My Joe Biden Story

(January, 2022) - This might be the time for me to give my personal recommendation for our President, as he is surely beset by misfortune and insufficient support in these days.

My one and only in-person encounter with our 46th President came in the late winter of 1974 (so long ago!), when young Joe Biden was in his first term as Senator from Delaware, having won his seat in an upset and then lost his wife and young daughter in a tragic auto accident in the previous 18 months.  

I had the great honor of being one of two persons representing the Commonwealth of Virginia in a program jointly sponsored by the W. Randolph Hearst Foundation and the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Senate Youth Program.  It consisted of travel to D.C., fine hotel (the Mayflower) and dining, privileged tours of all the great edifices of our Republic (my favorite is the Library of Congress, though the Supreme Court is indeed most impressive), but, most of all, it featured private audiences with the high and mighty of the day--usually a speech, including a lot of content about that official's role, and some Q and A with the attendees--did I mention we were all high school seniors? My one real obligation, besides behaving myself, was appearing for a photo op with Virginia's Senators, who were undoubtedly the worst duo in the nation at the time (Harry Byrd and William Scott). 

Great care was taken in the selection of speakers, who all showed impressive consideration in taking their  scheduled event, and mostly showed some enthusiasm about the civic educational function the whole thing represented.   One more thing they showed was courage:  we were a keen, well-informed bunch and far from passive in this highly-charged moment of history. 

For the Watergate scandal was at a peak then:  Nixon's resignation was only months away, and he was basically hunkered down in his bunker.  Still, we were granted access to Vice President Gerald Ford and other officials of Cabinet or near-Cabinet rank (not Kissinger, though), along with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.  In particular, though, a host of Senators came before us, one at a time. 

Not too many of them that I can remember were Republicans.  Chuck Percy (IL) I know was one. They didn't want to speculate about the looming question of impeaching Nixon.  Two of the old-timers of the moment I remember in particular were Jennings Randolph (WV), an expert on the history of the Senate, and former VP and then-Senator Hubert Humphrey, an impressive wind-up speechifier if ever there was one.  We also saw the other Senator from Minnesota, young Walter Mondale, who I remember being somewhat flustered by our frank questions. 

If I'm not mistaken, Senator Edward Kennedy had to cancel on us, but we had a substitute, Senator Biden.

May, 2022:  We were taken aback, somewhat. Here was this young upstart--recently widowed, with his own children deceased in an auto accident, winner by the narrowest of margins in a huge upset.  We knew nothing and expected little.

 (By 'we', I mean the vibe of our group, the selected prospective student leaders. At least we cared enough to fill out the application.) 

But he was the one whose appearance before us gained the most approval.  His frankness, his urgency--who knew how long he would serve?  He certainly had no reason to think it would be decades--and his empathy, they came across to us, who had expectations, desires, curiosity. 

The circumstance, of Biden replacing the no-longer-electable Teddy, caused me to see an indirect connection to Biden as a Latter-Day Kennedy, which I have clung to, against all others, ever since. Anyway, among my many outrageous pronouncements during that fall, my freshman year of college (now post-Nixon), one was the advocacy of the notion of Biden as future President.  (He, then, like AOC now, was not old enough.)

My friends, it must be said, looked at me askance:  they were skeptical of the bona fides of any Democrat, no matter how seemingly progressive (I think Fred Harris was popular in our circle in early 1976 there, before Carter caught on), and Biden would not put his toe in the Presidential water at all for another decade or more.

They were certainly right in their skepticism in the years that followed, and I could not explain it away.  He disappointed me, so many times.  His sponsorship on the dastardly Crime Bill was a concession to the crime panic of the time (and we seem to have that one building again now, too!).  I found his sponsorship of the much-despised Bankruptcy Bill in the early aughts more defensible:  after all, he was the senator from Delaware.  If the rest of the country wanted to use bankruptcy as its curtain covering the cost of massive numbers of health-related family financial failures, it was his duty to make sure it was a fair bill, one preventing excessive exploitation of its lenient provisions. (Note:  student loans the exception--why?)  

I was not a supporter in his previous runs; as I recall it, I was for Al Gore in '88 (until Ed Koch's endorsement killed him), and Biden's speech plagiarism fiasco in that campaign is now legendary, and now seems so quaintly distant. The years passed, and he became less relevant until Obama picked him out for VP in 2008 (somewhat parallel to Biden's choosing failed competitor Kamala Harris).  

Still, there is fulfillment, for me, after all these years.  And for Joe Biden.  His destiny was present, essential, but indiscernible.  Now we know what it was, all along.