Did you hear that Joe Biden is running for president? He totally is. Well, not officially, yet. But the president, a job that is kind of like a Pope except not religious, gave Biden his blessing. It is probably the same kind of thumbs-up he also gave Hillary Clinton, but he allegedly gave Biden’s at lunch and the president would never profane the sandwich by uttering insincerities above one. But what does this mean? And what do America’s best citizens, the pundits, think it means?
To answer, let us go through the three stages of politics — the fanciful, the practical and the cynical — because it is always funnier when the portcullis drops down on a bunch of bodies after they thought they were going to get into the castle. The first fanciful bit of the Biden 4 Prez story came out this past week, when the veep sat down with Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for a two-hour meeting. If you are fantasy booking at home or merely from your TV studio in Washington, it is fun to imagine that this conversation was held:
Biden: Liz, I am running for president. I am going to campaign in my Chevelle. Warren: Can I call you Boss? Because that is boss. Biden: Anyway, do you want to be my vice-president? Warren: Everyone else in the Democratic Party wants me to run for president and I have repeatedly denied any interest because I enjoy what I’m accomplishing in the Senate, but sure, let me take a worse version of that job instead.
If you are a more sober Beltway fantasy booker, the other fanciful version of the tale goes something like this: Joe Biden has built a career selling himself and Democratic Party values to regular fellow Joes. With Warren declining to run and with Bernie Sanders hobbled by the inability of Beltway commentators to say ssssssssssocialisssssssst without the extra S’s, like they are all speaking Parseltongue, only Biden has the chops to put their message in a mainstream package without all the liabilities Hillary Clinton faces. But let us pause and turn up the bummer dial on the amp and consider a few more practical things:
n 1. The Democratic Party has spent the last 40+ years trying to convince itself that this election and this candidate will be the combination that wins back white working-class votes. That Donald Trump is packing 20,000 people into football stadiums to talk about “anchor babies”, while attendees praise him for sounding like George Wallace does not suggest that 2016 is when said voters start pulling levers in favour of economic self-interest instead of to punish ethnic minorities.
n 2. Many of Hillary’s potential negatives will also rebound upon Biden; they were members of the same administration, after all. “A third Obama term” applies equally critically to both, and since the Benghazi investigation long since departed the realm of fact, there is no reason not to blame Biden for it too. Also, you can be sure we will learn he is the reason why “we lost Iraq”.
n 3. Unlike Hillary, Biden makes a good target in any War On Women rhetoric. Yeah, he wrote the Violence Against Women Act, but there are also all those clips of Biden awkwardly smooching women at official receptions. All anyone has to do is air those in slo-mo to a Barry White track and Biden looks like something from a Church pamphlet.
n 4. Biden will have to raise a lot of money very fast — as much as $30 million (Dh110.34 million) to be competitive in early races. Where is that going to come from? The line on Monday from the TV pundits was that many of the anti-Hillary bundlers from the 2008 election are willing to throw in with Biden for the same reasons they did not back Hillary then: Baggage, the Clinton name, electability. But the large sums that undercut Hillary’s sudden fondness for economic populism will undercut Biden just as much, especially if raised conspicuously quickly. At that point, you have to argue that his personality says more to voters than the numbers and fantasise about that Biden/Warren meeting involving his pleading with Warren to push the dialogue to the left to give him the political opportunity to campaign against his own backers’ economic interests. Then, after the election, two B-grade Bob Woodwards can reconstruct the scene in their book Game Down: The Double Change 2016.
Which brings us to the cynical bits. Respectability politics requires that Beltway thinkers demonstrate their seriousness by trivialising Bernie Sanders when not outright ignoring him. It does not matter that all other developed nations have robust pro-labour politics: In America, that sort of thing is for college students or anyone unduly high. Serious thinkers know the discussion falls along a spectrum between benign oligarchy and a less-tacky fascism. These are the people who watch a wolverine devour a henhouse on Discovery HD and yell at the screen because the chickens “refused to compromise”.
Which leaves us with Hillary, who refuses to apologise. She will not apologise for the nothingburger that was Whitewater. She will not apologise for whatever makes the New York Times treat her with middle-school levels of petty scorn. She will not apologise for her “character issues” — all of the above, plus #Benghazi, plus email — and those issues give every pundit free reign to accuse her of years-long corruption if she so much as accidentally gets an extra burrito in her to-go bag during her next trip to Chipotle.
And — admittedly, this is an ugly thought — there is probably no shortage of people who have looked at the past seven years and wondered how many items could have been ticked off their political wish lists had this administration not been faced with the racial hysteria ginned up against a black president.
Combined with the knee-jerk bigoted pushback that would not only greet the Clinton name, the thought of the sexist hysteria facing a woman president may send elite staffers and Beltway tastemakers towards a conventional (male) politician, to head off a further four to eight years of the party dragging America agonisingly up a hill.
Biden’s meeting with Warren may have been little more than courtesy; his means of raising money may undermine whatever populist message he would choose to campaign on and, yes, he has liabilities, not to mention fewer A-list staffers and volunteers to choose from at this late a date. But he is not going to be as methodically ignored or unfairly, reflexively accused as either of the Democratic hopefuls ahead of him. He has a compromise appeal to a certain type of thinker who thrives on that as a solution. Biden may wind up being sold like crazy by everyone on TV just by showing up and being a smiling white guy who loves America and is running because it was his son’s dying wish.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
