Joseph R. Biden, once considered too young to serve, now too old to win

WASHINGTON — So ends the half-century career of a flawed but resilient politician who won the White House in a razor-thin election and lost it four years later in a debate: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

Biden, 81, now eases into a lame-duck presidency for the next six months, as the party he once commanded abandoned him in the span of a few weeks for an as-yet-unnamed candidate to carry the fight against Donald Trump.

Biden’s collapse began with a June 27 debate against Trump, when he turned in a disastrous performance from which he couldn’t recover. An elderly president with his mouth agape, he struggled to complete a sentence or finish a thought. One by one, Democratic leaders who watched in alarm broke their polite silence and openly called on him to step aside.

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Stunning as his fall may be, Biden may be better prepared than most to deal with repudiation. Few presidents in history have endured as much tragedy and disappointment as the 46th.

Biden’s life has careened between unexpected triumph and unimaginable loss. He won elections and lost them. He built a family, lost part of it, rebuilt it, and lost part of it once more.

Hardened by experience, Biden seems to grasp that political partnerships are transactional: They come with an expiration date.

If you want a friend in Washington, “get a dog,” Biden said at an NAACP convention on July 16, invoking former Democratic President Harry Truman’s famous dictum.

Long before he was considered too old to win, Biden was considered too young to serve.

He won a U.S. Senate seat in 1972, ousting longtime Republican incumbent Caleb Boggs. Just 29 years old, Biden did not meet the Senate’s minimum age requirement of 30 at the time. He turned 30 a couple of weeks after his victory.

He was young, handsome and his political future seemed limitless. Then his world cratered.

Before he was sworn in, his wife Neilia and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, died in a traffic accident. A tractor-trailer struck the family’s Chevy station wagon while they were out shopping for a Christmas tree. Biden’s two young sons, Beau and Hunter, were injured in the crash.

Biden was so shaken by the accident that he nearly renounced his Catholic faith. He considered giving up the Senate seat he had just won.

“The underpinnings of my life had been kicked out from under me,” Biden wrote in his memoir, “Promises to Keep.” “No words, no prayer, no sermon gave me ease. I felt God had played a horrible trick on me, and I was angry. I found no comfort in the Church.”

One of the Senate’s giants, Democrat Mike Mansfield of Montana, called constantly, imploring him to fill the seat as Biden sat in the hospital room with his sons. He relented and agreed to serve, riding the Amtrak train home from Washington every day when the Senate was in session so that the  boys would not be without a parent.

He rebuilt his life with the help of a devoted family. After Neilia’s death, his sister Valerie and brother Jimmy stepped in to help raise his sons.

In 1977, Biden remarried. Jill Biden would become a loving partner, stepmother and community college teacher wrapped into one. She also showed political chops. When Biden mulled a presidential bid in 2004, a bikini-clad Jill walked into a room at their home as he met with advisers. On her stomach she had written the word “No.”

No it was.

Biden spent 36 years in the Senate, gaining a national profile when he chaired the Judiciary Committee and presided over two of the most polarizing Supreme Court picks in U.S. history.

In 1987, then-President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an appeals court judge, to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Bork’s conservative approach to the law made him anathema to liberal Democrats.

Biden led public hearings in which he zeroed in on Bork’s criticism of previous Supreme Court rulings establishing a constitutional right to privacy, a notion that underpinned the Roe v….