CODA TO A TRILOGY ON THE BIDENS
On 'sacrifices' and acts of love
The London Review of Books Blog asked me to write on Biden’s withdrawal from his re-election campaign. I dithered a little bit because the news was moving fast, but the piece is out today:
The tin cup is empty, and the ass has gone under. Joe Biden’s political career is over, and he had to do it by autocoup. His two most trusted aides came to him at Rehoboth Beach and told him from a distance – because he has Covid – that he no longer had a path to victory. The money had dried up, he was trailing in all the usual swing states, and even in states the Democrats usually win without spending much money, like Virginia and New Mexico. The next day he posted his resignation letter to X (formerly Twitter) and followed it up with an endorsement of his vice president. Oh, yeah, c’mon, man, keep her around. So came to an end a month of blather about the way Biden had become King Lear. The final reckoning was less like Julius Caesar than like sending the president to the self-checkout till at Tesco to pay for his own hemlock.
You can read the rest here.
I first wrote on Biden, his affecting family story, his dubious political achievements, and his irrepressible ambitions in 2020, drawing on Branko Marcetic’s excellent book Yesterday’s Man as well as Biden’s pair of memoirs. The love story of Joe and his late first wife Neilia is a charming one:
Scenes of the young Biden ingratiating himself to Republicans recur during a youth spent winging it, hustling, and depending on the kindness of a series of characters who, in the words of his letters of recommendation, took ‘a chance’ on him despite his ‘lousy marks’, because he was ‘a natural’. For spring break in his junior year he flew to the Bahamas, despite having only a fraction of an $89 tax refund left to spend. On the beach he met a blonde, Neilia Hunter, who picked up the tab for hamburgers for two and got him into a club for free because a friend of hers was dating the owner. (‘I fell ass over tin cup in love – at first sight. And she was so easy to talk to.’) By the end of the weekend they had decided to get married. Biden, a mediocre undergraduate at the University of Delaware with a spotty disciplinary record (he once sprayed a dorm adviser with a fire extinguisher), quit the football team and mustered the grades and testimonials for law school at Syracuse. There he managed to scrape through despite a charge of plagiarism – a matter of poor citation, he explains – and won the reluctant approval of Neilia’s father, who didn’t want to see his daughter marry a Catholic or a Democrat.
The next year I reviewed Hunter Biden’s memoir beautiful things and learned that once upon a time he was an aspiring poet:
As a flaneur at the café he ‘read everyone, from John Fante to Aldous Huxley to Lao-tzu. My favourite novel at the time was Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, about a down-and-out barfly – a bleak omen, in retrospect, of where my life would one day land.’ (The epigraph of Beautiful Things is a few lines from Bukowski’s poem ‘Nirvana’.) It was in Portland that he met his first wife, Kathleen. Hunter got into law school at Georgetown, Duke and Syracuse. He also applied and was accepted on Syracuse’s creative writing MFA programme. ‘I considered getting a joint MFA-law degree,’ he writes, but after Kathleen became pregnant and they married, ‘all of that sounded a little silly. Studying fiction at Syracuse was a dream that would not lend itself to supporting a family.’ He went to Georgetown, then applied to transfer to Yale ‘and included with my application a poem I wrote – something everyone discouraged. Yale’s acceptance letter noted that my success and dedication during my first year of law school at Georgetown more than qualified me, but that my poem was unlike anything they’d ever received and earned me my spot there’ (a polite note to send to the eccentric son of the Senate Judiciary Committee chair who’d sunk the Supreme Court nomination of a faculty member, whether or not it was true). Here we can imagine Hunter’s road not taken: publishing books of verse and perhaps novels, guest editing issues of Ploughshares, sitting on panels about the intersection of literature, law and politics at the AWP Conference. It was what Beau wanted: he ‘was disappointed I didn’t take the leap and pursue an MFA’. Beautiful Things isn’t the book the young brothers thought Hunter would write.
And in the last issue of the LRB I wrote on Biden’s recent troubles and the early chronicles of his administration:
The debate last month between Biden and Trump was painful to watch because it reminded us that someday we’ll all die. In retrospect Biden’s advanced age was a political asset in 2020. By contrast with the sneering and erratic Trump, given to mocking the disabled and insulting anyone unlucky enough to be in his vicinity, here was a kindly and familiar old man who had suffered terrible personal tragedies: the death of his young wife and infant daughter in an automobile accident in 1972; the death of his eldest son from brain cancer in 2015; the crack addiction and wastrelsy of his surviving son in the years that followed. Broadcasting a socially distanced campaign from his Delaware basement, he appeared gentle and forgiving, the ‘designated mourner’ in Fintan O’Toole’s phrase, just the man to heal the country after the devastation of the pandemic and the four-year reign of the American berserk. To see Biden that way was to forget his decades in the Senate as an arrogant opportunist, an inconsistent warmonger and a plagiarist (his speeches stole from Neil Kinnock and JFK). Age took the edge off him. Reaching the White House four years ago, he accomplished at 78 what he couldn’t manage at 45 or 65. Perhaps he’s been better at the job as a mellow old man than he would have been as a middle-aged hothead – though that is little comfort to the rest of the world, especially the zones under American protection or subject to US (or US-sponsored) might. There, it seems, the emperor has no brain.
Now there’s no more Joe to kick around. I’ll be reporting for the LRB from the DNC in Chicago next month. We’ll see if it’s as exciting as the last party the Democrats threw in the Windy City.