The speech Joe Biden has been preparing for his entire life

Over his near half-century in public life, Joe Biden has made many speeches: good speeches, bad speeches, campaign kickoff speeches and concession speeches, speeches without proper attribution to original sources, speeches so impossibly Biden that no one could ever accuse him of lifting anything.

“No one ever doubts that I mean what I say,” Biden, 77, is fond of telling audiences. “The problem is, I sometimes say all that I mean.”

What he means to say Thursday, as he accepts the Democratic presidential nomination in the most important — and likely most surreal — address of his career, has been something of a work in progress for several decades, since he charged onto the national stage as a 29-year-old senator-elect and sparked his first presidential speculation soon after.

And so, friends said, some elements of his preparation process were to be expected: consultations with a coterie of family members and his longest-serving advisers, including his sister Valerie Biden Owens, his wife, Jill Biden, and his chief strategist, Mike Donilon. Cycling through multiple drafts, reflecting a long-standing habit of tinkering until the end, often by hand. Biden and his team have also conferred with close friends and others he admires about themes and narrative arcs. Jon Meacham, the presidential historian, has been among those contributing to the process. (The title of a recent book by Meacham, “The Soul of America,” has been echoed by Biden throughout his campaign.)

But other parts of the task this week were less familiar. Namely: planning to deliver remarks with virtually no audience — distressing for a politician who has long fed off the energy of a crowd — with his top supporters left to uncork miniature bottles of confetti (supplied by the Biden team for solo watch parties) amid a pandemic that has claimed more than 170,000 American lives.

Biden’s speech, those close to him say, will be fashioned accordingly to meet the moment: more sober than jubilant, more restrained than swaggering, in his most ambitious effort yet to offer the American people a vision of steady leadership and national unity in the face of extraordinary crises.

“The times dictate a different type of speech,” said former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, D-Va, a close ally of Biden’s. “This is a different speech, this is a different time, than probably any other time going back to the days of FDR when we were dealing with a world war and we were dealing with a Depression. This is a very serious speech.”

Asked how long Biden had been preparing for his Thursday appearance, McAuliffe replied, “for his entire life.”

To borrow from Biden, that is not — entirely — hyperbole. Before he turned 30, Biden kicked off a long-shot Senate bid from a storied Wilmington hotel, assailing divisiveness and preaching optimism about the capabilities of the American people. Around five decades later, he is expected to touch on similar themes in his remarks from a conference centre here on Thursday, less than 2 miles from the hotel where he began his career in national politics.

“I would expect him to follow the same process he’s used for years,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a close Biden ally who said they spoke on Sunday. “You ask outside advisers. Message, pollsters, political advisers — they give you sort of framing. Then you go away, and you take a crack at it. Then you share it with the folks who know you — I mean, literally his sister — with your sister, with your spouse, with your closest political advisers. They give you some input. Then you go and think about it some more. And then you give your speech.”

While every prominent political figure becomes a practiced public speaker through sheer force of repetition, the act is, for Biden, almost definitional. Negotiating a stutter since his youth, Biden carved out a national reputation built in large measure on the power, preponderance and more-than-occasional precariousness of his words.

His belief in his own skills as an orator — his ability to persuade, to move, to own the room — has been a through-line of his public arc, often leading him to seek his own counsel despite any guidance he might absorb from advisers.

One former Senate speechwriter recalled Biden describing their working relationship like this: “I’m going to compare you to a golf coach,” Biden told the aide. “If you try to change my swing, we’re not going to get along.”

Matt Teper, a top Biden speechwriter during his vice presidency, suggested that Biden’s attention to detail could border on the obsessive. “You have an engaged principal,” he said. “You’ve also got someone who, on a word level, is caring about things that sometimes you’re like, ‘well, let’s leave the commas to me.’ But by and large, his engagement makes things better.’”

Teper predicted that the final edits Thursday would be made as late as “an hour or two in advance” — or, perhaps, extemporaneously. “He will change one thing as he delivers it,” Teper said, “to make it better.”

Of course, Biden’s words have not always landed with care. His first presidential bid, for the 1988 Democratic campaign, ended in a hail of plagiarism accusations. His next one, 20 years later, reinforced perceptions of verbal recklessness almost immediately, when Biden gave an interview in which he called Obama, his fellow competitor, “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, a trusted adviser throughout his political career, campaigns for his presidential primary run in Beaufort, SC, Oct 8, 2019. Sean Rayford/The New York Times

When Biden became Obama’s vice president, his incaution by turns frustrated White House aides and cemented Biden’s standing as a kind of incorrigible tale-telling uncle, prone to exaggeration or profanity on a live mic. On the campaign trail this cycle, he constantly wandered off script, into meandering asides, verbal missteps and the occasional inaccurate story that had to be walked back.

Yet it is also no coincidence that scores of families have trusted Biden with the most sacred speechmaking task: delivering eulogies. His fluency in grief and resilience was forged through his own grim fate, burying his first wife and daughter — who died in a car crash just after his first Senate election — and his son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015.

“They’re very difficult,” said former Sen. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden friend and former chief of staff who briefly succeeded him in the Senate, in an interview this spring about Biden’s eulogy-writing process. “It takes a lot out of him emotionally but also just physically. It is real — it isn’t like he sits down and does it on the back of an envelope or something like that. He really concentrates on these eulogies. He spends time on them. It takes out of whatever else he’s doing.”

Former Biden speechwriters have said that Biden was more engaged, and easier to work with, on eulogies than on virtually any other kind of speech.

The skills he has developed as a eulogist — an ability to communicate empathy and a sense of optimism to people confronting unfathomable loss — may be important preparation for a nominating speech Biden makes to a grieving nation confronting an uncertain future.

“He’s going to show people that he’s going to connect with real people,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich. “That he understands that they’re scared.”

Biden entered convention week fresh off the search for a vice-presidential contender. While he selected Sen. Kamala Harris of California, he had extensive conversations with a list of candidates representing a diverse range of states and of personal and political experiences, and a number of Democrats said they expected that process to have also informed his thinking about how to address the nation.

“I’m sure it did,” said Rep Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del, a co-chair of Biden’s vice-presidential search committee. “Their personal stories, I think, are representative of America. I think all of that will feed into the remarks that he gives. But ultimately I think he’s going to really focus on the resilience of our country and the future direction we’re going to go in.”

Although Biden and his party have never encountered a convention quite like this, he has been something of a regular through the years for the in-person affairs.

Since at least as far back as 1980, he has addressed Democratic National Conventions, accompanied at least occasionally by presidential rumblings.

While some television networks cut away during his speech that year, according to an account in The News Journal of Wilmington, his local supporters never lost faith.

From their perch on the convention floor, delegates from Delaware held a banner hinting at a future that would have to wait a bit longer than they had hoped back then: “Biden in ’84.”

© 2020 New York Times News Service