JOE BIDEN
Biden does have a talent for projecting “authenticity,” an electoral strength he shares with Trump. About once a day, you can peer directly into his cerebral cortex.
half-bright anachronism who could move the chains in Congress, but was no longer a viable archetype for national contention.
Obama and then-New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson were believable leaders of the party’s new multicultural coalition; Hillary Clinton offered excitement as a possible first female president; John Edwards spoke to a nascent class-based progressive movement. What did Biden represent that meant a damn thing anymore?
A lot, as it turned out. The perception that Biden killed his campaign with inappropriate remarks about Obama, Indian Americans (“You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent”), and other groups, in addition to an iffy history on racial issues like busing, was offset by Obama’s naming of Biden to be his running mate. Pundits believed the move was designed to “reassure white voters” in “economically strapped” areas.
This year, as Biden’s campaign gained momentum, The New York Times reported that Biden’s relationship with Obama was a marriage of racial convenience. Obama told Virginia’s Tim Kaine in 2008, “You’re the pick of my heart, but Joe is the pick of my head.” Obama wanted “someone with gray in his hair,” because he, Obama, was “deeply worried about a backlash against a black man at the top of the ticket,” and believed an “older white running mate would ease fears in battleground states.”
Thus Joe Biden earned a place in history books at center stage of a great moment of racial healing, walking into the White House as the partner of America’s first black president, precisely because his own political career had foundered on a bed of Archie Bunkerisms. He won by losing.
This was an insane (but also darkly funny) piece of luck, but Biden by all accounts made the best of it. He reportedly won Obama over with his dedication to family and with the effort he put into his role as running mate, which included learning to “shut up,” as former Obama aide David Axelrod recalled.
In 2020, the calculus is similar. Biden in almost every respect is a flawed politician. For progressives, he offers little, especially given his history supporting policies like the Iraq War and NAFTA, while not only opposing Medicare for All, but regularly dissembling about it (“Medicare goes away as you know it!”). Past support of legislation like the 2005 bankruptcy bill highlight his unfortunate ties to corporate interests like the powerful credit-card companies in Biden’s home state of Delaware.
Those who are hoping for a quick-thinking zinger machine who’d shine in a campaign against Trump can’t take much solace in the face-plant-a-day pattern of Biden’s run to date. A general election pitting an angry, feces-hurling Trump against this version of Biden has awesome disaster potential.
To all of these objections, there’s basically one response: He’s better than Trump. Even if he’s losing faculties, has a few objectionable character quirks, and is too cozy with financial interests, the argument goes, Biden is at least not a terrible human being.
Biden does have a talent for connecting and projecting “authenticity,” a concept of dubious value in someone 46 years into a political career, but still. Many see in his incautious statements realness absent in slicker internet-age politicians. In this sense — and this shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a negative — he shares an electoral strength with Donald Trump, whose tweeting habits get him in deserved trouble but also rally fans who appreciate being able to access a politician without barriers. The Biden effect is similar: About once a day, you can peer directly into his cerebral cortex.
Former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, who first met Biden back in 1987, says all “authentic” candidates have this problem: They mangle words, not being afraid to say what they think. In the case of Biden this year, Trippi says Democrats will not only have to ask themselves if they can get past that problem to focus on the bottom-line character proposition, but also if they should.
“Is he a guy stuck in his ways, still able to connect, still mangling unapologetically but prepared to be president who can read a teleprompter and talk to us sincerely in most moments?” Trippi asks. “Or is it something a lot more? I have no idea.”
It may not come to this. Biden is no longer the clear front-runner. The health problems of Sanders have coincided with a surge in support for Warren, and even apple-cheeked South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is out raising him. Some commentators are noting similarities between Biden’s campaign and that of Jeb Bush, another early front-runner and “invisible primary” winner whose campaign collapsed amid a long-term dearth of small-money donations. It’s not as bad as being compared to Mike Dukakis, the campaign-journalism-cliché equivalent of circling vultures, but Jeb comparisons aren’t a good sign, either.
After the event in Vegas, crowd members almost all say the same thing. They like the way Biden has handled the beating he’s taken all around, from media jerks like me, from Democratic rivals, and especially from Donald Trump. “Class,” says Alicia Tarr. “Goes nose to nose with someone, doesn’t put him down.” “Experience,” says a local print-shop owner named Richard. “Not too radical.”
Ellen Vernon, a kindly Belize native, wanders out of the community center last of all the audience members, wearing a smile. She’s a fan of Obama’s, and predisposed to Biden, but his forbearance this campaign season in the face of constant attacks added to her admiration.
“He never gets mad,” she says. “Now that is a man.” I ask her how she thinks a candidate with so many issues could prevail in a general election.
“People,” she says with a sigh, “have soft hearts.” This might be true. But while there’s still time to pick a different nominee, should they? It’s a tough question, and Democrats are running out of time to answer it.
The story of “Joe Impedimenta” j ourneying from a high school exemption to public speaking to America’s second-highest office earns him a deserving spot on an inspirational list next to James Earl Jones, King George VI, and others who’ve overcome a stutter (that’s the word Biden uses) to make history with speech.
It’s impressive and speaks to an indefatigability that friends and colleagues insist is one of the best arguments for electing the man: He doesn’t give up. Biden by his own account ate buckets of shit just to survive high school. This prepared him for a career in the U. S. Senate, which is basically a meaner and more corrupt version of high school. It also provided at least some psychological practice for a potential general-election contest against a man who routinely calls him a “loser” and a “dummy” who was picked “off the trash heap” to be Obama’s vice president.
Beating his speaking demons, plus the experience of moving to the “moonscape” of a working-class neighborhood when his high-school-educated dad fell down on his luck, are central tales in Biden’s legend:
“My dad would say, Get up!” he wrote. “You’re lying in bed feeling sorry for yourself? Get up . . . ! Kids make fun of you because you stutter, Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden? Get up!”
You can hear the echo of his father’s tirade in Biden’s current stump speech, delivered in the form of his own paternal directive to a moribund (or maybe hypersensitive/overwoke?) nation: “We’re walking around with our heads down, like ‘Woe is me!’ What’s the matter with us? We’re the United States of America!”
Unfortunately, Biden is such a cliché-spewing, idea-borrowing goof, you can’t help but wonder if he borrowed the “Woe is me!” theme from one of the “Get up!” speeches in the Rocky series (specifically, Rocky’s “It ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit!” rant to pre-millennial loser son Robert in 2006’s Rocky Balboa).
Carve the policy bits out of Biden’s stump presentation and what you get is something as trite as a Rocky movie, only with less-convincing action scenes. Although he rode this legend of a boiler-cleaner’s son who kept throwing punches all the way to the Senate, it’s not surprising it couldn’t carry him further. Biden’s first two White House runs were launchpad explosions.
In August 1987, at the Iowa State Fair, Biden delivered a stirring speech about the difficulty of rising above working-class origins. “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?” he asked. “Why is it that my wife, who is sitting out there in the audience, is the first in her family. . . ?”
Unfortunately, British Labor Leader Neil Kinnock had asked the same thing months earlier, in May 1987: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to a university? Why is [wife] Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations. . . ?”
Biden had been caught not just lifting, but morphing, to the point where he seemed to believe new life details. (He did this with the medal story this year.) He wasn’t the first person in his family to have gone to college. He started saying he came from a family of coal miners, going so far as to claim a relative who would “come up after 12 hours [in the mine] and play football.” The New York Times even reported Biden began using Kinnock’s “gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact.”
He dropped out of the 1988 race under a cloud, but never corrected the record. Decades later, he was still using constructions like, “No Biden I ever knew went to college” (the collegians in his family tree were Finnegans, on his mother’s side).
In 2008, Biden again led with his face when he decided to run for the White House at the nadir of public confidence in an Iraq War he backed.
He not only commenced what seemed like his last big run at power at a time when 84 percent of Democrats believed the biggest decision of his career was a mistake, he did so when a generational Democratic Party superstar was centering his own campaign against the Iraq consensus Biden helped build. Biden called Barack Obama the “first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean,” one of a growing pile of unfortunate comments The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen was soon describing as the “Himalayan barrier” of Biden’s mouth.
Stomped in the Iowa caucus, earning less than one percent of the vote, Biden exited in January 2008, vowing, “I ain’t going away.” Nobody much believed him. The general consensus was “Scranton Joe” was a [ Cont. on 97]