Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
“WASHINGTON — Whenever I called my mom to tell her something bad had happened, she said, “I know.”
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously put it, “To be Irish is to know that, in the end, the world will break your heart.”
Joe Biden has had his heart broken again and again and again.
And yet somehow — against all odds, in one of the most remarkable resurrections in political history — Biden stood with a full heart before an empty hall to accept his party’s nomination.
“This is our moment to make hope and history rhyme,’’ he said, using the Seamus Heaney line alluding to the Irish finding a way beyond the Troubles to peace.
But there’s another Heaney line, the one the Nobel laureate chose for his gravestone in County Derry, that suits the moment even better: “Walk on air against your better judgment.”
At 77, he has spent half-a-century running races; he has been dismissed and written off and gotten tangled up in his own missteps. He has been immobilized by grief, slowed by age and imprisoned by this plague. And yet the old war horse has made it to his party’s winner’s circle — and he has a real shot at the Oval.”
