8

From Gaffes to Glory (2008–2016)

“The number one issue facing the middle class [is] a three-letter word: Jobs.

J-O-B-S.”

JOE.

JOE.

How many times did Barack Obama say that to himself?

At times, the gaffes seemed endless. On the campaign trail, Biden reminded us that “when the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television,” yet the stock market crashed in 1929, or about three years before FDR became president.

Then he gave an omen: “Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. Watch, we’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis to test the mettle of this guy.” Republicans smacked their lips, weaponizing this line against Obama.

In a classic moment of Biden-y bluntness, he said that Hillary Clinton was “as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of America, and quite frankly, it might have been a better pick.” Okay, Joe. And Republicans gleefully pounced on a careless comment from earlier in the election, when he said that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” He was trying to make the point that the demographics had changed and there was now a larger Indian population in Delaware, but still. Joe.

But wait, there’s more! At a campaign rally, feeding off the energy of the room, Biden raised his voice, joyful, and urged a man named Chuck Graham, a state senator, to stand up and show himself to the crowd. “Stand up, Chuck! Let ’em see ya! Stand up, Chuck!”

Only one hiccup.

Chuck was in a wheelchair.

“Oh, God love ya, what am I talking about?” Biden said, scrambling to recover. “I tell you what, you’re making everyone else stand up though, pal. Thank you very, very much.” He turned back to the crowd. “I tell you what, stand up for Chuck!” The crowd stood, cheered, clapped, and Biden left the podium to go meet Chuck and shake his hand, smiling. “You can tell I’m new.”

Thanks to goofs like this, reports later surfaced of friction between Obama and his No. 2. At one point “a chill set in between [Obama headquarters] and the Biden plane,” according to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, authors of Game Change, and “Joe and Obama barely spoke by phone, barely campaigned together.” They report that Obama became “increasingly frustrated with his running mate after Biden let loose with a string of gaffes,” and when Biden “made the prediction that Obama would be tested with an international crisis, the Illinois senator had had enough. ‘How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?’ he demanded of his advisers on a conference call.”

Yet even on the bumpy road of the campaign, Biden started to put these miscues behind him and show Team Obama, as he said years ago, “the essence of Joe Biden.” Videographer Arun Chaudhary’s team was split in two—most on Obama’s plane, then some on Biden’s. “At first, people would complain when they had to do Biden duty, because it felt like you were getting kicked off the grown-up plane and put on the junior plane,” says Chaudhary. “And then, one by one, Joe Biden just won them over. Every one of them would come back to me with some story like, ‘It was late at night, and we were just talking, and he wanted to know about my family, and he had really good questions.’ All of a sudden, the prized job was to be on the Biden plane.”

The team soon found that the Biden energy was nonstop. At a random hotel in Ohio, to blow off some steam, Herbie Ziskend hit the gym and did some abs work. He then saw this guy in the corner going full-speed, hyperintense, wearing a ball cap. Is that Joe frickin’ Biden? “He’s doing endless pushups and biceps curls,” says Ziskend. “He’s obviously working harder than anybody. And he’s forty-five years older than me.”

Sometimes the best Biden moments are the small ones, the tiny gestures, the lift of an eyebrow or the squeeze of a bicep. Chaudhary remembers following both Obama and Biden to a biodiesel factory that takes chicken waste and converts it into energy. Obama, true to form, made some comments about the importance of biodiesel fuel and how it relates to energy policy. Biden? “He just kept holding up vials of liquid and saying, ‘Chicken manure,’ in this really satisfied tone of voice,” says Chaudhary. You can visualize the solemn nod, the squinted eyes, the hint of a smile. Chicken manure. Heh.

Given the backdrop of all the prior gaffes, Biden probably doesn’t get enough credit for the trickiest job he had in the 2008 campaign: the debate against Sarah Palin. This could have so easily gone sideways. Biden had thirty-six years of senatorial experience, he had met every world leader, and, boy, did he love telling you how much he knew. Sarah Palin, well, was Sarah Palin. If Biden said anything that could be perceived as belittling, condescending, sexist, or mansplaining, then suddenly Palin would emerge with a bounce, and God knows how that might wound the campaign.

He took the debate seriously. Unlike that fateful debate in ’87 where he winged it and flubbed the Neil Kinnock quote, this time he knuckled down. Practiced. And when he finished his prep sessions, the last two people in the room were his sons, Hunter and Beau. He had always given them that privilege to ease their minds: wild card. Now they had the chance to return the favor. To comfort him and to give him calm, Beau looked at Joe and said, “Look at me, Dad. Look at me. Remember, remember home base. Remember.”

WISDOM OF JOE

Remember home base.

Biden remembered. Against Palin he struck just the right note of competence, statesmanship, and humility. Saturday Night Live had a field day with what Biden presumably wanted to say. “My goal tonight was a simple one,” said SNL-Biden, as played by Jason Sudeikis. “To come up here, and at no point seem like a condescending, egomaniacal bully. And I’m gonna be honest, I think I nailed it. Sure, there are moments when I wanted to say, Hey, this lady’s a dummy!, but I didn’t. Because Joe Biden is better than that. I repeat. Joe Biden is better than that.” SNL took one more swing that’s worth revisiting. You know how Biden always talks about his working-class roots of Scranton? SNL-Biden takes it up a notch: “I come from Scranton, Pennsylvania. And that’s as hardscrabbled a place as you’re going to find. I’ll show you around sometime, and you’ll see. It’s a hellhole! An absolute jerk-water of a town…It’s just an awful, awful sad place. So don’t be telling me that I’m part of the Washington elite, because I come from the absolute worst place on earth, Scranton, Pennsylvania,” He flashes a Biden-smile. “And Wilmington, Delaware’s, not much better.”

Boosted, at least in part, by Biden’s strong performance, Obama won both the electoral college (365–173) and the popular vote, which is something that used to happen in American history. And in January of 2009, Joe Biden took two different Oaths of Office. One was for VP, the other for senator. In what must have been a bittersweet departure, after thirty-six years of fighting for his beloved Delaware constituents, he had won his old Senate seat for the seventh—seventh!—straight time. (Biden’s vacant seat would be filled by the guy who had supported him, faithfully, since that very first Hail Mary in ’72: Ted Kaufman.) After officially becoming the United States’ forty-seventh vice president, Biden joined in the celebratory parade, did a little jog, and smiled as well-wishers shouted “Joe! Joe! Joe!” The Secret Service gave him a code name: Celtic.

Biden immediately made himself useful, helping to persuade Hillary Clinton to accept secretary of state. (The two were close from their years in the Senate, and on the phone he’d tell her, “I love you, darling.” Before you think that he’s flirting, remember that Joe Biden loves everyone.)

And if people thought that Joe Biden was going to keep his mouth shut when he became vice president, people didn’t know Joe Biden. He kept saying what he saw as the God’s honest truth…even when it hurt him. In the early days he acknowledged that “If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, if we stand up there and we really make the tough decisions, there’s still a thirty percent chance we’re going to get it wrong.”

The press drooled over this one: 30 percent chance you’re going to get it wrong? And get what wrong, precisely?

At Obama’s very first prime-time press briefing (remember those?), he was asked about this mysterious 30 percent. “What were you talking about?” the reporter asked. “In general [do] you agree with that ratio of success, 30 percent failure, 70 percent success?”

Obama laughed. “You know, I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to, not surprisingly.”

The reporters chuckled.

“But let me try this out.” Obama then gave a lengthy, measured response about how their decisions might have uncertain consequences, and how the country needed a recovery package, and yada yada yada; then he admitted, finally, “I have no idea. I really don’t.”

Wait, did Obama just throw some shade at Biden? That’s sure what it sounded like to Maureen Dowd, who wrote, “Joe is nothing if not loyal. And the president should return that quality, and not leave his lieutenant vulnerable to Odd Couple parodies.”

“Biden felt insulted,” reported Newsweek. “Through staffers, Obama apologized, protesting that he had meant no disrespect. But at one of their regularly scheduled weekly lunches, Biden directly raised the incident with the president. The veep said he was trying to be more disciplined about his own remarks, but he asked in return that the president refrain from making fun (and require his staff to do likewise). He made the point that even the impression that the president was dissing him was not only bad for Biden, but bad for the administration. The conversation cleared the air.”

Given the deep friendship we now associate with Biden and Obama, this feels like ancient history, but it’s sneakily instructive. Those early hiccups suggest that the Obama/Biden friendship was not inevitable, it was not always easy, and sometimes it wobbled. All relationships, even bromances, take work.

Before Biden had time to truly settle into his new residence at the Naval Observatory, Team Obama was tossed another curveball: swine flu. As the nation started to panic, Biden said on Today, “I would tell members of my family—and I have—I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now.” More panic. The travel industry blew a gasket. Once again Biden had gone off-script. Later that evening, Biden ran into Ziskend and threw an arm around him, staying upbeat, boosting morale. “Are we winning today?” he asked with that smile of his.

“I don’t know about today, sir,” Ziskend said a bit nervously.

A beat. “You’re right, we’re not,” Biden said.

It lightened the mood and gave Ziskend some perspective. “He was being funny, but he was also showing me that, well, he had had many days,” Ziskend says now. “He’d been doing this for thirty-six years. It’s a lesson to all the people who were running around like headless chickens—this is one day, and there were going to be many, many more days. When you’ve seen enough of these cycles, you know how it goes.” This type of mind-set, and a focus on the longer arc, is what helps Biden avoid getting flustered by minor gaffes, and pivot to the important work that lies ahead.

WISDOM OF JOE

There will be many more days.

Meanwhile, Biden had to figure out the answer to a very simple question: What does a vice president do, exactly? If you ask John Adams, it’s the “most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.” In LBJ’s opinion, the office isn’t “worth a warm bucket of piss.” And if you’re Aaron Burr, well, maybe you shoot someone in a duel.

Biden understood that because the Constitution failed to provide a VP instruction manual, he would need to study the people who had come before him, analyze what worked and what didn’t, and then choose a model to follow. To help with his due diligence, he met in person with not just the Democrats (Al Gore and Walter Mondale), but also Dick Cheney and George H. W. Bush. He thought about the various VP archetypes:

DICK CHENEY: Biden considered him the most dangerous veep in the nation’s history, and on the campaign he had vowed to “restore the balance” of the vice president. Perhaps he met with Cheney to figure out what not to do, or as a courtesy, but this was (clearly) not his model.

DAN QUAYLE: Biden viewed Quayle as strictly an ideologue, and therefore not the right model. That said…“My favorite vice president is Dan Quayle,” Biden later said to his sister, Val. This threw her. Um, why? Because Quayle had installed a pool at the VP’s residence, and now Biden’s grandkids could use it to go swimming, and he could run around with squirt guns.

AL GORE: Gore tended to focus on a few key areas—government reorganization, technology, and obviously the environment. Biden was tempted by this, but he was concerned about getting stuck in just one or two boxes, unable to see the full picture.

WALTER MONDALE: Mondale was perhaps the dark horse, but Biden found him appealing. He thought about the historical parallels to Jimmy Carter, who came into office young, inexperienced, and with a veteran veep. Back in the ’70s, Mondale had written Carter a memo outlining how he could function as something of a general advisor, a do-it-all trusted confidant. “Mondale gave Biden a copy of the memo, and they met three times,” explains Witcover. “Biden, who thought similarly, concluded that this model was better suited to Obama’s needs and his own desires and skills. With Obama’s full agreement, Biden proceeded to organize his own vice presidency accordingly.”

From the jump, Biden thought of himself as the advisor-in-chief. “Every single solitary appointment he has made thus far, I have been in the room,” he said in December 2008. “The recommendations I have made in most cases, coincidentally, have been the recommendations that he’s picked. Not because I made them, but because we think a lot alike.” Biden quickly became a steady hand, a go-to guy whom Obama could dispatch to solve seemingly any problem: Joe, you do Iraq. Joe, you do the debt ceiling. Joe, you do the Stimulus tracking. The gaffes would melt into the background. Despite the caricatures, he would not be Uncle Joe, and while a few lovable, shoot-from-the-hip moments of candor would still bubble to the surface, they would not define his vice presidency. Instead he played many roles, and he played them well. Let’s look at each.

JOE THE AMBASSADOR

This role was a natural fit. Obama would send Biden to crisscross the globe, leveraging all those years on the world stage. Take Jerusalem. In 2010, Biden flew to Israel to give a speech in which he promised “absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to Israeli security.” So far so good! Then things got awkward when Israel announced—while Biden was there—that they would build 1,600 new settlements.

Shit. How to play this? He didn’t mince words (he never does). In public he blasted the move, charging that it “undermines the trust we need right now.” Then he took it up a notch. He and Jill were scheduled to have a double dinner-date with Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu and his wife, Sara. Biden showed up late, sending a clear signal.

He later pulled Netanyahu aside, and to underscore the point that Bibi should take a bigger step for peace—nothing small would do—he told the Israeli prime minister some old advice from his father: “There’s no sense dying on a small cross.” Was there awkward silence? A glare? As one pundit said, “Few American politicians would think it wise to invoke crucifixion in a conversation with the leader of the Jewish state,” but after Biden’s folksy dollop of wisdom…Netanyahu just laughed. “I have to tell you,” an Israeli ambassador said at the time, “it is the single most succinct understanding of Israeli political reality of any other statement that I’ve heard.”

Herbie Ziskend was there for this now-legendary interaction. “He had known Netanyahu for decades. I don’t know how that scenario would have played out if he had been, like, a one-term governor and had never met Netanyahu,” says Ziskend. “But it was like two old friends reconnecting. Again, it speaks to just the importance of those long-term relationships.”

Biden’s secret to diplomacy? It comes down to authenticity, which sometimes requires you to go off-script, to ditch the canned rhetoric. Biden would roll his eyes at the “official” talking points. “They’ll give me a line and I’ll say, ‘I’m not gonna say that! That’s simply not believable!’ ” he said in 2014. “It’s really very important, if you are able, to communicate to the other guy that you understand his problem. And some of this diplomatic bullshit communicates, ‘We have no idea of your problem.’ ”

Thanks to all of Biden’s strong relationships, he would soon be tapped for missions in Ukraine, Japan, Korea, Colombia. “This personal element is, perhaps, why Biden is regularly handed the lemons in the foreign-policy sphere—the tough, unglamorous cases, the ones that have to be worked for a long time,” suggests The Atlantic’s Steve Clemons. “There are leaders Obama never really warmed up to. Biden tends these relationships.”

And as we saw with Milošević, the war criminal, sometimes diplomacy takes some tough love. In 2011, Biden met with Vladimir Putin in his Kremlin office. Putin, proud of the handsome furniture and decorations, turned to Biden and said through an interpreter, “It’s amazing what capitalism will do, won’t it? A magnificent office!”

Biden moved close to Vlad, close, closer, closer—so close that the two men could almost kiss—and said, “Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.”

Putin looked back at him. Smiled. “We understand one another.”

JOE THE POT-STIRRER

Biden likes to ask the tough questions. Challenge assumptions. So when Obama was faced with the most agonizing choices of his presidency—like whether to boost the number of troops in Afghanistan—Biden unleashed his inner interrogator, just like he did when chairing the Bork proceedings.

Quick recap: As the war in Afghanistan slid into mayhem, the generals requested 50,000 more troops. Obama refused to make a snap decision. (Too many wars, in Obama’s mind, were launched by snap decisions.) So the president demanded more data, more options, more intel, determined to undergo a rigorous review. Obama and the generals had meeting after meeting.

Biden was the chief skeptic, pressing the generals and pushing for clarity.

“In the midst of that debate, Joe and I would have lengthy one-on-one conversations, trying to tease out what, precisely, are our interests in Afghanistan, what exactly can we achieve there,” Obama explained to The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos. “There were times where Joe would ask questions, essentially on my behalf, to give me decision-making space, to help stir up a vigorous debate.”

In one meeting in the Situation Room, as Newsweek reported, Biden interjected with a question. “Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?”

$65 billion.

“And how much will we spend on Pakistan?”

$2.25 billion.

“Well, by my calculations that’s a thirty-to-one ratio in favor of Afghanistan,” Biden continued. “So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we’re spending in Pakistan, we’re spending thirty dollars in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?”

Silence. “But the questions had their desired effect,” reported Newsweek’s Holly Bailey. “Those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.”

Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, health care, budget reconciliation deals—Biden was always there, always stirring the pot. “Joe is very good about sometimes articulating what’s on other people’s minds, or things that they’ve said in private conversations that people have been less willing to say in public,” said Obama. “Joe’s not afraid to tell me what he thinks. And that’s exactly what I need, and exactly what I want.”

WISDOM OF JOE

Have the guts to ask the tough questions.

And let’s not forget another pot that he stirred. On May 6, 2012, on Meet the Press, David Gregory asked Biden if his views on gay marriage had evolved.

Biden spoke slowly, quietly, earnestly. “This is all about…a simple proposition,” he said, hands clasped. “Who do you love? Who do you love, and will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out is what all marriages at their root are about. Whether they are marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals.”

Gregory wanted to clarify. “And you’re comfortable with same-sex marriage now?”

“I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying one another, are entitled to the same exact rights,” Biden said. “All the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that.”

Whether he had intended to or not, Joe Biden had just made history, and we all know what happened next. This is “accidental wisdom” at its finest.

JOE THE DEAL-MAKER

In 2009, the Democrats controlled fifty-nine seats in the Senate. That wasn’t enough to muscle through the Affordable Care Act, where they would need sixty to break a filibuster.

Yet they had a surprising card to play. Senator Arlen Specter, from Pennsylvania, had been a Republican since 1965. Yet guess who he knew from years of commuting on the Amtrak? He and Biden were close. When Joe sensed that his friend was wavering, he met with Specter six times in person and called him an additional eight times, urging him to switch teams and join the Democrats. The courtship paid off. (Quick refresher: Back in 1991, then-Republican Arlen Specter had a cameo in the Clarence Thomas hearings, acting as Anita Hill’s interrogator. Biden knows that yesterday’s opponent can be today’s ally….)

When Specter hopped across the aisle, the Democrats now had exactly sixty senators. Without Biden’s charm campaign, would the ACA have passed? Obviously the future of health care will be debated for years and decades, but the one thing we know is that, as Biden said the day it passed—while miked-up for all the world to hear—“This is a big fucking deal.”

And when Republicans threatened to not raise the debt ceiling, which suddenly risked an economic meltdown, Biden got on the phone with his old frenemy Mitch McConnell. As a Reuters headline put it, Biden was seen as the “last hope” for the negotiations. He huddled up with a gang of his old colleagues, Democrats and Republicans. A deal didn’t happen overnight. Some Republicans left the table, then came back. They had a second session, a third session. The nightmare stretched for months. And when a compromise was finally secured, Obama and John Boehner would announce the deal and get all the credit, but “it was Biden’s close working relationship with McConnell that broke the months-long logjam,” according to Politico.

As McConnell later said, “We got results that would not have been possible without a negotiating partner like Joe Biden. Obviously, I don’t always agree with him, but I do trust him.” This might be why Biden has another nickname: “The McConnell Whisperer.”

JOE THE COMEDIAN

The Gridiron Club is one of the oldest organizations of journalists. Every year, the president is invited to a comedy roast of the Who’s Who in media—basically a JV version of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Politicians are expected to tell jokes. One year Obama played hooky at Camp David, and asked Biden to pinch-hit.

Biden’s eyes must have gone wide. Finally he gets to say whatever the hell he wants, with no penalty! It’s supposed to be funny! Some of his stand-up bits:

This was Biden trying to be funny. As we all know, he does his best work when the comedy is unintentional. Like when he visited Harvard and met the vice president of the student body, and said off the cuff, grinning, “Isn’t it a bitch, this vice president thing?”

Or the time when he introduced an elderly couple, commenting, “There’s an old Irish saying, that says, may the hinges of your friendship never go rusty.” Biden said to the crowd, “Well, with these two folks, there’s no doubt about them staying oiled and lubricated.” He heard the crowd laugh and groan, and then cracked a large grin, suddenly realizing what he had just implied. “Now, for you who are not Irish…‘lubricated’ has a different meaning for us Irish.”

Biden seemed to have a special fondness for Irish gaffes. Take the time he introduced the prime minister of Ireland. Likely thrilled to get back in touch with his Celtic roots, Biden told reporters, with the prime minister right beside him, “His mom lived in Long Island for ten years or so. God rest her soul.”

Biden then paused, thought for a quick second. “Although, she’s—wait—your mom’s still alive. It was your dad [who] passed.”

Ireland’s PM awkwardly nodded.

Biden didn’t miss a beat. “God bless her soul!” he said, laughing, and the prime minister laughed, too.

JOE THE RAINMAKER

In February of 2009, Congress passed the $787 billion stimulus package to help rescue the economy from the maw of depression. That was the headline. But what happened next? Where did the money go? Who kept track of it?

Joe Biden kept track of it.

Obama gave Biden the sprawling job of overseeing the project. As Biden says, it’s “the largest economic stimulus in history, larger than the entire New Deal.” $30 billion to health information technology. $48 billion to transportation projects. $90 billion into renewable power and advanced biofuels. (Those vials of liquids from the factory again. Biofuels. Chicken manure. Heh.)

Like he does with everything, he obsessed over the details until he became a wonk. In June of 2010, for example, Biden joined Mayor Bloomberg at the Brooklyn Bridge, where funds had been allocated for repairs and upgrades. It was a fairly innocent event—just a quick speech about how the stimulus bill was helping to fund roads and tunnels and bridges. Nothing too complicated.

“But then he started drilling me on the components of every piece of spending,” remembers Ziskend. “And he had this deep understanding of the most efficient way that federal dollars can go into bridges and tunnels and roads, and he starts just asking me every piece of it. And it was amazing.”

JOE THE HUGGER

In 2009, Biden took trip after trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. He needed to. Obama had asked him to give a no-bullshit assessment of the facts on the ground, good or bad. Biden would meet with the troops, give them pep talks. (“As corny as it sounds, damn, I’m proud to be an American,” he said to one crew.) On one of these trips, Biden met with a unit of soldiers that happened to have a certain captain in their ranks—a man who had volunteered for National Guard duty…Captain Beau Biden, wearing his desert fatigues. Father and son had an emotional hug.

Then Biden hit the cafeteria to mix it up with the soldiers. “He lit up like a 1,000-watt bulb,” reported the New York Times’s James Traub. “Biden shook every hand, and threw his arm around every shoulder—hundreds and hundreds of them. ‘How are you, man?’ he cried, with fresh joy, to each table of soldiers. ‘Did you get a picture of me?’ A soldier said politely, ‘Look this way, sir,’ and Biden, who has the blinding white teeth of a starlet, whirled around with a huge smile. The vice president never stopped moving, smiling, or talking.”

Biden has always been a hugger, regardless of whether his victims are men, women, kids, grandpas, family, strangers. Take the swearing-in ceremonies of new senators (in both 2013 and 2015), which were caught on C-SPAN, and which have become something of a Biden cult classic. “You’ve got beautiful eyes, Mom, holy mackerel!” he said to one old lady. He mugged for selfies. Touched another old lady’s cheek. Rubbed shoulders. He appraised one couple and said, “You married up, son.” To a muscular guy he said, “Call me if you need help on your pecs.”

JOE (AND JILL) THE PRANKSTERS

The Internet fell in love with the idea of Joe the Prankster. And there might be some truth to this. Biden would hide M&Ms throughout the White House, as something of a gentle ribbing to Michelle Obama’s healthy eating campaign. And it’s definitely true that Biden is a prankster…

…Jill Biden.

She took pride in her nickname of “Captain of the Vice Squad,” and she earned that title with stunt after stunt, such as the one Valentine’s Day when she snuck into Joe’s office to use a stick of lipstick to graffiti the windows with “Jill loves Joe” and “Happy [Heart] Valentine’s Day.” And if this strikes you as treacly, you’ll be happy to know that on Halloween, she once surprised Joe by placing a fake rat on his podium.

One morning after getting up early, while Joe was still in bed, she raced into the room to wake him up. “Joe, don’t you have a breakfast this morning? People are coming through the gate!”

He threw off the covers, panicked, and said, “I do, I do!”

“April Fool’s!” Jill yelled out.

She has been known to wear disguises, like the time she pretended to be a server at a party she hosted. She has worn red wigs.

Yet nothing will top the time that Joe, on Air Force Two, reached up to open the overhead compartment, ready to stow his luggage.

Boo!

Jill had climbed into the overheard compartment, just to surprise him.

But just like her husband, beneath the pranks and the jokes is a person of rock-solid values, hard work, and a lifelong devotion to public service—in her case, through teaching. She taught English at community colleges for decades, earned her doctoral degree at the University of Delaware, and then Dr. Jill Biden became, as Obama put it, “the first Second Lady in our nation’s history to keep her day job,” as she kept teaching classes. She wrote a children’s book titled Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops, inspired by Beau’s deployment in Iraq, and how that affected his daughter. Along with Michelle Obama she cofounded Joining Forces, which supports veterans and military families, and she also found time to launch the Biden Breast Health Initiative.

So it’s easy to understand why Joe sometimes introduces himself as “Jill’s husband.” Although other times he’s less smooth, like when he gave a speech praising the nation’s teachers, calling them “the best-kept secret in America,” and then said, “I think I’d have the same attitude [even if] I did not sleep with a community college professor every night.” The crowd laughed. Biden quickly clarified. “Oh, the same one, the same one!”

We all know that oldest of clichés, “Love takes work,” and perhaps that’s true, but sometimes it just takes a damn good laugh.

JOE THE COOL BOSS

In January of 2009, on his very first team meeting, Biden told his staff something that they didn’t expect to hear. They had likely envisioned a talk about the importance of the job, the long hours they would need to work, or the sacrifices that they would make. And of course they would indeed work long hours and sacrifice, but that was not Biden’s message.

“The absolute most important thing is your family,” Biden told his staff, as Ziskend remembers. “Make sure that’s all taken care of. I don’t want to hear that you’re putting off going to a Little League game, or that you’re straining your relationships because you’re not seeing your loved one.”

Ziskend couldn’t believe it. “This was our first staff meeting. He really set the example.” And Biden stuck by that principle. Years later, in 2014, he sent a memo to his staff on work-life balance. It’s worth printing in full:

To My Wonderful Staff,

I would like to take a moment and make something clear to everyone. I do not expect, nor do I want, any of you to miss or sacrifice important family obligations for work. Family obligations include, but are not limited to, family birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, any religious ceremonies, such as first communions and bar mitzvahs, graduations, and times of need, such as an illness or a loss in the family. This is very important to me. In fact, I will go so far as to say that if I find out that you are working with me while missing important family responsibilities, it will disappoint me greatly. This has been an unwritten rule since my days in the Senate.

Thank you all for the hard work.

Sincerely,

Joe

The staff was touched. The world was touched. And when we know Joe Biden’s full story—especially the story of what would happen just a year later, with Beau—we know that when it comes to family, he means every damn one of these words. By nearly any conceivable standard, Biden’s run as VP had been a success. He had racked up the wins. Yet no matter how well things are going in your career, as Biden once said, “Reality has a way of intruding.”

Reality intruded in 1972. Reality would intrude once more.