Remarks by President Biden at a Reception for the Democratic National Committee
SEPTEMBER 13, 2022
Location: Boston, Massachusetts

6:35 P.M. EDT
 
THE PRESIDENT:   Well, Jonathan and Jeannie, thank you very much for hosting me again.  And we were talking about it: It was 2008 or ’10 that I was here.
 
MR. LAVINE:  Nine.
 
THE PRESIDENT:  Nine.  2009.  And they still invited me back.  (Laughter.)  It’s amazing.
 
Folks, you know, I am optimistic.  I genuinely am.  I’ve never been more optimistic about the prospects for America, not because I’m President, but because the nature of where we are as a country.  And —
 
(Refers to the microphone.)  Does this work?  Yeah, I guess it does.
 
You know, one of the things that I realized is that, you know, I was Vice President for eight years, and I got to know most world leaders because the President asked me to do an awful lot of the foreign policy.  And I traveled around the world and — at his request.  And one of the things that I’ve come to realize is how much the rest of the world looks to us, the United States — it sounds like hyperbole, but it’s for real — for — to measure their own security.  And there’s a lot going on.  An awful lot going on. 
 
And I think we’re at one of those inflection points in world history where the things — we’re going to look back and kids are going to look back 10 years now and say, “How did they handle those several years at that point when things all began to change?”  And I think we have an opportunity not to build back the phrase that’s overused by me now, but not just to build back to what it was before this pandemic and before Trump came into office, but build back a hell of a lot better than it was before.
 
I really think that inflection points are times when you’re going to look back, as I said, 10 years now and say they either did it or they didn’t do it; they either changed direction for the country and improved it, or they lost the opportunity.
 
And when I talk about democracy, it’s not just the United States, it’s around the world.  The good news, or the bad news, is I’ve been around so darn long, I know every one of these heads of state, and I’ve known them well.  I mean it sincerely — for a long time.
 
And it is one of these things where you see what’s happening around the world.  I called a meeting of the Summit of the Democracies.  And there are 15 fewer democracies today than there were four years ago in the world.  Fifteen fewer than there were four years ago.  And a lot of countries are struggling.  And they look to us.  I know it’s not our responsibility, but they look to us to determine whether or not people are going to be able to see our way through this next 10, 12, 15 years.
 
And, folks, you know, there’s a lot that’s been happening, a lot that we’ve been able to do.  And I know when I ran, you may recall I said I was running for three reasons: one, to restore the soul of this country.  By that, I meant just graciousness, decency in the way we treat each other, the way we talk to one another, Mr. Ambassador.  Just the way — just the way we act.  Just the way we act.  Because we lost an awful lot of that.
 
One of the reasons I ran — and I wasn’t joking about it; I had no intention of running again — I ran because seeing those people come out of the field, those — carrying torches and Nazi banners and singing the same antisemitic bile they sang in the ‘30s, down in Virginia, and then a young woman would end up being killed.  And the President was asked, “What did you think?”  And he said, “There are very fine people on both sides.”  And I thought I couldn’t imagine any President saying something like that, how that could be.
 
And that’s when I decided to run. 
 
And the press has heard me say this before, but I was still reluctant to run because I knew how ugly it would be.  I knew how ugly the fight would be.  And I got a call.  We have a — we have a rule in the Biden family for two generations now — longer maybe, but only that I’m aware of — that said any child can ask for a family meeting.  Not a joke.  And it has to be taken seriously.  And they have to — if they ask for a family meeting, it means the family meets, and whatever is on that child’s mind, they get to raise.
 
And I got a phone call from my oldest granddaughter who is a graduate of Columbia Law School, works for one of the mega law firms in the country now.  And they said, “Pop, we want a family meeting.”  And so my — at that time, my five grandchildren — Beau’s two children, who were younger — they’re now 17 and 18 — and my son Hunter’s children who are — now range in age from 21 to 27, or 28 actually.  And — and they said they wanted to meet.
 
So we met in the library two days later.  And they said, “Pop, we’ve been talking.  We think you ought to run.”  And I said, “Well, honey, I don’t know if I should do this.  It’s going to be a very difficult race, and it’s going to be a very mean race.  And they’re going to — you’re going to be in the bullseye of a lot of people, and it’s going to just be tough.”
 
And my — they explained to me — since their entire life, all of them, either I’ve been a senator, a Vice President, or a candidate for President.  And they — so they’re sophisticated; they know what it’s like.  It’s not like it’s new to them.  Their entire lives.
 
And they went through as to why I should run.  And my granddaughter, Beau’s son said, “You know, Daddy would want you to run,” et cetera.  And my little grandson then — this is five — four years ago now — said to me — and he’s now 17 years old — he took out his phone and he said, “Pop, we know it’s going to be mean.”  And he showed me a picture on his cell phone taken at my son’s funeral — Beau’s funeral — where I had my hand on the flag-draped coffin, and I had my arm around him, and I was sort of holding him on his chin, holding him up.  And the saying on the bottom of the photograph was, “Biden molests another child.”  And he said, “We know it’s going to be mean.”  “We know it’s going to be mean.” 
 
And that’s when I decided I was going to run.
 
And here’s the deal: You know, we’re — we’re now in a situation where we’re less than 60 days from the midterms.  And the stakes are as crystal clear as any of you thought.  I know we talked about them earlier.  As crystal clear as they could ever be.  And it’s about the right to choose.  It’s about the right to privacy.  It’s about whether Social Security will be paid for or whether or not it’s going to be something every year that comes up on the ballot and it has to be voted on again.  That’s the Republican platform so far, in writing.
 
It’s about the safety of kids and the school violence.  Instead of dealing with reading and writing and arithmetic, learning how to duck and cover.
 
And it’s about the survival of the planet — literally, not figuratively — in terms of the environment.  It’s about the right to vote.  It’s really about democracy itself.  And I don’t think that’s hyperbole.  It’s about democracy itself.