Joe Biden Still Wants to Be President. Can His Family Endure One Last Campaign?

REHOBOTH Embankment, Del. — The new house is on the edge of Greatcoat Henlopen State Park, just north of the boardwalk: three stories, vi bedrooms, iii fireplaces and an expansive view of the Atlantic Ocean.

The new owners are Joe and Jill Biden, rich for the first fourth dimension in their lives, thanks to a three-book publishing deal — 2 past him, one past her — that allowed them to buy the $2 million holiday home in this beachiest of beach towns.

Cherry-red-white-and-blueish bunting hangs from the second-flooring balustrade. There's a small wooden sign, "A Promise Kept," over the archway, and two others on either side: "Forever Jill" on one, "Beau'south Souvenir" on the other. One is a tribute to Joe's wife of four decades, the other to the elderberry Biden son, who died of encephalon cancer two years ago at age 46.

"Throughout our careers, Jill and I accept dreamed of being able to buy a identify at the beach at home where we can bring the whole family," Joe said when the sale fabricated headlines earlier this summer. "We feel very lucky that we're now able to make that happen and are looking forward to spending time with our family unit."

But if you think that sounds like a human ready for that gilt political afterlife where time is finally your own and nothing is on the line, y'all're wrong. Since Joe left public life in January, the Bidens have never been more than public.

The past six months accept seen the formation of the Biden Foundation, a way for Joe and Jill to support their pet causes, and the Biden Cancer Initiative to honor Swain. The University of Pennsylvania inaugurated the Penn Biden Center for Affairs and Global Engagement to study international issues, and the Academy of Delaware the Biden Institute for domestic initiatives.

Last — just not least — there'southward a new political action committee, American Possibilities, a vehicle for raising money for Democratic candidates.

And maybe for one last endeavour at the White House in 2020.

Delaware's favorite son and America'due south favorite uncle decided non to run in 2016, a choice he made while he was still in mourning, and Donald Trump was just a political sideshow.

"Exercise I regret not beingness president?" Joe said this bound. "Yes."

The story backside that decision — Beau's illness, his expiry in May 2015, and the announcement that Oct that Joe would not seek the Democratic nomination — is the discipline of "Promise Me, Dad: A Yr of Hope, Hardship and Purpose." The memoir comes out November. xiv, and every stop on the volume tour will undoubtedly include a variation of "What if?"

With Washington in chaos and the Democrats without a standard-bearer, Joe Biden is arguably the about popular former vice president in history. His wife got a continuing ovation when she appeared as a presenter at this year's Tony Awards. Earlier this calendar month, there was an excited buzz when the couple walked into Manhattan's Music Box Theatre to see "Dear Evan Hansen."

Simply there was besides the recent bitter and very public divorce of their younger son, Hunter, and the scandalous news of his affair with Beau'south widow, Hallie, a stain on the perfect family portrait.

Conventional political wisdom says that Joe, at present 74, is as well old to run for president over again. Merely American voters, it seems, don't really care about conventional wisdom anymore.

So the real question is: What next?

The boardwalk at Rehoboth Embankment, where the Bidens have come for years and recently purchased a $2 million vacation domicile. (Judy Chiliad. Rolfe/For The Washington Postal service)

The Biden saga reads like one of those large embankment novels that pepper the sand every summer. Middle-class Joe makes expert. At that place'southward ambition, success, hope, tragedy — only always family unit beginning. Although the loquacious politician loves to talk nearly his parents and his wife and kids in speeches and memoirs, he declined to be interviewed for this story.

The Bidens have chosen this 144-yr-old former Methodist campsite site, a quintessential beach town that combines the upscale and the cheesy, for their family retreat. Joe, with at least 1 family member at his side, has been coming here for years and is a regular at the local bookstore and ice foam shop.

"He's even so a hometown male child," says council member Paul Kuhns, who is running for mayor of the town of 1,500 full-time residents (30,000 in the summer). "That'southward what a lot of people like about him. When he walks effectually the neighborhood, it'south not, 'There'south the vice president.' It's, 'There's Joe.' "

When the Bidens celebrated his altogether in Rehoboth last November, they dropped by the Pond, an unpretentious sports bar with nine apartment-screen TVs and $2 Bud Lights at happy hr.

"Word spread like wildfire," says Swimming owner Pete Borsari. "Everyone gave him a standing ovation. He is a dear effigy here. I would say the vast majority of people love Joe."

Biden surrounded by birthday well-wishers at The Pond eating place in Rehoboth last November. (Courtesy of The Pond eating house)

He grew upwards in Scranton, Pa., but fabricated his name in Delaware, which he served as a U.S. senator for 36 years, riding the railroad train into Washington every day. In 2009, he became President Barack Obama'south vice president and trusted confidant. The two are so close that in Jan, Obama surprised him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the state'south highest civilian honor.

Citing his "amuse, candor, unabashed optimism and deep and abiding patriotism," Obama called his friend "ane of the most consequential vice presidents in American history, an accolade that nonetheless rests firmly behind his legacy equally husband, father, and grandfather."

But that storied career almost didn't happen. Weeks after the 29-year-old was first elected to the Senate in 1972, his married woman and baby daughter were killed in a horrific motorcar blow while shopping for a Christmas tree. Sons Young man and Hunter, so three and 2, were severely injured.

Biden intended to resign his Senate seat, but congressional Democrats persuaded him to stay, and he was sworn into office at the boys' infirmary. The tragedy created an unusually close bond between Joe and his sons, a bond unaffected by his 1977 marriage to Jill and the nascency of their daughter, Ashley.

Beau was his father'south political heir: He was chaser general of Delaware and served a yr in Iraq equally a member of the U.Southward. Army National Guard. He was widely expected to run for governor or the U.S. Senate, but it was not to exist. In 2015, he died of brain cancer, a disease he had been secretly contesting for more than ii years.

The death devastated the family and kept Joe out of the presidential race. Grief, he said in announcing that he wouldn't challenge Hillary Clinton, "doesn't respect or much care about things similar filing deadlines or debates and primaries and caucuses."

[Joe Biden'due south heartfelt speech on grief]

Whether the vice president could have bested the Clinton juggernaut is still up for fence. His family — specially Hunter — wanted him to run, but many of his closest directorate cautioned that he couldn't raise enough money in time.

His fans in Rehoboth are convinced that was the wrong call.

"Had he run, he would be president right now," says Borsari.

And the entire Biden clan would be in the spotlight — which tin be both a blessing and a expletive.

The triumphs and the tragedies are existent, only as in a novel, everything is more dramatic and a bit romanticized in the telling.

Joe loves to tell audiences that Jill had no interest in politics when they met, but he never says that she worked in his Senate role for five months before they married. He concluded his 1987 presidential campaign amidst charges of having plagiarized a spoken language by British politico Neil Kinnock, something he now claims he never did. In that location's nil about his controversial role overseeing the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in his 2007 memoir, "Promises to Go on: On Life and Politics."

And then it is with the Biden sons. If Beau could do no wrong ("the finest man I've ever known in my life," says Joe), his younger brother has struggled — but with his father ever in his corner.

"We have an expression in our family: 'If y'all have to inquire for help, it's likewise belatedly,' " Joe told Popular Mechanics last year. "We're at that place for each other."

"We don't have a complicated human relationship," Hunter said in the interview. "I know that no thing what, he loves me, and no matter what, I love him more than annihilation in the globe."

Hunter, 47, is the second son, with all the baggage that comes with having a perfect older blood brother. He has bounced from police to banking to lobbying. In 2014, he was kicked out of the U.S. Naval Reserves for cocaine utilize and spent some time in rehab. This spring, he became tabloid fodder when he divorced his wife of 23 years and went public with a love matter with his sis-in-law. Friends said that the two brutal in beloved as they tended to the dying Swain.

"Hallie and I are incredibly lucky to have found the love and support we have for each other in such a difficult time, and that's been obvious to the people who dearest us most," Hunter said in a statement. "We've been so lucky to have family unit and friends who have supported us every footstep of the way."

The relationship has the approving of Joe and Jill, who also released a argument: "We are all lucky that Hunter and Hallie plant each other equally they were putting their lives together after such sadness. They have mine and Jill's full and complete back up and we are happy for them."

There was no mention of Hunter'south estranged married woman, Kathleen, a fact that didn't play well with her friends, who privately complained that she had been neatly erased from the happy family portrait.

Hunter and Kathleen Biden in 2012. They divorced in early 2017, amid news of Hunter'southward affair with his sister-in-law, Hallie Biden. (Ron Sachs/Picture show-alliance/DPA/AP Images)

Young man Biden and his wife, Hallie, celebrate his reelection equally Delaware attorney full general on ballot night 2010. (Susan Walsh/AP)

The news of the romance leaked out in the midst of a nasty divorce between Hunter and Kathleen, who have iii daughters. The two officially separated in October 2015 — the same month Joe decided non to run for president, although there's no indication that Hunter'due south marital bug factored into that determination.

In public court filings, Kathleen alleged that her husband had blown a fortune on drugs, women, strip clubs and "other personal indulgences." She requested that his access to their articulation assets be limited because the couple had a double mortgage and owed more than $300,000 in dorsum taxes. She also requested sole custody of their teenage daughter. (The other two girls are adults.) Hunter struck dorsum, suggesting that it was his married woman who had been unfaithful.

It was dingy laundry flying on a flagpole, a tactic they quickly came to regret. But a District gauge rejected their bid to make the filings private retroactively, ruling that embarrassment was not sufficient reason to seal the records.

The divorce was finalized in April; the family's Washington home was listed for $1.vii million presently afterward.

People fall in love every day, simply falling in love with a sis-in-law is rare enough to raise eyebrows. Hunter'south childhood friend Lea Carpenter told People mag that anyone disquisitional of the relationship "doesn't understand the Biden family unit. Anyone moved to judgment at present has no cognition of the grace and strength with which Hunter and Hallie take navigated the last four years."

Hunter, who declined to be interviewed, is helping enhance his brother's young children: his 12-year-old niece, Natalie, and 11-year-onetime nephew, as well named Hunter. There are reports of a strained relationship betwixt Hunter's daughters and their aunt.

So it's unlikely that the unabridged Biden clan is, in fact, enjoying the new beach house together.

Hunter and Hallie have not been spotted in Rehoboth this summertime. That doesn't mean people aren't talking most them — although not to the media.

"When I saw that, I was like 'Wow,' " says Kuhns. "What I was really surprised about is that the story kind of came and went. If they were a controversial family, it would be a big deal, but they're so well-liked. Things happen. I call up that's how a lot of people in Delaware look at it."

"That's a sensitive subject," says Rehoboth councilwoman Kathy McGuiness. "Personal life is personal life. In my book, information technology's off limits."

In the protective embrace of Delaware, that may be true. In the wider world of politics, maybe not so much.

President Obama presented Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January. (Susan Walsh/AP)

Once yous dream of condign president, information technology's difficult to permit go. Joe has chased that elusive prize for more than 3 decades, and missed his best chance in 2016 for the worst possible reasons. He has made no secret of the fact that he idea Clinton ran a terrible campaign and that he believes he could take beaten Donald Trump.

Is he too former for 2020?

"Joe Biden has always been a human with boundless energy, and he'll never quit," says Bruce Reed, his old chief of staff. "He would be doing all he's doing no affair what his plans are. He'due south not the retiring kind."

For at present, information technology's all talk, the endless stream of speculation and desperation that drives cable news 24-7.

"I have no intention of running for president, just I'1000 a great respecter of fate," Joe told NPR. "I don't have any plans to do it, but I'm non promising I wouldn't do information technology."

If Joe chooses the role of elder statesman, his family unit's individual life volition probably be — for the near function — onetime news. If, on the other hand, Squad Biden takes one final swing at the presidency, his entire family unit will exist scrutinized, judged and otherwise pushed into the spotlight — including Hunter and Hallie.

The new conventional wisdom, one the public does seem to accept: Y'all don't elect only a president. You elect his family, too.

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/joe-biden-still-wants-to-be-president-can-his-family-endure-one-last-campaign/2017/07/28/65770bfa-70a0-11e7-9eac-d56bd5568db8_story.html