The day that Beau Biden died: What helped him and what motivated him to run for office? A personal observation for the special counsel on Biden’s age and how he handled classified documents
WILMINGTON, Del. — First lady Jill Biden said in an email to campaign donors on Saturday she didn’t know what the special counsel was trying to achieve when he suggested President Joe Biden could not remember when his oldest son died.
“We should give everyone grace, and I can’t imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points,” she wrote. “If you have experienced a loss like that, you do not measure it in years, you measure it in grief.”
That’s true even though the report by Hur, a former Trump appointee tapped by Merrick Garland to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents, looks like a partisan hit job. Democratic attorneys general are terrible at giving Republican special counsels the appearance of impartiality in order to make themselves look better. The comments about Biden’s age and the claim that Biden can’t remember the year his son died seemed to be designed to make him politically unpopular. If that’s the case, it worked.
It was a personal observation for the special counsel as to how the president handled classified documents. Beau Biden died in 2015 from a brain tumor. It’s something that Biden speaks of regularly, and cites as both a reason why he didn’t run in 2016 and a later motivator for his successful 2020 run.
May 30th is remembered as the day that Beau Biden died by the Biden’s, said a note from the VP’s wife. “It shattered me, it shattered our family. … What helped me and what helped Joe was to find purpose. That’s what keeps Joe going and serving our country.
Biden mentioned that he had sat for five hours of interviews with Hur’s team over two days on Oct. 8 and 9, “even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7th and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.”
The conversation at the dinner party with the former Biden official and the Democratic donor started with Biden’s age and his chances of re-election. The ex-official said that from inside the White House, where people experience the policymaking process firsthand, Biden was overwhelmingly seen as an effective leader who should run again. The donor, on the other hand, saw Biden mostly at the fund-raisers where watching the president’s meandering speeches left him terrified about the upcoming campaign. The gulf in their perceptions, I think, speaks to the fact that Biden’s age has impaired his ability to campaign much more than his ability to govern, which has created an impossible dilemma for the Democratic Party.