When Joe Biden was growing up as a Catholic boy in Pennsylvania and Delaware, his car-salesman father, who loathed self-pity, gave his son some advice that has helped him endure some of the toughest moments of his 77 years: “Get up!”
“That was his phrase and it has echoed through my life,” Mr Biden wrote in his autobiography, Promises to Keep. It helped him tackle small problems — like when a “girl’s parents won’t let her go out with a Catholic boy” — and to survive trauma, such as when his wife and baby daughter were killed in a car crash weeks after his 1972 election as US senator from Delaware.
Mr Biden hinted that those words were once again on his mind when he spoke in Los Angeles on Super Tuesday after surging into first place in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. It came three days after a crushing victory in South Carolina rescued his campaign by providing a big enough margin to force almost all his moderate rivals to quit the race. “For those who’ve been knocked down, counted out, left behind: this is your campaign,” Mr Biden bellowed jubilantly.