Joe Biden Beatrice Gormley (classic children's novels txt) 📖

of neighborhood coffees. They found a hostess in each neighborhood, invited likely guests, and provided coffee and doughnuts. Twice a week, Joe attended ten coffees a day, beginning at eight o’clock.

As Joe arrived at the first meeting, Val would go on to set up the nine o’clock coffee, while Neilia would set up the ten o’clock. Jean Biden would wrap up at the end of the eight o’clock coffee and then leave to set up the eleven o’clock. And so on, the candidate and his team leapfrogging through the day.

Beau, Hunter, and baby Naomi were on the campaign trail too, although they were too little to know it. “We just carried them from house to house like footballs in wicker baskets,” Biden wrote later.

Delaware is such a small state that you can drive its length in only two hours. So thousands of voters had the chance to see Joe’s winning smile and hear his persuasive words, close and personal. They felt his warmth, and his concern for their concerns. Reporters began to take notice of Joe Biden, calling him a “joyous campaigner” and a “rising star” in the Democratic Party.

It was easy for Joe Biden to be likable, but he also intended to know what he was talking to voters about. He wanted to be the best-informed candidate. So Neilia put on Sunday night spaghetti dinners at their house, inviting scholars from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware. These dinners were like seminars, where Joe and his team could learn from the experts about important issues: the ongoing Vietnam War, problems of drug abuse, the environment, and crime.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Biden, only twenty-three at the time, traveled around asking for money. In Delaware, he didn’t stand a chance of getting funds from the state Democratic Party. They were sure that Biden was going to lose, and they were pouring their money into the governor’s race.

But outside of Delaware, Jimmy got more interest. He flew around the country, as far as Alaska and California, to find donors. He saw his job as a salesman with the best possible product—his brother Joe. “In sales,” he explained later, “you have to believe in your product, and I was a believer. How were they going to say no?”

And Joe, with his loyal, hardworking family and friends, had the best possible volunteer team. But at a certain point, the Bidens realized that they needed a professional campaign consultant. Joe thought he’d found the ideal consultant in Jack Owens, his best friend from law school. Jack had already worked on two successful political races in Pennsylvania.

So Jack joined the “Biden for Senator” campaign—but only two months later, he had to quit. Campaign manager Valerie couldn’t stand Jack now any better than she had on that blind date several years before in Syracuse. The bad feeling was mutual. Jack dropped out, and Joe hired instead a young consultant from Boston, John Marttila.

Another professional who joined the campaign was Patrick Caddell, a young pollster. His first poll for Biden, early in 1972, showed Joe losing to Boggs by a landslide. Joe exclaimed, “Oh my God, I’m going to get killed!” But Neilia got him to calm down and pay attention to the details of Caddell’s explanation. The pollster said there were hopeful signs—the numbers could change as the campaign went on.

On March 20, 1972, at the Hotel Du Pont in downtown Wilmington, Joseph R. Biden Jr. officially announced his candidacy for the US Senate. Although Biden spoke respectfully of his opponent, Senator Boggs, he suggested that the sixty-two-year-old politician was out of tune with the times. Americans were sick of the war in Vietnam, and people in Delaware in particular had lost many young soldiers to the war. Boggs, a Republican, would not criticize President Nixon for continuing the war. But Biden said bluntly that it was “a horrendous waste of time, money, and lives.”

During the campaign Biden was frank with his audiences about where he stood on the issues, and he didn’t necessarily agree with every liberal position. He did not favor legalizing marijuana. Although he was for racial integration, he thought school busing to achieve integration was a mistake.

If he was honest with voters, Joe believed, they would trust him. And trust was especially important to Americans disillusioned over the Vietnam War. Many felt that the government, whether Democratic or Republican, had been lying to them for years.

Since Joe Biden was hardly known outside of Wilmington, he hoped to persuade some national Democratic politicians to endorse him—to announce publicly that they supported his campaign. That would get Delaware voters to take him more seriously. With this purpose, Biden traveled to Washington, DC, to visit Mike Mansfield, majority leader of the US Senate.

Mansfield wasn’t willing to actually endorse Joe Biden, since Caleb Boggs was a longtime colleague of Mansfield’s in the Senate. But Mansfield agreed to have his picture taken with Biden in the grand reception room of the Senate, and to say something nice that Biden’s campaign could quote in their flyers. A few other Democratic bigwigs, including Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, also joined the photo op in the Senate reception room.

As Joe Biden went from neighborhood coffees to polka dances in the Polish sections to high school football games, Senator Caleb Boggs hardly campaigned at all. Why should he? By September, the polls still showed him winning easily over the upstart Biden. Senator Boggs turned down a chance to debate with Biden on TV. Boggs had spent only $3,000 to this point, compared with Biden’s $50,000, although Boggs’s campaign had plenty of money.

Overall, 1972 looked to be a good year for Republicans. It was also a presidential election year. The prediction was that President Richard Nixon would easily win reelection over his Democratic rival, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota.

The Biden campaign desperately needed money, especially for radio advertisements during the final weeks. But there were lines Joe refused to cross. One time, he and Jimmy went to a meeting with