On Vice President Joe Biden and Civility
I’m grateful to the Allegheny College Board of Trustees and to everyone involved in selecting me for this honor. It means a great deal to me, not the least because of whom I am sharing it with, my friend, Vice President Biden.
Our friendship goes back a long way. We’ve known each other since I was the Navy’s Senate liaison officer and carried Senator Biden’s bags on overseas trips. That was almost forty years ago, and, by God, I still resent it.
I’m kidding, of course. It was part of my job to escort senators on foreign trips and oversee the logistics of those trips, which included making sure everyone’s luggage arrived at their destination with them.
Then, as now, there were some senators whose exalted view of themselves exceeded the esteem in which they were held by their colleagues and constituents. But Joe Biden was never one of them. He was then and remains today, an awfully good guy, who is fair and courteous to everyone, even people who don’t always deserve it.
On those long ago adventures, he treated me not as a subordinate but as a friend, and it meant a lot to me. He served as an example of how a powerful person with genuine character and class treats staff or anyone in a position subordinate to their own. He treats them as people with dignity equal to his own.
That’s the essence of real humility. It’s not just modesty, though that’s a part of it. It’s realizing that you have as much dignity in the eyes of God as anyone else, but not one bit more.
I became Joe’s Senate colleague in 1987, and we served over twenty years together, until 2008, when he helped deny me the job promotion I had worked very hard to get, and took office as Vice President. I still resent that, too, by God. But I won’t dwell on it here.
Neither of us is exactly the shy and retiring type. We’ve both been known to hold a strong opinion or two, and to make our point emphatically when circumstances warrant. I think Joe appreciates the adage I’ve tried to follow in my public life. “A fight not joined is a fight not enjoyed.”
We’re in different parties obviously, and we hold different views on many issues. And you can safely assume we have managed over the years to make our different positions crystal clear to one another. Perhaps, in the persistent triumph of hope over experience, we both still cling to the expectation that we can persuade the other that he is mistaken. But I think, deep down, we probably both know better.
In addition to his being mistaken, here’s what I’ve also always known about my friend and occasional sparring partner, Vice President Biden. He is a good and decent man, God fearing and kind, a devoted father and husband, and a genuine patriot who puts our country before himself. I know, too, that it has been a great privilege to call him my friend.
Our political discourse should be more civil than it is today. Much more civil. We all, myself included, bear responsibility for it not being so. It probably asks too much of human nature to expect any of us to be restrained at all times from committing rhetorical excesses that exaggerate our differences and ignore our similarities. But it shouldn’t be beyond us to refrain from substituting character assassination and mean-spiritedness for spirited debate.
Too often, we lack empathy and mutual respect on all sides of our politics and in the media. But we can do better. We can behave with humility. We can be more courteous and respectful. We can treat each other as we wish to be treated. The Vice President has set the example for us.
We can be rivals. We can fight . . . fight hard and noisily. We can stand for our convictions and refuse to yield until our last breath. But whether right or wrong, we are only fools if we don’t recognize this truth:
We are fellow Americans and fellow human beings, who possess equal dignity and rights, and in the end, our shared identity is so much more important than our differences.
