Get up, Joey! If someone knocks you down, get up. Get up, Joey, get up!
Throughout former Vice President Joe Biden’s career, he has repeated these words of advice from his father countless times. It is almost surely Biden’s favorite mantra. Both personally and professionally, he indeed has gotten up from the mat again and again. Now, just when know-it-all pundits (such as I) pronounced his political career finally over, Biden has dusted himself off and, yes, gotten up.
His landslide victory in the South Carolina primary last Saturday may be the most dramatic political (but not personal) rebound of Biden’s life. It continues one of the most remarkable careers in American political history. It’s a career forged by a man with exuberantly contradictory character traits: candor and blarney, kindness and callousness, idealism and cold pragmatism. He’s irrepressible, inexhaustible, sometimes insufferable, and sometimes irresistible.
Biden was the guy with a horrid childhood stutter who at times (at least in his younger Senate days) became known for eloquence and stump-speaking “connection” with crowds. He was the guy Barack Obama put on his ticket to appeal to blue-collar whites, but who is building his comeback this year on heavy support from blacks. He’s the committee chairman who both Justice Clarence Thomas and accuser Anita Hill say was unfair to them during Thomas’s contentious 1991 confirmation hearings.
And, depending on to whom one talks to on Capitol Hill, he’s either a self-important prig who expects everybody to genuflect to him or he’s full of warmth and empathy, randomly solicitous for the feelings of custodians, elevator operators, and the like.
Sometimes the “good Biden” and the “bad Biden” can show themselves within minutes or even seconds of each other. Witness the 1986 incident when Biden was the floor manager for forces trying to defeat the judicial nomination of one Daniel Manion from Indiana. A series of complicated procedural moves and surprises left first one side and then the other thinking it had secured victory. Biden, in what was a common Senate courtesy at the time, had “paired” his “no” vote with the “yes” vote of a Republican senator unavoidably absent from the Senate floor. When another senator who was in attendance, though, one who had indicated opposition to Manion, changed his mind and voted yes, thus apparently giving Manion the victory, a flustered Biden took the microphone and said he was withdrawing his “pair” agreement and voting no, to kill the nomination after all. Yet then, almost immediately, Biden reversed himself again. An apparent attack of conscience made him decide his firm promise to “pair” should override his desire to defeat the nomination. Manion was confirmed by one vote.
The Delaware senator probably had “given his word as a Biden” to the absent Republican with whom he “paired.” That’s the funny thing: Few things in this world are as factually unreliable as Joe Biden speaking off the cuff, sometimes with him surely knowing he is fibbing; yet people understand that if he uses the phrase “give you my word as a Biden,” usually in the context of an agreement or transaction, you can take it to the bank.
More than all that, though, what marks Biden’s career is his resilience. He overcame his father’s fall from prosperity to major financial difficulty. He overcame his stutter. He won an improbable upset victory for the Senate against entrenched, popular Republican incumbent Caleb Boggs. After that victory, he somehow began to make his mark in the Senate in the wake of the devastating car crash that killed his wife and infant daughter two weeks before he took the oath of office. He resurrected his career after he bizarrely plagiarized the biography of a British politician. He kept plowing through debilitating headaches for months before almost dying from a brain aneurysm — and, after months of rehab work, recovered and kept going.
Biden utterly bombed in his attempt for the Democratic nomination not just in 1988, but in 2008, too, only to make himself attractive enough to be chosen by Obama as his running mate. Then, in one final tragedy, Biden’s “good son,” Beau (as compared to the hot mess that is his other son Hunter), died of brain cancer in 2015. A stricken Biden passed on what should have been his final chance at the White House, avoiding the 2016 campaign. Surely, there was no chance for him in 2020 — if he runs and wins this year, he’ll be older when he first takes office than Ronald Reagan was the day he left office after two full terms.
Yet here Biden is. Despite embarrassingly bad defeats in the first three Democratic contests this year, he enters the Super Tuesday primaries a clear co-favorite for the Democratic nomination he first sought 33 years ago.
Once again, Joey got up.
