28 Time February 10, 2020
a lumbering blue diesel emblazoned with the slogan
BaTTle for The Soul of The NaTioN. On this late
January afternoon in Iowa, the former Vice President
is in the cramped back cabin, nursing a paper cup of
Panera Bread coffee so the motion of the road and the
drone of the motor don’t lull him to sleep.
He is talking about loss. The things he has lost are
never far from Biden’s mind. Chief among them: his
son Beau, a rising star in Democratic politics who
died of brain cancer in 2015, a few months after his
46th birthday. “I get up in the morning lots of times
and ask myself if he’d be proud of me,” Biden says.
Beau’s death was the latest in the litany of losses
and setbacks that have defined Biden’s life. The death
of his wife and daughter in an auto accident in 1972.
The 1988 presidential bid that ended in a plagiarism
scandal. Life-threatening brain aneurysms. Another
failed bid for the presidency in 2008. For nearly a half-
century, the nation has watched Biden wrestle pub-
licly with sorrow. At countless funerals, he has eulo-
gized Americans great and ordinary, all while nursing
his own barely concealed wounds. “My mother used
to say God never gives you a cross too heavy to carry,”
his wife Jill says. “But God got pretty close with Beau.”
Yet Biden soldiers on: out of pride, out of duty,
out of a deep-seated need to remain in the mix. To his
boosters, he’s the last authentic man in American pol-
itics and the Democrats’ best hope of toppling Don-
ald Trump. To his critics, he’s a nostalgia act whose
well-worn slogans about middle-class uplift and na-
tional unity are out of sync in this season of outrage.
Now, at 77, he stands atop the field of Democratic
presidential contenders. For months, rivals have
nipped at his heels, evincing an I-can’t- believe-I’m-
losing-to-this guy incredulity. His campaign is disor-
ganized, his debate performances uneven, his stump
speech a long-winded hodgepodge delivered to small,
graying crowds. Anyone who’s known him can see he’s
slowed down. And yet, as the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses
draw near, Biden remains the man to beat for the nom-
ination. He has maintained a lead in national polls
since the start of the campaign, bolstered by a dura-
ble coalition of African American and white working-
class voters drawn to his experience, his relationships
and his humanity. No one in either party connects
with voters in such an intensely personal way: hug-
ging, gripping shoulders, planting kisses on fore-
heads. “He’s got more compassion in his little finger
than anyone I’ve met,” says Mary Luce, a 70-year-old
bartender at an American Legion post who lingered to
speak with Biden after a town hall in Ottumwa, Iowa.
“That’s what would make him such a good leader.”
The outcome of the Democratic primary and
potentially the party’s fate in November hinge on
Biden’s resilience and whether he can overcome one
last test. Embedded in the challenge are existential
questions about grief and experience: Do they add
or detract? Are they baggage or scar tissue? Do they
strengthen a person or deplete him? In Biden, both
possibilities are simultaneously pres ent.
Politics has always been a cathartic exercise for
Biden, a form of exuberant self-expression. It’s as if
he has to prove to himself he’s still alive, and this is
the only way he knows. “Purpose,” he says. “That’s
how I got through it. I lost my wife and daughter;
that’s how I got through it. When they told me Beau
didn’t have a chance of making it, that’s how I got
through it. You’ve got to have purpose.”
This time is no different. Biden’s iPhone rests on
the table in front of him, a platform bolted to the wall
of the bus. The phone is open to a text-message con-
versation in enlarged type, the sender identified as
“HUNT”: his younger son Hunter, the one with the
soap-opera life and foreign entanglements that fig-
ure into President Trump’s impeachment. The only
visible message reads, “Love you Dad.”It’s dark insideJoe Biden’scampaign bus,