Joe Biden, Obama's vice president now on a mission to remove Trump from the White House
Joe Biden is the person who stands in the way of Donald Trump to stay four more years in the White House.
Biden, who was vice president under Barack Obama, already has the mathematical support required to be formally named the candidate of the Democratic Party for the presidential elections scheduled for next November.
To his followers, he is a foreign policy expert with decades of experience in Washington, a gifted orator whose charm easily reaches ordinary people, and a man who has bravely overcome dire personal tragedies.
To his detractors, he is an outdated member of the establishment with a tendency to commit embarrassing blunders (who also has a worrying fondness for smelling women's hair).
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But does Biden have what it takes to get Trump out of the White House?
A controversial gift of words
Biden has a long history of campaigning for elections. His career in Washington began in the Senate in 1973 (47 years ago) and his first bid for the presidency dates back to 1987 (33 years ago).
As a speaker he has a natural talent for winning over voters but he is also a time bomb, always one sentence away from disaster.
That tendency to get carried away while he spoke in front of a crowd ended his first presidential campaign (this is the third) before it began.
At rallies he started saying "My ancestors worked in coal mines in Northeast Pennsylvania" and claimed that he was upset that they never had the opportunities they deserved in life.
But none of his ancestors had been a miner. He had stolen that phrase (and many others) from a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock, whose relatives had actually worked in the mines.
And that was just the first of many phrases that have come to be known as "Joe's bombs."
Boasting of his political experience in 2012 he told a confused crowd: "Folks, I can tell you that I have met eight presidents, three of them intimately," accidentally suggesting that he had had sex with the leaders and not simply that he had been a close friend of theirs.
As Obama's vice president in 2009, he caused alarm among citizens by saying that there was a "30% chance of being wrong" with the economy.
And it is that perhaps Biden was fortunate to have been chosen as the running mate of the first black president, after describing him as "the first ordinary African-American who knows how to express himself, he is bright, clean and good looking."
Despite that comment, support for Biden among African-Americans has been very high during the current presidential campaign.
However, a recent appearance on a radio show hosted by black host Charlamagne Tha God quickly turned into disaster, after he said: "If you have trouble deciding whether to support me or Trump, then you are not black." .
That phrase set off a media firestorm that put his campaign team to work desperately to try to mitigate the impression that Biden was taking African-American votes for granted.
It's easy to see why a NY Magazine reporter wrote last year that the prospect of "Biden improvising a speech is something his entire campaign team seems to be focused on avoiding at all costs."
Campaign veteran
The flip side to his oratorical skills (and deficiencies) is that in a world of automaton politicians spitting out carefully armed speeches, Biden looks like a real person.
He says that the memory of his childish stuttering makes him dislike reading speeches from an electronic prompter and instead speaks from memory.
Biden is capable of driving a rally with American workers to hysteria with an impromptu speech and then joining the crowd, shaking hands, patting the back and posing for selfies like a grizzled rock star.
"He brings them together and hugs them verbally and sometimes physically," John Kerry, former secretary of state and former presidential candidate, told the New Yorker magazine.
"He is a very contact politician. And he really is. None of this is fake," he added.
But, precisely, the "sobón" that he puts on has also become a source of problems.
Accusations
Last year, eight women accused Biden of inappropriate touching, hugging and kissing, while US television showed videos showing him greeting women at public events with gestures of great physical proximity, which - sometimes - included smelling their hair.
In response, Biden vowed to "be more careful" in his interactions.
However, in March, Tara Reade reported that he had put her against a wall and sexually assaulted her 30 years ago, when she was working as an assistant in her Washington office.
Biden denied the allegation, and his campaign team issued a statement denying what happened.
In defense of their presidential candidate, Democrats will point out that more than a dozen women have accused President Trump of various acts of sexual assault, but can this type of issue be reduced to a purely numerical question?
Since the emergence of the #MeToo movement, Democrats - including Biden - have insisted that society should believe women. Any attempt to minimize the accusations against him will leave many activists in a very uncomfortable position.
In a recent television interview, Reade accused members of Biden's team of "saying really horrible things about me and me on social media."
She acknowledged that Biden had not directly done these things but accused the campaign team of hypocrisy from him.
Avoid repeating the same mistakes
As problematic as he has been in the past, his supporters hope that Biden's style - less distant and distant, warmer with ordinary people - will keep him from falling into the same trap as many previous Democratic candidates.
He has vast experience in Washington, with some three decades in the Senate and eight years as Obama's vice president. The problem is that this kind of long resume doesn't always help.
Al Gore (eight years in the House of Representatives, eight years in the Senate and eight years as vice president), John Kerry (28 years in the Senate) and Hillary Clinton (eight years as first lady and eight years in the Senate) failed when they tried to defeat less experienced Republican presidential candidates.
Biden's followers hope that his more focused character will help prevent him from suffering the same fate.
On more than one occasion, Americans have shown that they will vote for the candidate who claims not to be someone with experience in Washington but rather who is running for the White House promising to shake up the political establishment.
And that's almost impossible for Biden to promise, after spending nearly half a century in high-level politics.
In fact, his long experience could be used against him.
A long story
Biden has been involved in or stanced on every major event in the past few decades, and some of those decisions may not look good in the current political climate.
In the 1970s, he sided with southern segregationists by opposing the practice of busing children to schools in other neighborhoods in order to racially integrate public schools. This has been the reason for repeated attacks against him during this campaign.
Republicans love to point out that Robert Gates, Obama's former defense secretary, said "there's no way anyone doesn't like" Biden but he's been "wrong on almost every major foreign policy and national security issue. in the last four decades. "
The Democratic presidential hopeful can expect to have to deal with a lot more of this sort throughout the campaign.
Family tragedy
Sadly for Biden, one of the reasons he seems less distant than many politicians is because he has been touched by something that affects us all: death.
As he was preparing to be sworn in, shortly after winning his first Senate election, his wife Neilia and his daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident, which also injured his two sons. , Beau and Hunter.
Beau died in 2015, at the age of 46, from brain cancer.
Losing so many young people close to him has made Biden someone many Americans can sympathize with seeing that he - despite his political power and wealth - is someone who has been touched by some of the same horrors of life they face. .
But there is a part of his family history that is very different: his, another son of his Hunter.
Power, corruption and lies?
Hunter became a lawyer and lobbyist before his personal life spiraled out of control.
In his divorce papers, his first wife mentioned drug and alcohol use, as well as strip clubs.
Additionally, Hunter was expelled from the US Naval Force Reserve after testing positive for cocaine use.
In an interview with the New Yorker magazine, he admitted that he once received a diamond from a Chinese energy billionaire who was subsequently investigated by authorities in Beijing on corruption charges.
The increasingly public way in which Hunter has combined his private life - he married a second time last year, a week after meeting his new wife - while making huge amounts of money has generated many negative headlines for his father.
Many Americans can empathize with someone who has been struggling with addiction problems, but the fact that he has held tremendously lucrative jobs at the same time underscores how different life can be for members of the political elite like the Bidens.
Impeachment
Some of that high-paying work took place in Ukraine, prompting President Trump to allegedly try to pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate Hunter over corruption allegations.
That phone call led to the recent failed attempt to impeach Trump to remove him from office. A political mess that Biden probably wouldn't have wanted to get into.
External relationships
A scandal abroad is particularly damaging for Biden, given that one of his strengths is his diplomatic experience.
He chaired the Senate Foreign Relations committee and boasts that he has "met all the important leaders of the world in the last 45 years."
While this assures voters that he has the experience to be president, it is difficult to know what effect his performance in that area will have on voters.
Like many of his policies, this one could be described as moderate.
Biden voted against the Gulf War in 1991, then in favor of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, though he later became critical of America's involvement there.
Naturally cautious, he advised Obama not to carry out the special forces operation that culminated in the death of Osama Bin Laden.
Ironically, it appears that the al Qaeda leader did not value Biden very much.
Documents obtained and released by the CIA reveal that Bin Laden ordered the killing of Obama but not his then vice president, since he believed that "Biden is totally unprepared for the position (the presidency), which will lead the United States to a crisis ".
Biden's positions also don't fit very well with those of many young activists in the Democratic Party, who prefer politicians with stronger anti-war positions like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
At the same time, he is too moderate for the many Americans who celebrated Trump's decision to kill Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike in January.
Much of his political program has a similar vein: he will hardly encourage many activists in his party but, he hopes, will be moderate enough to win the backing of undecided voters.
By these calculations, he doesn't need voters to vote enthusiastically. He just needs them to do it for him.
All or nothing
Polls have consistently been giving Biden a 5-10 point lead over Trump in the race for the White House.
However, as the elections are scheduled for November, there is still a long way to go, in which there will surely be more than one tough battle.
Both candidates have already clashed over their positions in the face of the wave of protests over police violence against African Americans, as well as the government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Even wearing masks has become a political issue, with Biden appearing to make an effort to be photographed wearing them while Trump has taken the opposite stance.
But, beyond the small fights and the management of the image of electoral campaigns, in this competition there are many important things at stake.
If Biden wins, it will be crowning moment for a long and busy political career; if he loses, he will give four more years in the White House to a man he thinks "totally lacks the qualifications to be president of the United States", someone he simply "cannot be trusted."
A few years ago, when evaluating whether or not he was running in the 2016 presidential race, Biden said: "He can die a happy man without being president."
That is no longer the case.
