April 26, 2019
So Joe’s in
now, and really, thank God. The corporate neoliberal “center” is dreadfully
under-represented in the current tiny
field of potential Democratic nominees. In the event candidates
Buttigieg, Harris, O’Rourke, Booker, Klobuchar, Moulton, Inslee, Hickenlooper
and Gillibrand fail to successfully advocate for continuing 30 years of failed
conservative “centrist” Democratic policies, former Senator and Vice
President Joe Biden (D-Delaware)
will be there to shoot the gap.
:facebrick:
“The third time’s lucky,”
reads Alexander Hilsop’s 1862 compendium of Scottish proverbs. I guess we’re
all going to find out how true that is over the course of the 79 weeks standing
between this ragged little patch of time and the 2020 presidential election.
Senator Biden’s first run at the brass ring began on June 9, 1987, and ended in
searing disgrace only 106 days later after his campaign was subsumed by
plagiarism accusations and his questionable relationship with the facts of his
own life.
Biden ran for president for
the second time 20 years later, after dancing right up to the edge of declaring
his candidacy before stepping back in 1992 and again in 2004. Biden managed to
stay in the 2008 race for 11 months while never polling above single digits,
finally withdrawing after placing 5th in the Iowa caucus. He did get noticed,
however, and ultimately accepted the number two slot on what became a
victorious Obama/Biden ticket.
Biden kicked off his third
presidential run on Thursday with an ominous and somewhat cumbersome 6:00
am tweet —
“[E]verything that has made America — America — is at stake.” The
announcement tweet failed to mention Biden’s plans to attend a big-dollar
fundraiser hosted by David Cohen, chief lobbyist for Comcast,
the most
despised company in the country. This, morosely, is par for a very
long course.
Though he labels himself a
friend to working people, Biden has a record of harming workers that spans
decades. “His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned
him the affection of the banking industry,” wrote Sen.
Elizabeth Warren in 2002, “and protected him from any well-funded challengers
for his Senate seat.”
“State laws have made Delaware
the domicile of choice for corporations, especially banks,” writes Andrew
Cockburn for Harpers, “and it competes for business with more notorious
entrepôts such as the Cayman Islands. Over half of all US public companies are
legally headquartered there.” Joe Biden spent 36 years as a Delaware senator
until Obama raised him up in 2008, and during that time he served his core
constituency with vigor.
Biden voted in favor of one of
the most ruthlessly anti-worker bills in modern legislative history, the 2005
Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, depriving millions of
the protections provided by Chapter 7 bankruptcy. For this, and for his
pro-corporate labors stretching all the way back to 1978, he has earned the
financial devotion of the too-big-to-fail club many times over.
Millennial voters are touted
as the sleeping giant of the 2020 election: Turn them out in large numbers,
goes the thinking, and you can practically start measuring the drapes in the
Oval Office today. If this is true, and I believe it is, candidate Biden began
his campaign behind an eight-ball roughly the size of, well, Delaware.
“Student debt broke $1.5
trillion in the first quarter of 2018 according to the Federal Reserve,” writes Mark
Provost for Truthout. “Twenty percent of student borrowers default on
their loan payments. Delaware’s own senator and former vice president of the
United States, Joe Biden, is at the center of the decades-long campaign by
lenders to eviscerate consumer debt protections.”
Biden became chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987, at a time when Republicans were running
actively racist campaigns under the gossamer veil of being “tough on crime.” Chairman Biden, who
was about to spend 106 days failing to become president at the time, was not
about to miss the boat. By 1994, he had become the Democratic
championfor the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a vicious
piece of legislation which ushered in an age of mass incarceration that
lawmakers today are still laboring to dismantle.
Biden’s problems on the matter
of race go far beyond his full-throated support for the 1994 crime bill. “I do
not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the
Black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for
everything our society offers,’” he said in
1975 regarding school desegregation. “‘In order to even the score, we must now
give the Black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the
race.’ I don’t buy that.”
You can expect to see that
quote at least once a day for as long as his campaign remains active. One can
try to shrug off a 44-year-old quote as the words of a man whose opinions on
race have “evolved” — he shared the ticket with Obama! — but his record on the
issue is unavoidably long and bleak.
“Joe Biden’s greatest strength is that he’s been in the mainstream of American
politics for the last 50 years,” writes the NBC
politics blog, The Fix. “And that’s his greatest weakness, too.”
In this, Biden mirrors the
history of the party whose nomination he seeks, a party that was firmly on the
wrong side of racial justice until the middle of the 1960s. “My state was a
slave state,” he told Fox
News in 2006. “My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest
Black population in the country. My state is anything [but] a Northeast liberal
state.” Later that same year, before a mostly Republican crowd in South
Carolina, Biden jokedthat
Delaware only stayed in the Union during the Civil War “because we couldn’t
figure out how to get to the South.”
Joe Biden voted in favor of
George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. I have spent the last 17
years of my life writing
about that horrific war, and expect to still be writing about it right up
until they wind me in my shroud. There is no lack of irony to be found in the
fact that Biden ultimately decided not to run for president in 1992 because
he voted
against George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War resolution, believing that vote
irretrievably damaged his chances for victory. Some 26 years later, his vote in
favor of a different Iraq war will be around his neck like a blood-soaked
millstone, and justly so.
And then there is the
matter of Anita Hill, which rolls many of the most pressing issues of the
day — women’s rights, the patriarchy, racism, the conservative balance of the
Supreme Court, collusion with a Republican Party that thinks “bipartisanship”
is hilarious — into a very hard ball.
“Joe Biden was the ringleader
of the hostile and sexist hearing that put Anita Hill, not Clarence Thomas, on
trial,” writes Shaunna
Thomas, co-founder and executive director of the women’s group, UltraViolet.
“In doing so, Biden caused tremendous harm to all survivors, he set back the
movement, and he helped put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. This is not a
subject he can sweep under the rug. This is not something he can just get out
of the way before announcing his candidacy. This is not something one line in a
speech or interview will fix.”
Prior to announcing his
candidacy, Biden expressed
regret for his treatment of Anita Hill, going so far as to say “I’m
sorry” on the Today show in September 2018, which speaks volumes about
how long he has been contemplating this campaign (Hill was not present in the
studio to hear the apology). On the day he announced this third run, CNBC reported
that Biden had spoken to Hill personally. “They had a private
discussion,” said a
campaign spokesperson, “where he shared with her directly his regret for what
she endured and his admiration for everything she has done to change the
culture around sexual harassment in this country.”
According to The New York
Times, however, Hill was having none of it. “Ms. Hill, in an interview
Wednesday, said she left the conversation feeling deeply unsatisfied and
declined to characterize his words to her as an apology,” reported the Times.
“She said she is not convinced that Mr. Biden truly accepts the harm he caused
her and other women who suffered sexual harassment and gender violence.”
“I cannot be satisfied by
simply saying I’m sorry for what happened to you,” Hill is quoted as saying. “I
will be satisfied when I know there is real change and real accountability and
real purpose. The focus on apology, to me, is one thing. But he needs to give
an apology to the other women and to the American public because we know now
how deeply disappointed Americans around the country were about what they saw.
And not just women. There are women and men now who have just really lost
confidence in our government to respond to the problem of gender violence.”
Joe Biden’s first three public
endorsements — from conservative Democratic Senators Chris
Coons (Delaware), Bob
Casey (Pennsylvania) and Doug
Jones (Alabama) — tell you all you need to know about who is rooting
for his candidacy. A significant number of the policies he has devoted his life
to are simply terrible. He’s a bannerman for a failed Democratic Party
experiment, and the only people who don’t seem capable of perceiving that
failure are the “centrist” Democrats cheering him on.
Biden is planning to run on
the same “But I can win!” platform that worked out so poorly in the last
election. The politics blog Crystal Ball labels
him as potentially “The Most Experienced New President Ever,” which
was also what some people were saying about Hillary Clinton in 2016. Even in
the short time between now and then, a great many Democratic voters have
demonstrably left
him behind.
Three decades of watching
conservative Democrats assist Republicans as they drove the country to the
right is enough already. Alexander Hilsop’s proverb, I strongly suspect, is
dead wrong on this one. Joe Biden is leading in the polls at the moment, but if
he’s still in the race after Super Tuesday, I will be stunned. At least he’ll
know how to find the exit. He’s done it before.
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