Step back from Biden’s forty-some years in national politics. Is there an ideological thread? A unified theory of Bidenite politics? Not really. One does not look to him for ideological robustness or even coherence. He is not “divisive,” exactly; it’s just that his long time in public life leads different people to see different Joe Bidens: precocious young senator or bumbling old senator, tribune of the “white working class” or tribune of Delaware-based banks, champion of battered women or clumsy misogynist, friend of cops or outlaw Diamond Joe. He has registered rather than transcended the major tensions of his time.
Yet on another level it is possible to articulate what for Biden is the elemental atom of political interaction: It is the communion of strangers on a train, who happen to pour their griefs out to one another because, after all, it’s easier with someone you don’t really know. Such an atom yields no grand vision of politics, and hardly meets our moment. But it still vibrates on a poignantly American frequency. Biden is the politician of fleeting but profound intimacy.
Consider one remarkable detail from his memoir. He gave a eulogy at the funeral of one of the two police officers killed in New York City in 2014; the remarkable thing is not the eulogy itself but what he tells one of the widows privately. Right now everyone is there for you, he says, but eventually they’ll go back to normal, and then grief will get harder: “After a while you’re going to start to feel guilty because you’re going to be going to the same people constantly for help, or just to talk.” So he gives her his private number: “When you’re down and you feel guilty for burdening your family and friends, pick up the phone and call me.” The reader glimpses a secret society of grievers:
I have a long list of strangers who have my private number, and an invitation to call, and many of them do. “Just call me when you want to talk,” I told her. “Sometimes it’s easier to pour your heart out to somebody you don’t know well, but you know they know. You know they’ve been through it. Just pick up the phone and call me.”
It is hard to imagine reaching for the phone to call, in a dark and lonely hour, the sitting vice president of the United States. And yet I hope this strange, beautiful story is true.