Biden caused a stir when he described Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American to be artful and bright and clean.” But Obama was hard to see as an expert, especially in foreign policy. , which reached working-class voters – so he put it on the ticket.As vice-president, Biden’s ideology developed again: he had effectively voted to ban same-sex marriage in in 1996, but in 2012 he told a television audience that he now supported it, a decision that helped encourage Obama to take the same position a few days later. this is one of the most important things a vice president has ever done.
Biden was well placed to run in 2016, and that was definitely the plan, but the pain of Beau’s death from brain cancer put him off. If it had run, it would probably have been lost to Donald Trump – because Biden is a means of the establishment that the voters rejected that year. After four years of Trump’s anarchic presidency, however, knowledge and civilization were back in fashion, and no doubt contributed to Biden’s influence.
Biden had a choice: he could say “the country is divided, I will lead from the left”, or he could say “the country is divided, I will unite it.” He took the second path, as American Liberals in general, and doubled down unity in his first Sunday school, vowing to put “my whole soul” in bringing people back together. . Biden gambling on his personal ability to reach across the aisle to get things done, as he would often do in the Senate.
Looking at him from a distance, with his arms folded against the cold, Bernie Sanders, his socialist opponent in the primary – was clearly thinking: “That’s what Obama tried to do, Joe. It didn’t work for him, and he won the job for you. “