I can’t wait for Vice-President Joe Biden to leave office. I can’t wait for that day, in just a few months, when he hands over the reigns of the vice-presidency and moves the hell out and on.
But let me back up a moment – I’m a lifelong Democrat who voted for him twice. I’m a fellow Catholic who’s been inspired by how Biden’s used his faith to inform his compassion – but not to dictate how other Americans conduct their private lives. I’m a hardscrabble north-easterner, and I’ve spent the past eight years watching the man from Scranton blossom and mature before our eyes.
It’s go time. Biden – much like Democratic predecessor Al Gore – is a man who seems destined to do great things after his tenure in office.
Gore has used his post-White House incarnation to become a leading champion of environmental awareness and action. Freed from the constraints of running for and maintaining political office, he’s been able to effect change with greater gusto. Biden has likewise already earmarked his next big thing: an ambitious cancer “moonshot” initiative to, in his words, “accelerate our efforts to progress towards a cure, and to unleash new discoveries and breakthroughs for other deadly diseases”.
As a Stage 4 cancer survivor whose life was saved by an innovative treatment, I couldn’t be happier to be alive for this breakthrough moment, and to see what the future will bring. (But if Donald Trump somehow actually becomes my nation’s 45th president, I’ll be asking Biden if we can use that moonshot of his to depart this planet for the real moon.)
Biden’s profound investment in spending the next phase of his career advancing the prevention and treatment of cancer is heartbreakingly understandable. Last year, his eldest son Beau died of brain cancer. In a candid and emotional interview last fall with Stephen Colbert, the veep – who in 1972 lost his first wife and baby daughter Naomi in a car accident – spoke on the subjects of loss and making meaning of tragedy.
He said that as his son neared the end of his life, Beau had told him, “Dad, I know how much you love me. Promise me you’re going to be all right.” For Biden, “all right” has clearly come to mean something different than it did when he ran for president in 1988, or as the inevitable speculations about his ambitions for the White House have arisen throughout his second term. Just as his earlier tragedy galvanized his public and private sense of duty, this more recent loss seems to have done much the same.
He’s also lately been laying the groundwork for his future as an advocate for women and the LGBT community. This month alone he penned a heartfelt declaration of support to the Stanford sexual assault survivor, and he delivered an impassioned speech on rape culture at at the recent White House Summit on the United State Of Women.
Biden endorsed marriage equality before Obama did, telling David Gregory on Meet the Press he was “absolutely comfortable” with it on March of 2012. Obama then issued his support three days later.
Biden, the occasionally foul-mouthed, frequently hot-headed caller of malarkey and all around loose cannon to Obama’s sophisticated good cop, is a career politician who has spent much of his time looking like the guy you can’t believe has made a career in politics. He’s a Democrat who’s made feminists chafe at his track record toward Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas supreme court confirmation hearings, and at his tendency to be what’s been described as cluelessly “handsy”. His history of generously borrowing other people’s words has meanwhile earned him the description of “unusually creepy” from Slate.
Yet in life, as we grow up and grow older, we can choose to make our hardships and tragedies an excuse to become cynical and guarded, or an opportunity to become kinder and wiser. This flawed loudmouth from Pennsylvania has spent more than seven decades on this planet learning his lessons, and making his choices. Maybe he could have, at one time, been the president. But I think he’s got a much better job lined up next.
- This article was amended on 18 June 2016 to reflect that Jill Biden did not tweet about Joe Biden running down the halls with a “rainbow flag tied on like a cape high-fiving everyone”.
