As Democrats ponder their future, Biden makes a plea for a focus on the middle class
WASHINGTON — Over a career in elected public office lasting more than 46 years, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has seen campaigns from the rudimentary, family-run effort that first launched him unexpectedly to the U.S. Senate as a 29-year-old to the sophisticated, data-driven juggernaut that helped elect him and Barack Obama twice to the nation's highest offices.
But rarely has he trusted anything as much as his own gut instinct, attuned to the middle- and working-class sensibilities of his former neighbors in towns like Scranton, Pa., and Claymont, Del.
And so as he sat in his office one day in October and watched footage of a Donald Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., not far from his childhood home, Biden sensed trouble.
"Son of a gun. We may lose this election," Biden said, recalling his reaction during an interview in his West Wing office.
"They're all the people I grew up with. They're their kids. And they're not racist. They're not sexist. But we didn't talk to them."
Now, as the Democratic Party struggles to understand what went wrong in an election that left them with the least power in state and federal offices in decades, that same instinct leads Biden to offer a diagnosis and a prescription for what he sees as a more successful approach, one which pushes back, if ever-so-gently, against a powerful current in Democratic politics.
It begins, in typical Biden fashion, with a reference to family wisdom.
"My dad used to have an expression. He said, 'I don't expect the government to solve my problems. But I expect them to understand it,'" Biden said.
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