By Sam Waltz
The world’s worst kept secret ended today with the announcement of Delaware’s own Joe Biden for President. Or at least the Democrat nomination for president in 2020.
Delawareans always seemed to know that their guy, “our Joe,” wouldn’t retire after his Vice Presidency.
“I’ll be back,” Arnold Schwarzenegger had to say in his 1984 film classic The Terminator.
Joe Biden never had to say that. We all knew it.
A column I wrote 16 months ago for the Delaware Business Times said that 2018 would be “the year of Biden,” that he would finish the year as the top candidate for the Democrat Presidential nomination. Of course, he did!
This month, I’ve lost track after the first couple dozen emails and calls I’ve received this month on the eve of Joe’s announcement.
“Coming home” as “a term of art” historically enjoys a certain funereal status.
But there was nothing funereal about the rousing “Welcome Home” that Jill and Joe Biden received from thousands of Delawareans on Jan. 20, 2017, at the Chase Center on the Riverfront where they were greeted after they Amtraked back to Delaware from Washington, DC, after the inauguration of President Trump.
I was there, along with Gov. John Carney, and Sen. Tom Carper and Sen. Chris Coons, all of them celebrating the end of his historic tenure as vice president.
I chatted with Joe at that event, but he already seemed distracted by thoughts of 2020. I think most of us who have known Joe for years felt that way that day. He basked in the adulation, but he knew this day would come.
Likely only one Delaware journalist still alive, columnist Harry Themal of the News Journal, where he was an editor when Sen. Biden first was elected in 1972, has known Joe Biden longer than I have.
Themal and the late former editor John Taylor brought me to Delaware to cover politics 44 years ago this month, in April 1975. I’d love to remember my first meeting with Sen. Biden, but all I can say for sure is that it was in that 1975-76 election cycle.
According to the U.S. Constitution, anyone can run for president as long as they are at least 35 years old, a natural born citizen of the United States, and have lived in the United States for at least 14 years.
Joe Biden checked all those boxes long ago. And he knew it back then! And he’s wanted it.
From my own conversations with Joe, going back even to his second run for the US Senate in 1978, I remember first-hand his discussions of going to work in the White House one day.
Thomas Francis Bayard (1828-98) was the last Delawarean to be so seriously considered as a likely president.
Also a U.S. Senator, Bayard ran three times, but never enjoyed “the third time is the charm” that Biden hopes to encounter. Bayard’s big year was 1880, and even Harper’s Weekly, the Time magazine of its day, featured him on its cover for one issue, a cover I still have in my collection of ephemera.
President Grover Cleveland named Bayard Secretary of State in 1885, after Bayard’s third effort in 1884 failed.
In Joe Biden’s universe, “the third time is the charm!”
