Biden's Window Onto America, Our Window Into Biden

[kpete]

Biden's Window Onto America, Our Window Into Biden

Michelle Obama was fine and Hillary Clinton was good and John Kerry was forceful and Bill Clinton was terrific, but Joe Biden… Biden brought a tear to my eye. It came, of course, when he talked about his mother, the virtually cinematic embodiment of maternal myths -- a speechwriter’s concoction, you might have thought -- but there she was in the convention center, a face of crags and ripples, of past pain and present pleasure, with her son looking up and saying that her lessons, each and every one of them, was a step he mounted to reach the stage of the convention hall. Mothers move us all -- and so do sons who love them.

But then Biden got to the bit about the railroad. Most nights, as everyone must know by now, he takes the train from Washington, D.C. home to Wilmington, Del. Much has been made of this, including the preposterous statement that this nightly commute makes him something other than a Beltway insider. But the train trip is still important not because it takes him out of Washington, but because it takes him out of himself. Listen:

“Almost every night, I take the train home to Wilmington, sometimes very late. As I look out the window at the homes we pass, I can almost hear what they're talking about at the kitchen table after they put the kids to bed.” Biden said he overheard talk about economic desperation, about the calamity of aging without enough money, about college tuition payments so immense they can break the back of the middle class, of staggering bills to heat the home, and no pay raise this year and less health insurance and a retirement that gets postponed and postponed and postponed.

This is the virtue of trains and solitude. The train passenger is free to imagine, to fantasize -- to wonder about what’s happening in that lighted window or behind that door. The train brings you close, sometimes so close you can see the people inside. All politicians should be forced to take trains.

Joe Biden painted a picture last night. He did not just recite a list of programs, of what should be done and what was not done. Oh, I know he also knocked his friend John McCain and spanked George Bush, as any Democrat rightly should, but he also fired up the imagination of the torpid TV viewer. Out there, a bit beyond the tracks, close to the saloon and near the pool hall, over by the Holy Rosary Church and down by the social club, next to the bodega, up in that window where -- dammit, the light just went out -- is a story as rich and as complicated and as sad and as joyous as any in America. Great politicians are all voyeurs.

As Biden showed, on a train you can look into a window and see America. And sometimes, as his words about his mother showed, you can look into a window and see yourself.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2008/08/bidens_window_onto_america_our.html#more

[Javaman]

1. In a way it reminded me of Steinbecks "The Grapes of Wrath"...

When Jobe makes the "I'll be there" speech at the end of the book.

[KittyWampus]

2. It's A Wonderful Life, where you hear all the prayers for George Bailey