GRAND Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 41) cond Family however, defined Joe Biden as a fighter. At a time when others might have wondered why he wasn’t slowly cruising to a soft landing with his wife Jill—punctuating an illustrious career—Biden threw himself back into battle as Barack Obama’s running mate in a bruising, yet successful presidential run. Now Biden is preparing to help his president take on the worst economic times since the Great Depression, escalating healthcare costs, two wars and a worldwide energy crisis. W hen he was a child, Joe Biden’s father used to tell him, “Champ, when you get knocked down, you get up. You just get up.” Little did Joe Biden know how many times life would knock him down and how hard it would be to get up. Life’s early tragedies, The question remains: Why? “I’m in this for my grandchildren,” Biden told us, speaking from a phone right after a campaign rally in Florida. Biden said he wants for his grandkids (Naomi, 14; Finnegan, 10; Maisey, 8; Natalie, 4; and Hunter, 2) the America he remembers during his youth in Pennsylvania. “When I was growing up,” Biden shouted into the phone over a background swelling with crowd cheers, “the mothers and fathers in our neighborhoods told us that if we worked hard, played by the rules and reached for something better, there wasn’t a single thing we could not do. We believed it, and it was true. Right now, there are a lot of families who are struggling. They need to have that same sense of hope that life can be better.” Still, after shutting down his own presidential campaign earlier this year, Biden thought he would play out the political season from the sidelines. When asked by reporters if he was in the Veep stakes, he’d say, “I’m not the guy, fellas, honest.” In fact, when Obama tried to reach Biden to offer him the spot on the ticket, Biden wasn’t in Washington waiting by the phone—he was at his granddaughter’s birthday party in Wilmington, Delaware. Maisey was turning 8. Biden says the family gathers together at the big old farm table in the kitchen of his home for every birthday, without exception. After Maisey blew out the candles and the cake was cut, Biden broke his news almost casually. “Hey, I have something that I’d like to announce. Barack called me and asked me to be vice president.” The family cheered and hugged. Maisey was the first to break ranks. “Pop,” she asked Biden, “can I have more ice cream cake?” Jill Biden recalls that everything changed he wasn’t sitting by the phone, waiting for the call he was at his granddaughter’s 8th birthday party. NOVEMBER DECEMBER 2008 GRAND 41
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.