Nov 3, 2020
On Election eve, Claudia Cragg speaks for @KGNU with Evan Osnos @eosnos about his book about Joe Biden, 2020 Presidential Candidate for The Democratic Party.
Former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both
the luckiest man and the unluckiest—fortunate to have sustained a
fifty-year political career that reached the White House, but also
marked by deep personal losses and disappointments that he has
suffered.
Yet even as Biden’s life has been shaped by drama, it has also been
powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of politics, to
confront his shortcomings, errors, and reversals of fortune. As he
says, “Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving
up is unforgivable.” His trials have forged in him a deep empathy
for others in hardship—an essential quality as he addresses
Americans in the nation’s most dire hour in decades.
Blending up-close journalism and broader context, Evan Osnos, who
won the National Book Award in 2014, draws on his work
for The New Yorker to capture the characters and
meaning of an extraordinary presidential election. It is based on
lengthy interviews with Biden and on revealing conversations with
more than a hundred others, including President Barack Obama, Cory
Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and a range of progressive
activists, advisers, opponents, and Biden family members.
This portrayal illuminates Biden’s long and eventful career in the
Senate, his eight years as Obama’s vice president, his sojourn in
the political wilderness after being passed over for Hillary
Clinton in 2016, his decision to challenge Donald Trump for the
presidency, and his choice of Senator Kamala Harris as his running
mate.
Osnos ponders the difficulties Biden will face if elected and
weighs how political circumstances, and changes in the candidate’s
thinking, have altered his positions. In this nuanced portrait,
Biden emerges as flawed, yet resolute, and tempered by the flame of
tragedy—a man who just may be uncannily suited for his moment in
history.