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

forty-two in 1984, so he’d be old enough to be president. But after a long, serious talk with Jill, he decided not to register for the Democratic primary elections.

Biden felt that even if he had a good chance of winning this time, he wasn’t ready. He wasn’t sure he knew why he would run, or what he could accomplish if he was elected. As his good friend and advisor John Marttila had said, “You shouldn’t run until you know the answers to those questions.”

Besides, Joe thought a presidential campaign would be too much of a strain for his family. The Bidens had a brand-new member: in the summer of 1981, they welcomed a baby girl.

Beau and Hunter had actually found out about the baby coming before their father did. When Jill first thought she might be pregnant, she stopped at a pharmacy for a pregnancy test kit. The boys were with her in the car, and Jill explained to them why she was going into the pharmacy with a scarf covering her hair and wearing dark glasses. She wanted to keep the result of the test private, either way.

Beau and Hunter were excited to be the first ones in on the secret. Jill told them they could choose their baby sister’s name, and they decided on “Ashley.” And so Ashley Blazer Biden was born on June 8, 1981.

Earlier that year, in March, an assassin had shot and critically wounded President Reagan. Reagan recovered, but the attempt was a reminder, for anyone seeking the presidency, of that danger.

Joe Biden had plenty to keep him busy in the Senate. On the Judiciary Committee, he was eager to work on revising the US criminal code, which had not been updated since 1900. His double goal was to make the streets safe and to protect the civil rights of people accused of crimes. Black people, he knew, did not get treated fairly in the court system. On average, they got longer sentences for the same crime.

By the 1980s there was great concern about drug trafficking and the use of illegal drugs in the US. Several parts of the revisions of the US criminal code called the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 were written especially to try to correct this problem. The conservatives in Congress, backed by President Reagan, thought the solution was to “get tough on crime.” They wrote some harsh penalties, such as for possessing marijuana, that would turn out to do more harm than good.

Joe Biden was now the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, and so he led the whole Senate in considering the Comprehensive Crime Control Act. In October 1984, President Reagan signed the act into law. At the time, Biden was proud of his work on this project. But many years later, he would see it as a mistake.

Meanwhile, he was again running for reelection to the Senate. By now he was firmly established in Delaware as a popular senator, and his campaign manager, Valerie, had campaigning down to a science. In November 1984, Biden won his third term by twenty percentage points. As for President Ronald Reagan, he won reelection by a second landslide, bigger than in 1980.

“My Word as a Biden”

Why did Joe Biden want to be president? What would he do if elected? Those were the big questions.

By 1985, Biden felt more confident about his answers. The four years of President Reagan’s first term had made clear to Biden how a Democratic president, and Biden in particular, could make a difference. He felt that Ronald Reagan’s genial manner was only a front for the Republicans’ stingy policies.

Republicans were cutting spending for welfare programs that the Democrats had put in place, such as Medicaid, food stamps, and public housing. The Republicans froze the minimum wage at $3.35 per hour and cut funding for federal education programs. As a result, the gap between the richest and the poorest Americans widened. The homeless population grew as more Americans could not pay their rent or mortgages.

And Biden believed that he was ready to lead the country. He understood working-class and middle-class Americans. And he’d served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for ten years, traveling outside the US and meeting leaders of foreign countries. “I knew the world and America’s place in it in a way that few politicians did,” he wrote later.

Joe Biden began making public appearances around the country, getting a sense of whether he had a realistic chance of winning the presidency in 1988. At least he would not be running against the immensely popular President Reagan, since Reagan was in his second and final term. Jill often went with Joe on these testing-the-waters trips, and so did Beau, sixteen, and Hunter, fifteen.

The boys were now both at Archmere Academy, their father’s old high school. Beau would even be elected student body president with Hunter’s campaign help. Unlike Joe, Beau was coolheaded and disciplined—in fact, his friends called him “the Sheriff.” Hunter was the impulsive one. Both boys would do anything for each other, and anything for their father.

At the Iowa Democratic Party’s dinner in November 1985, Biden presented himself as a young, vigorous senator like John F. Kennedy in 1960. He even used a phrase from Kennedy’s presidential campaign, “Let’s get America moving again.” Biden sounded like a candidate, but he denied that he was planning to run for president in 1988. He didn’t want to declare too early. First he wanted to be sure he’d have enough backing for the expensive, grueling campaign.

Jill was seriously worried about how a campaign for the presidency might strain their family. She’d talked to Lee Hart, the wife of Gary Hart, candidate for president in 1984. “It’s harder than you can ever believe,” Lee had told her. Although Jill and the children were well adjusted to being a senator’s family, being a presidential candidate’s family would be a much higher level of stress.

But Joe reassured Jill that he