My One Joe Biden Story

So much of life is how we treat the people we don't know

I know many people who know Joe Biden - and who are sharing stories of the man they know as he faces a harrowing cancer diagnosis.

I do not know Joe Biden. In the Obama White House, there was a bright line between the POTUS and VPOTUS speechwriting teams. We were all friendly and sometimes ran ideas by each other, but as a presidential speechwriter I never wrote for their boss, and vice versa.

The only time I did anything with the Vice President was when Julia Louise Dreyfus came to the White House for a VEEP crossover. Even then, my job was literally, “Stay out of the crew’s way and make sure they don’t break the Oval Office.”

My only Joe Biden, story, then, comes from my 22nd birthday. September 17th, 2008. Which happened to be when Biden campaigned in Wooster, Ohio, where I was a field organizer on the ‘08 Obama Campaign.

I’ll be honest: I don’t remember his speech. What I remember is what happened after. I’d been asked to pick ten volunteers to do a meet-and-greet with the Vice Presidential nominee. Once the remarks were over, we huddled in a hold room and waited. I assumed he’d come in, shake some hands, take a few pictures and leave.

Not Biden.

He burst through the door of the hold room and seemed to teleport into a deep conversation with the first volunteer. Usually, politicians have a staffer responsible for tapping them on the shoulder and keeping them on schedule. If such a staffer existed for Joe Biden, they’d long ago given up. The conversation ended when it was over, and not a moment before. Then Biden teleported to the next volunteer and started again. There were hugs. There were tears. There was crying while hugging.

Lots of politicians meet people. Joe Biden spends time with them.

And the thing about my Biden story is that it’s everyone’s Biden story. Using a conservative estimate - that Biden encountered an average of 30 strangers a day during a fifty-year political career - more than 500,000 Americans spent meaningful time with our nation’s 46th president. I suspect the real number is higher. And the number of people who witnessed one of these scenes, as I did, is higher still.

There’s a lot of talk right now about Biden’s legacy right now, and that’s only fair. Like many Democrats, I wish (in retrospect) that he hadn’t run for re-election, that many on his team had taken a longer-term view of loyalty, that he hadn’t gone on The View earlier this month.

But our elected officials are - even now, God help us - role models. The vast, vast majority of us will never ask, “What kind of presidential legacy will I leave?” But all of us will ask, “What kind of person should I be?”

And when it comes to the kind of person Joe Biden is, there’s something not just inspiring but patriotic about the way he treats people he doesn’t know.

Usually, when thinking about Biden’s speeches and campaigns, the theme of “resilience” comes up. But there’s a second, less-noticed theme. Equality. Countless times over the past decades, Biden quoted his parents maxim: "No one’s better than you, but you're better than nobody."

Or, to put it slightly differently, we are all created equal.

Plenty of politicians pay lip service to that idea. (Or, as speechwriters might call it, to that “common creed.”) But most of American history is the story of a people either ignoring the demands of those five words or struggling to live up to them. This notion - not that we’re all equally good, or equally wise, or equally trustworthy, but that we are, on some basic level, equally worthy - runs counter to the self-obsession that comes inevitably with having a self. And politicians tend to be more self-obsessed than most. Despite the words of the Declaration, for most people who seek power, equality is anything but self-evident.

Which makes Biden’s willingness to spend time with ordinary Americans, not because they’re “his people,” but because they’re people, its own kind of radical. He lives America’s bedrock principle with almost missionary zeal.

Even more remarkable, in a life shaped by loss, tragedy didn’t harden Biden’s heart. Tragedy expanded it.

I worry that given the current balance of power, people - especially younger people, especially younger men - will look at a life like Biden’s and conclude that treating people as equals makes you a sucker. But I think that in addition to being incorrect, it ignores the far greater risk of self-obsession.

Look at Elon Musk. Or Stephen Miller. Or Donald Trump Jr., who responded to Biden’s cancer diagnosis by trolling Jill Biden online. Or President Trump himself. These people who have won the wealth/power/influence lottery - they’ve accomplished things that most of us thought were impossible - yet they’re perpetually unhappy. Bouncing from narcissistic grievance to narcissistic grievance has, I guess, helped them achieve their goals. But it’s hollowed them out.

Who wants to live like that?

Joe Biden achieved some pretty impressive stuff, too. But unlike the people who have for now replaced him in Washington, he became successful while remaining a human being. Look at the genuine joy of Biden eating ice cream. Then look at the forced, performative gloating of five MAGA heroes eating McDonald’s on Trump Force One. You only get one life. Which one would you rather have?

And thanks in part to the kind of treatments and researched that he championed, there are reasons to hope that there’s still plenty of ice cream in Joe Biden’s future - that he will once again demonstrate the resilience - the ability to get back up after life knocks you down - that he’s spent his life extolling.

I don’t know Joe Biden. Yet I know that, if I was hurting and he were in Asbury Park Roastery as I order another coffee and finish writing this post, he’d come over and spend as much time with me as I need. Yes, he’s a former Senator and a former Vice President and a former President, but he would see me (and, I know this, because this is how he sees everyone he doesn’t know) as fundamentally his equal.

What could be more American - or more worth emulating - than that?