Biden Sneers at Millennials, and Vice Versa
Joe Biden’s decision to forego a run for the White House in 2016 was, for many Democrats, his moment of highest statesmanship. Biden’s difficult decision, racked as he was with grief at the loss of his son Beau, elevated the vice president to heroic status not only within the Democratic Party, but with voters across America. There was something superhuman in the Biden who set aside his well-known ambitions to nurse a private and consuming grief.
As the 2016 campaign grew ever nastier, the retired Biden came to embody Democratic dreams about what might have been. His absence allowed voters to project their own deeply held values onto an imagined Biden campaign in much the same way Democrats in 1968 allowed themselves to imagine what America might have achieved under President Robert F. Kennedy.
I dreamed, too. I imagined how much more engaged voters would’ve been with an effervescent, optimistic Joe Biden running against the darkness of Trumpism. I imagined his working-class image lighting up labor union rallies in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Biden was still “Uncle Joe.” He still reminded us of the possibility of the Obama years.