Valerie Biden Owens, a political strategist and sister to President Joe Biden, once called her mother from the campaign trail to speak directly with an Iowa voter. That personal touch has been part of her political strategy for decades. Back in 1972, she brought out the youth vote for a Delaware race by encouraging students she taught to take to the streets and campaign themselves.
“I told them that they could learn about politics in the classroom with me, or they could go out and experience [it],” Owens said on Boston Public Radio Wednesday.
These are just a few of the anecdotes Owens shares in her new book, “Growing Up Biden: A Memoir.”
Owens emphasized how, from early childhood, Biden always pushed to include her in a world dominated by men.
“My first memory is my brother sticking out his hand and grabbing mine and saying, ‘Come on, come Val, we've got things to do and places to go and people to see.’ And off we went,” she said. “He told me that whatever he could do, I could do better.”
Reflecting on their upbringing, Owens called her brother her closest confidant.
“I owed it to him and to myself to try and be the girl that he thought that I was,” she said. “He gave me the confidence to reach and risk, and we've been best friends our entire life.”
Owens went on to become the first woman to run a major U.S. presidential campaign, as well as lead Biden to seven straight victories in the U.S. Senate, in addition to a county race. She said that being one of the only women in the room was not easy.
“I was the token woman and I was a token relative who sat up at the table,” she said. “But the flipside was that my brother was the one who pulled up the chair at the table and said, ‘This is my sister. When she speaks, consider that I'm speaking.’ Everything that happens here goes through her. … I had to hold my own.”
Owens also credits her parents, Joseph Robinette Biden Sr. and Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, for the siblings’ success, as well as their outlook on politics.
“We were raised in a middle-class Irish Catholic family,” Owens said. “Being Catholic meshed with the social values of mom and dad, of social justice … empathy, I think, is the connective tissue in our humanity.”
Owens said that empathy is sorely missing in political discourse today. While Biden ran on visions of reuniting the country, that promise is yet to come to fruition. He has faced political divisions both across the aisle and within the Democratic Party, blocking his Build Back Better and voting rights Bills. Owens, meanwhile, maintains hope.
“I believe that people know that Joe cares,” she said. “He is a warrior and he will bring us together … Joe is not ‘pie in the sky, la la la, everything is going to be fine.’ He continues to fight with grace and dignity, and he doesn't give up, he is not a quitter.”
Asked whether the president has read her book, Owens said yes — but not until it was finished.
“Normally I talk to him about everything … but I didn't show him the book beforehand because he had a couple of things on his mind,” she joked.
Valerie Biden Owens is the chair of The Biden Institute, a partner at Owens Patrick Leadership Seminars and an advisory board member of the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children.
