Joe Biden Paradox
He’s under attack and slipping in the polls. Should Democrats be all in on the former vice president, or all out?
Facing four more years of Trump, should Democrats go all in on the former VP?
On a blistering afternoon in the courtyard of the East Las Vegas Community Center, former Vice President Joe Biden steps to the lectern. With white hair and aviator glasses, he looks like he wandered off the set of an Invisible Man remake.
“How’s he going to hold up in this heat?” whispers a middle-aged white woman in the crowd to her husband. The latter keeps eyes forward under a golf visor, as if attention might keep the 76-year-old Biden upright.
If Donald Trump is expanding with age, Baron Harkonnen-style, like a giant zit, Biden seems to be shrinking. Always a verbal loose cannon, he goes blank now with regularity, lacing every minute of every appearance with the threat of media calamity.
Biden and Trump appear destined to be linked, by age, social media heat (#BidenGaffe will rival #CatsofTwitter if Biden wins the nomination), and now, the exploding Ukraine scandal. Las Vegas is the former vice president’s first event since Democrats announced plans to push impeachment proceedings against Trump, who is accused of pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden and his son.
All year, Trump has displayed an almost gastrointestinal eagerness to face Biden in the general election. He alerts to Biden’s name like a spider to an earwig, pounding the theme that the ex-senator is too old and too punch-drunk to hold up in the internet blood dojo that is modern presidential politics. “I like running against people that are weak mentally,” Trump said of Biden in June.
Since Ukrainegate broke, a furious Trump has stepped up such attacks on “our not very bright vice president” and “Sleepy Joe.” Will this abuse help or hurt the Biden campaign? How will the candidate respond? In Vegas, a large press contingent waits for a sign.
“Look,” begins Biden in a quiet voice, “in the weeks and the months to come, it’s the Congress’ job to pursue the facts, and, uh, to hold Donald Trump accountable.”
Cheers. The “I Will Kick Trump in His Tiny Balls” preamble is a mandatory element in 2020 Democrat stumpery.
Biden goes on, seeming on the verge of settling into rhythm, when a heavyset man with a blond Prince Valiant haircut jumps up.
“Joe Biden is a predator!” he screams, dropping into a weird power pose while flashing a #MeToo sign. “The media is covering it up!”
The sign might reference Nevada’s former candidate for lieutenant governor, Lucy Flores, who last spring described being creeped out (“What in the actual fuck?” she wrote) by Biden kissing her head and sniffing her hair before a speech in 2014. It’s one of many tales that have bounced off Biden. If enough people think you’re the best hope to beat Donald Trump, it turns out, a lot of warts disappear.
“Let him go!” Biden pleads.
The heckler is ushered toward the door, to chants of Bi-den! Bi-den!
“That’s how far we’ve fallen!” snaps Biden. People keep telling Biden he should just go away, but he takes the abuse and keeps soldiering on, like a stray dog following a hiking party. It’s working, or it was, anyway, until he recently began sinking in the polls.
Biden is a man from another time, marooned in a public sphere that has passed him by. His speeches about tax credits, “investing in ourselves,” and building “cutting-edge infrastructure” feel like echoes of “pro-growth” Democrat speeches from the Nineties, just returned to Earth after a journey around the sun. Along with a history of questionable ties to campaign donors, he’s also an old white man with a history of wandering hands and problematic ut
terances, which would seem to disqualify him these days for a post as an adjunct lit professor, let alone the liberal party’s nominee.
Everything seems like it should be against Joe Biden: #MeToo, age, a radicalizing Democratic base, calculated attacks from a huge field of primary opponents, an iffy past on racial issues, a Google-searchable mother lode of verbal boners, and a dozen other things.
But no one who is familiar with Biden’s past would ever write him off. He lost his grown son Beau to brain cancer in 2015, and his first wife, Neilia, and daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident in 1972. Unspeakable loss has become intertwined with his political persona, so much so that current Delaware Sen. Chris Coons once called grief Biden’s “superpower,” in the sense that it aids his ability to connect with voters. Bill Clinton said he felt your pain — with Biden it’s the opposite, voters feel his.
As great as Biden’s personal tragedies may be, though, he’s also suffered significant political losses, and here we come to the first quirk of Biden’s bizarre career: He has a rare ability to convert disaster into opportunity.
The Ukraine story might sink his campaign, but it also may help. Trump occupying the other side of an all-consuming media apocalypse may garner sympathy, while solidifying the impression that Biden carries the flag for Democrats. Could a scandal propel Biden upward? It wouldn’t be the first time.
The biden paradox: One could make an argument he’s building a legacy as the most comically maladroit national political contender in American history. At times, Biden 2020 has been more like an MTV blooper show than a presidential campaign. Here’s a rundown of what should have been a sleepy August campaign:
August 1st: “Poor kids are just as bright and talented as white kids.” August 4th: Expresses sorrow over “tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan,” i.e., mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. August 8th: “We choose truth over facts!” August 16th: Confuses Burlington, Vermont, and Burlington, Iowa. August 21st: “Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King had been assassinated in the Seventies.” August 24th: In Keene, New Hampshire — “I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont?” August 26th: Forgets which Dartmouth College building he just visited, telling the crowd, “I’m not going nuts.”
From there, Biden drove into telephone pole after telephone pole. He told a story about braving “Godforsaken” country in Afghanistan to pin a medal on a soldier’s chest that turned out to be an amalgam of multiple tales. He called Bernie Sanders the president (he’d already called Cory Booker the president). Then, in front of 14 million TV viewers for the third Democratic Party debate, he turned a question about the legacy of slavery into a rambling diatribe about how inner-city parents should leave a “record player” on at night, a line that was somehow both parody of right-wing paternalism and outdated by about 30 years.
Yet Biden still could win the Democratic nomination. One can almost hear party figures trying to work out the riddle: Should there be an urgent examination of this candidate’s flaws before it’s too late? Or should they circle wagons early, and start trying to force attention on Biden’s bright side heading into next year?
Biden has strengths. While he endures near-constant ridicule for tortured verbiage and inappropriate statements, he rarely gets credit for his tenacity. No matter what else this older, perhaps diminished version of Biden might forget onstage, he always stays on script. Along with his ability to connect emotionally with audiences, it’s his greatest asset.
In Vegas, he continues his campaign-long habit of avoiding mention of “impeachment,” a word that has helped fuel rival Elizabeth Warren’s rise up the Democratic primary polls (Warren was the first Democrat to unequivocally endorse impeaching Trump), but efforts to oust the president have a less certain prognosis for the general election. Biden clings, instead, to phrases like “holding Trump accountable.” This restraint takes discipline, given that impeachment is on the entire world’s lips.
He reminds the crowd that his “job” is not fighting the impeachment battle, but remaining electable against Trump, whom he claims to have bested in 70 head-to-head polls. “My job, our job,” he says, “is to make sure above all else . . . we . . . beat . . . Donald . . . Trump!”
There’s a workmanlike, industrial quality to the way Biden doles out salvos, like a man unloading boxes of frozen fish. He’s unafraid of redundancy and reaches with awe-inspiring frequency for certain words. He says America 30 or 40 times per appearance — literally — getting there with heavy use of related constructions like the United States of America, the American people, and the story of America.
The perfect Biden rhetorical devices are metronome tautologies like those used in Vegas: “This election is about the American people, here in Nevada and throughout the United States of America. . . . The American people, and this is not hyperbole, have never, ever, ever let the American people down. . . . This is the United States of America!”
Biden moves through the first part of his Vegas speech in low tones, at times turning sideways and whispering, like he saw someone over a wall in the distance. Then he hits an applause line (“You know what Donald Trump has done. I’m here to tell you what I will do!”) and begins speaking in Loud Voice. The ex-veep’s emotional attitude in this campaign can switch from distant to troubled to lucid and defiant and back again, in the space of minutes.
Still, when he rolls, Biden’s voice crackles with energy, and with his blue shirtsleeves and swept hair, he looks like Politician Clip Art. His tepid unoriginality on the policy front is in this sense a positive. In the Trump era, many voters have had enough kink — they’re looking for the absence of something — and few politicians can say nothing quite like Joe Biden. Listening to one of his speeches all the way through is like being beaten with a cliché hammer:
“I was proud to serve as Barack Obama’s vice president. . . . We have to make health care a right, not a privilege. . . . You can sign up for a public option. . . . Increasing subsidies for the middle class . . . Their debt will be forgiven. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump inherited a strong economy from us, just like he inherited everything in his life!”
While Biden talks constantly about Trump, he does so in a way different from Hillary Clinton, who spent a whopping 90 percent of her advertising attacking Trump as an individual. Biden has tweaked that message, ironically using Trumpian themes to sell an anti-Trump message. Biden, like Trump, relies on American exceptionalism but in a different construct. Trump argued America had lost its exceptional status and he, Trump, would single-handedly fix it. Biden argues America was always exceptional, but lost its status because of Trump. He volunteers as the experienced old alley fighter willing to go down into the labyrinth to slay the Orange Minotaur.
The logic of the Biden campaign, at least up until the Ukraine story broke, had been avoiding hot takes, focusing on this elemental tale tailored for the general-election message. This “above the fray” approach was described by The Washington Post as trying “to avoid the political spasm in which he is now the central figure.”
For a long time, it worked. After Biden announced his candidacy in April, he surged to a huge poll lead and joined Sanders as one of two Democrats to consistently poll well in head-tohead surveys against Trump. Commentators said he offered voters “normalcy” and scored particularly well with the blue version of the Silent Majority, the “Hidden Democratic Party” of less-progressive, older voters. When California Sen. Kamala Harris assailed him for his past support of school busing in the first debate, she temporarily became a “top tier” candidate while Biden dipped, prompting predictions that he would slide among voters seeking a “fresh” face.
But Harris cratered soon after and Biden rebounded, seeming to validate his “above the fray” strategy. He took working-class voters from Sanders and retained enough support from major donors to stall the momentum toward Warren. The problem is, Ukraine makes staying out of the “spasm” impossible. When the news broke that a CIA whistle-blower launched a complaint about President Trump’s apparent request that Ukraine investigate Biden and his son Hunter’s ties to Ukrainian gas giant Burisma, Joe had no choice but to respond.
His initial strategy, after Trump released the rough transcript of his call to Zelensky, was to go full-on Liam Neeson and pitch Ukrainegate as a home invasion requiring urgent vengeance. He said Trump “abused his power to come after my family,” describing the implication that he or his son had done anything wrong as a “malicious conspiracy theory that has been debunked by every independent outlet that has looked at it.”
REDMAP PAYS OFF GOP flips 10 statehouses through
“Project REDMAP,”
spending millions on vicious attack ads, so it can control post-census redistricting.
TWISTED DISTRICTS 2010 census triggers round of GOP
redistricting using advanced mapping software and massive political data sets, creating hyper gerrymandered districts.
UNPRECEDENTED RESTRICTION
Forty-one states proposed laws restricting
voting rights within the previous year; 19 states passed them, including voter-ID laws, proof of citizenship, and placing limits on early voting.
LOST OVERSIGHT
The Supreme Court
guts the Voting Rights Act, removing a requirement that certain states receive federal approval before changing election laws.
WHAT FRAUD?
The GOP claims ID laws are needed because of mass
voter fraud, but a major study finds only 31 cases of fraud out of 1 billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014.
ATTACK OF CONSCIENCE A Wisconsin GOP legislative aide
resigns when he sees lawmakers “giddy” over ID laws’ ability to suppress minority and college-age voters.