Biden takes on Donnie Darkness and promises to bring us into the light.
Whenever I called my mom to tell her something bad had happened, she said, “I know.” As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously put it, “To be Irish is to know that, in the end, the world will break your heart.” Joe Biden has had his heart broken again and again and again. And yet somehow — against all odds, in one of the most remarkable resurrections in political history — Biden stood with a full heart before an empty hall to accept his party’s nomination. “This is our moment to make hope and history rhyme,’’ he said, using the Seamus Heaney line alluding to the Irish finding a way beyond the Troubles to peace. But there’s another Heaney line, the one the Nobel laureate chose for his gravestone in County Derry, that suits the moment even better: “Walk on air against your better judgment.” That is what Biden is doing. At 77, he has spent half-a-century running races; he has been dismissed and written off and gotten tangled up in his own missteps. He has been immobilized by grief, slowed by age and imprisoned by this plague. And yet the old war horse has made it to his party’s winner’s circle — and he has a real shot at the Oval. At an Iowa caucus event in 2008, the Biden booth was so lonely, the campaign literature so untouched, I actually picked up a Biden bumper sticker just out of pity. It’s still in my office. And look at Uncle Joe now. He is, at long last, walking on air. His roots are a mix of Irish, English and French (hence, his middle name, Robinette). But he has always consciously made a choice to embrace the Irish Catholic side on the advice of his grandmother, who told him, “Remember, Joey Biden, the best drop of blood in you is Irish.” While Biden has gotten in trouble for blarney, he does not embrace the Irish propensity, woven through our literature and history, to let the past drag down the present. Through all of his travails and disappointments — as he went from being a cocky 29-year-old senator-elect to a chastened 72-year-old vice president pushed aside for Hillary Clinton — he never lost his passion for the American ideal that anything is possible if you work hard enough and dream big enough. And that is how he cast his vision for America — in mythic terms of light and darkness, empathy and cruelty, decency and despicability. Never naming Donald Trump in his speech, Biden vowed to be “an ally of the light, not of the darkness,” and to help us “overcome this season of darkness in America.” The antidote to Trump’s dystopia, he said, would be the illumination of Ella Baker, a civil rights icon: “Give people light and they will find a way.
