by Susan Ahern, Midlothian, VA
How cool to be a Biden Girl in 1972. “No- not that kind of Biden girl. Rather part of an army of high-school students (many like me from Catholic school), knocking on thousands of doors to elect Joe Biden. Back then we knew him as a young, cute, passionate 29-year-old county councilman, trying to grab a brass U.S. Senate ring. That Joe had an infectious Broadway smile and preached he was on the right side of history, only helped him in the eyes of young voters.
College kids typically work on grass-roots pollical campaigns. Biden’s team, however, resorted to recruiting high schoolers to campaign for him in 1972. Maybe because no one (even Biden’s later chief of staff Ted Kaufman who took Biden’s senate seat when Biden became VP), thought Biden had a snow ball’s chance in hell of winning. Definitely not a secret, Biden faced near-impossible odds to beat his senate Republican opponent, Caleb Boggs, a 63-years old, who’d served three terms as a U.S. Rep from Delaware and was running for his 3rd term as U.S. Senator.
Thing is, Joe got recruited to run as a sacrificial lamb, because Democrats had to field somebody, and everybody knows even if you lose, you get your name out there for the next campaign.
An article in Slate Magazine, “When Joe Biden was the Candidate of the Young,” captures the spirit of what Biden’s inaugural senate bid was up against in 1972: Young Joe faced the formidable Boggs, a moderate Republican, who had a “sweet-grandpa image,” and was considered the “loveable old man of Delaware politics.”
“[Boggs] was a pro-business Republican whom labor had supported in the past. In his 2007 memoir, Biden wrote about all of the people he would run into in Wilmington who told him it would be lunacy to challenge Boggs, who had earned the trust of so many Delawareans over his decades of service. One ‘older attorney,’ Biden wrote [in his memoir], told Biden of a dispute between players at a poker game he had recently hosted. No one at the table could resolve it. ‘You know what we did, Joe?’ the attorney told Biden. ‘We called [Biden’s GOP opponent] Cale Boggs to settle it.’”
Biden’s David vs Goliath campaign against a Republican Delaware institution was homespun, for sure. Biden’s sister, Valerie, served as senate campaign manager; his brother Jimmy as finance chair. The campaign has little cash on hand to buy ads and mostly ran radio spots interviewing Biden supporters. But in 1972, the Vietnam War was raging, and Biden wanted to bring American sons and daughters home, just as he would decades later as president, in the “forever” Middle East wars.
But, Kauffman, who warned Biden not to take on the mighty Republican Senator Boggs in an epic political battle, says in an NPR article, “Biden’s Road to the Senate Took Tragic Turns,” that Biden convinced [Kaufman] he could prevail. “[Biden’s] basic theory was Sen. Boggs was beloved, but these were changing times. People were looking for answers to some of these big questions,” Kauffman says. ‘The way [Biden] used to express it [is]: ‘If Sen. Boggs and I could just go down to the football stadium at the University of Delaware and people saw the two of us, they’d pick me.’ Kaufman says that was ‘pretty much the essence’ of how Biden won.’ ”
Back then, Biden sold himself as the candidate of change. The tag line at the end of Joe’s campaign ads: “He understands what’s happening today.”
Quoted in Slate, “Norm Lockman, a Wilmington News Journal reporter at the time, wrote of the new messaging, which Biden had developed himself and which varied depending on what part of the state he was trying to reach. To those near the beaches in downstate Delaware, Biden would say that ‘thirty years ago, caring for the environment meant picking up bottles and beer cans on Rehoboth Beach … and now it means saving the beach.’ In the north, around Wilmington, the pitch would be, ‘in 1950, Cale Boggs promised to keep highways growing; in 1970 Joe Biden promises to keep trees growing.’ Lockman called this the ‘dear old dad’ approach: ‘Dear old dad may have been right for his time—and I love him—but things are different now .’
Today, many young people see Biden at the “dear old dad. “Remember him as a presidential candidate who pledged in 2020 to be the bridge to the next generation. And sadly, President Biden is still trying to convince Americans that if they just see him in action—in ever more interviews, at rallies, on the stump–they will pick him.
Of course, Biden comes by his “never-quit” persona honestly.
In my day, Biden and his wife Nelia were the latest, freshest and greatest political newcomers; especially warm and inviting Nelia, Joe’s beautiful blonde wife, and mom to three poster-cute kids. Thing I liked best about her: she wasn’t stuck up like many of wives of the IT flashy couples that typically ran for office. Biden did a good job on the stump railing about his Republican opponent being in office so long he was out of touch with regular folks. Biden had as much energy as most of us teens and made us laugh, a lot, in the easy-breezy, sweet-smiling way he asked, even humbly begged, for our help.
I got into politics early, mostly because my mother was a long-time political activist– vice chairman of a working-class Ninth-Ward district. She once volunteered to have a federal election polling place in our house –likely illegal today. Yeah, voters stretched up a city block waiting to cast a vote in our row house on the East Side of Wilmington. Mom regularly talked up Joe at the dinner table. She got us all excited about working on his campaign, mostly because he was dead against that “unwinnable Vietnam War killing American kids.” Even though he was no tree hugger, Biden cared about the environment. Yeah, even a thing championed back in the ‘70s by a nature scientist, Rachel Carson. She wrote “Silent Spring” a book about how pesticide spraying in World War 2 was ruining the environment; all my teenaged brain heard was birds might not survive long term to sing. Mom read the book and told us kids how important it was to support politicians who cared about the earth, as we took for granted our great big home planet.
Most of all my mother said she wanted to get out the vote for Biden, ‘cause he pushed Civil Rights, important in her work at the YWCA, and then at the Mental Health Association. And he cared deeply for poor people like my family. Probably ‘cause Biden’s own start — definitely not the “life of Riley.
Apparently, Joe’s father found himself down on his luck, moving in with his mother’s parents, the Finnegans, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, when Joe Jr. was a boy, to make ends meet. Biden’s father later moved the family to Delaware, after he’d been commuting to clean boilers for a healing and cooling company in Wilmington.
No damn good: Joe’s Dad found himself with a wife, four kids in a small apartment in Wilmington, selling used cars. Joe’s campaign speeches often quoted his dad, saying: “Champ, the measure of a man is not how often he’s knocked down, but how quickly he gets up.” My mother’s own hard-scrabble ancestors, still near and dear to her heart, had preached that motto, or something like it, and that got Mom and her friends all fired up about Joe Biden. Fired me up, too.
I’d seen lots of young, hopeful couples trying their hand at politics, come and go. One glam couple even divorced after a failed campaign, making me wonder if they just got married for political reasons. So, who knew if Biden would last. He seemed genuine enough, though. I didn’t get the sense he was bullshitting his way through interviews, which often happened. At campaign headquarter when problems came up, he’d tell it like it was; he also had a safe hug, unlike many of the grownups in the political circles I ran in.
After a lotta phone banking and miles and miles of canvassing door-to-door, even Democrats showed shock when Joe Biden won that November 1972, beating such a well-known Republican, and becoming the youngest U. S. Senator elect. Time for the victory parties!
In the NPR article mentioned above, “On Election Day, as Republican President Nixon carried Delaware in a landslide, Democrat Joe Biden beat Boggs by 3,162 votes — by all accounts, an improbable upset. Kaufman remembers what he felt at the victory party that night.
‘I can remember the thought as if it was yesterday,’ he says. ‘I will never again think of something as impossible.’ “
Nevertheless, after accomplishing such an unexpected political victory, Joe Biden had a far more daunting challenge ahead, picking himself up after a devastating personal blow: I was babysitting a week before Christmas for a UVA-educated Lawyer, Cliff Hearn, who at one point ran for the Delaware State Senate. Mr. Hearn, to me, came home looking shell shocked, his wife in tears.
Turned out Joe Biden’s wife, Nelia, whom we all knew and adored from our campaigning, had been killed earlier than evening when a tractor trailed plowed into her up on Kirkwood Highway. She was out Christmas shopping with all three kids in their station wagon. Baby daughter, Naomi, was also killed and both Biden’s young boys, Beau and Hunter, were in the hospital in critical condition, broken bones; Hunter had a skull fracture.
Everybody I knew was talking about it at school the next day, and we heard through the grape vine that after the whirlwind election Biden was never expected to win, and amid the exciting plans to move the Biden family to D.C., Nelia had been saying eerie stuff to her husband Joe, like, things are too good. What’s going to happen next.? Like somehow, she knew the other shoe was gonna drop. And it had. Except it was a tractor trailer, not a shoe.
Regardless, the worst had really happened to the Bidens. But prominent Republican and Democrats in the senate urged Biden to stay the course, remain in the senate, despite suffering one of life’s harshest blows. Biden was sworn into his first U.S. Seante term in a hospital, near his sons.
If you want to understand why Biden won’t quit his unpopular run for a second term as President of the United States, know that it’s tied up in the ethos of Joe’s life quest to survive—both personally and politically. Biden’s signature mantra: “Don’t give up! No matter the odds. Nothing is impossible.”
Today, however, blinded by his “no- mountain- is -too- high -to -climb” persona, what President Biden can’t see is that this 2024 election is not a fight for his political career. As our party’s standard bearer, he leads the fight to preserve democracy. Put in jeopardy by a corrupt, felonious candidate with deep ties to a conservative-party Project 2025 that remakes the U.S. government into an authoritarian state.
Joe Biden also spearheads the current battle for all that he himself held dear in 1972: to protect the earth, to protect the rights of minorities to vote and live lives of dignity with equal access to housing, health care, etc. Biden leads the fight to protect our American sons and daughters from fighting in unjust, costly and unwinnable overseas wars.
Sadly, though, Biden is confusing the mission to save America with his mission to save himself. A mission he’s long been forging, as he’s battled plagiarism accusations and embarked on a quest for the presidency, on an off, much of his adult life.
The Joe Biden I knew in 1972, though, fiercely believed he was the change agent America needed. That his opponent was old and out of touch with the modern challenges facing our country.
And in the over 50 years Joe has served America, he contributed so much, including his work on gun safety and cancer prevention. Not to mention, Biden’s consequential first term as a President of these United States: According to Bloomberg.com, “What has Biden Accomplished. Look at these 10 Metrics. Not the Polls,” under his stewardship the economy has created over “14.8 million jobs in his first term in office, more than any president in U.S. history over the same period, and unemployment held below 4% for the longest stretch since the 1960s” Biden has also reduced the number of uninsured Americans to an all-time low, assured passage of the $1.2 trillion U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that invests record sums to modernize America, including record spending in Green Energy.
Biden helped get people back to work after the pandemic. According to his own administration, when Biden took office over 3,300 died each day of Covid. Biden got 300 million Covid vaccines administered in just 150 days at the mass vaccination sites where many of us remember standing in line. Biden brought inflation down from its 9% 2022 high to a little over 3% now. Last but not least, President Biden presides over a record -high stock market. Many Americans have their retirements invested in 401Ks in the stock market.
Indeed, once humble Biden from Scranton, Pennsylvania, has a political and human legacy to be damn proud of, for sure. As a revered, long-term statesman, he deserves a much more dignified exit from the political stage.
But as Biden fights his own past demons, he risks tarnishing his grand legacy, as he conflates his fight for his personal political survival with our county’s fight for its democratic soul – its very survival.
Biden promised in his 2020 campaign to be that bridge to the next generation. And considering Biden fought an epic battle – triumphing against an older, out-of-touch GOP politician over 50 years ago – Biden more than anyone, ought to understand that America cannot be led for the next four years by a “beloved grandpa” who exhibits many hallmarks of dementia. Sure, Biden can still, at times, deliver forceful speeches, particularly on foreign affairs. That’s baked into him through over 50 years of practice, reminiscent of a Boomer remembering Bob Dylan Lyrics. Biden’s “masking,” throwing up his hands and saying, “oh you know,” is clearly a new cover when Biden loses yet another conversation thread. He appears mostly alert between the hours of 10 am and 4 pm. There’s no shame, as Biden struggles with the normal cognitive decline that will happen to many of us, if we’re lucky enough to live to be an octogenarian, like Biden.
Joe Biden, whom I admire and adore, ought to recognize that’s it’s not him (just like it wasn’t his old 1972 political foe Caleb Boggs) that people are looking to for answers to some of the big questions of the day. Biden needs to face facts: today his 1972 political-ad tagline rings truer than ever—It’s Joe Biden himself “who doesn’t understand what’s happening.” It’s Joe Biden akin to a celebrity super-athlete who needs to retire, but keeps coming back for yet another swan-song performance.
Biden says often that Trump’s only in this race for himself, not for America. Well, the same can be said for Biden. Or, amidst mental decline, he’s being duped, flattered and propped up by aides and underlings who want to hold onto the power a Biden presidency confers.
However, based on Biden’s plunging poll numbers, in his pursuit to save his political career, he risks taking democracy down with him. He risks more reproductive freedoms taken away from women all over America; he risks ever more suppression of minority votes; he risks more fossil-fuel pollution and climate damage to our mother earth; he risks forcing LGBT folks back in the closet. On and on.
As a former Joe Biden Girl, you will never find a more devoted Joe Biden fan. True, Biden’s political instincts led him to take advantage of the frailties Father Time heaped on his first and much older opponent. So now, I beg our President: Please be true to the man young people in my day fell in love with. The politician of our hearts: a trustworthy, genuine, earnest, and natural leader. Be true to the young idealistic human you once were –who had better ideas and more knowledge of what the country needed at that moment than your opponent.
You’ve accomplished so much, Mr. President, and blazed a roaring, successful neon political trail. But please, do America a patriotic solid. Pass the torch, like you promised, to the next generation. Now. Let that generous, wise gift be part of your legacy. Instead of the destruction of democracy.
President Joe Biden, respectfully, your very FIRST campaign’s meta message is truer than ever: ‘Dear old dad may have been right for his time—and I love him—but things are different now
—Susan Ahern, Midlothian, VA
* https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/joe-biden-1972-race-senate.html
* Biden’s Road to Senate Took Tragic Turn : NPR
* What Has Biden Accomplished? Look at These 10 Metrics, Not the Polls (bloomberg.com)
