Biden’s appeal: Is being the ‘anti-Trump’ enough?
In the summer of 1999, law student Michael Migliore was working as a legal aide in then-Sen. Joe Biden’s office in Wilmington, Delaware. While at a staff picnic at the Biden home, he ran into the senator himself in the basement.
“Sit down!” Mr. Biden commanded. A lengthy conversation ensued.
“We ended up talking – I’m not kidding – an hour and a half,” says Mr. Migliore, now counsel to the New Castle County Council in Delaware. “We talked about everything under the sun – family, law school, civil rights, legislation he had worked on.”
“Whether you’re royalty or a regular person, he has a knack for really relating to people, which most people don’t have,” Mr. Migliore adds. “He makes you feel special.”
Stories like this about Mr. Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, are legion. And if they involve a personal struggle – a loved one lost, a battle with stuttering, as he has had – Mr. Biden is on it. His own stories of loss – of his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash and the death from cancer decades later of his son Beau – have given him a well of empathy and a sense of purpose.
This is the personal Mr. Biden that many constituents and those around him know. To some, he is an everyman, the scrappy champion of the working class from Scranton, Pennsylvania. To others, he’s the ultimate Washington insider, a creature of the Senate who spent 47 years in “the swamp.”
Supporters see the former vice president as a savvy moderate who knows how to reach across the aisle. Critics charge he’s an aging relic, hopelessly out of step with his own party and even, to some Republicans, a “Trojan horse for socialism.”
After 50 years in politics, Mr. Biden is, in other words, many different things to many different people. But almost everyone agrees on who Mr. Biden isn’t: President Donald Trump.
Tonight, Americans will get
A party moving leftwardWill young Black voters turn out?Family tiesAt home and abroadRetro or radical?
