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.
"I believe that we were not letting an awful lot of people _ high school-educated, mostly Caucasian, but also people of color _ know that we understood their problems."
There's "a bit of elitism that's crept in" to party thinking, he worries, setting up what he sees as the false impression that progressive values are inconsistent with working-class values.
"What are the arguments we're hearing? 'Well, we've got to be more progressive.' I'm not saying we should be less progressive," he said, adding that he would "stack my progressive credentials against anyone" in the party.
"We should be proud of where the hell we are, and not yield an inch. But," he added, "in the meantime, you can't eat equality. You know?"
He also distinguishes what he describes as the middle-class agenda that President Obama has put forth from the more populist, anti-Wall Street message that helped power Bernie Sanders' rise in the Democratic primary.
"I like Bernie," Biden said, adding he agrees with the Vermont senator on many issues. "But I don't think 500 billionaires caused all our problems."
