46- Joe Biden

There are already books out there!

I just finished Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. This is a somewhat flawed but mostly well-written and interesting bit of reportage about how Joe Biden managed to navigate the turbulent currents of a wild Democratic Party primary season and batten down the hatches during the general election to prevail as the Democratic nominee and defeat Donald Trump to become President of the United States. This is a mostly "inside baseball" report. That is, a lot of time is spent on describing the political machinations and the processes from inside the various campaigns, and those sections are often quite fascinating, though we learn a lot more about, for example, the rivalries and personal conflicts within the Biden, Sanders and Trump campaigns than we do about the candidates themselves. Nevertheless, it's interesting to learn that sort of history, the undercurrents of the election season that were mostly not on view to the general public. According to this narrative, Biden believed that his name recognition, the body of work he'd turned in over his decades-long political career, his association with Barak Obama via his two terms of Obama's vice president would serve to make his case to the country that he was experienced enough, well meaning enough and calm enough to serve as the antidote to Donald Trump and get him elected president. What America wanted, went Biden's theory, as a compassionate, non-controversial figure. Especially during the primary season, the attraction would be to nominate someone capable of projecting the kind of calm needed to defeat Trump. Also, and very importantly, Biden was help in high regard by many in the African American community and was thought of as the candidate who could attract high vote totals from people of color in general. In other words, he was at the same time the Anti-Trump and the Anti-Sanders. This book is, basically, the narrative of how this theory in the event played out successfully, though, as the title tells us, not without huge dollops of good luck at just the right times.