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Joe Biden Is Not the Safe Choice
BY JACK HOLMES
MAR 3, 2020
Bernie Sanders has been clear about his vision for victory: that he will galvanize a grassroots coalition of working-class people, many of them young people of color and others who have never participated in the political process, to form a new American majority movement.
But his candidacy presents risk. So far, after four primary contests—two of which were shamefully undemocratic caucuses—this revolution in participation hasn't yet materialized. On Super Tuesday, today, he needs it to happen. It must happen because there is reason to believe Sanders would, as the nominee, lose some ground in the suburban areas where the Democratic Party made such gains in the 2018 midterms with people—particularly white women—who are sick of having a whacked-out game-show host as president but will be scared off by Sanders. He's got to make up the difference by bringing new voters in, and that's the risk: the people Sanders is pledging to bring in do not have a history of voting. The rich old white people do.
On the flip side, however, there's a different kind of risk. After Joe Biden's strong performance in South Carolina, the party's centrist flank has marshaled itself—with the kind of discipline rarely seen in Democratic politics—behind Barack Obama's ex-VP. (In fact, by some reports, Obama himself is eyeing Joe now.) It seemed to all happen at once: Amy Klobuchar dropped out and endorsed him immediately. Pete Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed him by that evening. Beto O'Rourke, the forgotten future-prince of the Democrats, emerged from whichever dusty road he was walking to join all of them at a rally down in Texas. The message was clear: Joe Biden is the Party's Pick.
The field is shaping up quite clearly now.
But there seems to have been a whole lot of reverse-engineered confidence in Biden's candidacy almost overnight. A week ago, Biden was on the South Carolina debate stage bringing the kind of defiant energy you'd expect from someone whose entire career and legacy was on the line. But he still said things like, "150 million people have been killed since 2007" by gun violence. He said things that were...difficult to understand. This has been a constant theme of his appearances throughout the primary. Here's a passage transcribed by Politico in October.
“I think that, uh, the behavior of this administration has awakened, uh, a whole new generation to get engaged in ways that they may not have gotten before,” Biden said, referring to President Donald Trump and the current tumult. “Just like in my generation, when I got out of school that, uh, when Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King had been assassinated in the ’70s, uh, late seven—when I got engaged, um, you know, up to that time, remember the, none of you women will know this, but a couple men may remember, that was a time in the early, late ’60s, and the early ’60s and ’60s, where it was drop out and go to Haight-Ashbury, don’t get engaged, don’t trust anybody over 30. I mean, for real. What happened to them, by the, by the early ’70s, the late ’60s, there was a whole generation that said, ‘Enough.’ The war in Vietnam was underway, and it was—a lot of you served in that war—and, uh, we were fighting like the devil to make sure that there was something dealing with cleaning up the environment, which was only beginning. We were in a position where the women’s movement was just beginning to move. We should have, by now, long before, passed the ERA amendment, but that was another issue …”
This is a problem. It does us no good to overlook the fact that, not unlike the current president, Biden does not always finish his sentences, and it's not always to do with his stutter. He doesn't always make sense. He can have trouble placing people and events within space and time. Last month, he completely made up a story about how he was arrested in South Africa while attempting to visit an imprisoned Nelson Mandela. He is not the same guy who walloped Paul Ryan in a vice-presidential debate, laughing all the way. Time comes for us all. While Sanders is even older than Biden, and just had a heart attack, he does not have these particular struggles.
It's worth asking if someone who does is the ideal candidate to go up against an incumbent who just yesterday demonstrated he doesn't know what a vaccine does. You're not drawing as much contrast as you might, and one thing Donald Trump has going for him—even as he loses sharpness by the day—is a kind of primal instinct for savage cruelty. Even if he scarcely knows what's going on, he goes into a kind of autopilot where he lashes out aggressively, and it seems to work. Does Biden have what's needed to fight back, and to withstand the relentless assault on himself and his family that is coming his way if he wins the nomination? Biden is a more decent man in every aspect than the man he wants to run against, but it may not help him in a knock-down drag-out contest for the soul of the American republic.
That's particularly true because Biden is running on a Return to Decency and Normalcy platform without a whole lot else to it. Does anyone seriously believe he will go out and fight for a public option on healthcare? Will he seek to reform Wall Street or corporate governance or rein in the monopoly power? Will he champion a Green New Deal, or a plan of similar ambition, to unchain our economy from the fossil fuels that pose such a dire threat to the middle future of human civilization? Will he fight to raise the minimum wage? Will he do battle with Big Pharma to bring down drug prices?
So far, it's hard to see how his campaign will greatly differ from Hillary Clinton's. He has many of the same weaknesses. He is nearly as potent a symbol of the entrenched political class that millions of Americans clearly believe has failed them. His family has sketchy business entanglements in foreign lands. He seems to believe Trump is a kind of freakish accident unrelated to the Republican Party's descent into nationalist unreason over the last few decades, and unrelated to a socioeconomic status quo wherein the very few have gobbled up all the resources and left the many to scrap over what's left. One difference, which Biden has remarked on quite candidly, is that he won't face the misogyny Clinton did. But in general, Biden's hypothesis is that a majority of Americans will be energized to come out and vote for a return to the end of the Obama era, when the president was an emotionally functional adult they didn't have to hear about every gosh darned day.
This is probably true of some of those white suburban voters that Sanders would likely lose. Some folks just don't want to hear about this #### anymore. But there's reason to believe that, when it comes down to it, some of these traditionally Republican voters will "go home"—not stay home—just like they did in 2016. There's at least an outside chance, after all, that Biden will raise their taxes a bit. Moreover, will Biden energize the people whose real wages haven't budged in decades, who are drowning in student or medical debt, whose communities have been ravaged by opioid addiction, who have lost hope that their children will have better lives than they did, to come out and vote?
Maybe so. Or maybe the Coalition of the Trump-Exhausted that Biden seeks will be enough to get him over the top. It is foolish at this point for anyone to say they know what will happen. They don't. All we have are shadows on the wall. Everyone is electable, and anyone could lose. The idea Beto O'Rourke came out and backed Joe Biden because he is The Answer to America's Deep Structural Problems seems a little farfetched. Just listen to Beto O'Rourke last year.
“You cannot go back to the end of the Obama administration and think that that’s good enough. As much of a horror show as Trump has been—his racism, the disaster of his foreign policy, his punishment of farmers and workers here in this country—we had real problems before Donald Trump became president.”
And when asked if Joe Biden is a return to the past:
“He is. And that cannot be who we are going forward. We’ve got to be bigger, we’ve got to be bolder. We have to set a much higher mark and be relentless in pursuing that.”
If Biden is the nominee in the end, let's hope Beto is right that he was wrong. The Democratic Party has spurned the opportunity to nominate someone who, like Barack Obama in 2008, embodies the kind of change they are promising. We're left with the old folks now, as even the comparatively youthful Elizabeth Warren fades from contention. The future of our world is now dependent on those who largely will not live to see it. Let's hope at least one of them is up to the job of saving it. In the meantime, perhaps we all ought to vote for whomever we think would make the best president.
BY JACK HOLMES
MAR 3, 2020
Bernie Sanders has been clear about his vision for victory: that he will galvanize a grassroots coalition of working-class people, many of them young people of color and others who have never participated in the political process, to form a new American majority movement.
But his candidacy presents risk. So far, after four primary contests—two of which were shamefully undemocratic caucuses—this revolution in participation hasn't yet materialized. On Super Tuesday, today, he needs it to happen. It must happen because there is reason to believe Sanders would, as the nominee, lose some ground in the suburban areas where the Democratic Party made such gains in the 2018 midterms with people—particularly white women—who are sick of having a whacked-out game-show host as president but will be scared off by Sanders. He's got to make up the difference by bringing new voters in, and that's the risk: the people Sanders is pledging to bring in do not have a history of voting. The rich old white people do.
On the flip side, however, there's a different kind of risk. After Joe Biden's strong performance in South Carolina, the party's centrist flank has marshaled itself—with the kind of discipline rarely seen in Democratic politics—behind Barack Obama's ex-VP. (In fact, by some reports, Obama himself is eyeing Joe now.) It seemed to all happen at once: Amy Klobuchar dropped out and endorsed him immediately. Pete Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed him by that evening. Beto O'Rourke, the forgotten future-prince of the Democrats, emerged from whichever dusty road he was walking to join all of them at a rally down in Texas. The message was clear: Joe Biden is the Party's Pick.
The field is shaping up quite clearly now.
But there seems to have been a whole lot of reverse-engineered confidence in Biden's candidacy almost overnight. A week ago, Biden was on the South Carolina debate stage bringing the kind of defiant energy you'd expect from someone whose entire career and legacy was on the line. But he still said things like, "150 million people have been killed since 2007" by gun violence. He said things that were...difficult to understand. This has been a constant theme of his appearances throughout the primary. Here's a passage transcribed by Politico in October.
“I think that, uh, the behavior of this administration has awakened, uh, a whole new generation to get engaged in ways that they may not have gotten before,” Biden said, referring to President Donald Trump and the current tumult. “Just like in my generation, when I got out of school that, uh, when Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King had been assassinated in the ’70s, uh, late seven—when I got engaged, um, you know, up to that time, remember the, none of you women will know this, but a couple men may remember, that was a time in the early, late ’60s, and the early ’60s and ’60s, where it was drop out and go to Haight-Ashbury, don’t get engaged, don’t trust anybody over 30. I mean, for real. What happened to them, by the, by the early ’70s, the late ’60s, there was a whole generation that said, ‘Enough.’ The war in Vietnam was underway, and it was—a lot of you served in that war—and, uh, we were fighting like the devil to make sure that there was something dealing with cleaning up the environment, which was only beginning. We were in a position where the women’s movement was just beginning to move. We should have, by now, long before, passed the ERA amendment, but that was another issue …”
This is a problem. It does us no good to overlook the fact that, not unlike the current president, Biden does not always finish his sentences, and it's not always to do with his stutter. He doesn't always make sense. He can have trouble placing people and events within space and time. Last month, he completely made up a story about how he was arrested in South Africa while attempting to visit an imprisoned Nelson Mandela. He is not the same guy who walloped Paul Ryan in a vice-presidential debate, laughing all the way. Time comes for us all. While Sanders is even older than Biden, and just had a heart attack, he does not have these particular struggles.
It's worth asking if someone who does is the ideal candidate to go up against an incumbent who just yesterday demonstrated he doesn't know what a vaccine does. You're not drawing as much contrast as you might, and one thing Donald Trump has going for him—even as he loses sharpness by the day—is a kind of primal instinct for savage cruelty. Even if he scarcely knows what's going on, he goes into a kind of autopilot where he lashes out aggressively, and it seems to work. Does Biden have what's needed to fight back, and to withstand the relentless assault on himself and his family that is coming his way if he wins the nomination? Biden is a more decent man in every aspect than the man he wants to run against, but it may not help him in a knock-down drag-out contest for the soul of the American republic.
That's particularly true because Biden is running on a Return to Decency and Normalcy platform without a whole lot else to it. Does anyone seriously believe he will go out and fight for a public option on healthcare? Will he seek to reform Wall Street or corporate governance or rein in the monopoly power? Will he champion a Green New Deal, or a plan of similar ambition, to unchain our economy from the fossil fuels that pose such a dire threat to the middle future of human civilization? Will he fight to raise the minimum wage? Will he do battle with Big Pharma to bring down drug prices?
So far, it's hard to see how his campaign will greatly differ from Hillary Clinton's. He has many of the same weaknesses. He is nearly as potent a symbol of the entrenched political class that millions of Americans clearly believe has failed them. His family has sketchy business entanglements in foreign lands. He seems to believe Trump is a kind of freakish accident unrelated to the Republican Party's descent into nationalist unreason over the last few decades, and unrelated to a socioeconomic status quo wherein the very few have gobbled up all the resources and left the many to scrap over what's left. One difference, which Biden has remarked on quite candidly, is that he won't face the misogyny Clinton did. But in general, Biden's hypothesis is that a majority of Americans will be energized to come out and vote for a return to the end of the Obama era, when the president was an emotionally functional adult they didn't have to hear about every gosh darned day.
This is probably true of some of those white suburban voters that Sanders would likely lose. Some folks just don't want to hear about this #### anymore. But there's reason to believe that, when it comes down to it, some of these traditionally Republican voters will "go home"—not stay home—just like they did in 2016. There's at least an outside chance, after all, that Biden will raise their taxes a bit. Moreover, will Biden energize the people whose real wages haven't budged in decades, who are drowning in student or medical debt, whose communities have been ravaged by opioid addiction, who have lost hope that their children will have better lives than they did, to come out and vote?
Maybe so. Or maybe the Coalition of the Trump-Exhausted that Biden seeks will be enough to get him over the top. It is foolish at this point for anyone to say they know what will happen. They don't. All we have are shadows on the wall. Everyone is electable, and anyone could lose. The idea Beto O'Rourke came out and backed Joe Biden because he is The Answer to America's Deep Structural Problems seems a little farfetched. Just listen to Beto O'Rourke last year.
“You cannot go back to the end of the Obama administration and think that that’s good enough. As much of a horror show as Trump has been—his racism, the disaster of his foreign policy, his punishment of farmers and workers here in this country—we had real problems before Donald Trump became president.”
And when asked if Joe Biden is a return to the past:
“He is. And that cannot be who we are going forward. We’ve got to be bigger, we’ve got to be bolder. We have to set a much higher mark and be relentless in pursuing that.”
If Biden is the nominee in the end, let's hope Beto is right that he was wrong. The Democratic Party has spurned the opportunity to nominate someone who, like Barack Obama in 2008, embodies the kind of change they are promising. We're left with the old folks now, as even the comparatively youthful Elizabeth Warren fades from contention. The future of our world is now dependent on those who largely will not live to see it. Let's hope at least one of them is up to the job of saving it. In the meantime, perhaps we all ought to vote for whomever we think would make the best president.
exactly I wrote that last night as well.
