Joe Biden has run for the White House twice previously, in 1987 and 2008.
Washington:
He channeled personal tragedy into open-hearted compassion for ordinary Americans, but President-elect Joe Biden faces the challenge of his life as he inherits a nation both traumatized and fascinated by his predecessor at the White House.
Biden’s victory – projected by TV channels on Saturday in a cliffhanger election with the United States in crisis – turns the page on Donald Trump’s most controversial presidencies and rewards his appeal to the best angels of a country deeply torn up.
But can the man who introduced himself as chief healer make progress in a nation where Trump’s ideology, regardless of the president’s defeat, shows little sign of abating?
Rarely have presidential rivals differed so sharply as in the 2020 race, which pitted the empathetic Democrat against brawl Trump, the billionaire businessman who presented himself as the underdog despite his four years in the Oval Office .
As the sun rose over Washington’s National Mall the morning after a tense election night, the tight contest looked like it could go either way.
But as the quietly confident Democrat reclaimed state after state in the days that followed, his victory slowly but inexorably took shape.
On Saturday, US networks projected he won the pivotal state of Pennsylvania – and the White House.
“The job ahead of us will be difficult, but I promise you this: I will be the president of all Americans,” the 46th sitting US president said shortly after the networks call.
Now all his work is in front of him.
He is inheriting a coronavirus pandemic that shows no signs of slowing down and an office that he says has seen its credibility shattered by “liar” Trump.
Biden has run for the White House twice previously, in 1987 and 2008.
A defeat to the deeply polarizing Trump – Biden said in the home stretch of the election – would mean he had been a “lousy” candidate, lowering the curtain on a prolific but ultimately dissatisfied political career.
But “Middle Class Joe” had made it the supreme mission of his life to overthrow the Republican and, in his own words, to restore America’s “soul”.
And despite a stifled campaign beyond recognition by Covid-19 – carried out largely from home while his high-octane rival charged across the country – Biden finally showed Trump the door.
– Lasting compassion –
When he is sworn in on January 20, at age 78, Biden will be the longest-serving U.S. head of state ever to serve.
He reached the national stage at just 29, with a surprise victory in the United States Senate in Delaware in 1972.
A month later, tragedy struck: his wife Neilia and their one-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash while shopping for Christmas.
Biden’s two sons were badly injured but survived, only for the eldest, Beau, to succumb to cancer four decades later, in 2015.
Throughout his life, Biden has spoken poignantly of his personal encounters with the tragedy, perceived to have nurtured a capacity for genuine empathy – which Trump has failed to demonstrate even as the toll of Covid – 19 was a quarter of a million.
His retail politics skills are second to none: he can flaunt his million-watt smile to students, empathize with unemployed Rust Belt machinists, or issue a fiery warning to his rivals.
That personal and gregarious quality was reduced by the pandemic, which ended the in-person campaign in March and prompted a more cautious Biden on the trail.
Somewhat diminished from the figure he presented during his eight years as Vice President of Barack Obama, the dazzling smile remained. But Biden’s walk was more delicate and his fine white hair had thinned out.
Opponents, and even some Democrats, wondered if the talkative and gaff-prone Biden would stumble in his long campaign against Trump.
The 74-year-old president nicknamed him “Sleepy Joe” and accused him of diminished mental acuity.
In a flash of frustration at Trump’s interruptions in their first debate, he at one point told the president to “shut up.”
But most of the time, Biden ignored the attacks.
– ‘They are the future’ –
The oldest elected president of the United States began his career on Capitol Hill as one of the youngest senators of all time, and spent more than three decades in the Upper House before becoming Obama’s MP.
Much of Biden’s campaign message was based on his association with the ever-popular Obama and his ability to do business with the many world leaders his former boss had sent him to meet (“I know these guys,” he would recall. people).
His offer of moderate politics in a time of division was a balm for an electorate exhausted by four years of scandal and chaos in the Trump White House.
But Biden balanced his general call with a pledge to take genuinely progressive action as president, on climate change, racial injustice and student debt relief.
In January, Americans may already be wondering if the former statesman will seek to expand his role as U.S. president beyond a first term, given his own words on the transitional nature of his candidacy.
“Look, I see myself as a bridge, not like anything else,” Biden told a crowd at a rally in Detroit, Michigan in March.
He waved to the Young Democrats who had joined him on stage – including the woman who would become his deputy, 56-year-old Senator Kamala Harris.
“There is a whole generation of leaders that you saw standing behind me,” he said. “They are the future of this country.”
– Historical review –
Biden was anything but assured of becoming his party’s standard bearer. Although he is the frontrunner of the Democratic establishment, he has been deemed by some to be too old or too centrist.
His campaign was shaping up to be dire after disappointing primary losses to spirited Bernie Sanders earlier this year.
But Biden came back strong in the South Carolina primary thanks to overwhelming support from African-American voters, a crucial base of Democratic support.
Landing the nomination marked a stark contrast to his extinction in 1988, when he resigned in disgrace after being caught plagiarizing a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock.
In 2008, he did little better, dropping out after garnering less than one percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses.
That year, he was finally chosen as running mate by Obama, who dubbed him “America’s happy warrior.”
As a senator for more than 30 years, Biden was known to forge unlikely alliances – and, like Trump, he developed a lack of loyalty to the script.
He has been faced with an account among Democrats – including Harris, the next Vice President of the United States – for working with known segregationists in the Senate and for opposing “bus” policies in the 1970s. aimed at transporting black children to predominantly white schools.
He has also been criticized for helping to draft a 1994 crime bill that many Democrats say resulted in incarceration, disproportionately affecting African Americans. Biden recently called the push a “mistake.”
Other Senate episodes also threatened to spoil her presidential campaign: her 2003 vote for the Iraq war and her presiding over controversial hearings in 1991 in which Anita Hill accused Supreme Court candidate Clarence Thomas, of sexual harassment.
Last year, he faced a storm over his own notoriously tactile approach with female voters, which might suggest a man out of step with his modernizing party.
He apologized and promised to be more “attentive” to the personal space of women.
– ‘Stand up’ –
Biden relays the heartbreaking details of his family stories so often that, despite his obvious grief, they are now part of a political hallmark.
The 1972 accident left his sons Beau, four, and Hunter, two, seriously injured, and Biden, 30, sworn in beside their hospital beds.
Biden met his second wife, teacher Jill Jacobs, in 1975 and they married two years later. They have a daughter, Ashley.
Both boys recovered from their injuries and Beau followed his father into politics, becoming Delaware’s attorney general – but the rising Democratic star died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46.
Lawyer and lobbyist Hunter Biden has had a different trajectory.
He received a lucrative salary serving on the board of a Ukrainian gas company accused of corruption while his father was vice-president.
Pressure from Trump for Ukraine to investigate the Bidens led to the president’s impeachment last December by the democratically controlled House of Representatives, but he was acquitted by the Republican-led Senate.
Hunter has not been personally charged with any foul play, but Trump has not let the problem die.
He repeatedly insisted that the Bidens were a “criminal family” that got richer on corruption, but the accusations were of dubious origin and did not stick to American voters more concerned with the problems of the campaign. bread and butter, not to mention once in one. lifelong public health crisis.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr was born on November 20, 1942 and raised in the town of Rust Belt in Scranton, Pa., To an Irish Catholic family.
His father was a car salesman, but when the city went through tough times in the 1950s and he lost his job, he moved the family to neighboring Delaware when Joe Biden was 10.
“My dad always said, ‘Champ, when you get run over you get up,’” Biden says.
He made Delaware his political domain. As a young man, he served as a lifeguard in a predominantly black neighborhood, an experience he said sharpened his awareness of systemic inequalities and heightened his political interest.
Biden studied at the University of Delaware and Syracuse University Law School, and expressed pride in not being a product of the elite Ivy League.
He boasts of his working-class roots and remembers being hampered as a child by a stutter so severe that he was cruelly nicknamed “Dash”.
But he got over the situation and, during the election campaign, explained how he still advises young people who stutter.
Biden often referred to Jill, 69, as a powerful asset to her campaign, and recalled how she had succeeded as a mother to her husband’s two boys.
“She put us back together,” Biden said.
– ‘Proud of me?’ –
“It never goes away,” Biden said of the pain that has gone through him since losing Beau. Tragedy prevented him from launching a presidential candidacy in 2016.
Even today, he often stops to greet the firefighters, reminding them that they were the ones who saved his boys.
They also saved Biden. In 1988, firefighters took him to hospital after suffering from an aneurysm.
Biden’s condition was so dire that a priest was called to give him the final rites.
Almost every Sunday, Biden prays at St. Joseph on the Brandywine, a Catholic church in his affluent neighborhood of Wilmington.
There in the cemetery rest his parents, his first wife and daughter – and son Beau, under a gravestone adorned with small American flags.
In January, Biden confided in Beau and his undeniable influence: “Every morning I get up … and I say to myself: ‘Is he proud of me? “”
(This story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
