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How Winning Turned Joe Biden Into a Confident Candidate

Associated Press

   LOS ANGELES - Joe Biden strode confidently to the podium, shutters
   clicking, a bank of cameras beaming to a national audience.

   "Those of you who have been knocked down, those of you who have been
   knocked out, this is your campaign," Biden said Wednesday. "We welcome
   all of those who want to join us. We're building a movement."

   The former vice president has found his stride and his voice as he
   becomes a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

   Gone is the sometimes mumbling, almost wistful 77-year-old, standing
   before small Iowa crowds full of voters lamenting the state of the
   union. "What in God's name is happening?" he'd ask, after deviating
   from anything approaching prepared remarks.

   Instead, there's a confident candidate, jabbing at Bernie Sanders, his
   chief rival for the Democratic nomination, yet reserving his biggest
   swings for the Republican president he hopes to topple in the fall. "If
   we give this man another four years in the White House, he will forever
   and fundamentally change the character of this nation," Biden said
   Wednesday.

   But Biden also tries to seem above the trenches, promising to unify a
   fractious Democratic Party and a general electorate roiled by Donald
   Trump's presidency.

   It's part scrappy Joey Biden, the kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who
   learned to navigate a severe stutter but still talks of the searing
   humiliation. It's part Delaware senator, the deal-maker promising to
   replace Washington churlishness with comity, dignity and diplomacy.
   It's part two-term vice president, the national officeholder who
   believes "with every fiber of my being" that he can return in the top
   spot this time and "heal the nation." And it's part devoted husband and
   father, wearing personal loss as public grief.

   Of course, Biden's Super Tuesday surge was aided in part by the
   unceremonious fall of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who entered the race
   because Biden appeared headed toward an uninspiring finish. Similarly,
   he benefited from party moderates' fears about Sanders, whose
   democratic socialist identity mainstream Democrats see as a November
   albatross. That was enough for two competitors, Amy Klobuchar and Pete
   Buttigieg, to drop out and endorse Biden, with former candidate Beto
   O'Rourke making it an endorsement trifecta on Super Tuesday eve.

   Nonetheless, the former vice president put himself in position to take
   advantage of those dominoes, tapping personal and political strengths
   and muting at least some of his weaknesses to make a comeback
   unparalleled in modern presidential campaigns.

   Those close to him describe a candidate and campaign jolted into
   abandoning a "Rose Garden" campaign -- the kind of effort an incumbent
   president might run by using the trappings of the office -- that had
   come off as cautious and, worse, presumptuous.

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