Column: The Joe Biden moment

Former Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff admits he gets emotional when giving speeches.

“I only cry when I talk about my family, my country, or my God,” says Shurtleff, who is now a lawyer in private practice, told a gathering of immigration reform advocates a few years ago.

I was in the room at the time, and those words have stuck with me ever since. Family. Country. God. What do these things have in common? Answer: they all make us feel small.

Joe Biden has shed his share of tears — and then some. The vice president is currently mourning the tragic death of his son, Beau, from brain cancer. And even though Beau reportedly asked his father to run for president, the elder Biden isn’t sure what to do, as he revealed recently during an emotional appearance on CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

The vice president needs to run. This is the Biden moment.

For one thing, the election season has just begun, and already many Americans are sick of blowhards, demagogues, egomaniacs, and narcissists who are in love with the sound of their own voice.

With politicians, a big ego is almost a job requirement. Yet, in this election, the self-adoration is off-the-charts.

What the country needs is someone with a sense of perspective, someone who knows what it’s like to feel small. We need someone who — when he or she talks about family, or recalls the many acts of heroism on September 11, 2001, or worships in a church, mosque and synagogue — feels almost insignificant.

I caught a glimpse of it last spring when Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida launched his presidential bid.

“I am humbled by the realization that America doesn’t owe me anything, but I have a debt to America I must try to repay,” Rubio told supporters at the Freedom Tower in Miami.

There is not much humility in the childish attacks that the candidates are launching against one another. When businessman Donald Trump insisted that former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina doesn’t have the right “face” to be president, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal responded that Trump isn’t one to talk since he “looks like he’s got a squirrel sitting on his head.”

Now that they’ve mastered swagger, and honed their insults, many of the candidates are trying to prove they’re authentic.

In that department, Biden has nothing to prove. His interview with Colbert was raw, honest, almost painful to watch. Biden doesn’t put on airs, or try to be something he’s not.

Compare this to Hillary Clinton. A national survey by Quinnipiac University, released July 30, asked Americans if candidates were "honest and trustworthy." For Clinton, 37 percent said “yes,” but 57 percent said “no.” For Biden, 58 percent said “yes” and 34 percent said “no.”

Biden brings something deeper to the race as well. He is intimately acquainted with suffering. Those of us who have lost a child know that you never get over it, that it causes an exquisite kind of pain, the kind that, in turn, brings wisdom through what Greek poet Aeschylus called the awful grace of God.

A painful loss doesn’t automatically make you a leader. But it does often produce something that is essential to leadership, something that voters are hungry for right now, and something that Biden has in abundance: character.

And if one is looking for a place from which to launch a presidential campaign, that’ll do nicely.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a columnist with the Daily Beast, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group, and the author of A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano.

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