Biden, closet Republican: liberal Dole, alleged safe bet

It didn’t come to me right away, but finally I recognized the model for Joe Biden’s unusual campaign, the former president whose pitch Biden’s most closely resembles: George W. Bush.

I’m referring to Bush’s first presidential bid, in 2000, which is remembered mostly for its surreal climax: the seesawing returns on election night, the Florida recount, the Supreme Court ruling that effectively decided the contest in his favor. To the limited extent that political junkies recall his slogans and stump speeches, the phrase “compassionate conservative” comes quickest to mind.

But Bush’s strategy and success arguably hinged less on selling himself as a new kind of Republican than on being seen as a tested, trusted, traditional brand. His surname did much of that work, and he augmented it with a sustained oratorical emphasis on propriety. He pledged to “restore honor and integrity” to the White House in the wake of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent impeachment. He would end the melodrama of the Clinton years and expunge the shame by having the nation essentially pick up where it had left off — with a Bush at the helm.

Biden’s core promise is to end the much greater melodrama and expunge the infinitely darker shame of Donald Trump’s presidency, also by returning to what preceded it: Barack Obama’s administration.

Obviously there are big, glaring differences between Biden and Bush, and not just ideologically. Bush’s public-service résumé then was scrawny next to Biden’s now.

But Biden isn’t exactly campaigning on his three and a half decades in the Senate, not when you consider all the chapters — his fury over busing, his treatment of Anita Hill, the crime bill, the invasion of Iraq — that he wishes voters wouldn’t dwell on.

No, Biden is campaigning on his eight years as vice president. He’s also campaigning on the nostalgia of his surname, the familiarity of his presence and the comfort of his aura. And that’s not just a tactic from Bush’s playbook. It’s a quintessentially Republican move.

The last two Democrats to win the presidency, Clinton and Obama, didn’t take a tack anything like Biden’s. Clinton was the man from Hope, Ark., who was determined to give liberalism a modern makeover and set the Democratic Party on a more profitable course. Obama was hope and change — not to mention the audacity of hope — and those nouns in aggregate augured a fresh start.

Both men were under 50 when they attained the presidency, and both were in keeping with the Democratic Party’s flattering (and not quite accurate) image of itself, from John F. Kennedy onward, as youthful, innovative, visionary, trailblazing. But Biden, 76, isn’t about exploring uncharted paths. He’s about following bread crumbs back to where we lost our way. Less Lewis and Clark, more Hansel and Gretel.

This isn’t a bad thing. It’s a Trump thing. For many Democrats, Biden included, the insult of Trump is so immense and the threat that he poses so profound that 2020 isn’t a year for experiments and idealism. It’s a year for survival.

Biden is trying to get Democrats to do something Republicans have more practice at: choose a nominee who’s due over one who’s new. He’s the liberal iteration of Bob Dole, the looser version of Mitt Romney, John McCain without Lindsey Graham glued to his side.

At most other junctures, it would be fatally underwhelming. At this one, there’s no telling.