The Healer
It’s dark inside Joe Biden’s campaign bus, a lumbering blue diesel emblazoned with the slogan BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE NATION. On this late January afternoon in Iowa, the former Vice President is in the cramped back cabin, nursing a paper cup of Panera Bread coffee so the motion of the road and the drone of the motor don’t lull him to sleep.
He is talking about loss. The things he has lost are never far from Biden’s mind. Chief among them: his son Beau, a rising star in Democratic politics who died of brain cancer in 2015, a few months after his 46th birthday. “I get up in the morning lots of times and ask myself if he’d be proud of me,” Biden says.
Beau’s death was the latest in the litany of losses and setbacks that have defined Biden’s life. The death of his wife and daughter in an auto accident in 1972. The 1988 presidential bid that ended in a plagiarism scandal. Life-threatening brain aneurysms. Another failed bid for the presidency in 2008. For nearly a half-century, the nation has watched Biden wrestle publicly with sorrow. At countless funerals, he has eulogized Americans great and ordinary, all while nursing his own barely concealed wounds. “My mother used to say God never gives you a cross too heavy to carry,” his wife Jill says. “But God got pretty close with Beau.”
Yet Biden soldiers on: out of pride, out of duty, out of a deep-seated need to remain in the mix. To his boosters, he’s the last authentic man in American politics and the Democrats’ best hope of toppling Donald Trump. To his critics, he’s a nostalgia act whose well-worn slogans about middle-class uplift and national unity are out of sync in this season of outrage.
Now, at 77, he stands atop the field of Democratic presidential contenders. For months, rivals have nipped at his heels, evincing an I-can’t-believe-I’m-losing-to-this guy incredulity. His campaign is disorganized, his debate performances uneven, his stump speech a long-winded hodgepodge delivered to small, graying crowds. Anyone who’s known him can see he’s slowed down. And yet, as the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses draw near, Biden remains the man to beat for the nomination. He has maintained a lead in national polls since the start of the campaign, bolstered by a durable coalition of African American and white working-class voters drawn to his experience, his relationships and his humanity. No one in either party connects with voters in
