Joe Biden began his national political career in 1972, improbably ousting a Republican senator in Delaware at the age of 29. Biden was so young that he was elected before he was old enough, per the Constitution, to serve in the Senate. He turned 30 on Nov. 20 of that year, enabling him to take the seat in early 1973.He ended his career Sunday some 52 years later as the oldest president in U.S. history, a man forced to step aside from a reelection campaign less than four months before voters go to the polls by leaders in his own party who determined his elderly state made him unelectable. The weekend timing might have been a surprise but the exit was inevitable.Simply put, Biden had lost the support of the vast majority of his party and, crucially, also those who burnish its coffers.Both William Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks excelled at writing tragedies, and the story of Joe Biden is one squarely in a tradition reaching back thousands of years. The brash upstart becomes the hubristic old lion who doesn’t realize when his time is up and is forced under the white-hot spotlight to suffer a humiliating end to his story of public life. He became part an Oedipus and part a King Lear, howling with rage at a perceived injustice actually born of his own mortality.So what to make of America’s 46th president now that his ill-considered initial choice to run has left his party in a chaotic shambles as it again faces an ascendent Donald Trump, a presidential candidate Democrats both fear and detest?In many respects, this spectacular miscalculation reflects the Joe Biden that Americans of a certain age have long known.He’s a man who has repeatedly made mistakes — bad ones at times — and has made many other poor decisions.His first run for the presidency in 1988 crumbled after the emergence of credible plagiarism allegations in a speech he gave. His leadership as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman of Clarence Thomas’ 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in which he gave short shrift to the sexualharassment allegations of Anita Hill, a former aide to Thomas, was a notable blemish on his record for which he later apologized. He voted against President George H.W. Bush’s war against Iraq in 1991 and in favor of President George W. Bush’s war against Iraq in 2002. With the benefit of hindsight, most ...
