Joseph R. Biden Jr. has spent his career devoted to institutions and relationships. And those are the tools he will rely on to govern a fractured nation.
Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the presidential race is the culmination of a career that spanned a half-century of political and social upheaval.
Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the presidential race is the culmination of a career that spanned a half-century of political and social upheaval.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Katie GlueckThomas Kaplan
By Katie Glueck and Thomas Kaplan
Nov. 7, 2020Updated 3:25 p.m. ET
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Thirty-three years ago, he was the fast-talking junior senator from Delaware with a chip on his shoulder, desperate to prove his gravitas during a brief, ill-fated presidential run.
The next time around, in 2008, he was the seasoned foreign policy hand and veteran lawmaker who strained to capture the imagination of Democratic presidential primary voters.
As he weighed a third attempt at the presidency last year, many Democrats feared he was too late. Too old, too moderate, too meandering to excite ascendant voices in his party, too rooted in the more civil politics of the past to nimbly handle Donald Trump.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. ran anyway. He ran as a grieving father who connected with a country in pain. As a relative centrist who emphasized character, stability and belief in bipartisanship over the particulars of a policy agenda. As a flawed, uneven campaigner whose vulnerabilities were ultimately drowned out by his opponent’s outsize weaknesses, and eclipsed by the seismic issues at stake, as the nation confronted the ravages of a deadly pandemic.
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In many ways, he ran as the politician he has always been. And for one extraordinary election, that was enough.
“They’re not so much saying, ‘I’m investing in Joe Biden because of his philosophy,’” said former Senator William S. Cohen, Republican of Maine, who served with Mr. Biden and supported him this year. “They’re invested in Joe Biden because of him, of who they see as being a human being.”
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Mr. Biden’s victory on Saturday is the culmination of a career that began in the Nixon era and spanned a half-century of political and social upheaval. But if the country, the political parties and Washington have changed since Mr. Biden, now 77, arrived in the Senate as a 30-year-old widower in 1973, some of his attitudes — about governing and about his fellow Americans — have hardly changed at all.
He still reveres institutions, defiantly champions compromise and sees politics more in terms of relationships than ideology. He has insisted that with Mr. Trump out of office, Republicans will have an “epiphany” about working with Democrats — a view that elides the fact that Republicans were rarely interested in working with the Obama administration when Mr. Biden was vice president.
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Those beliefs, coupled with his reputation as an empathetic and experienced leader, made Mr. Biden acceptable to a broad coalition of Americans this year, including independents and some moderate Republicans.
ImageMr. Biden was closely attuned to the moderate, older Black primary electorate and had carefully followed which Democrats won in the toughest districts in 2018.
Mr. Biden was closely attuned to the moderate, older Black primary electorate and had carefully followed which Democrats won in the toughest districts in 2018.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Now, Mr. Biden’s convictions about how to unite the country and move forward will be tested as never before.
He will take the helm of a nation devastated by a health crisis, reeling from an economic downturn and divided over virtually every major political matter of the day, from how and even whether to confront climate change and racial injustice, to baseless questions from some of Mr. Trump’s supporters about the very legitimacy of free and fair election results.
His first priority, Mr. Biden has said, will be to bring the coronavirus under control, as he also works to invest in infrastructure and to promote economic growth. Mr. Biden has released a series of policy plans around all of those issues, and has made clear that a national emergency calls for urgent and ambitious action.
But the president-elect, a 36-year veteran of the Senate who has never embraced the most far-reaching progressive proposals, is also well aware that the partisan makeup of Washington may limit the scope of his agenda. He is unlikely to press for rapid, transformational change of institutions like the Supreme Court or to embrace the boldest proposals in the Green New Deal.
Yet for all of his instincts for consensus-building, he will face enormous and conflicting pressures when he returns to Washington.
Progressives who papered over their differences with Mr. Biden in the name of defeating Mr. Trump will quickly turn to fighting for their priorities, which may not always align with Mr. Biden’s goals or timeline.
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“Where the progressive energy will really turn angry is if we see Biden really compromising on core principles,” warned Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Even his closest allies believe there are elements of his long record that should be reconsidered from the White House, including the legacy of the crime bills passed during his tenure in the Senate. Mr. Biden for years served as a tough-on-crime Democrat, and he has sometimes struggled to account for his leading role in the 1994 crime bill, which many experts now associate with mass incarceration.
“He needs to put together a commission or a committee to study the 1986 and 1994 crime bills,” said Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking Black official in Congress, describing mass incarceration as an unintended consequence. “We’ve got to rectify.”
And Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the powerful Republican leader, has a relationship with Mr. Biden — but he is unlikely to be moved by encomiums to bipartisanship and civility.
“Joe is a peacemaker — he’s always tried to get along with Republicans,” said Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat and the former Senate majority leader.
But he was skeptical that Republican leaders in Congress would feel similarly about curbing divisiveness in Washington.
“I just hope Joe’s right and I’m wrong,” he said, “but I don’t see that coming to an end.”
The New York Times