then holds a trial of the accused president. If the Senate votes—by a two-thirds supermajority—to convict, the president will be removed from office. This has never actually happened.

  The president has been impeached only three times in US history. In 1868, Andrew Johnson was impeached by the House of Representatives but acquitted by the Senate. Bill Clinton was likewise impeached but acquitted in 1999. In 1974, Richard Nixon was threatened with impeachment, but he resigned before charges could be brought against him.

  The trouble with the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” is that it’s not very precise. It can be interpreted in different ways, so there is a temptation to interpret it against a political opponent, or for a political ally. But Donald Trump’s was the first totally partisan impeachment. No Republicans in the House voted to impeach on either of the two charges, “abuse of power” or “obstruction of Congress.” And in the Senate trial, every Republican except one voted to acquit on both charges.

  Since Congress was so clearly divided along party lines, the impeachment process worsened the divisions in the country. It seemed possible that Donald Trump, in spite of the extreme dislike many Americans felt for him, would be reelected in November. His strongest point was the thriving US economy, although income inequality had increased.

  Meanwhile, the Democratic primary elections began early in February 2020. Suddenly Joe Biden was running way behind, coming in fourth in the Iowa caucuses and then fifth in the New Hampshire election. The front-runner was now Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders was a year older than Biden, but many Democrats felt he was the best candidate to fight against racial injustice and economic inequality.

  Back in the spring of 2019, a new criticism of Joe Biden had been brought up as part of the Me Too movement. The intention of this movement was to make visible and to stop the sexual harassment and assault of women by powerful men. Joe Biden’s style of interacting with everyone—not just women—had always been physically affectionate. His natural instinct was to like everyone, and to demonstrate how much he liked them by touching, hugging, and giving shoulder rubs.

  Many people liked him for it, while others thought it was just Joe being Joe. But a number of women spoke up about feeling that Biden had invaded their personal space. In response, Biden apologized publicly for the times he’d made women uncomfortable.

  In March 2020 the issue came up again. A woman who had worked for a short time in Senator Biden’s office accused him of sexually assaulting her in 1993. But other people who worked for Joe Biden during that time found the charge frankly unbelievable. And Biden denied it absolutely. After investigating the story, the major news media concluded there was little substance to it.

  * * *

  In the important South Carolina primary at the end of February, Biden’s lagging campaign got a big boost. He was endorsed by the influential congressman Jim Clyburn, and he won every county in the state. And on so-called Super Tuesday, March 3, when 1,344 electoral votes were at stake, Biden again won big. He went on to win eighteen of the next twenty-six Democratic primaries.

  On April 8, Biden’s last rival, Bernie Sanders, dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden for president. On June 6, it became official: Joe Biden, with more than 1,991 delegates, was the presumptive Democra
tic nominee.

  But back in March, the United States had been engulfed by a threat that drew Americans’ attention from the presidential race. A new virus, causing a disease called COVID-19, had arisen in China and quickly spread around the globe. It was a coronavirus, like the viruses that cause the common cold, but more infectious and much more deadly. There was no vaccine—and no cure.

  Pandemics

  An epidemic is an outbreak of disease that rapidly infects a large number of people in one country or region. A pandemic is an epidemic that spreads quickly through many countries and continents, even worldwide. One of the worst was the Spanish flu of 1918–19, an influenza pandemic that started toward the end of World War I. That highly contagious and often deadly disease infected one-third of the world’s population. In the United States, 675,000 people died.

  Some serious infectious diseases, such as polio, have been controlled by vaccines, which protect people against infection. Other viruses can be treated with prescription medications to lessen the effects of the disease. But even without a vaccine or treatment, a pandemic can be controlled by preventing the disease’s spread in a combination of ways.

  Keeping infected people away from healthy people is one important action. Hygiene, such as washing hands and sanitizing surfaces; social distancing, such as avoiding crowds or any close contact; and wearing face masks, to keep infectious droplets out of the air, are all ways to reduce the spread of some viruses.