BIDEN’S HIGHS AND LOWS

In 1990, he sponsored the Violence Against

Women Act; it passed in 1994. “My proudest legislative achievement,” Biden has said.

On gun control, he helped push through the Brady Bill and the assaultweapons ban.

A toughon-crime Democrat, Biden helped write a 1994 crime bill that led to mass incarceration. “[It] worked in some areas. But it failed in others,” he said. “The violent-crime rate was cut in half.”

Biden voted for the Iraq War in 2002. “I do not believe this is a rush to war,” he said at the time. He has since admitted his error.

But Hunter Biden’s acceptance of a $50,000-per-month position with Burisma while Daddy was a sitting vice president with a foreign-policy brief is not conspiracy theory, but fact. It’s an automatically gruesome look. The Ukrainians were almost certainly looking to create the “perception that [Burisma] was backed by powerful Americans,” as The New York Times put it. This is before we get to the question of whether or not Hunter actually did anything to earn the money (unclear) or whether Joe Biden knew about the arrangement (father and son have told different stories).

The standard media take on Hunter’s noshow Burisma job has been “Sure, it looks completely like shit, but is it illegal?” (“Of course there’s an appearance problem,” a “former adviser” told The Washington Post, before adding quickly that there is no evidence of “wrongdoing.”) Regarding Biden’s awareness or lack thereof of Hunter’s job, the standard line has been “no evidence of criminal wrongdoing,” the word “criminal” being operative.

There are other angles on the Ukraine story that seem destined to remain problematic, like Biden’s visit to Ukraine as vice president in December 2015. Uncle Joe delivered a Kneel Before Zod dictum to then-President Petro Poroshenko, declaring he would hold up a billion-dollar aid package if the country’s general prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was not fired immediately. “I’m leaving in six hours,” he later recounted saying. “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.”

This incident would look Trump-level terrible if it were to come out that Shokin was investigating his son’s company. The Biden campaign, and most American news agencies, have insisted such investigations were “dormant.” However, multiple foreign news reports, including an early-October exposé by noted Russian opposition paper Novaya Gazeta about Burisma’s ties to a Russian fugitive named Sergei Kurchenko, have insisted there were in fact open investigations of the Ukrainian gas firm in late 2015. (The Biden campaign did not comment on the record about this story.)

Part of the problem is that this is not the first time Hunter Biden has been caught in a compromising position. In 2008, reports surfaced that Hunter had been retained as a consultant by the credit-card company MBNA while his father was on his way to voting for the infamous bankruptcy bill, which made it harder for debtors to declare bankruptcy.

The Obama campaign insisted “[Hunter’s] work had absolutely nothing to do with the bankruptcy bill,” but it sure didn’t look good. It likewise looked horrible when Hunter got a seat on the board of another major employer of Delawareans, Amtrak, with Sen. Tom Carper offering what feels like a sarcastic anti-recommendation of Joe’s son, saying he was qualified because “Hunter Biden has spent a lot of time on Amtrak trains.”

This is in addition to Joe Biden in 1996 having sold his Delaware house to an MBNA executive for $1.2 million — six times what he paid for it — in what The New York Times described as a word-of-mouth transaction.

Even if there was nothing shady in any of this, Democrats have to ask themselves if they want to return to parsing the not-wrongness of a nominee’s head-scratching financial relationships. The Biden family’s history of confusing entanglements would represent a déjà vu return to the 2016 campaign, which saw a Democratic candidate having to spend nearly two years explaining why it was OK to make $225,000 per speech to Goldman Sachs executives. Why revive the soft-corruption argument?

The Ukraine story by its very nature will — and possibly should, depending on your view of Hunter’s Burisma job — dog Biden for as long as his campaign continues. The increased scrutiny and Trump’s direct assault on his family have forced Biden into a more combative mode on the trail. In one 24-hour span, he attacked the New York Times coverage of his campaign as “journalistic malpractice” while endorsing impeachment, saying Trump was “shooting holes in the Constitution.”

Impeachment does commit Democrats to a strident defense of Biden and his son, even if, or perhaps especially if, there’s a real problem that needs regular PR response. There are already reports that major party donors are “weighing” whether to set up a Super PAC to “independently” defend Biden.

These include Julianna Smoot, who led Obama’s campaign finance team, Democratic consultant Mark Riddle, and others. The Washington Post reported the group is concerned a pro-Biden PAC may trigger attacks from primary rivals Warren and Sanders that he is “being bankrolled by wealthy interests.” This comes as word leaked out that Biden has cut back on digital ads after posting just $15.2 million in money raised in the third quarter of the 2020 race, a dramatic fall from his second-quarter number of $22 million. He is far behind both Warren ($24.6 million) and Sanders ($25.3 million), so a sudden surge in PAC money would be a potential campaign saver.

In other words, the fact that Biden has political vulnerability on Ukraine may end up pushing more institutional support his way. Again, this wouldn’t be the first time a Biden political weakness became an asset.

The notion that the former vice president is the perfect person to take on schoolyard-bully Donald Trump is not entirely unsupported by the evidence, even if the evidence comes from Joe Biden.

Biden’s autobiographical works, Promises to Keep and Promise Me, Dad, tell the story of a man who overcame stuff. The Pennsylvania and Delaware native reports he was nicknamed “Dash” in high school, not because he was fast (although he is quick to remind readers, “I was fast”) but because of a stutter. “I talked like Morse code,” he recalled. “You gu-gu-gu-guguys sh-sh-sh-sh-shut up!”

PHOTO-ID BOOM Since 2008, states with strict voter-ID

laws have quadrupled, from two to eight, including Tennessee, Alabama, and Kansas.

HOW TO DETER VOTERS

People wait in line for as long as five hours to vote as counties no longer under the oversight of the Voting Rights Act are free to reduce the number of polling locations. A report finds 868 fewer polling places in just the 381 counties studied.

WISCONSIN VOTE Up to 23,000 Wisconsin voters in two Dem-leaning counties couldn’t vote in part because of an ID law, roughly the same number of votes by which Trump won the state.

THE PURGE Sixteen million Americans were purged from voter

rolls between 2014 and 2016, many from counties previously subject to oversight under the Voting Rights Act.

THE FRAUD MYTH Falsely claiming there were millions of fraudulent votes in the election, Trump establishes a voter-fraud commission, requests states hand over sensitive voter data.

CENSUS NONSENSE In a ploy to undercount Dem-leaning communities, the Commerce Department announces it will ask 2020 census-takers

whether they are U.S. citizens.

MODERN POLL TAX After Florida passes a ballot measure restoring voting rights to 1.4 million ex-felons, GOP legislators move to impose

onerous fees on people trying to be re-enfranchised.