ELKADER, Iowa — Joe Biden has had his share of hard knocks and self-inflicted wounds. And the past tough times are allowing the former vice president to play a form of healer-in-chief as he encounters 2020 Democratic primary voters eager to share their own tales of woe.
Biden’s personal tragedies give him a sincerity that attracts voters, and he often acts as a counselor to those who come up to him on the campaign trail. Now, Biden, 77, is pitching himself as the candidate best equipped to heal the country from the Oval Office tumult of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Biden has already shown resilience in the face of personal tragedy. His first wife Neilia and 1-year-old daughter Naomi died in a 1972 car crash just after he was first elected to the Senate. His sons Hunter and Beau survived the crash but were in critical condition, and Biden was sworn in to the Senate at his sons’ hospital bedside.
Beau Biden grew up to become Delaware’s attorney general and a decorated Army National Guard veteran, but tragedy struck the vice president again when Beau died from brain cancer in 2015.
In the past, Biden shied away from using his personal tragedies as a campaign tool. In 2015, an outside group that hoped to draft Biden to run for president in 2016 created an ad that pictured his dead family members. Biden objected, asserting that the ad “treads on sacred ground.”
But this time around, Biden has embraced sharing his personal tragedies on the campaign trail. His campaign released a video titled “Personal” that was very similar to the 2015 ad and tied the car crash that killed his wife and his son’s brain cancer to the issue of healthcare access.
“I can only imagine what it’d be like if we didn’t have the healthcare we had. It’s bad enough dealing with these crises,” Biden said in Waverly, Iowa, on Wednesday.
Voters at Biden’s campaign stops seem to sense that he can feel their pain, often describing Biden as “sincere.”
“He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” said Ken Zichal, a retired doctor in Elkader. “He can probably assess the needs of the not-so-wealthy more than anybody else.”
Delaware Sen. Chris Coons said in January that Biden “has almost a superpower in his ability to comfort and listen and connect with people who have just suffered the greatest loss of their lives.”
The question is whether Biden’s personal endurance and healing can translate into votes during his third presidential run, facing a set of Democratic primary rivals with policy positions sharply to his left.
Reba Eagles, a retired Waterloo resident, said that Biden’s wisdom from his personal struggles was apparent in his speech.
“It translates very well, and you can feel it in his responses that are always very sincere, and he comes from a place of knowing, not just a place of wanting,” she said.
Biden and his supporters are trying to turn his personal touch into a broader critique of Trump’s presidency — and why, in their view, the incumbent should be tossed from office.
The next president will “inherit a world that’s in disarray,” Biden said in Iowa Falls, Iowa, on Wednesday, and he said that person will have to “repair a nation that’s divided — divided philosophically, geographically divided.”
“So, on day one, whoever our next president is, there’s not going to be time for on-the-job training,” said Biden, a Delaware senator for 36 years before two terms as President Barack Obama’s understudy.
“We need a president who has shown that he can immediately begin to heal a broken world,” former Secretary of State John Kerry, who endorsed Biden, said while campaigning alongside him in Elkader.
