My wife, who, I can safely say, is part of the “general public,” said after Joe Biden’s rousing Raleigh speech on Friday: “He’s the real thing.” She says she has even more respect for him now than she did before last Thursday’s debate.
Why? “If you are a woman and a mother, you know what it is like to pick yourself up,” she explained. For women in North America, a constant chorus of critical voices incessantly whispers, “You are a bad wife, a bad mother, a failure because you’ve put on weight.”
“You are doing a good job, and your record shows it,” she said, “But you have a bad day and that’s what gets featured. Women have bad days all the time. But you pick yourself up and you keep on going. You do what must be done to the best of your ability.”
That, for her, is true grit. That is real courage, and that’s what endears Joe Biden to her.