On Saturday morning, in Des Moines, Joe and Jill Biden, the former Vice-President and Second Lady, appeared at a rally alongside some prized guests. Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, who served as Secretary of Agriculture under Barack Obama, and Christie Vilsack, his wife and political partner, had come to endorse Joe Biden’s bid for the Presidency. In front of a few hundred people, the Bidens and Vilsacks, two storied political couples, proud heavyweights of the first decades of twenty-first-century America, stood shoulder to shoulder and took in some applause. Jill Biden, serene and bright-voiced, reminisced about a trip that she took to Laos during the Obama years with Christie Vilsack, who was then serving as an adviser with the United States Agency for International Development. “We had the privilege of taking part in a beautiful national custom called the baci ceremony,” the former Second Lady said. “It’s a blessing that translates to ‘calling of the soul.’ The belief behind it is that part of our souls can sometimes wander and must be pulled back to keep harmony in our lives.”
The soul of America is Biden’s great campaign theme. His supporters, though, tend to back him less for metaphysics than for rude practicality. “You can’t govern until you win,” Tom Vilsack said in Des Moines, prompting cheers from the crowd. “That’s the one thing, and the only thing, that I agree with President Trump about. Joe is the most difficult guy to beat.” Biden’s principal challengers—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—have won over supporters by pitching major policy reforms such as Medicare for All, a wealth tax, and free public college. People want them to win because they want big changes. People want Biden to win because they think he can win—and this is why, despite his big lead in the national polls, many observers and rival campaigns consider Biden’s front-runner status precarious at best. Mike Bloomberg and Deval Patrick’s recent entry into the race is as much a reaction to Biden’s perceived struggles as anything else. In Iowa, polls have recently shown Pete Buttigieg surging. Warren and Sanders are both competitive. Kamala Harris has made a tactical decision to bet big on the state. It’s going to be crowded on caucus night. “If he wins Iowa, then I think he’s going to be the nominee,” one veteran Iowa political operative told me. “If he comes in below third, then everything that he has nationally, I think it’s going to go away in a heartbeat.”
On Saturday afternoon, the Bidens and Vilsacks toured Coyote Run Farm, a hundred and ten acres set on rolling hills in rural Marion County. The place is run by Patrick Standley and Matt Russell, a married couple who have lately become very involved in conversations about how different farm practices might help reduce and capture carbon emissions and how farmers might be at the center of policy debates around climate change. Other candidates, including Harris and Beto O’Rourke, have made stops at Coyote Run this year. “I’m passionate because I see the future, but it’s going to slip away if we don’t hold onto it,” Russell said as he showed his guests around his property. He praised Biden’s plan for rural America, which calls for American farmers to become “first in the world to achieve net-zero emissions.” The press was dutifully herded along with the hosts and the politicians, and reporters in leather shoes had to take care not to step in piles of cow manure. The tour ended among bales of hay in a red barn. “How old is the barn?” Biden asked. Russell had a response at the ready. The farm was built in the thirties and included five draft-horse stalls. “The family that built this,” he said, “they were betting that the future of agriculture was horses and harnesses. And we know the future of agriculture in the thirties was tractors and hybrids and petrochemicals. We’re at the exact same moment—that the future of agriculture isn’t what it is right now.”
Later, as Biden approached the S.U.V. caravan that would whisk him to his next stop, a reporter asked what his plans were for Thanksgiving. Biden stopped. His whole family would be getting together this week, he said. His aides tried to move everyone along, and another reporter, emboldened, floated a sharper question. Had Biden read the recent article in The Atlantic about his stutter? A few days earlier, an editor at The Atlantic, John Hendrickson, who himself has a stutter, had published a moving, humane piece about whether Biden’s childhood speech issues might still be affecting the former Vice-President. Biden had sat for an interview for the piece. “C’mon, guys,” one of Biden’s aides muttered. Biden smiled cryptically as he weighed his answer. “I came away admiring the author a great deal,” he said. Someone asked if he thought that his debate performances had been hampered by his stutter. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “But then again—” His aides began to yell “thank you” and “O.K., guys,” and succeeded in getting the candidate moving toward the waiting vehicles.
The day ended in Knoxville, in the lobby of the town high school, amid the memorabilia of past generations of Knoxville Panther athletes, pictures of boys in football jerseys giving way to pictures of girls in soccer uniforms. Biden stood in the center of the room, delivered his stump, and then took some questions. When Biden gets going, he’s happy to speak for twenty minutes or more at a clip, so it’s difficult at these events to get more than a few audience questions into the mix. “I’m boring the heck out of everybody here,” he said suddenly, ten minutes into an answer about his views on health care. A little later, Biden spotted a man a few rows back in the audience with two metal prosthetic legs. “Sir, are you a veteran?” he asked. “Me, no,” the man said. “I’m diabetic.” Biden stepped out into the audience. “You’re a hell of a guy, man,” Biden said. “No, no, no, no. I’m not joking. The prostheses you’re wearing now, guess what? You know, we’re making gigantic progress with prostheses. But it’s going to cost a lot of money. It should be available to you, period. Period. Period. Period.” Applause broke out.
Since the launch of his campaign, in April, Biden has declared, in countless events and appearances, that “we are in the battle for the soul of this nation.” In this telling, Donald Trump is an aberration, and Biden is offering voters a chance to set things right. And yet, at times in the past seven months, Biden’s candidacy has seemed stretched across multiple planes of existence. There was the battle with Trump, which became increasingly less theoretical as the President’s attempts to smear Biden became the center of an impeachment inquiry in Congress. There was the battle with his fellow-Democrats over the direction of the Party, and how far left it should turn in response to the newfound energy of its base. And then there was Biden’s battle against himself, in which his fifty-year record in national politics was contrasted with where the country has ended up, particularly on matters of race. Were these battles all over the same soul, or different ones? What, exactly, needed to be pulled back to maintain harmony?
After the Knoxville event ended, I approached the man with the prosthetic legs. His name was Bob Mann, and he was a great big guy, fifty-six years old, wearing a green cardigan and a red ball cap. He was on disability, and his wife worked for the sheriff’s department. They had three college-aged kids. Until that day, he had been undecided about which primary candidate to support, but he felt that he was in the Biden camp now. “I think he’s sincere,” Mann said. The government had provided assistance for his kids until they were eighteen, he said, which was a big help. But how was he supposed to help his kids pay for college? “I haven’t worked for twenty years because of this problem,” Mann said. “So I didn’t have twenty years’ worth of employment to save for my kids’ college.” And health-care costs were eating into what money he did get. “I think, eventually, our country is going to have to go to a national health-care system of some type,” he said. His kids were Sanders supporters, he said, on account of Medicare for All. His parents, he said, supported free public college. “My mom and dad told me, ‘Used to be free college. Why can’t there be now?’ ” he said. But he was feeling like he was for Biden. “I’m just right in the middle,” he said. “I just don’t think anybody can win with all that. I think people just can’t fathom that that could happen.”
