Kaddish Time For The Biden Campaign?

The caucus goers I saw interviewed on TV seemed like dull-witted zombies who were incapable of explaining their candidate preferences other than by parroting campaign talking points, usually word for word. But in his funeral oration for the Status quo Joe campaign in The Atlantic yesterday, Blaine Dodfrey found a sentient being at the Burlington caucus who he quoted. Noting that there wasn't a single person causing for Biden, Dodfrey asked Lonnie Herbert, a 50-year-old forklift driver, to explain. Donnie sounded smarter than most of the MSNBC correspondents. "Biden wants to go back to the way it was before Trump, but things weren’t working all that well then, either." He said the country needs a "hard shift" and that that was why he is supporting Bernie. Dodfrey says that was what he was hearing in working class caucuses not just in Burlington, but across Iowa, explaining why he came in 4th in the first state to look at the candidates and rate them.

Iowa has more counties that flipped from Barack Obama to Trump in the 2016 election than any other state. In these counties are small cities like this one, where I’m from-- hilly old towns dotting the Mississippi River that were once booming manufacturing hubs, union strongholds, and, for the most part, faithfully Democratic. The economies of these river cities in the state’s southeast have been slowly contracting for the past few decades. Younger residents tend to move to large metro areas for work, and many of the people who are left are older, whiter, and disaffected because of low incomes and limited opportunities, as Dave Swenson, an economics professor at Iowa State University, told me.

The Iowans I spoke with at caucus sites here in Burlington are people whom the former vice president has claimed he can win over. His message to working-class voters-- and Trump supporters-- has been one of warmth and solidarity, emphasizing his own middle-class upbringing in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and promising that he will not leave them behind in his quest to set the country back on the right track. “We don’t deserve a president who goes out of his way to make life in America harder, crueler, pettier,” Biden told a crowd in his hometown last fall. “[Trump] said he’s working for the Forgotten American. Well, he forgot about the Forgotten American.”

The senator from Vermont, in his campaign, has made a much different case to the same voters: Sanders is hoping to capture their frustration and anger, and channel it into revolutionary political change. “He’s the man with the plan!” said Darran Reverend, a 56-year-old union carpenter, who told me that he supports Sanders because of the senator’s push for Medicare for All. “He could’ve beat [Trump] in 2016 if they would’ve elected him.” (Reverend wasn’t able to caucus in the previous cycle, because of a felony conviction. In Iowa, ex-felons can’t vote in elections unless they apply directly to the governor to restore their rights, as Reverend did.)

People are “so tired of the way things are,” said Sara Mason, a 51-year-old full-time caretaker for her mother. Sanders is very far left, she added, but instead of scaring off voters in the general election, a Sanders nomination and his ambitious progressive proposals “might work the other way and get people fired up more.”

And although Buttigieg, with his Harvard education and his fancy fundraisers, may not appear to be the type of candidate who would attract a lot of blue-collar voters, the Iowans I spoke with seemed to see the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, as a fresh version of Biden. “He’s young and moderate,” said Lois Blythe, a Burlington librarian wearing a PETE button. “I think he can bring people together.” Blythe’s husband, Ike, seated next to her, told me that in November he’ll support “anybody that can beat that guy that’s in there now.” And his money, right now, is on (former) Mayor Pete.

Biden’s success was stymied by Sanders and Buttigieg across Iowa. As MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki has pointed out, Biden captured just one of Iowa’s 31 Obama-Trump counties. At Grimes Elementary, Sanders, Yang, and Buttigieg were the only candidates who had enough support to win a delegate to the county convention. At a small satellite caucus I’d visited earlier in the day in Keokuk, about 40 miles downriver from Burlington, Sanders and Buttigieg had both received enough support to be viable candidates; Biden had not. Statewide, Buttigieg and Sanders are effectively tied for first in the state delegate count; Senator Elizabeth Warren is in third place, with Biden trailing behind. This dismal showing for Biden suggests that his electability argument is much weaker than he-- and many other Democrats-- had hoped.

Biden's political corpse, still supported by elderly rural black voters in the South, is still kicking while progressives are shoveling dirt into the grave. Mayo Pete and Mini-Mike are fighting over Biden's white supporters, while Bernie, Steyer and Mini-Mike are trying to appeal to Biden's now shaky black coalition. "But," wrote Dodfrey, "for the candidate whose entire campaign pitch has been his ability to win by appealing to a wide range of voters, the results from Iowa come as an especially significant blow. Even the voters at this working-class precinct just blocks from the Mississippi, the voters Biden considers his people, were rooting for somebody else."

One day earlier, also at The Atlantic Edward-Isaac Dovere penned the inevitable essay, How Biden Blew It, that went beyond the rejection by Iowa voters, despite the binders full of endorsements by conservative politicians. The Biden Dovere is writing about is out of gas-- the same way his chartered jet he was hoping would fly him to all the Super Tuesday states is. Out of gas and out of cash, having created a palpably joyless campaign. The feeling everywhere now is that no one wants to back a loser, which is how people see Biden again. He wrote that "Biden aides who were being honest with themselves knew for months that they were in trouble. Some didn’t want to believe it; some couldn’t. Others felt like they’d gotten into a taxi with a driver who was swerving all over the road, and they were just holding on and hoping they made it to the end."

Before this week, October was the low point, punctuated by the smack of the first Des Moines Register poll showing him tumbling and Warren in the lead. Biden was being out-organized, outworked, and, most of all, outspent. His late entrance in the race kept coming back to haunt him: He didn’t have a cushion of campaign cash; he hadn’t locked up top operatives anywhere. November 1 found Biden in Des Moines for the biggest primary event of the year: the Iowa Democratic Party’s Liberty & Justice Dinner, where all the candidates were speaking, and all their teams were organizing major shows of force to strut for the press and the local party bigwigs. Buttigieg went first, and he was smooth, claiming Barack Obama’s legacy as his own. But more important than anything he said was what he looked up at: sections of the arena packed with supporters wearing yellow T-shirts, their light-up wristbands flashing as they waved their signs.

Biden spoke second, right after Buttigieg. Some watching him closely from the audience swore they could see his attention drifting to the hundreds of empty spots in his reserved sections. They were right.

The next few weeks were a scramble. Just in time, money started coming in from big donors spooked by Warren’s strength and in response to the impeachment inquiry, which the Biden campaign moved aggressively to turn into proof that Democrats should see him as the strongest candidate against Trump. Headquarters rushed Biden’s ads back onto the air. The campaign started hiring again. Aides planned more trips to Iowa. A bus tour was a massive success. Big-name endorsements that had been kept in reserve for months, like Kerry’s, were rolled out.

But Sanders was creeping up in the polls, and Biden aides weren’t quite sure what to do about that. “I don’t respond to Bernie,” Biden told reporters after opening an office in Cedar Rapids at the beginning of January, although three weeks and a bunch of new polls later, Biden was suddenly on the attack, mockingly saying that Sanders’s position on Medicare for All was “I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, but we have to do it.” The Thursday night before the caucuses, at the American Legion hall in Ottumwa, asked by a reporter about the Sanders campaign circulating a video in which Biden seems to be advocating for Social Security cuts, Biden reached into his jacket pocket and handed him a prewritten statement with the header “BERNIE FALSE ATTACK ON SOCIAL SECURITY.”

Grave by Will Boone

Biden's staffers said it worked. Iowa caucus goers said otherwise. And Friday night Biden indicated that he realizes it's not working for him in New Hampshire either, where he is, again, struggling for a 4th place finish. Biden's response to his disaster in Iowa was to take a long 3 day nap and then shake up the upper echelon of his campaign staff a tiny bit.