WILMINGTON, Del. — As President Joe Biden met with confidants last week to discuss whether he should end his reelection campaign, John Flaherty, a retired government employee, was seated in a booth at Angelo’s Luncheonette in Wilmington, Delaware, the small city that has been Biden’s political home base for more than 50 years.
Wearing a Philadelphia Phillies cap, Flaherty, 73, who worked as a staff assistant to Biden in the 1980s, invoked the song “The Gambler” to express his opinion of what the president should do.
“As Kenny Rogers said, ‘You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em,’” he said.
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Shortly after Biden announced that he had put an end to his bid, Flaherty weighed in by phone. “I’m glad,” he said. “I think he should enjoy his life after January and spend time with his family.”
He added that he was “happy” that Biden’s withdrawal had left Donald Trump as the oldest major-party presidential nominee. “Biden might be the oldest president,” he said, but now “Trump will be the oldest candidate” for president.
Wilmington, a city of roughly 71,000, is the site of the Joseph R. Biden Railroad Station, one of the busiest Amtrak stops along the Northeast Corridor, and Biden’s main residence is in a nearby suburb. But even here, in the world’s most Biden-friendly enclave, Flaherty was just one of many who believed the president had made the right call.
Most people I spoke with for this article seemed fond of the president but pessimistic about his reelection prospects. And everybody, it seemed, had a Biden story.
At Angelo’s, where Biden used to stop in for meals, I heard about a poster from his 1988 presidential campaign that had pride of place on a wall near the booths. For years, a smiling Biden, surrounded by his wife and children, looked down on the customers.
Early in Trump’s presidency, the poster prompted occasional anti-Biden remarks, according to Nina, a server at the restaurant who did not want to share her last name. And then, at some point, the bickering among the customers over politics grew more heated. Finally, the staff had enough and took the poster down.
“People are jerks,” Nina said softly, as if not wanting to provoke more arguing.
Even in Wilmington, which propelled a 29-year-old Biden to the U.S. Senate in 1972, local pride has met political reality.
Biden moved with his family from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Wilmington in 1953, at age 10. For 70 years, he has been rooted in this place, and he has shaken thousands of hands in its neighborhoods, from Little Italy to Trolley Square.
One of his most ardent local supporters is Eunice LaFate, an artist who operates LaFate Gallery on Market Street, where she sells her paintings.
Born and raised in Jamaica, LaFate, 77, moved to Wilmington in 1983 after meeting her husband, a city native who worked for Amtrak. “I saw a banner in a park on a yellow board,” she said, sitting amid her colorful paintings last week. “It said, ‘Wilmington — A Place to Be Somebody.’”
LaFate spent 12 years working for a bank in town, she said. The shift to becoming a full-time artist and gallerist was inspired, in part, by an encouraging letter she received from then-Sen. Biden after one of her paintings had adorned the cover of Out & About, a local entertainment publication.
LaFate’s Biden story has to do with his son Beau, who died in May 2015, shortly after the death of her husband.
“When his son passed, I stood five hours in a line at the church, waiting to greet him,” LaFate said. “After the five hours waiting in line, I went up and expressed my condolences. And I mentioned to him I am going through grief myself. The man took time out to console me. It was just — what should I say — so moving. The crowd was waiting, but he took time out.”
There was no portrait of Biden on the walls of LaFate’s gallery, but she went into the back to show me another one she had done — of Kamala Harris, painted after the 2020 election, wearing a white shirt and a black blazer against a pink background.
In an interview the day after Biden’s announcement, LaFate seemed happy with the turn of events. “This is where our salad bowl of culture comes into play,” she said. “And Kamala Harris is a very dynamic ingredient in that salad. And she has Jamaican heritage! Her father is Jamaican. So all of this combined, this is pretty dynamic for me.”
Jerry duPhily, the publisher of Out & About, spoke fondly of the president over lunch last week at the Kozy Korner, another Wilmington spot that Biden has been known to frequent.
“People go, ‘Why does he come back so much?’” duPhily, 66, said. “I think he likes it here. He’s comfortable.” But he added that there were concerns. “I think a lot of people are cognizant of, ‘You’re 81, and you lost a step, and we see it,’” he said.
After the announcement, duPhily said that Biden had made the right decision, in his view. “Maybe he could have made it a few weeks earlier,” he said. “But someone who has the history he does, which is being a fighter and determined, isn’t just going to walk away from it.”
DuPhily added that he hoped Biden would build his presidential library in Wilmington, saying, “OK, he’s from Scranton — but he’s Delaware Joe.”
Perhaps more than anyone else, Mike Purzycki, Wilmington’s 57th mayor, a Democrat who ran unopposed by any Republican to win his second term in 2020, knows what Biden has been going through. A few months ago, he announced that he would not be seeking a third term. (Local term-limit laws allow the city’s mayor to serve 12 years.)
“I’m 79,” Purzycki said over lunch at Kid Shelleen’s Charcoal House and Saloon, a onetime biker bar turned elevated saloon at the corner of 14th and Scott streets. “I took a look and said, ‘Can I do this four more years?’”
A native of New Jersey, Purzycki came to the state on a football scholarship to the University of Delaware, where he lived in the same dormitory as Biden. He worked for IBM, became a real estate developer and served as the executive director of the Riverfront Development Corp., which turned Wilmington’s blighted riverfront into an area of parks, walking trails, restaurants, stores, nightclubs and new housing.
Once considered a corporate town where the sidewalks roll up at 5 o’clock, Wilmington now has buzzy restaurants downtown. Transplants from out of state are discovering the beautiful architecture, ample parks and relative affordability, all within an easy drive to bigger cities and beaches. This is the Wilmington to which Biden will return.
He will have to figure out how to spend the days after he leaves office. Purzycki has no easy advice about that.
“I’m struggling,” he said of his own post-retirement plans. “I’m struggling mightily.”
In a statement Monday, the mayor showed his support for Biden’s decision to withdraw, writing that the president “has shown himself to be someone who courageously put the welfare of his fellow citizens above personal ambition.”
The headquarters of the now defunct Biden-Harris campaign occupied a nondescript high-rise office building downtown. Last week, there were no big signs out front, no staff members scurrying in and out, nothing to suggest an operation running at full steam. That may change soon.
“It’s the first full day of our campaign,” Harris posted on social media Monday morning, “so I’m heading up to Wilmington, DE later to say ‘hello’ to our staff in HQ. One day down. 105 to go. Together, we’re going to win this.”
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