How Biden’s rivals can derail his front-running campaign

Where politicians are concerned, especially aging and garrulous ones, it may be a mistake to attribute to strategy what can be chalked up to simple fecklessness. But amid the shambolic style of Joe Biden’s front-running campaign to date, it’s possible to discern a certain method, a general plan for how the candidate hopes to run for president: by changing positions on issues when he needs to, but without betraying his own sense of what being Joe Biden is supposed to mean.

This combination is an interesting response to the political dilemma Biden faces. The party’s activists and enforcers hate his record and his style, while many of his core supporters like him precisely because he’s out of step with the ideologists. This leaves him with a choice between consolidating his current support and risking a divisive conflict with the left, or potentially losing core supporters while pledging fealty to emerging liberal orthodoxies.

Or, alternatively, it requires him to weave and stagger between the two approaches. So Biden will go along with the activists when they demand a specific shift, as they did with his long-held, now-repudiated opposition to public funding for abortion. But then he’ll refuse to repudiate anything that falls into the broader zone of Biden-ness — the un-PC, he’s-from-a-different-time stuff, encompassing everything from his handsiness with women to his recent lament for the lost days when you could smoke cigars with segregationist Democrats.

But the approach has a certain strategic logic. It assumes that activists can be appeased with specific promises, while the moderation of many older Democrats manifests itself more in general cultural attitudes than detailed policy preferences.

Biden is hardly the most formidable of front-runners, and if any piece of the current coalition breaks off, he’ll be in deep trouble. And his rivals have obvious plays that might make that breakup happen.

The first play is to split off some of Biden’s African-American support by linking his nostalgia for dealmaking to his less-than-progressive record on race. This is the play Cory Booker is trying to execute, and Booker’s campaign probably depends on its success.

The second play is to make the broader “Uncle Joe” persona, not just its unwoke element, a liability for Biden’s elect-meto-beat-Trump case. This is probably the Pete Buttigieg play, though it’s available to any younger candidate: Without saying so directly, establish contrasts that make Biden look old, confused, a man out of time.

The third play is to attack Biden from the center when he flip-flops, and try to break off his more conservative supporters by arguing that the former VP isn’t the moderate he used to be. This should be an obvious move for the legion of candidates (Amy Klobuchar, Tim Ryan, Seth Moulton, Michael Bennet, etc.) lining up to inherit the moderate torch if Biden’s campaign fails.

And the fourth play — well, the fourth play doesn’t actually require breaking up Biden’s current coalition; it just requires uniting a slightly larger portion of the party against him.

In the rising line of Elizabeth Warren’s polling support, and the flat or falling lines of all the other non-Biden candidates, you can see at least the beginning of how NeverBiden might unite, and win.