The day after the disastrous presidential debate, CNN convened a panel that included Katie Rogers, a New York Times reporter who covers the White House. When the host asked her what those closest to President Joe Biden, including First Lady Jill Biden, were telling him, she paused to set the table first.
“I think it’s important to understand how this family works in a way, and her place in it, but also the children, the grandchildren,” she said. “They view obstacles as part of his story, as part of his tapestry, his long life in politics. And the way they’re talking about this is, ‘We’ve been here before, we can keep going.’”
The list of setbacks and soul-shattering tragedies Mr. Biden has weathered is so long, deep and disparate that it would be lurid to shove everything into one box stamped “Adversity.” He has buried two of his children – one as a toddler and one as a grown man – as well as his first wife. Somehow, those losses didn’t kill him, but an aneurysm years later certainly tried.
He had a severe stutter as a child that marked his speech patterns and confidence ever after. The kid who couldn’t talk became a college student who couldn’t get good grades and eventually a politician who embellished his life report card.
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In the decades-long Senate career that followed, his instinct for bluntness fired bullets into his own shoes nearly as often as it imbued him with an appealing authenticity. He ran for president unsuccessfully twice and was deeply stung in 2016 when then-president Barack Obama backed Hillary Clinton instead of him, his own vice-president.
In 2020, when Mr. Biden finally succeeded in winning the Oval Office, he ran in the most dire of circumstances, as an eye of calm and sanity amid the unhinged churn of Hurricane Trump.
It’s easy to understand why, after weathering all of this, persevering against the impossible is how Mr. Biden and those closest to him see his place in the world.
And that’s where Scranton Joe and the dauphin Trudeau share improbable common ground.
Justin Trudeau is the son of an iconic prime minister, famous from the moment of his birth, moving through life with the material gifts of wealth and the genetic rewards of the professionally handsome. It seems vaguely insane to talk about him as an underdog. But – often because and not in spite of all that shiny stuff – being underestimated has shaped his entire political career.
In 2015, when he ran his first federal campaign as Liberal Leader, his party started out as third-place roadkill, and Stephen Harper’s Conservatives engineered a long campaign because they figured it would expose him as a dilettante. Before a key debate, Mr. Harper’s spokesperson, Kory Teneycke, said of Mr. Trudeau, “If he comes on stage with his pants on, he will probably exceed expectations,” which in political terms registers as a gift so large that it should have been declared to the Ethics Commissioner.
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Even old-guard Liberals weren’t sold, to the point that one member of Mr. Trudeau’s inner circle dubbed them “the boo-birds.”
Paul Wells’s new book, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times, uses the 2012 charity boxing match in which Mr. Trudeau seemed destined to be pummelled by Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau as a frame.
“I am told that Trudeau keeps the boxing match in his head as a reference, a model. Every time he’s in trouble, he thinks, I’ve been in trouble before and they were wrong to count me out,” Mr. Wells writes, adding, “He likes the fight as a metaphor. He was on the ropes. Everyone was watching. Some made an early start of gloating. He won anyway. This is enough like what happened later, in the 2015 and 2019 and 2021 elections, that he mentions it sometimes to friends.”
Over and over, Mr. Trudeau has faced long odds and hideous circumstances – many the result of his own handiwork, but still – and somehow squeaked by.
Now, he’s 20 points down in the polls, people ask every few minutes whether he’s finally decided to walk the plank, and the calls are starting to come from inside the house. Mr. Biden, meanwhile, turned in a heartbreakingly weak debate performance, worsening his already shaky poll standings and setting off a panic tsunami among Democrats and everyone else seeking Donald Trump damage insurance.
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Yet both men insist flatly that they’re not going anywhere, even as the voices around them calling for change rise in both volume and octave. They’ve been counted out before, remember. Knowing that everyone thinks they’re about to be eaten for lunch, ignoring it and just getting the job done is who they are.
The problem for both of them – for all of us, really – is that showing grit, resiliency and optimism in the face of brutal odds is a wonderful quality that serves you well. Until, one day, it doesn’t.
And it’s very hard to know what day that will be.
What’s the difference between perseverance and delusion? Courage and hubris? Between acting like a hero and playing the fool? Where is the line? And how do you know when you’ve slipped across it?
The whole point of picking yourself up when everyone else thinks you’re done is that everyone else thinks you’re done but you pick yourself up. What’s supposed to tell you enough is enough if you’ve spent your whole life defying the orthodoxy of doubters?
One answer suggests itself in what Ms. Rogers said next on that panel. After she explained how the Biden camp sees struggle as part of the President’s story, she pointed out the one big, heavy fact they weren’t grasping.
“They haven’t acknowledged that age is a different thing,” she said. “It’s not an obstacle. It tells you what to do, not the other way around.”
Age can do that. So can Canadian voters.