What
Cramer shows beautifully is that you have to be a little crazy to want to run
for president, to believe you can and should be the most powerful person
in the world. It requires an almost pathological belief in yourself and your
destiny. In Biden’s case, Cramer describes the strange combination of inferiority
and superiority complex, failure and success, that become fused into a
powerful, stubborn, preternatural determination that he can overcome any
obstacle. On the one hand, Biden comes from an Irish immigrant family with
something of a chip on its shoulder, which his Irish American mother, Jean
Finnegan, compensates for by pumping up their self-regard: “She told
those kids, every day, over and over, that they were Bidens, and there was nobody
better than a Biden.” His father goes from relative affluence to abject
failure, forced to move into his wife’s family home after he loses his job, and
then later enjoys some success as a car salesman.
From these painful experiences, the phrase Biden repeats over and over today: “When you get knocked down, you get back up.” Joe is the stuttering child whom his classmates tease mercilessly until he
grabs one of his tormentors by the throat. As he matures, Joe becomes popular,
the kid who accepts all the most dangerous dares, winning bets with friends by
performing unlikely feats of derring-do. He agrees to scamper under and across
the carriage of a moving dump truck. He swings among the ropes attached to the
steel girders of an unfinished building some 60 feet in the air. The trick for
Biden, Cramer writes, is “imagination”—if Joe could imagine something, he could
do it. “Joey was always quick with a grace born of cocky self-possession. He
didn’t—like some kids that age—doublethink himself. So his movements got jerky
and he screwed up … no. Once Joey set his mind, it was like he didn’t think at
all—he just did. That’s why you didn’t want to fight him.”
Biden was
a mediocre student at the University of Delaware and Syracuse Law School, which
fed a certain resentment toward those (like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) who
went to Ivy League schools. Still, he had no hesitation in challenging a
seemingly unbeatable incumbent senator (Caleb Boggs) for one of Delaware’s two
Senate seats, even though he was only 29, had done little of distinction in his
brief law career, and had almost no money for an election campaign. “Biden was
at three percent in the polls when he rented the best and biggest Ballroom in the state
for his victory celebration,” Cramer writes. Against all odds and the
advice of friends, Biden wins, becoming one of the youngest senators in U.S.
history. Then, just weeks before he was to be sworn in, tragedy strikes when
his wife, Neilia, and their daughter, Naomi, are killed in a car crash. (His sons,
Beau and Hunter, are in the same car but were not killed.) When you get knocked
down …
