Every resident of Delaware by now must know the lore. During the more than three decades when President Joe Biden represented our state in the Senate, he maintained a remarkable tradition. Rather than settle in D.C. for the work week after his election in 1972, he began riding Amtrak home every evening so that he was an everyday presence in his sons’ lives. As Beau and Hunter grew older, he maintained that ritual, which later included his wife, Jill, and their daughter. Ashley. By maintaining his home life in Delaware, Biden never lost touch with how we Delawareans thought about politics, even as he climbed the ladder in Washington.
The sensibilities he must have encountered at the two end points of that daily journey would have been wildly different from one another. In Washington, the impulse it seems is always to steer the country toward ever more partisanship — for those working “inside the Beltway,” one party’s victory is the other party’s loss. But that’s not how residents of Delaware see it. We believe that Democrats and Republicans shouldn’t see one another as enemies so much as friends with different views of how to solve various problems. And so our collective expectation is that our leaders will apply that bipartisan sensibility to their work. And that’s just what we saw from Biden during his decades representing us in Washington.
