[LA Times] Over a career in elected public office lasting more than 46 years, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has seen campaigns from the rudimentary, family-run effort that first launched him unexpectedly to the U.S. Senate as a 29-year-old to the sophisticated, data-driven juggernaut that helped elect him and Barack Obama twice to the nation’s highest offices.
But rarely has he trusted anything as much as his own gut instinct, attuned to the middle- and working-class sensibilities of his former neighbors in towns like Scranton, Pa., and Claymont, Del. And so as he sat in his office one day in October and watched footage of a Donald Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., not far from his childhood home, Biden sensed trouble.
“Son of a gun. We may lose this election,” Biden said, recalling his reaction during an interview in his West Wing office. “They’re all the people I grew up with. They’re their kids. And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist. But we didn’t talk to them.”
There’s “a bit of elitism that’s crept in” to party thinking,
he worries, setting up what he sees as the false impression that progressive values are inconsistent with working-class values.
| For a given value of false that means true, that is a true statement. |
“What are the arguments we’re hearing? ‘Well, we’ve got to be more progressive.’ I’m not saying we should be less progressive,” he said, adding that he would “stack my progressive credentials against anyone” in the party.
“We should be proud of where the hell we are, and not yield an inch. But,” he added, “in the meantime, you can’t eat equality. You know?”
In the campaign, “you didn’t hear a word about that husband and wife working, making 100,000 bucks a year,
| ..isn't that a lot of money? It sounds like a lot of money, but maybe I'm wrong -- I'm not very good at financial things... |
two kids, struggling and scared to death. They used to be our constituency.”
The party’s defeat leaves the Democrats without a clear leader. But Biden says he’s not going anywhere, which he means literally and figuratively. Like Obama, he is planning to live in Washington, at least part time, after moving out of the vice president’s residence on Jan. 20.
The presence of both the former president and the former vice president in the capital will be historically unusual. But Biden’s decision to remain nearby is, like many he’s made in his political career, largely driven by family. His wife, for one, will continue teaching at a community college in Virginia.
Still, the decision to live even part time in the nation’s capital will give him proximity to the unfolding Trump administration and the decision-makers and media figures interacting with it. And it will allow him to continue stoking the political fires — he seems to revel in the notion that he might be fit enough to challenge Trump in four years, when he would be 77 and Trump 74, although he has not publicly committed to any plans.
| I can just imagine what that will look like. |
Others close to him are less reticent. “Biden’s going to be the country’s conscience," said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee who forged a close relationship with him.
| And who would know more about having a conscience than Debbie Downer? |
Biden will be freer to speak out about Trump administration actions than Obama, Wasserman Schultz said. "And he’s certainly not shy." |