Book Review: "Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now"
Evan Osnos' new book is a potent reminder of why Joe Biden was the perfect presidential candidate for 2020
From the moment that Joe Biden declared that he was going to run for the presidency in 2020, I knew that he had the makings of a winner. To be clear, I was a Kamala girl from the jump, and after that my allegiance wavered between Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Pete. I even briefly flirted with supporting Amy Kloubchar. The whole time, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were underestimating Biden, that this time he would actually be able to pull a victory out of his hat.
And so it proved to be.
Since then, I’ve never had a moment of doubt that we voted for the right person to right the wrongs and rectify the horrors of the Trump era. Biden may not be the fire-breathing radical that Bernie Sanders is, and he may not have the crispness of his Vice President or Elizabeth Warren, but what he does have is empathy and a surprisingly firm grasp of the needs of the moment. All of this is made abundantly clear in Evan Osnos new book Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and what Matters Now.
It’s a slender volume, more a compendium of his various pieces for The New Yorker than a fully-fledged biography, but it’s still a brilliant and at times deeply moving portrait of the man who is now the forty-sixth President of the United States. It gives us a whirlwind tour of Biden’s early life, his time in the Senate, his Vice Presidency under Barack Obama, and his campaign for the top job in 2020. As a result, we get a surprisingly nuanced portrait of the man now occupying the White House.
It’s no secret that Biden’s superpower is his ability to connect with others on a deeply emotional level; time and again throughout the campaign (and, more infrequently, after his victory), news outlets reported on exactly that. By this point, it’s become so much a part of the Biden mystique that it almost doesn’t feel real. What this book provides, however, is an understanding of how he developed this capacity, and it’s clear that his sense of empathy is very real and very rooted in the tragedies that have marred his personal life.
Take, for example, the moment that Biden learned that his first wife and their young daughter had perished in a horrible car accident. As related by his sister, she received a call from their brother. Though she turned to him and told him that there had been a slight accident, the look on her face told him everything. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Biden said. When I read that passage, it was all I could do not to break down into tears in the middle of the laundromat. One could hardly have blamed Biden if he’d chosen to leave public life after suffering such tremendous loss, but instead he continued on. Several years later, after his son Beau had died of brain cancer, he wrote in his diary: “It happened. My God, my boy. My beautiful boy.” It’s another of those moments that just pulls your heart out, and you can’t help but marvel at how this man went on to have a successful career in the Senate and eventually won the 2020 election.
There’s no doubt that family was and is key to Biden’s sense of self and to his identity as a politician. The way that he looks at the world, including his approach to the pandemic, very much stems from his relationships with his family. It’s what gave many of his voters the confidence to vote for him, knowing that he, unlike Trump, actually seemed to care about the effects of the pandemic on individuals, particularly those who had lost someone to the disease.
The book also does an excellent job showing us just how thoughtful and nuanced Biden can be in his thinking. Throughout the 2020 campaign there was an unsettling habit of many on the left and the right of painting Biden as not just a man who was out of his depth when it came to the needs and desires of a new generation of voters but downright senile. Though that has largely disappeared now that he has become president, that ugly sentiment still raises its head every now and again. What we see in this book, however, is that he’s a man who has a politician’s sharp instincts for what the people need and want from their leaders, which proved to be a valuable asset during the 2020 campaign. Though he ran as a moderate, Osnos shows us that, at base, Biden strongly believes in the power of government to make people’s lives better.
What’s more, the book shows us that Biden is a politician who relies a great deal on personal relationships, both in terms of how he forges legislation in the domestic realm as well as how he deals with foreign leaders. Though foreign policy often takes a back seat these days, I found Osnos’ reporting about Biden’s connections with various foreign leaders some of the most illuminating parts of the book. Given the way that Trump managed to shred America’s reputation abroad during his four years in office, it feels good to have someone in charge who actually cares about our image.
However, it is also true that Biden can be a bit of a blowhard, and he’s notorious for rambling in meetings and for exaggerating his own actions in the past. And the book doesn’t shy away from showcasing some of Biden’s missteps in the past, including his treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and his drafting of the crime bill. However, it situates those incidents in their context and, more importantly, it emphasizes that Biden, in contrast to his predecessor, is more than happy to own up to his mistakes and to apologize for them.
Reading this series of biographical sketches, more than ever I’m convinced that Joe Biden, despite all of the odds and the expectations, was just the person we needed to steer us into a brighter, more prosperous future.