And they defined him as a person as well, according to longtime friends, former aides and veteran politicos in his home state of Delaware. They influenced major decisions he made about his political career-first, his priorities in the Senate later, his decision to opt out of the presidential election of 2016. These wretched tentpoles are not only tragedies the 76-year-old Biden has had to endure. In 1972, his wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident in 2015, one of his two sons who had survived the crash died of a rare strain of brain cancer. The long arc of Biden’s career is all but bracketed by tragedy. There is no person in American politics today whose life has been so shaped by loss and grief. Biden, he believed, talked with “total credibility.” “You know that he’s speaking from life experience, you know he’s drawing from his emotional bank, and so it’s pretty real and pretty raw,” Barden said. “He said, ‘I think what you’ll find is the lows will always be just as low-but they’ll start to get farther apart.’” Barden knew enough of Biden’s backstory to know that Biden knew how he felt, and knew how to get through it, because otherwise he couldn’t have been a senator for 3½ decades, couldn’t have been the 47th vice president, and wouldn’t have been on the other end of the line, making this call. Biden granted he wouldn’t see a 10 for quite some time, Barden recalled, but he also offered a kernel of hope. “Tap into that.” And he gave him some practical advice, too: Keep a pad by your bed and rate each day, 1 being the worst, 10 being the best. “Lean on that,” Barden said Biden told him. “I felt,” Barden told me recently, “immediately connected to him.” They talked for more than an hour-about shared priorities, about their families. It cut through the fog of sorrow and shock. He held the phone up to his ear and heard the voice of Joe Biden. “The vice president,” his sister-in-law whispered. Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.ĭays after his 7-year-old son was murdered inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the phone rang at Mark Barden’s house.
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