US election 2020: Is Joe Biden a political buzzkill or the ultimate sensible centrist?

It’s his third attempt to make it to the Oval Office and this time he’s the Democratic front-runner
No flake: Joe Biden on the campaign trail in Iowa
Reuters
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With 19 candidates already jostling for the right to run against Donald Trump next year, the Democratic Party scarcely needed a 20th. But Joe Biden was perhaps the most inevitable of all. The 76-year-old former vice-president announced last Thursday that he is running for the third time in his long political career.

To older Democrats, Biden is a cherished warhorse, a glad-hander and bipartisan deal-maker, the perfect balm for a fractured political age, a real human being in the increasingly artificial and airbrushed political realm. Thanks to strong support among Democratic traditionalists, he is already well ahead of his rivals in the polls.

But for younger Democrats Biden is the ultimate political buzzkill, the cheesy old uncle sashaying on to the dancefloor. He is a creature of the Washington swamp, down to his hair plugs, year-round tan and improbably white teeth — the vehicle of the Clinton-Obama restoration which lurks around Washington waiting to be returned to power.

Younger voters would much rather the fierce, socialist ravings of Bernie Sanders, who is older than Biden, or someone with more future than past, like Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who has shot into early contention. Either seems better equipped to combat Trump’s ferocity or address the economic, social and political challenges facing any American under 50. Biden will likely raise a lot of money from traditional party sources, corporations and wealthy, older individuals. But he is struggling to hire a decent campaign staff. Anyone ambitious is going elsewhere.

He held his first campaign event on Monday in a union hall in Pennsylvania, a traditionally Democratic state which Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, as working-class white voters tipped the election to Trump.

Jill Biden at a campaign rally for her husband in Pittsburgh
Getty Images

“If I’m going to beat Donald Trump in 2020, it’s going to happen here,” Biden said. He promised to revive the power of the unions, which have been scorned by Trump, and to raise the minimum wage. He said America was suffering from a “broken political system that’s deliberately being undermined by our President to continue to abuse the power of the office”.

Trump tweeted back that his challenger and Obama “didn’t do the job and now you have Trump, who is getting it done — big time”.

Biden is pitching himself as a sensible centrist, but he risks being rhetorically outflanked on both the Right and the Left. If Trump had been in the same room with the same audience as Biden on Monday, he would have spoken directly to his audience’s deepest economic and social anxieties, their fears of irrelevance as technology, immigrants and foreign rivals gobble up their livelihoods.

If Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren had been there, they would have spoken of raising taxes on the rich to pay for more expansive healthcare and to cut the cost of higher education. Had Beto O’Rourke, the 46-year-old social media sensation, been there, he would have spoken of this new $5 trillion plan to address climate change. Pete Buttigieg would have talked of the urgent need for root-and-branch electoral and democratic reforms to ensure the political system can function. The Democratic Party is fizzing with ideas these days, many from the Left, but Biden doesn’t seem to be registering them.

"Other candidates are blank slates —  Biden has decades of actions by which he can be judged"

In fact, his long track record in public life may be hurting him. While other candidates are virtual blank slates, Biden has decades of actions and decisions, good and bad, by which people can judge him. His experience may qualify him for office, but it is also a weight on his candidacy.

He was first elected to the Senate from Delaware in 1972, when he was just 29. Barely a month later, his first wife Neilia and 13-month-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident. He married his second wife, Jill, in 1977.

Over the years he has taken positions which, out of context, look wildly contradictory. He opposed the forced racial integration of public high schools, yet ended up serving as vice-president to America’s first black president. He is a Catholic who wears a rosary on his wrist yet has backed abortion rights and pre-empted his own party in his support for gay marriage.

He first ran for the presidency in 1988 but had to withdraw when he was caught plagiarising his speeches from, among others, former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. He waited 20 years before trying again, but his second campaign was derailed on its first day when he was asked his opinion of his rival Barack Obama. “You got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden said. His comment was immediately decried as patronising and borderline racist, and Biden was soon out of the contest.

Obama, though, was more forgiving. He said he had “no problem with Joe Biden” and picked him as his running mate. Biden would act as the ultimate Washington insider on Obama’s insurgent campaign and in his administration.

Initially, they seemed a political odd couple. When Obama arrived in the Senate in 2005 he was assigned to its foreign relations committee, on which Biden was the senior Democrat. Obama quickly tired of his colleague’s interminable speeches. During one hearing, as Biden spoke, he passed a note to an aide: “Shoot. Me. Now.” But after winning the presidency in 2008 they developed a curious friendship: the fastidious, cerebral Obama, and the garrulous, emotional Biden.

Obama respected his vice-president’s request to be the last person in the room on every major decision, the last person to make his case before the president. Biden eagerly took on the tasks Obama didn’t want, from selling unpopular policies to Congress and the public to attending state funerals around the world.

"He was accused by female politicians of smelling their hair, kissing them"

While many on the president’s staff wanted to replace Biden with Hillary Clinton in 2012, Obama refused. When the vice-president’s son Beau died of a brain tumour in 2015, Obama offered to pay off the mortgage on the Bidens’ house so they could afford to help Beau’s family. Biden had hoped to run for the presidency in 2016, but Obama felt he was too emotionally distracted by the death of his son, and the Democratic Party congealed behind Hillary Clinton before Biden could muster the machinery of a campaign.

Predictably, his entry into this presidential race has been anything but smooth. Before he announced his candidacy, he was accused by several women politicians of inappropriate touching, of sidling up behind them, smelling their hair and kissing them. He responded with a video in which he said he would be “more mindful and respectful of people’s personal space”. He added: “I worked my whole life to empower women … so the idea that I can’t adjust to the fact that personal space is important, more important than it’s ever been, is just not thinkable. I will. I will.”

Support buttons for Joe Biden
AFP/Getty Images

He was also confronted with the lowest point of his political career — his chairmanship of the Senate judiciary committee when it considered the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991. Anita Hill, a young, African-American law professor who had worked for Thomas, accused him of crude, lecherous behaviour. Yet the all-white, all-male judiciary committee, led by Biden, treated her with scorn.

One senator accused her of deriving sexual fantasies from The Exorcist. Another drafted a forensic psychologist to accuse her of “erotomania”. Several other women were ready to make similar charges to Hill’s, but Biden refused to allow them to appear before the committee.

Before announcing his candidacy, Biden called Hill (now a professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts) but she was underwhelmed by his half-apology. “I cannot be satisfied by you simply saying: ‘I’m sorry for what happened to you’,” she said. “I will be satisfied when I know that there is real change and real accountability and real purpose.”

The line among Biden’s supporters is that he’s the only human in a field of robots. He enjoys cutting deals more than accumulating likes. He was never as machinating as the Clintons nor as data-driven as Obama, and he is certainly nicer than Trump.

But he may have missed his moment — by about a decade.

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