It may come as no surprise that there are a lot of characteristics of Joe Biden, now running for the Democratic Presidential nomination, that I like, and that many of them fall into the category of experience. After all, the one characteristic of every other Democratic candidate is they’ve never worked at a high level in the White House. True, some of candidates have executive experience at the city and/or state levels. However, in my view, this is only a taste of what the White House requires, and a very slight one.
Biden brings 8 years of experience as Vice-President, and a very busy Vice-President at that, a VP who became close friends with President Obama, and an integral member of the team. In short, he knows how the this branch of government works, and to me, that’s a valuable asset for Biden. I’ve not noticed any intolerable policy positions, and if he’s made some mistakes over the years, he seems to own up to them and correct them when he can. He’s apparently been an inveterate union champion, which on balance is a good thing.
My main objection is his age. I have to wonder about a guy who wants to be President in his late 70s. Vitiating this objection would be the selection of a VP candidate, of course, and so I shan’t belabor the point.
But if you want to know how he’ll match up with Trump, see Andrew Sullivan’s diary entry for this week. Sullivan goes against the received wisdom of the left side punditry and believes Biden may be the antidote to flush Trump right out of our system. He has details, and I found it enlightening.
And his strength is drawn from two contrasting bases: older, moderate whites, and African-Americans. Although his share is in the 30s overall, he has a whopping 50 percent share among nonwhite Democrats, according to the latest CNN poll. A Morning Consult poll found him with 43 percent of the black vote, including 47 percent support among African-American women. Biden’s deep association with Obama gives him a lift in the black vote no other white candidate can achieve. And so it turns out that the base of the Democrats has not been swept into the identity cult of the elite, wealthy, white left. As a brand-new CBS poll finds, Democrats may prefer a hypothetical female nominee over a male (59–41 percent), a black nominee over a white one (60–40 percent), and someone in their 40s to someone in their 70s. But that’s in the abstract. In reality, Biden seems to scramble these preferences.
He’s also been able to reach non-college-educated white men in ways few other candidates could. That’s a big fucking deal in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — and if Biden can carry those states, he’ll be the next president. He’s a union man, and always has been. In what was a brilliant ad-lib, Biden began a speech to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers by making a joke about the excesses of #MeToo — “I had permission to hug Lonnie,” the union leader, he quipped. Later, as he brought some kids onstage, he joked again, as he put his hands on the shoulders of a boy: “He gave me permission to touch him.” The crowd’s reaction both times was bellows of laughter.
Which is to say, as much as progressives would like to convert the country to their views in an instance instant, the truth of the matter is that these things can take time, and it appears Joe may understand that. It’ll be interesting to see if Biden fades down the stretch, or becomes the monster of the midway.
Enjoy!
