Joe Biden, Briefly
December 26, 2007, 12:08 pm
Joe Biden, Briefly
By Matt Bai
New York Times Political Blog link
One day last week, I drove down to Indianola, Iowa, to see Mitt Romney speak at a country club, then headed two and half hours northeast to the little town of Tipton, where Hillary Rodham Clinton held forth at the fairgrounds. Then I got back into car and drove north, toward Cedar Rapids, where I knew a lot of my colleagues would be going that evening for an appearance by Mike Huckabee. By then, though, I decided I’d seen enough standard campaign rallies for one day, so I turned right off Route 30, instead, and set a course for Marion, where the Nash family was throwing a house party for Joseph Biden.
The place was filling up when I got there, and as it turned out, more than 150 people, most of them devoted Biden fans, would soon jam themselves into the colonial home on a cul-de-sac, munching on mini-sandwiches and commenting on the regal Christmas tree. They stood around patiently for hours while Mr. Biden slowly groped his way through the translucent sheet of white fog that had settled over Iowa.
One of the mysteries to me about this campaign season is why Mr. Biden hasn’t gotten more of a hearing. I know that elicits groans from a lot of Washington veterans. Mr. Biden is now the fifth longest-serving senator, having been elected weeks before he passed the minimum age threshold of 30 in 1972, and when someone hangs around the Capitol that long, his flaws inevitably become legend, and the buzz that once surrounded him dissolves into a kind of cynical familiarity. Insiders like to ridicule Biden’s propensity to bloviate without end. When Mr. Biden started out his presidential campaign with a nightmarish gaffe, describing Barack Obama as “clean” and “articulate,” official Washington scoffed and moved on.
And yet, from that moment on, Mr. Biden has run a very good campaign. He has consistently scored high in the debates, where his obvious expertise in foreign policy have often made him appear to be a statesman among strivers, and he has demonstrated a surprising capacity for brevity. Mr. Biden is tough, having weathered both personal tragedy and political collapse. When he talks about Iraq, he does so with singular credibility in the Democratic field, because his son, Delaware’s attorney general, is soon to be deployed there, and as Mr. Biden puts it, “I don’t want my grandson to go, too.” A lot of people in Iowa absolutely love Mr. Biden, going way back to his first presidential campaign in 1988. From just chatting with voters around the state, the guess here is that Mr. Biden would be a significant force in the upcoming caucuses if Iowans actually thought he could win. They never have.
Mr. Biden’s supporters will tell you that this is all the media’s fault for not covering him more — much the same argument you hear from Bill Richardson and Christopher Dodd’s supporters, too. This has some validity, but personally, I think Mr. Biden is less a victim of the media itself than of the distinct political culture that we in the media have wrought. Ten years of endless blather about the game of politics on cable TV have trained the most engaged American voters to handicap candidates rather than hear them, to pontificate about who might win rather than deciding whom they actually want to win. Voters seem to approach politics increasingly as pundits, and they look to poll numbers to tell them who’s electable and who isn’t, never stopping to realize that they are the ones who get to decide.
Anyway, when Mr. Biden finally showed up at the Nash home, dressed in a black turtleneck and suit coat, he went from one little conversation clique to the next, quietly shaking hands and reconnecting with old friends. Later, he told the crowd that he had mistakenly thought he was attending the Nashes’ private Christmas party, not a campaign event. “(“Not a joke, folks,” he said, and I believed him.) “You find people who go so out of the way for you, it boggles the mind,” Mr. Biden said. “It really does. They become friends.” He talked for five minutes and addressed his comments to the soldiers who were overseas at Christmas, pointedly reminding the guests that he had been the Middle East more than all the other candidates combined. He talked about the opportunity that the next American president had to remake the world. He teared up, for real.
Joe Biden probably won’t win Iowa or any other state, for that matter, and maybe he doesn’t deserve to. But he certainly has earned some respect in this campaign, and if a Democrat is elected next November, he may well find himself up for a major cabinet post. He has reminded Democrats that he is a serious man, even if he hasn’t been taken all that seriously in the process.
Matt Bai, who covers politics for the Sunday Times Magazine, is the author of “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.”