WHY I LOVE JOE BIDEN

We do love Joe.

We got a TV in time for my father to watch the 1952 Democratic Convention. I was eight, and it didn’t make much of an impression on me, but I realized it was an Important Event.

Four years later, I was twelve, and I remember one event at that convention: the speech given by Massachusetts Senator John Kennedy. I liked what I saw and heard.

I was 16 when Senator Kennedy became the nominee in Los Angeles. I knew enough then to be interested in all the machinations of the various groups in the party. I understood why it was important that Kennedy chose Johnson to help the ticket in Texas. That was the year I went on to work in his campaign, hanging “door knockers”. That was the first time my father and I had a political disagreement. He was a Mason, and in 1960 that meant a Catholic candidate was a “No.” I quit DeMolay over that. The two of us watched the returns on election night from opposite sides of the room. He glared at my smile when JFK was announced the winner. I got “sick” on January 20, 1961, to stay home from school and see his inauguration, when a chill went down my spine when I heard”Ask not what your country can do for you...”

I was in Vietnam for the 1964 convention and pissed off that I was a year too young to vote against Goldwater. But by the time the election itself came along in November, my attitude toward American elections and American presidents had changed completely, since I had learned the truth about the lie known as the Tonkin Gulf Incident (my best friend from boot camp was the fire control petty officer in charge of the main battery on the Maddox; when I chanced on him in an Olongapo bar a month later, he told me there had never been any “North Vietnamese torpedo boats” that night).

I watched the 1968 convention from our house in Texas, completely pissed off at both parties, hating LBJ and Humphrey, and heartbroken by the assassination of my candidate. I didn’t vote that year, a lesson I learned the hard way: not voting is a vote in favor of the thing you most don’t want. I’ve never made that mistake a second time, and never will.

I was fully invested in the 1972 election. I’d been “recruited” into working in the San Francisco Democratic Party by my political science professor at San Francisco State, Robert H. Mendelsohn, member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and soon to be my boss after I proved myself as a volunteer that year, working for McGovern. I remember when one of the paid guys pooh-poohed the candidacy of Shirley Chisolm. I told him he was wrong and expressed a hope that I would live long enough to vote for someone like her who would win. (Fifty-two years later, that memory seems prescient).

I looked on 1976 with the eyes of a professional, and admired the way the Carter team won. Four years later in 1980, I was pretty well disgusted with Carter (as president - he was remarkable asn a former prsident)0 enough that I secretly hoped Ted Kennedy would win, though that was not something a loyal “operative” in the state party said that year.

I was disgusted with the institutional Democratic Party in both 1984 and 1988. By then I wasn’t in Sacramento because I’d had it with the Jerry Brown Democrats (I hate Jerry Brown to this day; there aren’t enough electrons in the internet for me to completely describe his fuckwittedness), but I still knew enough to know losers when I saw them and Mondale and Dukakis were the epitome of everything I didn’t like then and don’t like now about a certain wing of the party.

Jesse Jackson caught my interest in 1984 and in 1988 I voted for him in the California primary. I really liked seeing him get his moment last night, from a crowd that understood his importance.

Come 1992, I was set to go with Clinton until I read about his game with the draft board over ROTC and realized he was the worst of the kind of Democrat I hate. It didn’t really matter, being in California, but I’m still proud I didn’t vote for that two-faced slickster twice. He’ll be the one speech this week I’ll hit the mute button on.

In 1998 I didn’t vote for Gray Davis for governor, since he was tops on my Shitheaded Asshole List from having dealt with him when he was Brown’s Chief of Staff. I wasn’tall that upset when Ahhhnuld won the recall, since I had met him in Hollywood and knew he wasn’t the terrible kind of Republican (he’s one of the smartest guys I ever met in Duh Biz).

I supported Gore in 2000 because he was running against Junior Bush, but god, what a fucking moron he was; it was like he was trying to lose. The man committed so much political malpractice and fuckwittery, I think he set the all-time record, even more than Dukakis; I can’t even stand listening to him on climate change, even if he is dead-on right.

I was enthusiastic in 2004 since I thought I knew John Kerry from back in the GI antiwar movement, where I’d said to myself after I met him in 1971 that he would be the presidential candidate of my war baby generation. But the Model 1971 Mark 1 John Kerry was a very different guy from the Model 2004 Mark 22 Kerry. I still voted for him but it was more from a sense of duty; after finding out what kind of a piece of shit John Edwards, his vice presidential running mate really was, I still wonder about his judgement.

I knew when I saw and heard Obama give that 2004 keynote address that I was looking at the guy who would be the first black president. I worked my heart out for him from when he declared in 2007 through 2008, and then was shocked to watch him throw it all away with the cabinet and staff choices he made after he was in office. I still love Obama as a person, but he is the biggest political disappointment of my life. Oh how I wish he had listened to different people and made different choices. I should have listened to the “uh-oh” that went through my mind in 2008 when I discovered he considered the unrepentant Weatherman terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn good friends in Chicago. You can know a lot about a person by their choices in friends.

I was not a Hillary fan, but I came around on her and voted enthusiastically in 2016; I wouldhave voted unenthusiasticly ifnecessary, given the stakes. If she’d given one speech in 2016 like the one she gave last night, she’d have won the Electoral College as well as the popular vote.

Joe Biden was not my choice his first two times at bat (which in hindsight I now think was my mistake), but when I heard him say why he was running in 2020 (that he decided he had to run when he heard Trump’s response to Charlottsville), I knew he was the man for the times.

Joe Biden is the best president I can remember in my life. I was only nine months old when FDR died, so he’s someone in the history books - my choice for Number Three of the Three Best Presidents in American History: Washington, Lincoln and FDR; one created the country, one saved the country and one transformed the country. I was too young to know that much about Truman, though I once met him as a teenager, and after studying him historically he’s tied with Joe Biden for Favorite in my book. I used to think of LBJ as the most effective president (domestically) but he enacted everything with a huge progressive Democratic majority that made it easy. Biden accomplished more with a one vote majority in the Senate and six in the House. Truly Amazing.

Looking at Joe’s 50 years in public office, his steadiness is his major attribute; that’s often been boring for much of his career, but it’s absolutely priceless during a crisis such as he faced when he entered office. His list of accomplishments as president is stunning.

I like that Joe’s known what Jesse Unruh taught me in 1975: “If you can’t drink their booze and fuck their women and vote against them the next morning with a smile on your face, you have no business in this business.” Not that I think for a minute that he’s ever done either of those things, but he obviously mastered the ability to “go along to get along” and to find a way to work with people he was diametrically opposed to in the service of progress, and for taking campaign contributions then never quite going full “ROI” and losing his soul. Heknew his beliefs. That’s a real accomplishment in politics, a true talent.

And then this summer he demonstrated his true greatness in the toughest character test a politician like Joe Biden could ever face. And he carried it off in the manner of a master: going “public” with his decision to withdraw his candidacy for re-election in the most damaging way possible to Trump, and then masterminding the succession in such a way that all the idiots in the Democratic Party were so flummoxed they couldn’t do anything but go along with his decision. That’s the work of a real master politician.

He only got half the applause he deserved last night. Maybe not even half.

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