WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING

In the waning years of the Obama administration, Hunter Biden, whose life was in a downward spiral, took a job with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was transparently attempting to gain influence with Hunter’s father. The maneuver was unsuccessful for Burisma (which received no favorable treatment from the vice president), fairly successful for Hunter (who received a hefty paycheck for minimal work), and has left a residue of low-grade sleaze that Joe Biden’s campaign has proven unable to scrape away. …

Democrats have bitter experience with this sort of flaw. Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state is an eerily similar precursor. … The email scandal was not just a Fox News narrative. It dominated mainstream news coverage of Clinton’s campaign, because it was a real issue, albeit a small one. …

Reporters aren’t going to stop asking Biden tough questions about a legitimate ethical shortcoming just because his opponent’s sins dwarf Biden’s a thousandfold. Clinton’s example suggests that an apology wouldn’t do Biden much good. Maybe the solution is not to nominate Biden at all, though that strategy assumes Democrats can find somebody so pure nothing in their past can be turned into a Clinton-email or Burisma-level story. What if, instead of Biden, the nominee is Elizabeth Warren answering endless recursive questions about her decision to list her ancestry as Native American?

Opinion journalists are supposed to have snappy solutions to the problems we raise, but no easy answer presents itself. We are hurtling toward a recurrence of the 2016 nightmare.

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine