The Problem with Our Mourner in Chief

F or nearly 15 years, President Biden has leaned heavily on discussing family tragedy even when it has only the most tenuous, or even nonexistent, connection to the subject at hand. In 2007, for instance, during his second failed run at the presidency, Biden was asked a question about negative campaigning in Iowa and responded by talking about how his first wife, Neilia, and first daughter, Naomi, were killed in a pre-Christmas 1972 car crash. He also embellished the story in two ways: He claimed falsely that the driver of the truck in the accident “drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch.” That driver was not at fault; Neilia Biden, who was holding the baby while she drove, apparently ran a stop sign and drove into the truck’s path, and there was no indication he had been drinking.

Biden also cloaked himself in magnanimity by claiming “I never pursued it,” the antecedent of the pronoun being the supposed rumor that the driver had been drinking. Biden explained to a reporter then that the point of the story was proving he could understand other people’s problems: “Look, I was a single parent for five years, and I understand what it’s like. I don’t understand your situation, but I’m not devoid of an understanding of the problems ordinary people face.” Having suffered these two horrible losses, and the further devastation of burying his son Beau in 2015, is perhaps Biden’s single most humanizing quality. But is misfortune really a quality? Biden is, as Fintan O’Toole once put it, our designated mourner.

In a 2008 debate with Sarah Palin, when asked whether his “Achilles heel is that you lack discipline,” Biden changed the subject to the car crash: “Look, I understand what it’s like to be a single parent. When my wife and daughter died and my two sons were gravely injured, I understand what it’s like as a parent to wonder what it’s like if your kid’s going to make it. . . . But the notion that somehow, because I’m a man, I don’t know what it’s like to raise two kids alone, I don’t know what it’s like to have a child you’re not sure is going to — is going to make it — I understand.” No one had said anything like, “Because you’re a man, you don’t know what it’s like to raise kids alone.” Biden’s mention of the car crash was a non sequitur.

In his 2012 debate with Paul Ryan, Biden mentioned the accident again, this time as a completely off-topic response to Ryan’s mentions of Mitt Romney’s personal charitable acts:

Look, I don’t doubt his personal generosity, and I understand what it’s like. When I was a little younger than the congressman, my wife was in an accident, killed my daughter and my wife, and my two sons survived. I have sat in the homes of many people who’ve gone through what I get through because the one thing you can give people solace is to know they know you’ve been through it, that they can make it. So I don’t doubt his personal commitment to individuals.

In a June 2019 debate, when asked a question about Obamacare, he responded by telling the car-accident story and said the connection was that “there are people right now facing what I’ve faced.” But it wasn’t germane. No one disputes that people get in accidents. He led off a CNN op-ed the following month with the car-crash story as a way to say that health insurance is “personal” for him. Isn’t it personal for everyone? His family had health insurance, and the non-existence of Obamacare at the time was irrelevant.

After Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015, Joe Biden started bringing up the matter in unrelated contexts. In a 2019 Veterans Day town-hall appearance, he brought up Beau’s death in the process of suggesting that it was brought on by toxic fumes from “burn pits” in Iraq (there is no evidence for this claim) and tried to tie it to policy in this way: “And we should say, anybody who was anywhere near those burn pits, that’s all they have to show, that they — and they get covered, they get all their health care covered.” Universal health-care coverage may be a laudable goal, but how it should be implemented and how it should be funded have nothing to do with Beau Biden’s death. It’s a mere diversion of a complicated political issue to the far simpler story of Joe Biden’s sadness.

Most shamelessly, when his son Hunter Biden was corruptly leveraging the family name to pocket large sums from foreign entities, to the chagrin of officials in the Obama administration, then-Vice President Biden put out word that he couldn’t be approached about this matter because Beau Biden had died. It would be asking too much to rein in the unethical behavior of his living son because he had lost the other one. The New York Times:

Former administration officials involved in the response to the story, speaking on the condition of anonymity, cited one reason above all others for backing off: the vice president’s shaky emotional state over Beau’s illness and death. Mr. [George] Kent, now the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, told House investigators that his concerns had not been addressed by a White House official, who told him that Mr. Biden lacked the “further bandwidth to deal with family-related issues at that time.”

This week my friend Charlie Cooke and the Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn called attention to Joe Biden’s odd habit of stepping on the stories of the families of some of the 13 troops killed in the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal last week by telling them about Beau’s Army service (in Iraq) and unrelated death. It sometimes feels as though the president is hoping people will mistake him for a Gold Star parent. Biden fans have made a great deal of his supposed gift of empathy, but where exactly is the evidence for that? The New York Times conceded that the case for Bidenian empathy was looking shaky two weeks ago: “Biden Ran on Competence and Empathy. Afghanistan Is Testing That.” Asked about the horrific deaths of Afghans who fell from U.S. airplanes whose exteriors they clung to rather than fall prey to the Taliban, Biden scoffed, with a supreme lack of empathy, “That was four days ago, five days ago.” It had been only two days, but the details would hardly have been made less ghastly if four days had gone by.

When other people tell you about their sorrows, or mention Mitt Romney’s generosity, or ask you about negative campaigning or your lack of discipline, and you respond by talking about the deaths in your own family, it starts to seem more opportunistic and selfish than empathetic. Biden is asking for us to give him our sympathy and support, not offering any particular emotional support in return.

When families have just learnt that their loved ones died in a terror bombing in the last couple of days, it’s rather closer to narcissism than empathy to insist that you already know their stories, so they should instead listen to you grieve for a person you lost six years ago. The fact that Joe Biden has suffered family loss is not the answer to every question, nor can it be a shield against legitimate criticism.