Joe Biden drops out of 2024 race: A look back at a stubborn president, who battled too far

Joe Biden on Sunday (July 21) caved into pressure and announced his decision to drop out of the presidential elections slated to take place later in the year.

Looking back, it has been a difficult road for Biden as he tried to save his political career following the disastrous presidential debate. Biden has been hailed by his former boss, former President Barack Obama as ‘patriot of the highest order’.

But Biden’s life has been life filled with ups and downs. From playground punch-ups to a stutter to terrible family tragedies, the man’s life is an example of a series of comebacks against impossible odds. Overcoming his reputation as a gaffe machine, Biden initially lived up to his goal as a “unifier in chief” after the Trump years and the shock of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

But the question of his age always loomed large. Biden eventually joked about it but always denied it was an issue, even after a debate where his rambling answers and listless stare sparked a revolt by Democrats. A mix of pride and his conviction that Trump was a threat to democracy kept Biden fighting down to the wire.

Franklin Foer, author of a book on the Biden presidency, wrote recently that ‘humiliation — and its transcendence — is Biden’s origin story.’ He wrote in The Atlantic, “Right now it is his psychological prison, a mental habit that might doom American democracy.”

Let us take a look at Biden’s life.

Biden’s cruel losses

Biden’s outlook to life has been largely formed by a hardscrabble childhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the American rust-belt. Biden was part of a close-knit Irish Catholic family — he was just the second Catholic US president after his hero John F Kennedy — that was known for its intense pride.

His mother Jean told the young Joey and his siblings every day that “nobody was better than a Biden,” Ben Cramer wrote in his book What It Takes, about the 1988 US election campaign. He was also known for never backing down. “He decided to fight… BANGO – he’d punch the guy in the face,” Cramer wrote.

One affliction Biden famously had to battle was a childhood stutter. Repeatedly humiliated at school, the young Biden ended up teaching himself how to speak smoothly by sheer determination, repeating phrases again and again into the mirror.

But Biden’s biggest test was yet to come.

In 1972, he was only 29 and had just won an unlikely victory to be elected senator for Delaware when his wife Neilia and their one-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash. Their young sons Beau and Hunter were left badly injured. Tragedy struck again in 2015 when Beau died of brain cancer, aged 46.

Biden also had to deal with the agony of Hunter ’s drug addiction and legal problems. “Sometimes I marvel at Joe’s strength. His life has been marked by cruel losses,” First Lady Jill Biden, whom Biden married in 1977, said in her memoir Where the Light Enters.

President for all Americans

With his family close around him, Biden did not let two failed presidential bids - and a nearly fatal aneurysm in 1988 - discourage him. He served as Obama’s vice president for two terms, and his stubborn persistence in pursuit of the top job paid off when he came out of retirement to beat Trump in 2020, defying critics who said he was too old.

Saying at his inauguration he wanted to be a “president for all Americans,” his old-fashioned centrism was a relief to many after the divisiveness of the Trump years. At home, he forced through a massive COVID recovery scheme and a green investment plan.

Biden endorses Kamala Harris as presidential candidate

In Kamala Harris, his likely successor to the Democratic nomination, he appointed the first female, Black and South Asian vice president in US history. She said on Sunday she would work to ’earn and win this nomination.’ US allies welcomed Biden’s pledge that “America is back” and his strong support for Ukraine. But despite the best efforts of the White House to limit his public appearances, his age became the story again.

A series of senior moments culminated in the disastrous debate performance against Trump that doomed his bid for a second term.

As he fought to save it, he returned to the image of the underdog, often repeating his father’s saying: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.”

Now Democrats have done just that.

With inputs from AFP