People have not historically hustled to spontaneous outdoor dance parties for Joe Biden.
They have not clanged spoons against frying pans in celebration for him, formed triumphant honk-parades along Fifth Avenue for him, made Champagne toasts with strangers in his honour through chants and tears.
“BIDEN!” his supporters shouted outside Manhattan’s Washington Square Park on Saturday, the call echoing from apartment windows and taxis and sidewalk restaurant tables. “JOE BIDEN!”
Joe Biden. That Joe Biden — institutionalist 70-something, incorrigible square, inexhaustible reciter of Irish poetry.
But then, it seems that defeating President Donald Trump can do strange things for a man’s reputation.
In Biden’s first hours as President-elect on Saturday, many voters who have appraised him through the decades as a particular kind of capital veteran appeared ready to greet him as a sort of conquering hero.
“Winners write history,” said Amanda Litman, a former aide to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the executive director of Run for Something, a group encouraging Democrats to seek local office. “I think he definitely gets bonus points for doing what no one thought was possible, even when we hoped it was.”
Litman said she had spent the day walking miles across Brooklyn, sobbing in the street and encountering an intersection dance-a-thon, set to “Shout” by the Isley Brothers, that felt airlifted from a wedding reception.
Biden, of course, has not generally been Washington’s leading purveyor of cool. That will not necessarily change over the long term. It is likely that gushing Democratic affection would have awaited anyone who managed to beat Trump.
And yet, this is the person who did it.
If the last two commanders-in-chief have been phenomenon candidates who became phenomenon Presidents, Biden would appear to be ending the trend, comfortable instead with the identity that helped elect him: the man to rein things in a bit, to lower the collective volume before the neighbours complain.
During the campaign, Biden’s team strained to create a mini-cult of personality around him, bragging on his signature accessory (aviators), his signature vice (ice-cream), his interest in muscle cars.
“Ridin’ With Biden,” went one slogan that kinda-sorta caught on.
While most of the impromptu gatherings this weekend came in places unaccustomed to Biden-associated revelry — with rollicking bashes from Los Angeles to Washington to most any city in between, cheering Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris — there was at least one ZIP code for which the embrace was more culmination than novelty.
On Saturday, hundreds of cars jammed into a parking lot outside an events centre in Wilmington, Delaware, ferrying in Biden’s friends and fans from the state he represented for 36 years in the Senate for a somewhat socially distanced drive-in rally. They sat on the roofs of their vehicles and played cornhole as they waited. They lugged around oversize American flags and kibitzed in lawn chairs and balanced Champagne flutes on top of their cars. They were proud, they said, of their state’s most famous resident.
Carrie Casey, 49, said she had come in part to bask in “the utter excitement of a Delaware almost-native winning the presidency, as well as the first female and woman of colour Vice-President.”
She had turned out a few days earlier — the original Election Day, on Tuesday — for what was supposed to have been a victory party.
“It was, like, very stressful,” Casey said. “To wake up in the morning and there still be hope, and the next day and the next day, and being patient — and to be here right now is absolutely incredible.”
New York Times News Service
