Skip to main content

New top story from Time: Joe Biden Is Unmatched as America’s Grief Counselor

https://ift.tt/2PsVMnO

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

It was a few days before Christmas 2019 and Joe Biden was lingering after a campaign stop in Ottumwa, Iowa. He had been a consistent fourth-place contender in recent weeks’ polls in the lead-off state, his campaign bus looked to be skidding toward the caucuses without a steady hand on the wheel and most of the political oxygen was being huffed by what we now know was just the first impeachment of Donald Trump. But Biden was stubbornly holding out hope, his aides were trying to project calm and most of the reporters in the back of the barns, bingo halls and busses were filling notebooks with color for the What Went Wrong? stories we had all been sketching in our minds.

But there in Ottumwa, when a woman went up to him after his Dec. 21 meeting and started to tell him about her 9-year-old daughter’s unsuccessful six-year fight with cancer, Biden’s rationale for going forward with the seemingly hapless campaign made sense. Biden put both of his hands on Jennifer Stormbern’s shoulders and whispered a message of comfort to her. Her shoulders shook a little as Biden kept his voice low, presumably talking about his late son Beau, who had died four years earlier after a fight with brain cancer.

I walked over to Stormbern after and asked her about the exchange. It was clearly an emotional moment for both her and the former Vice President in the hotel ballroom. “He’s a dad. And you never, ever get over a loss like that,” she told me. And that, she said, was one of the reasons she was paying attention to Biden’s campaign and its message of bringing decency back to the White House.

It’s only been two months, and Biden has already shown us that, in moments of national trauma, he is America’s Grief Counselor. On the eve of his Inauguration, Biden installed a temporary memorial along the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool to mark the 400,000 lives lost to the coronavirus pandemic. When it hit 500,000 a month later, he eulogized the lives lost while encouraging the living to keep the faith. And now, twice in the last week, Biden has again stepped forward to show the nation — and the world — how to emote through another kind of crisis. First, the killing of eight in Atlanta. Then, this week, with the killing of another 10 in Boulder, Colo.

He’s been calm but not cold. Comforting, but hardly weak.“I’ll have much more to say as we learn more, but I wanted to be clear: Those poor folks who died left behind families. That leaves a big hole in their hearts,” Biden said in the White House’s State Dining Room yesterday. Within hours, he was in Columbus, Ohio, inspecting technology to treat the exact form of brain cancer that claimed Beau Biden.

Biden has been in this role before. As my colleague Molly Ball wrote in January of 2020, right as Biden was spinning toward a disappointing fourth-place finish in Iowa and a fifth-place end in New Hampshire: “For nearly a half-century, the nation has watched Biden wrestle publicly with sorrow. At countless funerals, he has eulogized Americans great and ordinary, all while nursing his own barely concealed wounds.” A New York Times review of his eulogies, collected in an oversized binder in the Biden archives, tallied them at close to 60. One of his closest friends in the Senate, Chris Coons, says Biden’s ability to comfort those weathering loss is his “superpower.”

That empathy was on constant display on the campaign trail. What he lacked in pizzaz at the front of auditoriums, he more than compensated with one-on-one connections. Biden’s resilience is as much a part of his brand as his aviator sunglasses and affinity for ice cream. In his own way, Biden is a survivor of the first order, a man who has been through ordeals that would have broken others. His advisers worried that when COVID-19 forced him to rethink how he would campaign, that he may lose this chance to connect to voters, so unique to him in 2020. Zoom didn’t really lend itself to such moments, but the reservoir of goodwill and credibility he had built was sufficient. And his rival, Trump, was no match.

Now that things are slowly starting to reset to pre-pandemic conditions, a vaccinated Biden is back in his counselor role. He’s able to escape the necessary bubble that grew around most of us and made trips to the grocery store into special events. It’s not the five-state-a-day pace that marks the end of a big campaign, but it’s also a decided upgrade from parking lots and drive-in rallies that kept people physically apart. And, in those kinds of interactions, Biden finds a connection that is rare in politics, one beyond partisanship. You can disagree with Biden on every gram of his platform, but it’s tough for even his harshest critics to question the sincerity of his heart.

“He’s got more compassion in his little finger than anyone I’ve met,” 70-year-old Mary Luce told me that same day in Ottumwa as the banisters in that hotel were wrapped in plastic garland for Christmas a few days away. “You can’t not after going through that. And that’s what would make him such a good leader.”

It turns out enough Americans made that same deal with themselves. And twice now in the last week, it’s been Biden’s turn to stand before the cameras and tell us it’s OK to be upset. After all, he knows the feeling all too well and still gets out of bed every morning, ready to believe, despite the evidence, that things will get better.

Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the daily D.C. Brief newsletter.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

FOX NEWS: Americans will suffer 5 sweaty, sleepless nights before turning on the AC for the summer, survey finds Nearly half of Americans wouldn’t date someone who didn’t have the same thermostat etiquette as them, according to new research.

Americans will suffer 5 sweaty, sleepless nights before turning on the AC for the summer, survey finds Nearly half of Americans wouldn’t date someone who didn’t have the same thermostat etiquette as them, according to new research. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/2Ay0ABA

New top story from Time: A COVID Outbreak Sparked by Partying Teens Leads to 5,000 Being Quarantined in Spain

https://ift.tt/2UJaeL7 MADRID — Almost 5,000 people are in quarantine after vacationing high school students triggered a major COVID-19 outbreak on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, a senior official said Monday. Authorities have confirmed almost 1,200 positive cases from the outbreak, Spain’s emergency health response coordinator, Fernando Simón said. The partying teens celebrating the end of their university entrance exams last week created a “perfect breeding ground” for the virus as they mixed with others from around Spain and abroad, Simón told a news conference. Mallorca health authorities carried out mass testing on hundreds of students after the outbreak became clear. It is believed to have spread as hundreds of partying students gathered at a concert and street parties. Officials have so far traced 5,126 travelers to Mallorca. More than 900 COVID-19 cases in eight regions across mainland Spain have been traced back to the outbreak. Scores of infected teens are...

PM Modi lauds IFS officers for their work towards serving nation, furthering national interests https://ift.tt/36HoEzw

Greeting Indian Foreign Service officers on IFS day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that their work towards serving the nation and furthering national interests globally are commendable. Their efforts during the Vande Bharat Mission, which was launched to bring Indians home from abroad during the COVID-19 pandemic as international travel came to a halt, and other related help to our citizens and other nations is noteworthy, Modi added.

New Sculptures Light up Van Ness Avenue

New Sculptures Light up Van Ness Avenue By Luis “Loui” Apolonio Light sculpture at Van Ness Avenue and O'Farrell Street Spectators gathered both online and in person to watch new lighting sculptures on Van Ness turned on for the first time on March 31, 2022. The whimsical and brightly colored sculptures located on the new Van Ness BRT boarding platform between Geary and O’Farrell are made of steel with LED lights inside on a timer set to illuminate at night.  The lighting event was kicked off with SFMTA Director Jeff Tumlin and MTAB Chair Gwyneth Borden serving as emcees. Mary Chou, Director of Public Arts and Collections at the San Francisco Arts Commission, spoke about the art installation itself, as well as the process for selecting the artist who would be awarded the project. In addition, Maddy Ruvolo, a member of the SFMTA’s Accessible Services team and a recently appointed member of President Biden’s U.S. Access Board, shared the importance of having accessibility as a ...

Happy Lunar New Year 2022: Year of the Tiger 

Happy Lunar New Year 2022: Year of the Tiger  By Pamela Johnson Lunar New Year is one of the biggest holidays celebrated in many Asian communities. Diverse San Franciscan communities including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese people have long celebrated this festive occasion.  For many, the Lunar New Year brings a fresh mindset and resolutions for happiness and health. A zodiac animal with specific traits represents each year in the repeating zodiac cycle of 12 years. 2022 is the Year of the Tiger, the third animal in the zodiac. The tiger is considered courageous and adventurous.   The holiday follows the moon's cycles and usually begins in late January or early February. This year Lunar New Year begins February 1.   Fun Fact: In the lunar calendar, the Vietnamese zodiac and the Chinese zodiac are similar, but the Vietnamese zodiac includes a cat while the Chinese ...

New T Third Connecting Chinatown to Sunnydale Starts Saturday

New T Third Connecting Chinatown to Sunnydale Starts Saturday By Christopher Ward New Muni Metro map. This Saturday the T Third starts its long-awaited new route connecting Chinatown-Rose Pak Station from 4th & King in Central Subway, Mondays through Fridays, 6 a.m. to midnight every 10 minutes and Saturdays and Sundays, 8 a.m. to midnight every 12 minutes.   The K Ingleside will now travel between Balboa Park and Embarcadero Station. Customers using Embarcadero & Folsom, Embarcadero & Brannan and 2nd and King platforms should transfer to the N Judah at Powell Station or 4th & King. Watch the new Muni Metro service  map animations . The following bus service changes also start this Saturday: The T Third Bus will now run along 3rd and 4th Streets in SoMa and on Stockton Street north of Market Street to align with the new T Third rail line and will no longer travel on the Embarcadero and Market Street.   The 6 Haight/Parnassus  will now...

FOX NEWS: Couple gets married at 'most beautiful' Taco Bell: 'It was the best of both worlds' Analicia Garcia, 24, and Kyle Howser, 25, from Sacramento, California, got married on Tuesday, Oct. 26 and had their reception at the famous Pacifica, California, Taco Bell.

Couple gets married at 'most beautiful' Taco Bell: 'It was the best of both worlds' Analicia Garcia, 24, and Kyle Howser, 25, from Sacramento, California, got married on Tuesday, Oct. 26 and had their reception at the famous Pacifica, California, Taco Bell. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/iznRBtFTJ

New top story from Time: ‘It’s a Catastrophe.’ Iranians Turn to Black Market for Vaccines as COVID-19 Deaths Hit New Highs

https://ift.tt/3AODY94 In January, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made the sudden announcement that American and British-made COVID-19 vaccines would be “forbidden” as they were “completely untrustworthy.” Almost nine months later, Iran is facing its worst surge in the virus to date — a record number of deaths and infections per day with nearly 4.2 million COVID-19 patients across the country , and a healthcare system near collapse. “It’s a catastrophe; and there is nothing we can do,” said an anesthesiology resident in one of Tehran’s public hospitals who due to the current surge is tasked to oversee the ICU ward for COVID-19 patients. “We can’t treat them nor help them; so all I can ask people to do is to stay home and do whatever it takes to not get exposed.” The doctor requested anonymity in order to speak freely; others interviewed by TIME asked to be identified only by their first name. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The scale of the crisis is such ...

Smarter Traffic Signals Prioritize Transit and People

Smarter Traffic Signals Prioritize Transit and People By Robert Lim Have you ever wondered how traffic signals could better balance the needs of all road users, whether driving, bicycling, walking or taking Muni? The SFMTA is rolling out its Connected Corridor Pilot this month to use transit platform and traffic signal sensor data to inform signal timing adjustments. The pilot also aims to collect information to support transit efficiency and street safety improvements.  Traffic engineers use signal timing adjustments as a tool to prioritize the flow of travel in specific directions or for different travel modes – Muni, people walking or driving – to meet the changing demands of the road network across different timepoints in a day. The Connected Corridors Pilot seeks to push the envelope of innovation by investing in advanced technologies, funded through a U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) grant. These tools will better position the city to serve the potential future ne...

Sunday Streets Returns October 17, with Phoenix Day

Sunday Streets Returns October 17, with Phoenix Day By Pamela Johnson For 13 years, the SFMTA and Livable City have brought "Sunday Streets" to San Francisco neighborhoods. Sunday Streets encourages communities to transform miles of car-congested streets into car-free spaces for neighbors to gather, kids to play, and for organizations and businesses to connect. On October 17, 2021, after more than 18 months of Covid-related shutdowns, Sunday Streets Phoenix Day will again bring free recreational activities, resources, and fun to the streets for tens of thousands of San Franciscans to enjoy. While Sunday Streets was celebrated in one neighborhood at a time in the past, this year's Phoenix Day spans various districts in the City for a simultaneous celebration of community, health, and resilience. This year's theme is "One City. One day. Rising together.”  Highlights this year include historic Sunday Streets SF routes, a 20+ mile community bike ride, three neighb...