“I don’t think I’m old enough. I had to do the math.”
This is how President Biden describes his reaction, back in the summer of 1971, when Delaware Democrats suggested a U.S. Senate run. (Biden’s 30th birthday would come in late November 1972, so he’d clear the age requirement with a few weeks to spare.) In his 2007 memoir, “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics,” Biden recalls the audacity of the idea. “How many 28-year-olds ever get in the position to even consider such a move?” he wondered.
And how many 81-year-olds ever get in the position to consider running for a second presidential term? With calls for Biden to end his candidacy multiplying following his alarm-bells CNN presidential debate against Donald Trump last week, and polls showing Trump’s lead widening, the president and his family have a decision to make.
It’s a decision they’ve faced many times; that’s one advantage of a long political life. In his memoirs and in various biographies, we see Biden grappling with this choice over the decades. (I first considered “Promises to Keep,” for instance, when Biden was contemplating a 2016 White House bid.) Does he run? Does he step aside? Does he still have what it takes? His recurring considerations are family, legacy and, yes, his age.
Looking toward the 1972 election, Biden’s first wife, Neilia, encouraged him to commit to politics. At the time, he was both building his law practice and serving on the New Castle County Council. “You should be all the way in or all the way out,” she said. “If politics is what you want to do, let’s do it — full-time.” Biden’s mother warned that running for Senate might sully his emerging reputation as a lawyer, but he concluded that it was a “risk-free” effort. “Only a handful of people outside the family thought I had a real shot to win,” Biden writes, “so I figured even if I lost, people were going to say, ‘That’s a nice young guy. That’s a serious young guy.’”
That nice young guy would win that election, defeating the longtime Republican incumbent Caleb Boggs. (During a debate, Biden declined to pounce when his 63-year-old opponent did not show mastery of some facts because, as he puts it in his memoir, “nobody in the audience wanted to see Boggs embarrassed — it would have been like clubbing the family’s favorite uncle.”)
By 1980, the young senator was already pondering the propriety of challenging a weak Democratic incumbent in the party’s presidential primaries. “I knew we Democrats were in trouble,” he writes. “Everything Carter touched seemed to turn to dust in his hands.” President Jimmy Carter was “a man of decency and a man of principle,” Biden had concluded, “but it wasn’t enough.”
Ted Kennedy had already announced his own primary challenge against Carter, and Democratic consultants hypothesized, a tad optimistically, that the two men would bloody each other and make Biden, the youthful second-term senator, an attractive compromise. But once again, age came into play. “I remember thinking: I have no business making a run for president,” Biden writes. “I was 37 years old. I still had nights when I was brought up short by my life.” He questioned his own ambitions. “Am I flying too close to the sun? Tempting fate?”
As Biden and his advisers gamed out strategies for Iowa and New Hampshire, one consultant finally challenged him. “The questions you have to ask are why you’re running for president and what will you do when you are president,” he told Biden. “You shouldn’t run until you know the answers to those questions.”
The questions returned in 1984, when his political strategist Pat Caddell, armed with dot-matrix printouts, told Biden that Walter Mondale, the likely Democratic nominee, could not stop Ronald Reagan from winning re-election. “Voters were hungry for a new young face with new ideas — somebody like me, Pat suggested, who wasn’t tied to the tired old politics of the liberal Great Society wing of the Democratic Party.”
Biden believed that voters were weary of Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric, and he recalls that whenever he spoke of how the government must play a constructive role in Americans’ lives, “I could see people lean toward me.” In particular, he was convinced that the baby boom generation could “reinvigorate” the Democrats. “If a bright new candidate could harness that boomer power, he could win the presidency and change the country,” Biden thought.
He went so far as to sign the necessary documents, but after discussions with his wife Jill, he chose not to file the paperwork. “I wasn’t worried so much about getting beat,” he writes, but he still couldn’t answer the big questions — why did he want to run, and what did he hope to accomplish? “I simply could not visualize myself running the bureaucracy of the federal government,” he writes. Biden concluded that “by my own standards, I wasn’t ready to be president.”
As the 1988 race approached, however, Biden felt better prepared to seek the nomination. “When I took a look at the likely candidates — Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt, Jesse Jackson — I felt I measured up,” he writes. “I was just 42 years old, but after a decade on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and nearly that long on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I knew the world and America’s place in it in a way few politicians did.”
Biden wasn’t certain that “now was my time,” he writes, but he felt that generational tug once again. “Wherever I traveled people seemed hungry for a candidate who believed in the same basic things I did.” And he felt that “the boomer generation seemed the hungriest of all.”
Jill worried about what the campaign would do to their family; the three kids — Beau, Hunter and Ashley — were still in school, after all, and they got to see plenty of their father. (She’d also spoken with Gary Hart’s wife, Lee, who told her that running for president is “harder than you can ever believe.”) But when Biden expressed his own misgivings as the announcement day neared, Jill bucked him up. “You have to do this now,” she told him, reminding him about everyone getting ready to work for his campaign. “You have too many people’s lives on hold.”
Biden felt energized speaking to the crowds. “The speeches were key for me, both in the writing and the delivery,” he recalls. Early on, he felt his message was “opaque” and not “absolutely authentic,” but soon he had developed “a rhythm and a cadence” that felt comfortable on the stump.
Of course, his rhythms were sometimes borrowed and his authenticity less than convincing; Biden would have to end his campaign in September 1987 when it became known that he was appropriating words and background from other politicians, particularly Britain’s Neil Kinnock. After the 1988 election, four more presidential contests would pass before Biden would launch another White House bid.
In the Senate in the 1990s, Biden focused on matters that would form the core of his self-perceived legacy. His attempts to end the genocide in the Balkans and his role in securing the passage of the Violence Against Women Act were his “proudest moments in public life,” Biden writes. “Those two efforts redeem every second of difficulty and doubt in my long career.”
But he still could not relinquish those White House dreams. After Senator John Kerry lost the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2004, Jill knew that running again was on his mind, Biden writes, “but we never really talked about it.” At Christmastime that year, however, Jill raised it, calling for a family meeting when the kids were all visiting.
The night before their talk Biden had trouble sleeping, he writes, and he paced around the house, anticipating what the family might say the next morning: “Remember how they treated you in 1987. Why invite more pain and heartache? Why take the risk?” He found himself growing preemptively angry, but he knew he needed the family’s support. “If they don’t want me to run, I thought, I can’t run,” he writes. “It’s not an arguable point.”
The next morning, with everyone arrayed in the library — including his sister, Val, a major player in so many prior races, and Ted Kaufman, his longtime friend and adviser — Jill delivered their verdict. “I want you to run this time,” she said. “It’s up to you, but we’ll support it.” She explained that they thought he was “the best person to pull the country together.”
Biden would not win the top job in 2008, but when he accepted his nomination as the vice-presidential candidate at the Democratic convention, he shared a belief that may stay with him even today: “Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.” He did not give up his quest. As his second term as vice president winded down, Biden considered the presidency yet again.
The illness of his son Beau posed logistical and emotional challenges. “The question of running for president was all tangled up in Beau, and purpose, and hope,” Biden writes in “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose,” a 2017 memoir. “Giving up on the presidential race would be like saying we were giving up on Beau.”
During the 2014 Thanksgiving holiday, Biden writes, Beau encouraged him to go for it: “You’ve got to run. I want you to run.” The pressures on Biden at the time were enormous — the demands of the vice presidency, the relentlessness of his son’s brain cancer, the prospect of another presidential campaign. “I wanted the power to cheat time,” he writes.
Beau died in May 2015, and by October Biden, then 72, had decided that he could not mount a credible 2016 campaign. The grieving process, he explained in a Rose Garden speech, with Jill on one side and President Barack Obama on the other, “doesn’t respect or much care about things like filing deadlines or debates and primaries.”
Even as he announced he would not run, he seemed to be delivering a campaign speech, full of talk about the middle class and foreign policy, the need for compromise and consensus. “Unfortunately, I believe we’re out of time,” he said.
The anti-democratic impulses of the Trump presidency motivated Biden, who began warning of a battle for the soul of America. Here he found a new cause, a new potential legacy that matched his sense of himself. He decided he had more time.
In his 2023 book, “The Last Politician,” the journalist Franklin Foer describes Biden’s “heroic self-conception” and how, born during World War II and forged by the Cold War, he “viewed himself as thrust by events into a successor struggle to preserve democracy.” He also wanted to show the world that the American system was not an “antiquated relic,” Foer writes, that it could still “accomplish big things.”
Biden had found the answer to those crucial questions — why he should be president and what he hoped to achieve — in the turmoil of the 2020 campaign and the threat of Trumpism. Only then did he finally win, once winning became its own end.
How does Biden decide if he can still make that case for a vital America, and for his own vitality? If he can still accomplish big things? If he can recover enough ground to defeat Trump again? If, rather than countering the critique of U.S. democracy as an antiquated relic, he has not come to symbolize it?
In his 2020 book “Joe Biden: The Life, the Run and What Matters Now,” Evan Osnos, a New Yorker writer, lists the factors Biden considers when deciding to run. Does he have the motivation, the chances and the organization? And is the family on board? “If Jill were not happy — it sounds like a stupid thing — but I’m not happy,” Biden said.
Osnos also asked Biden about those who think he is simply too old for the job. Biden had a simple and, four years later, damning response: “It’s totally legitimate for people to raise it,” he said. ‘And I’ll just say, ‘Look at me. Decide.’”
Well, about 50 million people got a good look during the CNN debate. The eye test did not go well.
The young man in a hurry is now an old man in a bind. The candidate who once wondered if he was too young to run must again do the math. He must ponder once more if he is tempting fate, not just his own but that of the nation — a nation that realizes, even if Biden doesn’t yet, that no one has the power to cheat time.
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