National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017--Conference Report

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise in honor of your service.

I just want to tell my favorite Joe Biden story. This is a story the Vice President has heard me tell, but I want it on the Record because everyone should know this story. It is the story of an interaction between our Vice President on one of the most important days of his life and a young man from Richmond, VA, my hometown, on one of the most important days of his life.

It was election day 2008, and I was Governor of Virginia. I was responsible for the running of the elections in my State that day when Senator Joe Biden was running for Vice President with our President, Barack Obama.
I received a call in the middle of the morning: There was going to be a surprise visit to a polling place in Richmond. After having voted in Wilmington, Senator Biden was going to make a stop in Richmond and wanted to meet some voters before he headed to Chicago to await the election results. We gave him the address of an elementary school polling place that was very near the Richmond Airport, and I raced there with my security detail to get there a few minutes before he arrived for a surprise visit with voters who were going to love having the chance to meet the soon-to-be Vice President. I got there a few minutes before Senator Biden arrived, and I saw a friend who had come to vote. I asked how he was doing. He said: I am doing great. I am really excited about voting today. And it is also a special day because I have a nephew with sickle cell anemia and he is casting his first vote, but he is so sick, he can't even get out of the vehicle.

I watched the election officials at the polling place take a voting machine from inside the school into the car so that his 18-year-old nephew could cast the first vote of his life. I saw this young man, the nephew of my friend, and he was very ill.

I said to my friend and his nephew: Can you wait here for 5 minutes? Because I think we can do something really exciting.

What?

Well, just wait.

And they said they would.

Within 5 minutes, Senator Biden came up to meet voters and shook the hands of those in line. I said: Senator, there is a young man here, and just as this day is very important to you, because I think you are about to be elected Vice President of the United States, for this young African-American male, who is very ill but extremely excited even in his illness to get out of his house to come here and cast his vote to elect the first African-American President--he is sitting there in that vehicle. Will you go and visit with him?

I didn't even have to finish the sentence and put the question mark at the end before Senator Biden shot across the parking lot and went up to the vehicle. The press corps was following him. The young man was sitting in the back seat. Joe just jumped in the front seat, closed the door, rolled up the window so nobody could hear the conversation, and the press corps gathered around all four sides of the vehicle with their cameras taking pictures of Senator Biden in an extremely animated and somewhat lengthy conversation with the 18-year-old who had just cast his vote. To me, that will always be the quintessential Joe Biden story.
Joe Biden is the Irish poet of American politicians. He and I share a passion for the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. Yeats, like our Vice President, was not just a poet. He was a man of the public. He was a public official. People asked him to weigh in on political matters all the time.

Once, in the middle of the First World War, somebody asked Yeats to write a war poem. He wrote a war poem, and the poem was titled ``On Being Asked for a War Poem.'' The poem says this:

I [often] think it better that in times like these A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth . . .
He has had enough of meddling who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter's night.

The meaning of the poem is this: I may be a public figure. I may have a public job to do. I may be asked to do a public job and to claim upon matters of public importance. But sometimes even more than the matter of public importance is the ability to please a young girl or an old man--or an ill young man casting a first vote, an important vote.

The fact that you took your time on that day of importance to you to shed some light and offer some joy to someone who was struggling--that is the Joe Biden who has us here for 2 hours offering these tributes.
I yield the floor.

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