US presidential election: Joe Biden, a consensual blunderer

Text by: Christophe Paget Follow

5 mins

At 77, Joe Biden is a veteran of American politics. Senator for more than thirty years, twice vice-president, he was dubbed Tuesday by the Democratic Party to become its champion against President Donald Trump. 

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"  I'm a goof machine, but what a wonderful thing about a guy who can't tell the truth  !" (Hear Donald Trump). Joe Biden gave that cry from the heart in December 2018 from Joe Biden, is indeed a serial blunderer, like when at a meeting he asked a senator in a wheelchair to stand up, or when he, even recently, confused on a podium his wife and daughter.

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr was born in 1942 in Scranton, a working-class town in Pennsylvania, to an Irish Catholic family. His father is a car salesman, Joe Biden will also put forward, much later, his modest origins to seduce the working class who mostly voted Donald Trump in 2016. As a child, he succeeds in overcoming the stuttering he is afflicted with . The family then moved to Delaware, where he entered college and studied history and political science. He married, became a lawyer, then turned to politics and at the age of 29, in 1972, was elected senator from Delaware for the first time. 

From the Senate to the White House

He will be re-elected six times, for 36 years. Among the best-known laws of which he is at the origin, one on “violent crimes”, another against domestic violence, a third on drug traffickers. Joe Biden will climb all the levels of the Senate where he will twice become the chairman of the prestigious Foreign Affairs Committee. Joe Biden will only leave this institution to become in 2008 vice-president of Barack Obama, who beat him in the Democratic primary and who needs a “veteran” by his side. Joe Biden had already tried his luck for the first time in the Democratic primary in 1988, but he had to throw in the towel after being accused of plagiarism - one of his speeches strangely resembled the one made by an English Labor ...

During his two terms As vice-president, Joe Biden will remain discreet in the face of President Obama, always charismatic - a charisma he lacks, he is known to often search for his words. The first debates of the primary in 2020 will be difficult for him. However, his often publicized friendship with the president seems real. Barack Obama will present him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2017, one of the two highest civilian decorations in the country. 

At the same time, Joe Biden's life was marked by tragedies very early on. In 1972, his first wife Neilia and daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident - her two sons were injured and survived. Joe Biden remarried five years later to his still wife, Jill, with whom he had a daughter . But in 2015 it was his son Bo, the Delaware attorney general, who died of brain cancer. Very affected, Joe Biden decides not to contest the Democratic primary of 2016.

On the way to the presidency ?

Last year, Joe Biden was accused by two women of inappropriate gestures (a kiss on the head without consent, one nose rubbed against another), and by one of his former Senate assistants, Tara Reade, of rape. An accusation that Joe Biden formally denies, recalling that he is at the origin of a law against domestic violence. Donald Trump now calls him, among other things, "  the vicious  ".

The candidate also made a number of comments deemed racist: he once equated black children with poor children, before trying to recover; affirmed that a black is not black if he votes for Trump … Remarks which caused a scandal, which Joe Biden himself described as unfortunate, and which in the end are blamed for his blunders. In the same vein, he praised the good relations he had at the start of his career with two segregationist senators - during a debate Senator Kamala Harris, of Jamaican and Indian origin, had criticized him.  He chose her a year later as his running mate. 

The pandemic will have been favorable to Joe Biden, who, confined from March to his home in Delaware, was able to avoid missteps, while communicating with his constituents from a recording studio installed in his basement. Meanwhile Donald Trump was increasingly criticized for his handling of the health crisis, and faced historic protests against racism and police violence that followed the death of George Floyd - this African American killed by a police officer by his arrest. 
In the end, despite criticism and accusations, Joe Biden manages to present today a rather consensual figure against a Donald Trump still very divisive.

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