Promise Me, Dad

by Joe Biden

  I was proud to have worked alongside the president throughout it all and proud to run on our record—without apology, or reservation, or retreat. And as I would tell anyone who asked I was happy to shoulder the blame for anything we got wrong—just as long as they were willing to give me at least some of the credit for what we got right. And now, we were at a turning point. Now we were in a position where we could move from what we had to do to what we wanted to do.

  That made the prospect of a presidential campaign exciting—and liberating. Starting so late, with no money, with all the “smart” people writing me off—I knew what I was up against. Which meant a cautious, trim-around-the-edges campaign was pointless. So Biden for President was going to go big. Because frankly, at this point in my career and after all my family had been through, anything less just wasn’t worth it. We were going to go after a tax system that had lost all fairness and made no sense. We were going to get rid of the trust fund tax break and the “carried interest” giveaway to hedge fund managers. We were going to put an end to taxing earned income more heavily than unearned income, because I didn’t see why people who invested for a living were being treated better than people who worked for a living. And we were going after the mountain of loopholes that had built up over the years. We had gone from having $600 billion worth of so-called tax expenditures (i.e., loopholes) in the federal budget when Ronald Reagan was president to more than $1.3 trillion today. No one could tell me they all made sense.

  That’s why I’d long thought that when people would tell me we didn’t have the money to handle our problems, it was just nonsense. Just getting rid of the trust fund tax break could pay for free community college tuition. Just that alone.

  A fifteen-dollar minimum wage. Free tuition at our public colleges and universities. Real job training. On-site affordable child care. Equal pay for women. Strengthening the Affordable Care Act. A job creation program built on investing in and modernizing our roads and bridges and our water and sewer systems. A middle-class tax cut. These were all within our power. It was a question of will.

  So many of the presidential campaigns that summer seemed locked in the past. A fight over what happened, what went wrong, what America had lost. If I ran, I wanted to paint a picture of America’s future, what we could become, how everyone could be dealt back into the deal. We needed what I called an American Renewal Project. That wasn’t just about our needs—it was about our spirit, too. We didn’t just want an infrastructure bill with money for highways, railroads, and airports. We were going to fund the highways of tomorrow, with thousands of charging stations for electric cars and dedicated lanes for self-driving cars. Those lanes could cut travel time in rush-hour Los Angeles in half. We wanted bullet trains capable of traveling more than 220 miles an hour; jets that could fly from coast to coast in an hour or two. Because that was the future. I had fought to create a smart grid for America’s electricity when we put together the Recovery Act. I was certainly going to fight for it as president. I was also going to fight for better gun safety. We had to overcome the cowardice and stand up to the NRA. New technologies such as hand recognition gun technology might just prevent another Newtown or Charleston. We wouldn’t just provide extra funding for cancer research; we would create and fund a Cancer Moonshot to reinvent the systems for prevention, research, and care, bringing together the best clinicians, scientists, and other experts to double the rate of progress and deliver real outcomes for patients. Why couldn’t we end cancer as we know it?

  * * *

  Mike was more bullish than ever about the run. In early August, he presented the case that I was in better shape as a candidate now than I had been six months earlier; my poll numbers were up, and still on the rise. My favorable ratings were higher than those of any candidate in the race—in either party. My numbers on trustworthiness, honesty, and empathy were as high as they had ever been. And I was strongest where the most formidable candidate, Hillary Clinton, was weakest: the key swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. The president must have been getting an earful from his political team—a few of whom were actively working for Hillary’s nomination—because at our next lunch he again asked me straight up what I was planning. “Mr. President,” I said, “I’m not ready to make up my mind.” I was still working through whether I was prepared to give it all of my energy for the next year and a half. “I’m taking it one day at a time. If we do decide to go, we’ll decide in time to be viable.” The president was not encouraging.

  * * *

  A lot happening, I wrote in my diary when I finally got some downtime in Wilmington the next weekend. Need to be careful it doesn’t get away from me. I need to slow down, ramp down, my schedule for the month of August. I’ve got to figure out what I need to know to be ready.

  I was assiduous about keeping my own deliberations within the trusted circle, but I was getting plenty of outside advice. The chatter among Democratic Party insiders and most of the political pundit class was that it was too late. I could not raise the money. There was no good talent left out there to fill up a real campaign structure and staff a viable ground game, and once I got in the race all my wonderful poll numbers would collapse. A lot of people were telling us that my high favorability ratings were merely temporary—the function of the public sympathy surrounding Beau’s death. A Politico reporter covering one of Hillary’s fund-raisers on Martha’s Vineyard, where Barack was also seen playing a round of golf with Bill Clinton, made my quixotic effort the lead of the story. “As Joe Biden considers a possible run for president,” the Politico reporter noted on August 16, “the donors he’d need to be viable appear to be ruling him out.…”

  “There really is no contest right now,” said one donor. “I think people are unifying around Hillary.”

  A couple of people on President Obama’s political team were telling us the race just wasn’t winnable for me. There was usually a preamble: We’re very protective of the vice president. We don’t want to see Joe get hurt. We can only imagine what he’s going through right now. But they were not subtle. They asked Steve and Mike to consider the incredible historical forces around Barack Obama in 2008, when he ran against the Clinton machine and still just barely won. And if she almost beat us, they implied, she will definitely beat you. I heard it all and understood the difficulties, but none of that much mattered. Just as it didn’t matter how fast the Bernie Sanders movement was building or how vulnerable Hillary suddenly looked. The other candidates simply weren’t my main consideration.

  I spent a full week of the August vacation at our house in Wilmington, refining the announcement speech and trying to breathe myself back into my old life. We didn’t get to spend much time at our house on the lake anymore, so it felt good to work the property. I got out the chain saw and took down some dead trees, replaced failing lightbulbs, power-washed the stucco walls. I had to call a contractor to get an estimate for installing a new tin roof on the tiny outbuilding by the lake where we kept the fishing poles.

  There were a lot of calls coming in from people encouraging me to run, especially from former colleagues in the Senate: Don Riegle, Bob Kerrey, Chris Dodd, Tom Daschle, who had told me months earlier that if I decided to go he was in 100 percent. Bill Bradley must have had me on speed dial. Gary Hart weighed in. So did Kent Conrad. “Joe has a humanity about him that comes across,” the former senator from North Dakota said publicly. “He is for real. He believes in things. He is able to articulate his values, and I think he would acquit himself extremely well.” The former governor of Iowa, Chet Culver, called to say the state was wide open and he was ready to help. The former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, Dick Harpootlian, was urging me to get in the race. “The country needs Joe Biden,” he was saying in public. And my best political operative in South Carolina, Trip King, had a list of serious supporters, including Charleston mayor Joe Riley and, by his count, more than half of the twenty-three members of the black caucus in the state legislature. Some of Obama’s to
p fund-raisers called to sign on, like Azita Raji, the nominee to be ambassador to Sweden, who offered to stay home and be my national finance chairman instead. And Denise Bauer, who said she was willing to leave her job as ambassador to Belgium to come home and help me. There were dozens of others, including mayors, state legislators, fund-raisers, and Democratic campaign consultants. I promised to keep all these calls and offers confidential. I didn’t want to leave anybody out on a limb in case I decided I wasn’t able to run. I didn’t want their loyalty to me to jeopardize their relationship with another candidate.

  There were a few different kinds of messages being sent my way through the press. “I just want the vice president to do what’s right for him and his family,” Hillary said at a campaign stop in Iowa. “I have a great deal of admiration and affection for him. I think he has to make what is a very difficult decision for himself and his family. He should have the space and opportunity to decide what he wants to do.” But by then the opposition research had already started on me. There was a big story at the end of August about the community policing crime bill that I had authored and Bill Clinton had heralded as a great step forward when he signed it as president in 1994. He was now calling it a big mistake. That was followed by a story alleging I was cozy with the banking and credit card industry when I was a senator. And Clinton backers sent the signal that they would not stop at voting records and policies if I did get in the race. “There’s not a whole lot of daylight on issues, that’s the problem,” one of her supporters told a reporter from Politico. “The attack would be on his aptitude to be president, and that’s going to be a very tough thing to do.”

  I focused on the calls of support, which meant a lot to me—especially coming from people who had known and served with me over the years. This support would make a difference if I ran, but it didn’t make the decision any easier. The real issue, the crux of the matter, was brought home during that full week in Wilmington in August. Beau’s children, Hunter and Natalie, were just a five-minute drive away, so they spent a lot of time at our house. Hunter could hop on a little plastic skiff and paddle diagonally across the lake, from the dock to the far end, 150 yards away, then go exploring in the woods and emerge with a newly captured turtle. Natalie spent most of her time at the pool. The best times were when we were all together at the pool, down below the back porch and the sunroom, splashing around in the water or lolling in the sun. “Pop,” Natalie would say sometimes, “I see Daddy all the time.” Hunter would lie down on my chest, out in the sun, and fall asleep. “You smell like Daddy,” he said one afternoon, with his head on my chest. “You’re not going to leave me, are you, Pop?”

  * * *

  I thought the decision was going to be simple after that; my grief had its own specific weight, and it was not feeling any lighter at the end of August. I knew also, from hard-earned experience, that the second year is in some ways the hardest. The shock is over, as is the strangeness of living through all the first holidays and anniversaries and birthdays, and the undeniable permanence of the loss begins to settle in. If I did win the nomination the next summer, we would all be trying to deal with that new layer of grief in the middle of a general election.

  The thing to do would be to get out now, while all those people who were sticking by me had a chance to go claim their places in another campaign. But I kept hearing Beau. Promise me, Dad. Promise me you’re going to be okay. Jill was not pushing me to run, but she didn’t want me to make my choice until I was sure. She understood exactly what I was going through, how much I was hurting, because she was going through it, too. She kept saying, “Keep your shoulders back, Joe. Keep your shoulders back. Smile when you talk about Beau.” Steve and Mike were telling me to just give it a little more time, that my resilience was what was going to set me apart.

  And on Labor Day, out in the open air, at a parade in downtown Pittsburgh, it felt as if something was happening. I was surprised by the reception I received. So were Leo Gerard, the president of the steelworkers union, and Rich Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, who were both there with me. The response was overwhelming. Thousands of people lined the street. A thousand or more marched. It was a big, loud, excited crowd. Young, old, white, black, Hispanic. An eight-year-old boy in a Superman T-shirt. Teenage girls in bright-colored headbands. Working moms with WOMEN OF STEEL shirts. Middle-aged men with their grandchildren on their shoulders. There were skateboards, bikes, and wheelchairs. It felt like America. There were chants of “Run, Joe, Run!” People holding up hand-lettered BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT signs. I think the enthusiasm caught the press off guard as well. I felt like I was back in my old form. This was the first physical manifestation of the momentum I had felt building for the last six weeks. There were too many people to greet them all, but I tried to get to as many as I could. I found myself jogging, faster and faster, zigzagging from one side of the avenue to the other, chest out and shoulders back, trying to get to more people as I went. It was hot, but I felt alive. It felt good. Really good.

  ABC World News Tonight led its broadcast with me that night. “A fired-up Joe Biden … Is this a man in the running?” And things just started to roll from there. Three days later I was a featured guest on the first week of the new Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Colbert let me talk a lot in the first segment about Beau and what my son meant to me. It was a good test. I thought I did pretty well, without getting too emotional. Maybe I was turning a corner. By the time we came back from the commercial break, his crowd was chanting, “Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe!”

  “Do you have anything to tell us about your plans?” he asked.

  “Look, I don’t think any man or woman should run for president unless, number one, they know exactly why they would want to be president; two, they can look at the folks out there and say, ‘I promise you, you have my whole heart, my whole soul, my energy, and my passion, to do this.’ And I’d be lying if I said that I knew I was there. I’m being completely honest. Nobody has a right, in my view, to seek that office unless they’re willing to give it 110 percent of who they are. I’m optimistic, I’m positive about where we’re going, but I find myself…” I started to get emotional again. “Sometimes,” I finally continued, “it just overwhelms you.” And I found myself telling him the story about the air base in Denver where I got choked up.

  When I got off the set I was relieved that I had held it together, but I was drained. Hunter saw how hard it was. “Dad, you were great,” he said to me when I got home, “but we’ve got to stop talking about the loss of Beau. We have to talk about all that Beau accomplished and we have to talk about the future.”

  The reviews of the Colbert interview the next day put talk of Biden for President into overdrive. “It was an extremely rare sighting given our culture and our politics today,” Mike Barnicle said at the top of Morning Joe. “It was an actual human being.” I was still in New York that day to help Governor Cuomo mark the anniversary of September 11. Andrew had already endorsed his home state’s former senator Hillary Clinton for president, but he was still pushing me to think hard about running. Don’t make a decision you’ll regret. And he was effusive in his praise for me. “Today is about human beings and character,” he told a meeting of first responders. “This is a man who is authentic. This is a man who is genuine.… When he’s with you, he looks you in the eye and tells you he’s with you.… He’s all heart. He’s here to do the right thing. He’s a friend in good days and bad days.”

  Four days later the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that my appearance on Colbert had changed his mind. He now believed I should run. “Every presidential candidate needs a narrative to explain how his or her character was formed,” he wrote. “With Stephen Colbert he revealed a story and suggested a campaign that is moving, compelling and in tune with the moment.” Two days after that, on the trip that put me over the million-mile mark for official travel as vice president, the mayor of Los Angeles leaned on me to run. Even more surprising, an executive in the entertain
ment industry insisted that I had more support in the Hollywood community than Hillary. He said I could raise money there without a problem. George Clooney got in touch with Steve Ricchetti soon after that. “I love Joe Biden,” he told my chief of staff, “and if he decides to do this I will step up with any and all assistance I can provide. I think I’ve proved I’m a pretty good fund-raiser, so that’s all anyone asks me to do. But I am invested in this. I am willing to take a campaign role if you want me.”

  Mike kept saying the good feelings about me were not dissipating; in fact, my character numbers were getting better. As a matter of politics—my personal traits, my message, my history—the case for my candidacy was growing stronger, he said. Authenticity mattered more and more to voters. The need in the field for somebody to speak to the middle class was more urgent and the call for somebody who could work across partisan divides more insistent. Mike believed even more strongly in September than he did in July that I could win.

  Bill Bradley called, again, when I got back from California. This was my time, he insisted. He told me about a woman he’d overheard in a coffee shop saying I ought to run. “And I do not want to see him attacked,” she had said to a friend. “He has been through too much.”

  “Joe, sometimes the man meets the moment,” my old colleague told me. “Tragedy has bonded you to the public, and you can build on that. Joe, this is your moment. You’ll take the entire country with you if you stand up.” He told me he wasn’t trying to pressure me, that I should take my time and be sure I was ready for this. It wasn’t too late, he said, if that woman in the coffee shop was right. “You’re a special case.”

  * * *

  I knew it would be an uphill race against Hillary, but I thought I could win. It had to have been very tough for her to make the decision to run, because she knew her detractors would come after her. And they did. Her numbers, in the face of relentless attacks by Republicans and critical press coverage, were declining. Bernie Sanders was polling eleven points ahead of her in New Hampshire and had closed to a tie in Iowa. She was unable to shake the focus on her emails and the speaking fees from Wall Street. I wasn’t sure how much it mattered, but I was running stronger than her in head-to-head matchups against the Republicans in the field. “For a guy who is not running for president,” said the director of Monmouth University Polling Institute, “Biden sure is making headway against the front-runner.” The firefighters’ union had decided to withhold their endorsement of her until I made up my mind. The head of the AFL-CIO was saying nice things about me, which was causing great consternation at Hillary’s headquarters. It was clear the Clinton campaign was very worried about my entering the race.