He became a county councilman in 1970, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. He became vice president in 2008 and president in 2020. Joe Biden has had a political career of 54 years, 52 of them in the national spotlight. But how do you quantify a political career of more than half a century? What standard do you measure it by?
You might start at point A: entering Congress as the second youngest Senator ever elected and leap the gap to point Z: leaving your presidency as the oldest POTUS who ever served. Spring from beginning your political career as the symbol of a new generation, to ending it as an icon of the gerontocracy; and somewhere in between, being chosen as a running mate by a fresh, young presidential candidate because he needs your gravitas. Go from resisting calls to run for president because you think you're too young, to resisting calls to suspend your presidential campaign because your party thinks you're too old.
You might pace out the distance between campaigning for county councilman by shaking hands and talking to people at picnics, graduations, and birthday parties, and campaigning for president by releasing videos on TikTok. Determine the expanse between first taking office when the entire nation gets its news from three major television networks, and last taking office when "news" is dying, because people are immersed in an internet full of partisan rants, misinformation, and memes spread by bots and troll farms.
Or calculate the distance from entering the Senate when Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (2 hours and 55 minutes) is the most popular film of the year, and leaving the White House when Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis (2 hours 18 minutes) is being widely panned as too long and overserious.
Fast forward through a series of scenes: campaigning for Senate with a wife who is considered an asset to your campaign because she's pretty; nearly resigning the office just weeks after taking it, when your wife and baby daughter are killed in a car accident; living through raising your two sons as a single father; remarrying a college professor; watching your elder son die of brain cancer; watching your younger son struggle with addiction; and finally, entering the office of the president with a wife who becomes the first presidential spouse to continue her separate career. Try to count the frames between making a joke about keeping your wife barefoot and pregnant, and inviting your wife to speak at Cabinet meetings.
How to gauge it? Try stretching a tape measure from first taking national office as a Senator and opposing the ongoing quagmire in Vietnam, past voting against George H.W. Bush's war in Kuwait, past voting for George W. Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, past turning against those wars, when they drag on as stupidly and wastefully as Vietnam, and finally, after taking office as president in the shadow of another ongoing quagmire, find the distance to ending the war in Afghanistan, clumsily, after it has gone on five months longer than the quagmire in Vietnam.
Maybe you'd prefer to measure the gap between first taking office when the biggest threat to the nation is a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, to winding down your presidency as one of the former Soviet republics, Russia, has invaded another of those former Soviet republics, Ukraine, while NATO fumes helplessly because the Russians still have their nukes. Somewhere in there, the USSR dissolves before your very eyes.
Or measure the gap between entering politics when a popular self-help book is I'm Okay, You're Okay, and leaving politics when a popular self-help book is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewriting of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
You could try numbers. Count the years from entering politics in 1970, when women are required to get a male relative to co-sign in order to open a bank account or get a credit card, to voting for the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 prohibiting such discrimination. Keep counting up to 1993, and helping to write the Violence Against Women Act. Add one year so you're hearing Republican Senator Jeremiah Denton ridicule the very idea of marital rape because "damn it, when you get married, you kind of expect you're going to get a little sex." Get the bill passed in spite of such troglodytes, and then keep counting up to 2020 and choose a woman as your vice president. Does the number compute?
Maybe you'd rather evaluate the change between starting off your career in the Senate by opposing busing to address segregation, then being the running mate to the first black president, then appointing the first black woman to the Supreme Court, then ending your career by stepping aside for your vice president, the first multiracial female candidate of a major party.
You might plot the distance between fighting, as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, against nominations to the Supreme Court who would reverse the precedent of Roe v. Wade, and becoming president after all those years of work have come to naught.
Or plot the distance between beginning your career as the Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in 1923, has finally been passed by Congress and sent to states for ratification, and ending your career after the ERA has died because not enough states ratified it.
Or between first taking office as the HP-35, the first handheld scientific calculator hits the market, and leaving office as the boom in artificial intelligence makes Nvidia the world's most valuable company.
Maybe you'd like to weigh taking your Senate seat the year Palestinian terrorists storm the Olympic Village in Munich and ultimately kill 11 Israeli athletes, against leaving the White House the year Israel is at war with Palestinian militant group Hamas in both Gaza and Lebanon in response to an attack by Hamas on Israel itself.
Measure the distance between watching Richard Nixon decide not to contest the 1960 election, even though there is credible evidence of fraud in Chicago, because contesting an election would disrupt national unity; and watching Al Gore decide not to fight the Supreme Court's decision halting the recount in Florida, because contesting an election would disrupt national unity; and finally watching Donald Trump refuse to accept your own election to the presidency, even as court after court finds no evidence of significant fraud, having the Trump administration refuse to cooperate with your transition team, having to carry on as if all is well as secretaries of state are bullied and false electors are threatened and the vice-president is branded a traitor for doing his constitutional duty--trying to act as if all this will blow over, because to admit that the orderly transfer of power is being undermined will disrupt national unity.
You might chart the expanse between being a new Senator and seeing a president forced out by his own party over charges that he covered up a break-in and theft of opposition party documents by hired lackeys, and being president-elect and seeing a president acquitted by his own party after he attempts to overturn a free and fair election and incites a mob of his supporters to disrupt the certification process with violence.
Or the expanse between first taking office when Puerto Rican statehood is a plank in the Republican party platform, and leaving office as a speaker at a Republican rally calls Puerto Rico "a floating island of garbage."
Or the expanse between running your first campaign for Senate in the civilized, respectful way campaigns were expected to be run, calling your opponent "a very ethical guy," and running your last campaign for president against an opponent who calls the opposition "scum," "vermin," "animals," and "the enemy within." Oh, and--breaking news--"demonic."
The expanse between starting your political career by wanting to step aside and focus on your family, and being talked into staying because it's your duty to the party, and ending your career by not wanting to step aside, and being talked into going because it's your duty to the nation.
Between beginning a political career in the free and democratic United States of America, and ending a political career in a nation that may be transforming itself into something else entirely.
How do you measure twenty-seven million, three hundred thirty-one thousand, two hundred minutes of public service? How do you weigh it, count it, add it all up? How do you adjust for the place where you started in the light of the place where you finished? How do you calculate the distance between points A and Z?
And how do you know if all of it, any of it, measures up to what you set out to do?
And that's it folks--Totus POTUS is a wrap! To those hearty souls who hung on with me the whole way, you are my heroes. Thanks for your support! Happy voting!
46: Joe Biden