Joe Biden by Beatrice Gormley (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📕

Wilmington. But they decided Joe’s parents should buy it instead, while Joe and Neilia bought the Bidens’ house in Mayfield.

Instead of living in the Mayfield house, Joe and Neilia rented it out also. Then they bought a farm that had possibilities of becoming their ideal home. There was a house they could enlarge for their growing family and visitors, and a big piece of land with room for other family members to build their homes. In the meantime, they rented the farm, as well, to college students. Now they were paying three mortgages.

To save money, Joe, Neilia, and the babies moved into a cottage on the grounds of the Country Club Swimming Pool. They could live there for free if Joe managed the swimming pool. For a person with Joe’s energy and ambition, it was no problem to squeeze pool management into his crowded schedule. “I was probably the only working attorney in Delaware who lifeguarded on Saturdays,” he joked later.

The Bidens were doing quite a real-estate juggling act. And it would get even more complicated with Joe’s first dive into politics.

Joe’s opening came when John Daniello, a Democrat on the New Castle County Council, decided to run for Congress in 1970. The problem was, Daniello didn’t want to leave his seat on the county council unguarded, for a Republican to win. Daniello had heard that Joe Biden was smart, popular, and ambitious. So he and others in the Democratic Forum, a group working to get the Delaware Democratic Party concerned about civil rights, asked Joe to run for county council in 1970.

For several reasons, Biden wasn’t eager to run. He wasn’t very interested in county affairs, like local construction regulations. Besides, New Castle County was heavily Republican, so his chances of getting elected weren’t good. And anyway, he yearned to jump straight into national politics, where he could have a say on big issues like the ongoing Vietnam War.

But as Daniello pointed out, Biden had to start somewhere, just to get his name known to voters. So Joe checked the idea out with Neilia, who had a good instinctive understanding of politics. She said, “Let’s try it.”

And Joe’s sister, Valerie, enthusiastically agreed to manage his campaign. If anything, she was a fiercer competitor than Joe. As Joe noted later in his first memoir, “Valerie Biden did not go into any race to lose.”

Valerie was only twenty-six, but she was already an experienced campaign manager. She’d run Joe’s campaigns since he’d been elected president of the junior class at Archmere, and he’d always won. Now Val set up a campaign center in their parents’ basement. From the public voting records, she gathered a database that included every registered voter in the district so that she knew which people were likely to vote Democratic. She organized a small army of volunteers, including her two younger brothers, to help voters get to the polls.

Meanwhile, Joe went door to door in the Democratic neighborhoods, introducing himself to the voters. But he also knocked on doors in the Republican precincts, confident that he could win voters over one by one. With his savvy about real estate, Joe knew what middle-class Republican voters cared about. They wanted to keep developers from building on all the open spaces, to keep the county budget tight, and to support the police.

On Election Day in November 1970, almost every single Democratic candidate in the state of Delaware, including John Daniello for Congress, lost their race. But Joe Biden won his county council seat by two thousand votes.

At the same time that Joe Biden was jump-starting his political career, he was also building the family life he wanted. Interviewed after the election by a reporter for the Wilmington Evening Journal, he said, “The most important thing to me without question is to be a good father.”

Soon after Biden took his seat on the New Castle County Council, Neilia was pregnant for the third time. The Bidens definitely needed a bigger house than the pool cottage, where little Beau was sleeping in a closet. After long searching, Joe and Neilia found their ideal house in North Star, a village only a few miles from the border between Delaware and Pennsylvania. This house, built in 1723, stood on four acres of land. Through complicated financial arrangements, they managed to sell their three rental properties and buy their dream house in the spring of 1971.

Unfortunately, this perfect Colonial house was not in the county council district that Joe Biden represented. He couldn’t move there and still keep his seat on the council. But Joe’s parents had just moved into a house that was in Joe’s district. So all he had to do was talk his dumbfounded mother and father into moving again—to North Star. “You’d really like it,” he urged. “It’d just be for a year or so.”

Three days later, Joe’s brother Jimmy moved Joseph and Jean Biden’s belongings into the house in North Star. Joe, Neilia, Beau, and Hunter would live in the senior Bidens’ house for the next year, until after the 1972 election. On November 8, 1971, Joe and Neilia’s baby girl was born, and they named her Naomi Christina.

Joe Biden could have been satisfied with this good start to his political career. But he was already looking ahead, thinking of running for the Senate in 1972. Not the Delaware state senate, a reasonable goal for an ambitious young man, but the United States Senate.

This would be a huge leap, from county councilman to US senator. To make the leap even harder, the senator up for reelection in 1972 was the popular Republican James Caleb Boggs. Boggs had had a long, successful political career, and every voter in Delaware knew who he was. Why would they vote for an unknown young Democrat instead? Biden wouldn’t even turn thirty, the minimum age for a US senator, until thirteen days after the election.

But Joe Biden was thinking about his next step in politics as carefully as he used to figure