Will Joe Biden become an activist president ?
Un candidat sans surprise ?
En 1972, Joe Biden devient le plus jeune sénateur de l'histoire, ayant à peine atteint l'âge légal de trente ans lors de son élection. Aujourd'hui, il est le candidat le plus agé à s’être un jour présenté à la présidence des États-Unis. Connu pour avoir été le viceprésident de Barack Obama, Biden se décrit aujourd'hui comme un candidat fédérateur – mais l'est-il réellement ? Retour sur près de cinquante ans de carrière politique...
On November 7th 1972 the people of Delaware voted to send Joe Biden, a brash, garrulous county councilman, to the United States Senate—even though he would not turn 30, the Senate’s age minimum, for another two weeks. During the campaign he had sought both to use and downplay his youth. His ads touted “new thinking” and “new solutions”; the compliments he paid his 63-year-old opponent on the success of his fights against Stalin and polio were delivered with a faultless backhand.
2. But he remained vague about precisely what all that novelty meant. In his slogan, “He understands what’s happening today”, the word “understands” was well chosen: it suggested to young voters that he got the counterculture and discontent over Vietnam, while reassuringly signalling to older ones that he did not fully condone them. As he told the Wilmington News Journal, “I’m not as liberal as people think.”
3. America’s youngest senator then is now its oldest ever presumptive nominee as a presidential candidate. His age, at times, has been painfully apparent on the campaign trail: his loquacity is less bounded, his stories meander without necessarily reaching their conclusion. His primary campaign was, for the most part, poor. Yet as things stand he has a good chance of winning November’s election. If so he may, more through circumstance than design, bring real change to a country long gridlocked and polarised.
IS "NOT BEING TRUMP" ENOUGH?
4. President Donald Trump is a highly divisive figure. He is the only president in modern history to never have seen more than 49% of the population approve of his performance in the role; his current rating is around 40%. At 74 he is the
oldest president ever to stand for re-election, which goes some way to neutralising concerns about Mr Biden’s age. He is also the first ever to seek reelection after being impeached. Stories that might have destroyed another presidency—tear-gassing peaceful protesters for a photo opportunity, asking the president of China for help in re-election— seem to break around his ears every few weeks.
5. On top of an extraordinary incumbent, extraordinary times. America’s covid-19 epidemic has, so far, cost the country over 120,000 lives. Not yet controlled, it could claim almost that many again by election day. Social distancing’s constraints have created a campaign unlike any other. An unprecedented number of Americans will vote by mail, a development that has already seen Mr Trump whipping up false fears of fraud.
6. Looking like a plausible president, the support of the party and not being Mr Trump seem to be more or less all that is required of Mr Biden, and the polls show that his familiar, unchallenging avuncularity is meeting the challenge well: a comforting figure for an uncomfortable time. On average he enjoys a polling advantage of about 9%, comfortably above that seen by Hillary Clinton in 2016. Mr Trump will try to fight his way out of this with personal smears against Mr Biden. But Mr Biden looks likely to prove a tougher target for such tactics than Mrs Clinton was in 2016, largely because people like him.
A LIKEABLE FIGURE
7. It is not just that Americans by and large see him as approachable and good-hearted. They also know his life’s sorrows. Mr Biden’s first wife, Neilia, died in a car crash with their one-year-old daughter, Naomi, shortly after that first victory in 1972. His son Beau, who gave a moving speech about that loss when Mr Biden was nominated to be Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008, died of cancer in 2015. The tempering of grief has given Mr Biden deep reserves of empathy.
8. But he will be attacked on policy. Mr Biden has always sat close to his party’s ideological centre. At points in his career he has been lukewarm on abortion rights and federally enforced school integration, an advocate of harsh criminal penalties and a proponent of financial deregulation. But as the party’s centre has moved to the left, so has he. It looks set to include a public option on health care and an ambitious effort to fight climate change which will include a carbon tax.
9. Many on the party’s progressive wing give him little credit for this. In the primaries, they wanted to abolish private health insurance; today, many want to defund police departments. Some warn, or threaten, that if he fails to take a turn to the left on such causes he risks losing the election. Aimee Allison, who heads She the People, an organising and advocacy group for women of colour, urges Mr Biden to “meet the moment [and] turn protesters into voters. If he doesn’t...he’s not going to be able to close this fatal enthusiasm gap he has now.”