It has been more than a week since President Joe Biden resigned from his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, after a process that must have been very difficult for him and must have stirred many inner fibers.
There has been much speculation about the reasons: whether he was a great patriot in resigning and “immolated” himself for the sake of party unity and democracy, whether he did so because of explicit political pressure from members of his party, or whether the decisive factor was the threat from donors that they would no longer contribute to the Democratic presidential campaign or to those of other party candidates. It is also possible that it was a combination of all of the above.
If the threat of donations is realized, a possible presidential defeat could be accompanied by other defeats, especially in Congress, where having a majority is essential to support the executive or to counterbalance it if the president is from the opposing party. In addition to the president and vice president, on November 5 all 435 members of the House of Representatives and one third of the Senate will be elected at the national level, as well as multiple positions at the state and local levels.
The little more than three weeks between the disastrous debate against Donald Trump in June and his withdrawal from the candidacy on July 21, were also plagued by many leaks and rumors related – among others – to the silence of some key allies such as his former boss and friend Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, the powerful congressional leader. Pelosi, at 84 years old, has been a member of the House of Representatives since 1987 and speaker of it on two occasions; she is the only woman who has held this position, the last time until 2023. And it is worth remembering that the speaker of the House of Representatives (Speaker of the House) is the third person in the line of presidential succession, if the president and vice president are absent. The support that Biden did not get from Obama and Pelosi, reached Kamala Harris and she immediately became the candidate.
And as if that scenario were not complex enough for him, on July 13 his political arch-enemy Donald Trump was almost assassinated, which – if it had happened – would have caused a chaotic and unpredictable political situation.
Biden began walking the halls of the Capitol when, in late 1972, he was elected as the senator “junior” from the small state of Delaware, after an austere campaign that he managed with his family and friends. In January 1973 he was sworn in as a senator and served in the Senate until 2009, when he left the Capitol for the vice presidential office at the Naval Observatory on the famous Massachusetts Avenue, from where he would later move on to the White House.
His more than three decades in the Senate shaped Biden into a charismatic senator, with a great sense of humor, appreciated and expert in foreign policy matters. Known for being a moderate and simple liberal, he went back and forth by train every day from Delaware to Washington, chatting with the other passengers. He was not free from controversy, but he had the ability and credibility to seek and often achieve bipartisan agreements; what in Washington is known as working with “both sides of the aisle,” an expression inherited from the English parliament, which comes from the way in which the parliamentarians of the Senate and the House are distributed in the Capitol: on one side those who are with the Government and on the other the opposition.
However, his successful public career has also been marked by personal tragedies, several of them at key moments in his political life.
The first of them was newly elected senator for the first time, in November 1972. A few weeks later, on December 18, his wife Noeilia and their three small children Naomi, Beau and Hunter went out Christmas shopping and in a car accident his daughter Naomi and his wife died, while Beau and Hunter were injured. The young and now widowed senator, with two small children, was sworn in in Washington the following month, amidst his personal and family mourning. He had just turned 30.
The death of his eldest son, Beau, on May 30, 2015, from a brain tumor was another of his great tragedies. Biden, as Barack Obama’s vice president, was the party’s natural candidate for the presidential nomination in 2016. At that time, he gave up his aspirations, dedicated himself to helping his family overcome the difficult moment and supported Hillary Clinton, who ultimately lost to Trump.
His second son, Hunter, has struggled with multiple alcohol and drug addiction issues in recent years and has been the target of public and judicial scrutiny. Less than two months ago, on June 11, he was convicted by a jury of lying under oath about buying a gun in 2018, claiming he didn’t use drugs when he was actually addicted to cocaine. Immediately after the verdict was announced, President Biden said publicly that he would do nothing to soften his situation or pardon him, which he could do, as it is within his presidential powers. Biden Jr. still has a pending trial on tax matters that will begin on September 5, in the middle of what would have been his father’s reelection campaign.
I met Senator Biden more than twenty years ago, as second in command of the Colombian diplomatic team at the White House led by Ambassador Luis Alberto Moreno, in the Administration of President Andrés Pastrana. During a meeting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which Biden was the minority leader, President Pastrana presented him with “Plan Colombia,” against the proliferation of illicit drugs and associated violence, for which Colombia was seeking American support. After listening to him, Biden responded—in his characteristically direct manner—that it was difficult for him to support it because he considered it too focused on interdiction and security, despite the fact that Colombia was immersed in great violence, largely financed by drug trafficking. For Biden, the United States should focus its resources more on prevention, education, and public health.
After several meetings with him and his team, he finally agreed to go to Colombia, which he did in the first half of 2000. I had the pleasure of accompanying him for a couple of days and traveling with him within the country. He returned to Washington with first-hand knowledge of the situation and, without abandoning his public health approach, he understood the difficulties the country was facing and ended up supporting Plan Colombia and working closely with the Republicans, including the chairman of the foreign relations committee at the time, Jesse Helms, an ultraconservative parliamentary leader.
I don’t know if history will judge Biden’s political career by its languid ending. I doubt it. Despite the bad debate that sparked the process and the abrupt end of his candidacy, there is no doubt that his career of more than five decades showed him to be a very significant leader nationally and internationally, resilient despite his tragedies, conciliatory and open; but, above all, he will go down in history as a decent man.
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