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From the New Statesman:
PT. 1
Can Joe Biden defeat Donald Trump?
Current New Statesman forecasts suggest that the Democrat presidential hopeful and veteran insider could end the Trump era on 3 November. If he succeeds, will he set the US on a path to renewal?
14 OCTOBER 2020
BY EMILY TAMKIN
When Barack Obama chose his running mate in 2008, he did not pick somebody who was, like him, a history-making force. He went for Joe Biden, who, during the primary, had said of Obama, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” And yet Obama chose him anyway.
Biden had decades of Senate experience, especially on foreign policy, that the Democratic presidential nominee lacked. But by choosing Biden, Obama showed he could overlook an older white man calling him “articulate” and “clean”. He could show voters, and specifically white voters, that saying “Yes We Can” didn’t have to be scary.
The US is on another journey with Joe Biden, who is trying to tell voters that what comes next need not be foreboding; it could be familiar, decent and safe. But after eight years of Obama and four years of Donald Trump, the US is split on the kind of trip it wants to take. Some Americans want to return to a sense of calm and normalcy in the wake of Covid-19, with a president who does not cast people who disagree with him as traitors, lambast the press as the enemy of the people, or say those who want greater racial justice hate their country. But other Americans believe that “normal”, with its societal dysfunctions and extreme inequalities, is what got us into this dark place.
The first big question, then, is whether Biden can appeal to both those groups and win the White House. The second big question is what a Biden presidency will look like if he does.
***
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr grew up in 1940s and 1950s Pennsylvania (in working-class Scranton, as he often mentions) and in Delaware, a sliver of America’s eastern seaboard between Washington, DC and New York City. His father was a used-car salesman descended from British and French immigrants. His mother, to go by Biden’s depictions of her, was an Irish-American matriarch. She was the sort of parent who, on learning that a teacher had made fun of her son’s stutter, threatened to beat up the teacher.
Biden was not a strong student, but he was popular, an athlete, and became class president. He studied history and political science at the University of Delaware. This was the 1960s, but Biden was hardly part of the counterculture. He got married (to Neilia Hunter, a teacher he had met on spring break), had three children and studied for a law degree at Syracuse University College of Law – studies that Biden deemed “boring”.
Law was interesting in one way, though: it helped bring him into politics. In 1969 Biden began working at the law firm of a politically active Democrat, Sid Balick, who nominated him to a group that was trying to breathe new life into the Delaware Democratic Party. Having previously been registered as an Independent, Biden changed his registration to Democrat and won a seat on New Castle County Council. His long career in public office began in November 1970. There would be a certain poetry if, precisely half a century later, the autumn sun rose on 4 November on a Biden presidential win.
The path and character of that half century was altered permanently, and almost ended, only two years later. In December 1972, six weeks after he had been elected the youngest senator at the time, Biden was in Washington, DC hiring staff when he received the news that his wife and daughter had been killed, and his sons Beau and Hunter severely injured, in a car crash while on a Christmas shopping trip. “For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” he would recall in a speech to families of fallen soldiers in 2012, “… because they had been to the top of the mountain, and they just knew in their heart they would never get there again.”
Biden considered resigning from the Senate but was persuaded not to, and subsequently spent 36 years there, acquiring a reputation for hard-nosed bipartisanship and becoming chairman of the judiciary committee and the foreign relations committee. He unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination twice, the first time in 1987. During that campaign he was accused of plagiarising a speech by Neil Kinnock, then the leader of the UK Labour Party, by asking in a debate at the Iowa State Fair, “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?”
Kinnock was not the only individual from whom Biden borrowed. His stated fondness for John F Kennedy – a fellow American-Irish Catholic Democrat politician – looked less like an homage and more like an attempt at dress-up when it transpired that Biden had, in 1987, reused parts of a 1967 speech of Robert Kennedy’s without giving credit.
***
He tried again for the presidency in 2008, a campaign that also included gaffes, but led to his becoming Obama’s running mate. According to those who worked with Biden when he was vice-president, he knows how to work the system of the US government. In the White House Biden could be relied upon to offer an opposing view, ensuring counter-arguments were aired in discussions. He kept a line open to middle America, helping to advance measures aimed at supporting jobs through the economic crisis and at curbing gun violence.
Biden, who married his second wife, Jill, in 1977, was also known for insisting that staff take time for their family commitments; ignoring those at the expense of work, he told them, was a sackable offence. That family was so important to Biden would make the 2015 death of his son and political heir, Beau Biden, from cancer even more poignant. Stricken with grief once more, Biden announced that he would not seek the Democratic nomination in 2016 and endorsed Hillary Clinton.
Grief is an inescapable theme of Biden’s political life. He speaks often of how he knows what it is like to experience it. “For anyone who’s experienced the kind of loss that he has, that would be central to how they see themselves in the world,” one Biden campaign staffer told me. “Even when you’re not talking about grief… you can feel it in the background of anything he’s doing.”
Take Brayden Harrington, a teenager who, like Biden, has a stutter. The two met on the campaign trail, and Harrington then featured at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August, where Biden accepted the party’s nomination. You cannot watch Biden speak to a child, the staffer said, and not think of the children that he has lost.
This ability to empathise with others’ suffering has a special salience. The US is currently mourning the death of more than 200,000 people, and millions of livelihoods, because of Covid-19. In his messages to the DNC, Biden said that Trump was not equipped for the job and that his mishandling of the pandemic had caused avoidable grief to so many American families.
***
Biden speaks of a different time in US politics, one in which politicians could work together across divisions, or at least be decent to each other. To many, that is an attractive offer: a return to politicians shaking hands, and not using Twitter or television to attack or defend the latest nonsensical thing the president has said. Biden has experience. He is sewn into the fabric of 20th- century American politics, and his candidacy nostalgically promises a return to a more decent society. A Biden ad over the summer featured him in a 1967 Corvette Stingray, and saying, “I love this car, nothing but incredible memories.” As his campaign staffer put it: “For the moment we’re in, versus the candidate we’re running against… Biden’s the perfect candidate. People are just looking to get back to some stability and predictability.”
Yet the good old days were not so good for everyone, and Biden also embodies that reality. In the 1970s, he led opposition to “busing”, whereby under desegregation efforts black students were transported to schools in predominantly white districts. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which defined marriage for federal purposes as between a man and a woman. He supported the US invasion of Iraq. Only last year did he explicitly withdraw his support for the Hyde amendment, which restricts federal abortion funding only to cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother’s life. His defenders argue that times have changed, and Biden’s views with them.
While that bothers many on the left, the Republicans are levelling very different criticisms: that Biden is an empty vessel (“Sleepy Joe” in Trump’s nomenclature) for the ideas of the radical left. This line of attack, which Trump used repeatedly in the first presidential debate, has three main weaknesses.
The first is that little in Biden’s long political history suggests he is any sort of radical. The second is that it lowers expectations, making, say, Biden delivering a solid speech seem like an achievement. And the third is that it is a reminder of what Biden promises he will bring back: the kind of calm that, at present, appears a distant dream.
Biden is currently polling well ahead of Trump nationally and ahead of Trump in most swing states. Polls, though, are not votes. If the Democrats are to escape a repeat of 2016 – where Clinton polled ahead for almost the entire the campaign and still lost the electoral college – Biden will need to bring out black voters; those, such as white suburban women, who were expected to vote for Clinton but instead chose Trump; and the young, registered voters who stayed at home four years ago.
........<next post>
PT. 1
Can Joe Biden defeat Donald Trump?
Current New Statesman forecasts suggest that the Democrat presidential hopeful and veteran insider could end the Trump era on 3 November. If he succeeds, will he set the US on a path to renewal?
14 OCTOBER 2020
BY EMILY TAMKIN
When Barack Obama chose his running mate in 2008, he did not pick somebody who was, like him, a history-making force. He went for Joe Biden, who, during the primary, had said of Obama, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” And yet Obama chose him anyway.
Biden had decades of Senate experience, especially on foreign policy, that the Democratic presidential nominee lacked. But by choosing Biden, Obama showed he could overlook an older white man calling him “articulate” and “clean”. He could show voters, and specifically white voters, that saying “Yes We Can” didn’t have to be scary.
The US is on another journey with Joe Biden, who is trying to tell voters that what comes next need not be foreboding; it could be familiar, decent and safe. But after eight years of Obama and four years of Donald Trump, the US is split on the kind of trip it wants to take. Some Americans want to return to a sense of calm and normalcy in the wake of Covid-19, with a president who does not cast people who disagree with him as traitors, lambast the press as the enemy of the people, or say those who want greater racial justice hate their country. But other Americans believe that “normal”, with its societal dysfunctions and extreme inequalities, is what got us into this dark place.
The first big question, then, is whether Biden can appeal to both those groups and win the White House. The second big question is what a Biden presidency will look like if he does.
***
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr grew up in 1940s and 1950s Pennsylvania (in working-class Scranton, as he often mentions) and in Delaware, a sliver of America’s eastern seaboard between Washington, DC and New York City. His father was a used-car salesman descended from British and French immigrants. His mother, to go by Biden’s depictions of her, was an Irish-American matriarch. She was the sort of parent who, on learning that a teacher had made fun of her son’s stutter, threatened to beat up the teacher.
Biden was not a strong student, but he was popular, an athlete, and became class president. He studied history and political science at the University of Delaware. This was the 1960s, but Biden was hardly part of the counterculture. He got married (to Neilia Hunter, a teacher he had met on spring break), had three children and studied for a law degree at Syracuse University College of Law – studies that Biden deemed “boring”.
Law was interesting in one way, though: it helped bring him into politics. In 1969 Biden began working at the law firm of a politically active Democrat, Sid Balick, who nominated him to a group that was trying to breathe new life into the Delaware Democratic Party. Having previously been registered as an Independent, Biden changed his registration to Democrat and won a seat on New Castle County Council. His long career in public office began in November 1970. There would be a certain poetry if, precisely half a century later, the autumn sun rose on 4 November on a Biden presidential win.
The path and character of that half century was altered permanently, and almost ended, only two years later. In December 1972, six weeks after he had been elected the youngest senator at the time, Biden was in Washington, DC hiring staff when he received the news that his wife and daughter had been killed, and his sons Beau and Hunter severely injured, in a car crash while on a Christmas shopping trip. “For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” he would recall in a speech to families of fallen soldiers in 2012, “… because they had been to the top of the mountain, and they just knew in their heart they would never get there again.”
Biden considered resigning from the Senate but was persuaded not to, and subsequently spent 36 years there, acquiring a reputation for hard-nosed bipartisanship and becoming chairman of the judiciary committee and the foreign relations committee. He unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination twice, the first time in 1987. During that campaign he was accused of plagiarising a speech by Neil Kinnock, then the leader of the UK Labour Party, by asking in a debate at the Iowa State Fair, “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?”
Kinnock was not the only individual from whom Biden borrowed. His stated fondness for John F Kennedy – a fellow American-Irish Catholic Democrat politician – looked less like an homage and more like an attempt at dress-up when it transpired that Biden had, in 1987, reused parts of a 1967 speech of Robert Kennedy’s without giving credit.
***
He tried again for the presidency in 2008, a campaign that also included gaffes, but led to his becoming Obama’s running mate. According to those who worked with Biden when he was vice-president, he knows how to work the system of the US government. In the White House Biden could be relied upon to offer an opposing view, ensuring counter-arguments were aired in discussions. He kept a line open to middle America, helping to advance measures aimed at supporting jobs through the economic crisis and at curbing gun violence.
Biden, who married his second wife, Jill, in 1977, was also known for insisting that staff take time for their family commitments; ignoring those at the expense of work, he told them, was a sackable offence. That family was so important to Biden would make the 2015 death of his son and political heir, Beau Biden, from cancer even more poignant. Stricken with grief once more, Biden announced that he would not seek the Democratic nomination in 2016 and endorsed Hillary Clinton.
Grief is an inescapable theme of Biden’s political life. He speaks often of how he knows what it is like to experience it. “For anyone who’s experienced the kind of loss that he has, that would be central to how they see themselves in the world,” one Biden campaign staffer told me. “Even when you’re not talking about grief… you can feel it in the background of anything he’s doing.”
Take Brayden Harrington, a teenager who, like Biden, has a stutter. The two met on the campaign trail, and Harrington then featured at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August, where Biden accepted the party’s nomination. You cannot watch Biden speak to a child, the staffer said, and not think of the children that he has lost.
This ability to empathise with others’ suffering has a special salience. The US is currently mourning the death of more than 200,000 people, and millions of livelihoods, because of Covid-19. In his messages to the DNC, Biden said that Trump was not equipped for the job and that his mishandling of the pandemic had caused avoidable grief to so many American families.
***
Biden speaks of a different time in US politics, one in which politicians could work together across divisions, or at least be decent to each other. To many, that is an attractive offer: a return to politicians shaking hands, and not using Twitter or television to attack or defend the latest nonsensical thing the president has said. Biden has experience. He is sewn into the fabric of 20th- century American politics, and his candidacy nostalgically promises a return to a more decent society. A Biden ad over the summer featured him in a 1967 Corvette Stingray, and saying, “I love this car, nothing but incredible memories.” As his campaign staffer put it: “For the moment we’re in, versus the candidate we’re running against… Biden’s the perfect candidate. People are just looking to get back to some stability and predictability.”
Yet the good old days were not so good for everyone, and Biden also embodies that reality. In the 1970s, he led opposition to “busing”, whereby under desegregation efforts black students were transported to schools in predominantly white districts. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which defined marriage for federal purposes as between a man and a woman. He supported the US invasion of Iraq. Only last year did he explicitly withdraw his support for the Hyde amendment, which restricts federal abortion funding only to cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother’s life. His defenders argue that times have changed, and Biden’s views with them.
While that bothers many on the left, the Republicans are levelling very different criticisms: that Biden is an empty vessel (“Sleepy Joe” in Trump’s nomenclature) for the ideas of the radical left. This line of attack, which Trump used repeatedly in the first presidential debate, has three main weaknesses.
The first is that little in Biden’s long political history suggests he is any sort of radical. The second is that it lowers expectations, making, say, Biden delivering a solid speech seem like an achievement. And the third is that it is a reminder of what Biden promises he will bring back: the kind of calm that, at present, appears a distant dream.
Biden is currently polling well ahead of Trump nationally and ahead of Trump in most swing states. Polls, though, are not votes. If the Democrats are to escape a repeat of 2016 – where Clinton polled ahead for almost the entire the campaign and still lost the electoral college – Biden will need to bring out black voters; those, such as white suburban women, who were expected to vote for Clinton but instead chose Trump; and the young, registered voters who stayed at home four years ago.
........<next post>
