Home > Work > Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now
1 " the streets. That’s not a criticism. It’s just a reality.” A senior Obama administration official observed that Biden’s acknowledgment also contained a subtler message: “This country needs to just chill the fuck out and have a boring president. "
― Evan Osnos , Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now
2 " Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, told me, “People said, ‘Oh, this man’s a hack.’ He’s not an ideological person, and ideology clearly matters to us. He was running a retrograde candidacy during the primary. It was all about going back to the track we were on with the Obama years.” Mitchell, who was also a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, said that Biden’s change of tone caught the attention of progressives: “He’s recognizing that this might be a Rooseveltian moment. He’s not all the way there—nobody thinks Joe Biden is a progressive star—but he can be a product of either your most cynical thinking or a product of your most optimistic thinking. "
3 " I'm embarrassed to say, I thought you could defeat hate. You can't. It only hides. It crawls under the rocks, and, when given oxygen by any person in authority, it comes roaring back out. And what I realized is, the words of a president, even a lousy president, matter. They can take you to war, they can bring peace, they can make the market rise, they can make it fall. But they can also give hate oxygen.[Joe Biden] "
4 " In the spring of 2020, Biden began describing himself as a “transition candidate,” explaining, “We have not given a bench to younger people in the party, the opportunity to have the focus and be in focus for the rest of the country. There’s an incredible group of talented, newer, younger people.” Ben Rhodes, an adviser to Obama in the White House, told me, “It’s actually a really powerful idea. It says, ‘I’m a seventy-seven-year-old white man, who was a senator for thirty years, and I understand both those limitations and the nature of this country.’ Because, no matter what he does, he cannot completely understand the frustration of people in the streets. That’s not a criticism. It’s just a reality.” A senior Obama administration official observed that Biden’s acknowledgment also contained a subtler message: “This country needs to just chill the fuck out and have a boring president.” To "
5 " The effect was kitschy and comforting and exhilarating, befitting an era in which Americans are waking to an unsettling conviction: a politician may give us light, or at least not obscure it, but we must find the way. "
6 " Above all, like much in Biden’s life, his relationship to Obama was built on loyalty. Once you become vice president, Biden said, “you have an obligation to back up whatever he does, unless you have a fundamental moral dilemma with what he’s doing.” He added, “If I ever got to that point, I’d announce I had prostate cancer and I had to leave.” At a Democratic Caucus lunch, after the party had lost the House of Representatives, the then congressman Anthony Weiner criticized Obama for making a deal with Republicans on tax cuts. Biden erupted, saying, “There’s no goddamn way I’m going to stand here and talk about the president like that. "
