Given that over a dozen Democrats had announced a 2020 presidential campaign before January, former Vice President Joe Biden took his time before considering his own run. Given his age (he would be even older than Donald Trump if elected, and Bernie Sanders would be even older) and his many, many political gaffes, not to mention actual policy mistakes, there would be a lot of reasons for him not to run and a lot of reasons to suspect he could lose to Trump even if he won the Democratic nomination. Yet he has decided to run, and with his name recognition, he is looking like the candidate to beat.
The political-media complex is not impressed, because as much as anybody else in the race, Biden, in all his Old Whiteness, is everything they think the political system doesn’t need. Just this week, Vox had an article entitled “Why so many Democrats are running for president” – sub-headed, “The epidemic of random white men running for president, explained” – and splashed it with a montage photo showing at least 11 candidates, five of whom are women and only three of whom are white men.
According to a Friday poll in The Hill, Biden is supported by 35 percent of likely Democratic primary voters, followed by Bernie Sanders at 18 percent – the only other Democrat to reach double digits in preference. In another poll, Biden actually leads Sanders among younger (under 30) black voters, 35 to 30 percent.
Which shows that for all the “progressive” obsession over intersectionality and people “of color”, most black people who do vote vote for Democrats, and usually mainstream Democrats, the same way that union people vote for Democrats and anti-abortion people vote for Republicans: Because they can’t afford to divide their focus. Just as anti-abortion people don’t waste their time with a Democratic party that is broadly pro-choice and prefer a Republican Party that caters to their position, even if they don’t necessarily agree with all Republican policies. Likewise even black voters who might count as conservative on some issues and disagree with Democrats know not to waste their time on a Republican Party that has no time for them, when it isn’t deliberately catering to racists. And they want to vote on the candidate they think will win. Whether that candidate is this week’s hip new flavor is less important than whether people outside the hip circle know and like them.
This also leads to another implication: That not everybody who opposes Trumpism is a “progressive.” Both leftists and “conservatives” have a vested interest in overstating the progressive influence on the mainstream Democratic Party, because “progressives” claim to speak for everybody and Republicans think that they can tar their opponents by association. But, especially as the Republicans purge anybody who isn’t increasingly ideological (read: Trumpnik) the majority of the country is not conservative, but it isn’t necessarily leftist, either. And in the system that the two parties have created, Democrats have to balance their self image as the “progressive” party with the practical reality of being the designated NotRepublican party. And if they want to win, they need to emphasize the factors that everyone, not just leftists, can agree with.
In this respect, the fact that Biden is “problematic” by the standards of the professionally offended is kind of a plus. When the Left kills its own initiatives and knife-fights itself to death with purity tests, you don’t have anything to worry about with Uncle Joe, because you know he’ll never pass a purity test. In fact, I’ve seen several commentators say words to the effect that Joe Biden is the Democrats’ version of Trump. And frankly, I think that’s what he’s counting on. I mean, Trump DID win, didn’t he? And he beat not only Clinton but a whole host of stuffed-shirt establishment Republicans who were always concerned about doing things the right way and presenting the right image and not making any mistakes. If Biden’s biggest problem is his gaffes, well, Trump has pretty much erased the idea that there’s any such thing as “too mistake-prone” to be president.
I’m just saying, if we HAVE to have an old, white politically incorrect doofus as President, why not the one who isn’t a racist Russian tool?
And as I’ve already said: Any Democratic candidate (well, except DeBlasio) would not only be a better president than Trump, they would be better than Hillary Clinton. Any one of them would have a more genuinely progressive record than Clinton. And if Biden doesn’t win, or if he does but he turns out to be too old to serve his term, voters have an excellent range of alternatives and if Biden does win, he has an excellent farm team of potential running mates and successors.
But given all the reasons for why a Biden campaign (or Administration) would not be the nightmare that “progressives” fear, I do want to mention one area where I agree that Biden is problematic.
Since I am a right-winger, I do not oppose the Party of Trump for the same reasons that “progressives” do. I do not think that capitalism is inherently evil, or that taxes and government are inherently good. And if it can’t be the Libertarians, I want at least SOME other party in this country besides the Democrats, because I do not want political ideas to be limited to a conflict between Corrupt Hack Democrats and Social Justice Warrior Democrats. The reason I hate the Party of Trump is because they threaten to marginalize any political viewpoint to the right of MSNBC. And that’s one area where I agree with “progressives.” We realize that the Republican Party has turned into a Snidely Whiplash cartoon of itself, which, far from promoting a smaller government, demands a more encompassing, less accountable and more oppressive government so that they can impose their social agenda on the majority of the population that opposes them, including non-progressives.
And it needs to be emphasized that this is what Republicans WANT. Against the wishes of the “donor class” and the other conservative intellects who know better, the base has taken over the operation. Rather than accepting abortion as a rally-the-base campaign issue that is never going to be seriously dealt with after election year, they are now demanding outright abortion bans to directly challenge Roe v. Wade. Rather than simply using Iran as a rhetorical punching bag to bolster their patriotic credentials, they’re gearing up for war with a country that is far more organized (and far larger, and far more mountainous) than Iraq. Because after a generation of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, conservative intellect has taken a backseat to grievance media and “owning.”
It matters that someone like Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. However evil someone like Mitch McConnell may be, even he didn’t have the brass to outright destroy political norms the way Trump did. But the fact of the matter is, Trump could not have done that without the Party backing him up. Before Trump, this was the same party that primaried out anti-abortion conservative Senator Bob Bennett in Utah, in favor of “Tea Party” conservative Mike Lee. This was the party that frequently railed against anti-abortion conservative war hero John McCain as a “RINO.” Donald Trump did not run for President in 2000, and he did not support Pat Buchanan in 2000, because Buchanan was endorsed by David Duke. Because then both Trump and the Republican Party knew better. Even in 2016, Trump was at least capable of entertaining ideas that would have been Republican heresy (like healthcare reform and gay tolerance). But since inauguration, all those big ideas dissolved, along with the idea that Republicans had an alternative to the ACA, or an infrastructure plan, or even a plan for a Wall. The Trump Administration in practice has been the worst of all worlds: all of Trump’s stupid ideas (like a government shutdown that senior Republicans didn’t want, and tariffs that businesses don’t want) and various federal initiatives for the Paul Ryan wing of the party, not to mention priority shifts in Washington and state legislation to slake the fundamentalist/Mike Pence wing of the party.
Now, since Republicans are basically pack animals, they will follow the leader whether that leader is Trump or Mitt Romney. But it matters what standard that leader sets. And Trump’s standard is to act like laws, norms and reality itself simply don’t apply to him. And Republicans – including those who would otherwise not be Trumpniks – go along with this because this gets them the policies that they want, which would really not be possible under a Bush or a Romney or any other cloth-coat Republican who believes that reality is a thing that exists. And since their White Trash Savior seems to be invincible, any Republicans who would have moral qualms about this know that they’ll be curbstomped out of the primaries if they dare to sass the Leader, so they go along too.
But again, the sane people were getting purged even before Trump showed up. The idea that there is more than one legitimate party was getting purged at least as early as Newt Gingrich, and we are now seeing the full results of that attitude. As I and many others have said, many times and many ways, Trump is not the aberration in the Republican Party. He is the norm. He is just the first one who’s willing to admit it. And again, given his heterodoxy on a few issues, I could argue that the Party has influenced Trump more than the other way around.
And the problem with Joe Biden’s premise, as most recently expressed in his May 18 campaign announcement, is the idea that we can have unity and harmony when the Democrats have always campaigned on that concept, and the reason we don’t have unity is because Republicans don’t want it, because it doesn’t work for them. Unity and harmony requires keeping Republicans in power as though they believed in shared responsibility, when they shirk responsibility and only seek power for ulterior motives.
Just this week, black activist Bree Newsome Bass tweeted, “Please ask yourselves why Democratic leadership is committed to telling you how horrible Trump is as a way of raising money for themselves but aren’t committed to actually exercising their power to stop him.”
Why? Maybe it’s the same reason that Democrats pitched a screaming fit over the Electoral College in 2000 but didn’t do anything on the state level in the 16 years between Bush’s election and Trump’s election, or do anything on the federal level when they had the White House and both houses of Congress. Maybe it’s the same reason that Democrats heard Mitch McConnell say he wanted Barack Obama to be a one-term president and then didn’t organize their party to keep Congress and go after McConnell’s seat. Maybe it’s the same reason that they told everyone how horrible Republicans would be for labor, and didn’t concentrate on the Rust Belt states in 2016.
Why do Democrats tell the rest of us that Republicans are horrible in order to raise money for themselves without actually trying to take the Republican majority down? Because that’s what Democrats DO.
You guys are just figuring this out?
It is not libertarians and “progressives” who need to be convinced that the two sides are not the same. IT’S THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. Because while they’ve been waving the bloody shirts to raise funds to support the lifestyle of the political class, telling voters that Republicans are an existential threat to the American way of life, Republicans DO think that Democrats are a threat to the American way of life, and that is why they are doing everything in their power to keep Democrats from having any influence on government ever again.
The strength of Joe Biden as a candidate is the implicit promise that once he’s elected president, things will get back to where they were before. But that is also his real weakness.