president of the United States
Joe Biden, byname of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., (born November 20, 1942, Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S.), 46th president of the United States (2021– ) and 47th vice president of the United States (2009–17) in the Democratic administration of Pres. Barack Obama. He previously represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate (1973–2009).
Early Life & Career
Biden, who was raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and New Castle county, Delaware, received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Delaware in 1965 and a law degree from Syracuse University in New York in 1968. During this time he married (1966) Neilia Hunter, and the couple later had three children.
After graduating from law school, Biden returned to Delaware to work as an attorney before quickly turning to politics, serving on the New Castle county council from 1970 to 1972. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972 at the age of 29, becoming the fifth youngest senator in history. About a month later his wife and infant daughter were killed in a car accident, and his two sons were seriously injured. Although he contemplated suspending his political career, Biden was persuaded to join the Senate in 1973, and he went on to win reelection six times, becoming Delaware’s longest-serving senator. In 1977 he married Jill Jacobs, an educator, and they later had a daughter. In addition to his role as U.S. senator, Biden also was an adjunct professor (1991–2008) at the Wilmington, Delaware, branch of the Widener University School of Law. As a senator, Biden focused on foreign relations, criminal justice, and drug policy. He served on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, twice as its chair (2001–03; 2007–09), and on the Committee on the Judiciary, serving as its chair from 1987 to 1995. He was particularly outspoken on issues related to the Kosovo conflict of the late ’90s, urging U.S. action against Serbian forces to protect Kosovars against an offensive by Serbian Pres. Slobodan Milošević. On the Iraq War (2003–11), Biden proposed a partition plan as a way to maintain a united, peaceful Iraq. Biden also was a member of the International Narcotics Control Caucus and was the lead senator in writing the law that established the office of “drug czar,” a position that oversees the national drug-control policy.
Neilia Hunter Biden
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Neilia Hunter Biden, the first wife of Joe Biden, was born on July 28, 1942. The couple married on August 27, 1966. After the wedding, the Bidens moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where Biden was on the New Castle County Council. The couple had three children: Joseph Robinette “Beau” III, Robert Hunter and Naomi Christina “Amy” Biden campaigned to unseat U.S. Senator from Delaware J. Caleb Boggs and Neilia was described by The News Journal as the “brains” of his campaign.
On December 18, 1972, shortly after her husband became U.S. senator-elect, Neilia was driving with Naomi, Beau, and Hunter to buy a Christmas tree, when their car was hit by a tractor-trailer. Neilia and the children were taken to Wilmington General Hospital. Neilia and Naomi died upon arrival, but her two sons survived with serious injuries. Biden was sworn into the Senate on January 3, 1973, at the hospital where his sons were being treated
Jill Biden
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Jill Tracy Jacobs Biden (née Jacobs, formerly Stevenson), the second and current wife of Joe Biden, was born on June 3, 1951. She met Biden while on a blind date in March 1975
She and Joe Biden were married by a Catholic priest on June 17, 1977, at the Chapel at the United Nations in New York City. This was four and a half years after his first wife and infant daughter died. Joe had proposed several times before she accepted, as she was wary of entering the public spotlight, anxious to remain focused on her own career, and initially hesitant to take on the commitment of raising his two young sons who had survived the accident
CHILDREN
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Joe Biden fathered four children from two marriages. His firstborn daughter, Naomi Christina Biden, died in 1972, in the same car accident as her mother, and his firstborn son, Joseph “Beau” R. Biden III, died in 2015 after a fight with brain cancer. The Bidens’ two surviving children include one son from his first marriage, Robert Hunter Biden, and one daughter from his second, Ashley Blazer Biden
Presidential runs and vice presidency
Biden pursued the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination but withdrew after it was revealed that parts of his campaign stump speech had been plagiarized from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock without appropriate attribution. His 2008 presidential campaign never gained momentum, and he withdrew from the race after placing fifth in the Iowa Democratic caucus in January of that year. (For coverage of the 2008 election, see United States Presidential Election of 2008.) After Barack Obama amassed enough delegates to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden emerged as a front-runner to be Obama’s vice presidential running mate. On August 23 Obamaofficially announced his selection of Biden as the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee, and on August 27 Obama and Biden secured the Democratic Party’s nomination. On November 4 the Obama-Biden ticket defeated John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, and Biden also easily won reelection to his U.S. Senate seat. He resigned from the Senate post shortly before taking the oath of office as vice president on January 20, 2009. In November 2012 Obama and Biden were reelected for a second term, defeating the Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
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As vice president, Biden played an active role in the administration, serving as an influential adviser to Obama and a vocal supporter of his initiatives. In addition, he was tasked with notable assignments. He helped avert several budget crises and played a key role in shaping U.S. policy in Iraq. In 2015 his eldest son, Beau, died from brain cancer; Biden recounted the experience in Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose (2017). Several months later, Biden—who enjoyed high favourability ratings, partly due to a candour and affable manner that resonated with the public—announced that he would not enter the 2016 presidential election, noting that the family was still grieving. Instead, he campaigned for Hillary Clinton, who ultimately lost the election to Donald Trump.
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Biden’s close relationship with Obama was evident when the latter surprised him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with distinction, on January 12, 2017, just days before they left office. When Obama presented the rarely given honour, he referred to Biden as “my brother.” Later that year Biden and his wife established the Biden Foundation, a charitable group involved in various causes.
Presidential election of 2020
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Biden remained involved in politics and was a vocal critic of Pres. Donald Trump. Biden himself faced censure when, in 2019, various women accused him of inappropriate physical contact, notably hugging and kissing. Although his response was widely derided—“I’m sorry I didn’t understand more.…I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done. I’ve never been disrespectful intentionally to a man or a woman”—his popularity remained high. Amid growing speculation that he would run for president in 2020, Biden announced his candidacy in April 2019, joining a crowded Democratic field.
Biden immediately became a front-runner, and he pursued a platform that was considered moderate, especially as compared with such candidates as Bernie Sanders. A poor performance in the party’s first debate in June 2019, however, raised questions about Biden, and his support dipped. After the first three nomination contests in early 2020, Sanders seemed poised to become the party’s nominee. However, worries about Sanders’s electability in the general election galvanized moderate voters, and in South Carolina in late February Biden won a resounding victory. Numerous candidates subsequently dropped out, and by early March it had become a two-man race between Biden and Sanders. As Biden registered more wins, he soon took a commanding lead in delegates. After the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States stalled the campaigns, Sanders dropped out in April, and Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
In the ensuing months Biden outlined a platform that included a number of policies that appealed to progressives. He notably supported government aid to low-income communities, ambitious climate change legislation, affordable child care, and the expansion of federal health insurance plans, such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which had been enacted during Obama’s presidency. During this time Biden gained a somewhat sizable lead over Trump in nationwide polls, in part due to criticism of the president’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which had caused an economic downturn that rivaled the Great Depression. In August 2020 Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate—she became the first African American woman to appear on a major party’s national ticket—and later that month, he officially was named the Democratic presidential nominee. Although preelection polling had shown Biden with a significant lead in key battleground states, the actual contest proved to be much closer. Nevertheless, Biden and Harris succeeded in rebuilding the so-called “Blue Wall” through the Midwestern Rust Belt states, and on November 7, four days after the election, Biden secured the 270 electoral votes necessary to capture the presidency. Biden’s eventual electoral vote total was 306 to Trump’s 232; Biden won the popular vote by more than seven million votes.
Presidency
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The 2020 election was marked by a historically large voter turnout, made possible in part by modifications in voting procedures initiated in many states to ensure that voters could cast their ballots safely amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Significantly more Democrats voted in the 2020 election than in previous presidential contests, and the Democratic Party not only won the presidential election but also maintained its control of the U.S. House of Representatives and took control of the U.S. Senate from Republicans, though only by the slimmest of margins (the resulting Senate membership was evenly divided between the two parties at 50 senators each, but tie votes could be broken by Vice President Harris, acting in her constitutional role as president of the Senate). In the view of many Democrats, particularly progressives, the party’s simultaneous control of the presidency and both houses of Congress afforded it a rare opportunity to pass transformative legislation that promised to make American society more democratic, equitable, and just.
During the first weeks of his presidency, Biden signed a raft of executive orders, actions, and memoranda, many of which rescinded policies of the Trump administration, particularly in the areas of immigration, health care, and the environment. Notably, on his first day in office, Biden issued executive orders that reentered the United States into the Paris Agreement on climate change and canceled the country’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization.
In March 2021 the Biden administration used budget reconciliation (a process that prevents certain budget-related bills in the Senate from being filibustered) to secure passage by Congress, without Republican support, of a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill, the American Rescue Plan. The law included, among other measures, one-time payments for lower- and middle-income Americans; extended unemployment benefits; an expanded child tax credit; financial aid to state and local governments, schools, and childcare providers; housing assistance; and additional funding for coronavirus testing, contact tracing, and vaccine distribution.
In August the Senate passed the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a drastically scaled-back ($550 billion) version of a wide-ranging infrastructure plan announced by Biden in March, its smaller scale made necessary by objections from Republicans and conservative Democrats to spending levels, tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, and several social spending provisions. The bill then languished in the House for months as progressive, moderate, and conservative Democrats debated its provisions, progressives refusing to support it except in combination with a larger social spending bill and conservatives insisting that it be voted on separately. In early November, following important off-year elections in which Democrats suffered several unexpected defeats—signaling a likely loss of the House and Senate to Republicans in the 2022 election—Biden and Democratic House leaders intensified their efforts to reconcile the factions, arguing that some tangible legislative achievement was necessary to retain the support of swing voters. After progressives finally conceded, the infrastructure bill was passed and sent to Biden for his signature.
Among Biden’s goals in foreign policy were to repair frayed relations with several U.S. allies, to cooperate in global efforts to ameliorate climate change, and, in general, to return the United States to a position of global economic and political leadership. Biden had also promised during his campaign that he would withdraw all remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan, finally ending nearly 20 years of U.S. military involvement in the country during all phases of the Afghan War, the longest military conflict ever fought by the United States. In April 2021 Biden announced a withdrawal of all U.S. troops by September 11—an extension of the May 1 withdrawal deadline negotiated with the Taliban by the Trump administration in 2020. By early August, after Biden had advanced the withdrawal deadline to August 31, the Taliban had begun to take military control of several Afghan provinces, and soon thereafter the Afghan capital, Kabul, was captured and the national government collapsed. Chaos ensued as the airport in Kabul was flooded with desperate Afghan refugees seeking to flee the country on American evacuation flights. During and after the withdrawal, the Biden administration was criticized by Republican and some Democratic leaders for having misjudged the strength and resolve of both the Taliban and the Afghan government and security forces.