“I’ve known a lot of people who have run for President,” Joe Biden told me. “I’ve known the last eight Presidents, three intimately.” That was in the spring of 2014, when Biden was the Vice-President, and I was interviewing him for a Profile in this magazine. We were in his office, in the West Wing, and he had come out from behind his desk, with his suit jacket off. It was nineteen months before the 2016 Iowa caucuses, and he was weighing whether to run, again, for the Presidency. He said, “What it comes down to is, what is the reason why I want to do this? Is there a cause? I don’t mean ‘cause’ like over the ramparts, but do you really believe you have the capacity to change things that you’re passionate about?”
Biden’s capacity to change—not only things but also himself—is still at the heart of his Presidential prospects. On Thursday morning, he declared his candidacy in a video that defined his cause as a “battle for the soul of this nation.” “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House,” Biden added, “he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation. Who we are. And I cannot stand by and watch that happen.” (In a tweet, Trump responded in his customary fashion, questioning Biden’s intelligence, calling him “Sleepy Joe,” and disparaging the Democratic field as having “sick & demented ideas.”)
A few hours after Biden’s announcement, as if to underscore a challenging array of questions that he faces about his record, he was confronted with fresh headlines regarding his handling, in 1991, of the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas. Biden, who, as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, ran the hearings, disallowed the testimony of women who might have backed up Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of sexual harassment. Biden later publicly lamented that he hadn’t given Hill “the kind of hearing she deserved,” but he only recently called her to express regret. The call left her unsatisfied. “I will be satisfied when I know there is real change and real accountability and real purpose,” she told the Times.
The Thomas hearing is one of several political land mines in Biden’s history. In recent months, he has been criticized for what the writer Michelle Goldberg, of the Times, called “avuncular pawing,” which had left some women uncomfortable. He released a video pledging to do better. (He then risked undermining the effect of that earnest response, by later joking, to a crowd of union members, that he had “permission to hug” their leader.) He is also contending with criticism for his role during the passage of the draconian 1994 crime bill and for his stance on bussing in the nineteen-seventies—two issues that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party today looks at with contempt for how its leaders acted at the time. Samuel Popkin, a political scientist who has worked in and studied Presidential campaigns for nearly half a century, told me that Biden faces an awkward balance. “He will be judged for his actions from 1972 to 1988”—from the time he won his first Senate campaign to his first Presidential bid—“by today’s standard, by candidates without any experience. It’s neither fair nor avoidable. So, can he acknowledge the past, and show he has learned—all without looking weak?” Popkin went on, “Experience means you have made mistakes on policy; it also means you have lived under different cultural norms. Why should an ambitious newcomer cut slack for an old-timer, when it means deferring their own ambitions? That is a growing problem everywhere, as the power of parties over individual members declines.”
None of these criticisms is news to Biden or those who have backed his entry to the race. His candidacy rests on a bet that, when the pendulum of history pulls back from Trump, it will swing toward experience and incrementalism, rather than toward youth and progressive zeal. Biden will seek to persuade Americans that, after the agonies of Trumpism, the benefits of his story—his experience of working-class life and of personal loss and suffering—outweigh the liabilities. He will try to emphasize his familiarity with government and diplomacy, which his rivals in both parties are hard-pressed to match. Julianne Smith, Biden’s former deputy national-security adviser, told me, “Pretty much you can drop him into Kazakhstan or Bahrain, it doesn’t matter—he’s gonna find some Joe Blow that he met thirty years ago who’s now running the place. And it doesn’t even matter what the political stripes are: he knows conservatives, he knows social democrats, because, over thirty-five-plus years, everybody came to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”
Eons of political time have passed since the spring of 2014. Trump was still the host on “The Apprentice,” but he was edging into politics. He spoke that March at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC.
During my conversations with Biden, he offered a premonition about growing political divisiveness. “I think the middle class is getting clobbered,” he said one day, over lunch. “I think there has to be a significant change in both, over time, fiscal policy and tax policy.” He was trying to get that view “further insinuated into the White House,” he said. It seemed like boilerplate, and I didn’t quote it. That was a mistake. He was describing an emerging divide in the Democratic Party over the degree to which it needed to address the frustrations of working-class voters, especially whites, some of whom eventually turned to Bernie Sanders—and others to Trump.
Biden continued, “I’ll be blunt with you: the only vote I can think of that I’ve ever cast in my years in the Senate that I regret—and I did it out of loyalty, and I wasn’t aware that it was gonna be as bad as it was—was Glass-Steagall.” The 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which once separated commercial and investment banking, partially facilitated the 2008 financial crisis. (Over the years, Biden has expressed regret about other votes, including his support for the invasion of Iraq and for tougher sentencing on the possession of crack cocaine.) He went on, “I have a basic disagreement with the underlying rationale that began in the Clinton Administration about the concentration of economic wealth to generate economic growth.”
That spring, he had begun to stake out a populist economic appeal that could have put him to the left of Hillary Clinton. He told a union audience that Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, had complained about Pope Francis’s critique of income inequity. Biden said of Langone, “As a practicing Catholic, bless me, Father, for he has sinned.” He warned members of the United Auto Workers that conservatives were waging “a concerted, full-throated, well-organized, well-financed, well-thought-out effort waging war on labor’s house.” Sanders was still months away from entering the Presidential race, and Biden was developing a pitch that would serve him if he ran.
When I finished reporting my piece, Biden was still undecided, but he was clearly leaning toward running, if his family was ready for another campaign. During our last interview, he stepped away to take a phone call and returned, smiling. “Just got really good family news. O.K., where was I?”
His eyes were glistening, and I asked if he wanted to take a break.
“Ah, no, I just—I just can’t tell you how good I feel,” he said.
Afterward, an aide told me that the phone call was long-awaited good news about the ongoing recovery of Biden’s son Beau, who had been given a diagnosis of brain cancer the previous year. That optimism was short-lived. After a recurrence of cancer, Beau Biden died on May 30, 2015. It was another cruel episode in a family story that is replete with them.
The family withdrew into itself; talk of Presidential campaigns was set aside. By the time Biden was ready to consider the idea again, Clinton had opened a lead that would be difficult to challenge. In October of 2015, he announced that the window for his candidacy had closed. It seemed to everyone that he would never have another day as a Presidential candidate. But Biden’s life has often turned in directions that were difficult to predict, and it has once more.