Borked!
One of the most controversial Supreme Court nominees in history was Robert Bork. Nominated by Pres. Ronald Regan, Bork was most famous for not following the lead of two men fired before him on the same Saturday and acceding to Pres. Richard Nixon’s ill-fated request that special prosecutor Archibald Cox be fired. Although it would seem obvious to anyone that just about any other American alive would have been a wiser choice, Reagan pushed ahead. Biden pushed back on issues beyond the most notorious firing of a prosecutor in American history:
“Bork was the intellectual knight errant of a movement intent on rolling back the Warren Court’s expansive reading of criminal suspect rights, individual liberties, and the reach of FDR’s New Deal economic policies.”
A Metaphor of the People
One of the reasons that Biden succeeded so well in politics, it has been suggested, is that he genuinely seems like a regular Joe rather than being a privileged character who hollowly insists he is just a regular from guy from his ivory (or even gold) tower. Biden writes much the way he speaks in that he make connections with metaphor that are easily understood. Oscar Wilde may not have anything to worry about, but sometimes understanding trumps aesthetics. Still on the subject of the Bork confirmation:
“The last weeks before the hearings started felt like the end of the preseason, just before the first football game of the year. I couldn’t guarantee a win, but I was prepared. I was in shape. I had been catching the ball. I knew my pass patterns and I knew the ways that would work best.”
Oscar Wilde, Watch Out!
And then again, when the occasion requires and the tone is right and his mind is working at a higher gear than passing a pigskin, Biden reveals a talent for the aesthetics of figurative language. The events of September 11, 2001 meet all those requirements and he comes through in the clutch:
“…there was an eerie stillness on Capitol Hill—like the moment of prolonged equipoise between inhalation and exhalation.”
The image here is of that moment between breathing in and breathing out; a moment when a person isn’t breathing at all. A snapshot of death that isn’t really death, but feels something like it. Whether Biden actually composed the image or whether it is the work of a ghostwriter, it is a sublime example of a simile at perfect pitch.
The Corrosion Toward Conformity
When Joe Biden was first sworn in as a new United States Senator, Richard Nixon was still President and votes breaking down strictly according to party lines was a rarity. By the time he left the Senate, Nixon was dead and almost every vote in the Senate was breaking down according to party lines. Biden traces the shift to the hyperpartisanship which now characterizes Washington, D.C. to the 1994 election which handed control of both houses of Congress to Republicans for the first time in forty years. Nothing has been the same since. And nothing has changed since. According to Biden, it was from that point that the: "ethic of division had permeated Washington” charging that the Republican revolution has been a “tragically corrosive agent in our politics, in our institutions, and in our daily lives.”
Personal Tragedy, Public Healing
Another aspect of Biden that makes him seem real to many people is that his life hasn’t seemed to be charmed like some fictional character for whom nothing ever goes wrong. Plenty of has gone wrong in Biden’s life and it is this awareness of shared tragedy that touches many. One of the most tragic moments in Biden’s history is the day a telephone call came to his office in Washington and he learned that he had just lost his first wife and a baby daughter in a car accident. The portrait of his immediate response cannot help but touch many people who sadly know first-hand exactly what he’s talking about literally which he framed as metaphor:
“The first few days I trapped in a constant twilight of vertigo, like in the dream where you’re suddenly falling…only I was constantly falling.”
