I Believe Trump When He Says He Wants To Run Against Biden

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who thinks Biden would make a miserable 2020 candidate and an even worse president-- not worse than Trump, worse as a president than as a candidate. Let me just sit back and revel in Alex Shephard's piece for the New Republic about someone who shouldn't be the next nominee for president: This Is As Good As It Gets for Joe Biden. Shephard's first point is one people who are concerned about Biden's high polling numbers need to keep in mind: "He's among the most popular politicians in America. So was Hillary Clinton before her 2016 campaign for president."

He wants to run as, in the primary, the centrist alternative to Bernie. He thinks balancing the ticket means another centrist who's much younger than his sickly 76 years. So he's thinking of Beto. How about a woman? Maybe a person of color? Maybe a progressive? All things Biden is not. But, as Shephard writes, "Biden is the early frontrunner for obvious reasons. He served for eight years as the vice president of Barack Obama, the most popular figure in Democratic politics, and did so with an avuncular charm that was once seen as a political liability, but has aged well under a crass president... But these benefits have significant drawbacks, all of which will begin to appear once Biden actually starts running for president, which he is expected to do. Hillary Clinton, after all, was in a very similar position in advance of the 2016 contest, having enjoyed a surge in popularity from her successful stint as President Obama’s secretary of state through her retirement from public office. In 2013, polling suggested she was the most popular politician in America. But reentering politics swiftly changed that: Her favorability plummeted after she announced her race for president in 2015... We may already have hit peak Biden, and it’s all downhill from here."

Biden’s public image has been bolstered by his distance from public life. Even as vice president, he largely kept his hands clean of everyday politics in Washington. If Obama was seen as the brain of the administration, Biden was its heart and soul: an emotional man of the people, simultaneously macho and unafraid to cry in public, who famously pressured Obama (albeit accidentally) into supporting gay marriage. That perception has only grown in his retirement, as Trump’s rise has fueled a nostalgia for more decent times in American politics.

But if Biden runs, his past will be raked over—and his political record looks increasingly checkered in today’s light.

Biden shamefully failed to protect Anita Hill after she accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991. He refused to call corroborating witnesses and did nothing to block disgusting personal attacks from Republicans. This was already seen as a weakness in the #MeToo era, but has become even more damaging after Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. (Biden has made things worse by failing to apologize to Hill.) Republicans, particularly Trump, will make much of Biden’s handsiness, but his treatment of Hill is by far his biggest liability.

Biden’s legislative record also contains a series of blights. As a representative of Delaware, one of America’s most corrupt states, Biden is notoriously cosy with financial interests. He spent years advocating for a law that made it significantly more difficult for consumers to declare bankruptcy, before it finally passed in 2005. Elizabeth Warren called it an “awful bill” and support for it likely hurt Hillary Clinton when she ran for president in 2016. Like Clinton, Biden supported the Iraq War and the 1994 crime bill, which made mass incarceration significantly worse. Unlike Clinton, Biden still defends the crime bill, which he praised in his 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad. If critics were to dig even further into Biden’s past, they would find that he went to great efforts to suppress busing and other school integration efforts and was against reproductive rights before he was in favor of them.

Biden, if he runs, undoubtedly will argue that he is the only Democrat who can truly connect with the white, blue-collar voters who have fled the party in recent years. He has always reveled in the perception that he’s an authentic politician who understands the so-called common man in ways that his colleagues do not. Even one of his greatest political weaknesses-- his penchant for gaffes-- can be favorably spun: He’s a guy who says what he thinks, and that worked out pretty well for Trump, didn’t it?

...[I]n a primary that may revolve around Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, Biden’s obvious centrism and voting record will be liabilities that his off-the-cuff style may make worse-- it’s easy to imagine the punchy, impulsive Biden doubling down when he should be recanting. At the same time, reminders of Biden’s past stances and behavior will damage the kindly Uncle Joe image he’s cultivated over the past decade.

A Biden candidacy, like Clinton’s, would serve as a reminder of the many flaws of a party establishment that an increasing number of Democrats would like to overthrow (or at least overhaul).

Jacob Weinding gives Biden a much harder time. "Much of American liberalism," he explained, "has undertaken a serious introspection in the wake of the most embarrassing election loss in human history, and in the 2017 and 2018 elections, liberals have demonstrated the potential to both bring in a very wide swath of voters and more importantly, do very big things. For example, no one knew what the Green New Deal was a few weeks ago (the most ambitious policy proposal of millennials’ lifetimes), and now it has the endorsement of thirty forty-one House Democrats and four in the Senate as of this writing, thanks to both a sincere grassroots push and new blood in Congress challenging the corrupt and oil-laden status quo. The lesson from 2016 for Democrats is this: losing to Donald freaking Trump should lead to challenging some of your longtime beliefs and assumptions. Which brings me to Joe Biden."

Joe Biden represents the past, and for his sake, he should remain there.

We remember Biden for his affability and transparent humanity during the Obama years, but here’s a fun fact: he was also one of the most powerful people in the country during his 36-year tenure as a senator from Delaware, and this is where my confidence that he will not win in 2020 comes in... Over his 36-year tenure as one of America’s most powerful men.

...Joe Biden's 1994 Crime bill is a stain on this nation and if he wants to wear it as a badge of honor, then he will find Michael “Stop and Frisk” Bloomberg credibly running to his left in the Democratic primary. This is far from the only policy where Biden finds himself sitting on the far-right flank of the Democratic Party (or more accurately, in mainstream Republicanism).

...Biden voted yes on the 1998 GOP budget that began to put the finishing touches on completely unchaining Wall Street from the constraints the government put it in post-Great Depression, and he voted along with tons of other Clintonian Democrats in 1999 to destroy Glass-Steagall-- which was one of the first reforms we passed in the wake of the Great Depression (it established a firewall between investment and commercial banking, meaning that your deposits can't be used for bankers' gambling-- which is also the “too-long, didn't read” explanation of the 2008 crisis).

...[I]n 1996, Biden joined 83 other senators in voting for the Defense of Marriage Act (that was later ruled unconstitutional), which allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages. The 1990s weren't some aberration in Biden's career either. He has a long-standing record of taking what can only be described as Republican positions. In 1975, Biden said that busing to reduce school integration was “the single most devastating issue that could occur to Delaware.” He even echoed famed segregationist, George Wallace, when he kept repeating the bullshit phrase “forced busing,” to stump for an anti-desegregation amendment in 1974.

In 2001, Biden voted to loosen restrictions on the government's ability to tap your phone. NARAL gave him a mixed record on the totality of his votes pertaining to abortion. Biden even voted for George W. Bush's failed No Child Left Behind Act (and yet again, later said that he regretted the vote). Over and over and over again, we find votes in Biden's past that he has either apologized for or would likely have to apologize for in order to win the Democratic nomination in 2020.

...Biden will not win because he is on paper, the most conservative choice the Democrats will have to choose from. Folks like Michael Bloomberg and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz are ideologically to the right of modern-day Joe Biden, but as his tone-deaf response to his monstrous crime bill demonstrated, Biden will either have to largely defend an unpopular conservative congressional record, or repudiate much of his legacy given that almost everyone will be running to his left. Either way, “I swear I'm different now!” isn't exactly a coherent and inspiring message that will break through in a crowded field with an electorate that is getting more liberal by the day. Biden is currently leading in the polls because he's the only person in the Democratic Party outside Bernie Sanders who has any broad name recognition.

Biden represents the past because he helped to create the past, and we are in our present malaise thanks to the past decisions made by powerful men like Joe Biden. Bill Clinton’s presidency was not liberal, and Joe Biden endorsed multiple Clinton-backed policies that he now claims were bad decisions. Policy should rule above all, and it’s difficult to see how Biden would dramatically deviate from his longstanding Republican-esque positions, especially when articles encouraging him to run for president (with Mitt Romney!?!?) pop up in Politico, written by folks like these:

Juleanna Glover has worked as an adviser for several Republican politicians, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani and advised the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Jeb Bush. She is on the Biden Institute Policy Advisory Board.

Not everything that Biden did as a senator was bad-- you can parse through his votes and find plenty of good-- but his overall record is simply not liberal. The fact that he still defends his brutal crime bill even as he backs down on other votes serves as proof that he simply does not understand the systemic injustices built in to this country, and he adheres to a worldview which has proven itself insufficient to addressing the challenges we face. Biden’s 2016 quote asserting that his bill, which constructed a ton of prisons, has nothing to do with systemic racism is frankly, disqualifying.

...Biden is a relic of a bygone conservative era, and if he cares about his legacy, he should not run for president in 2020. His record in the senate will move back into the forefront of people’s minds thanks to the efforts of the Democratic field, while his symbolic power as Vice President will fade into the background of our collective memory. The best thing that Joe Biden could do to protect his legacy is to not run for president-- keeping his reputation as “Uncle Joe,” instead of running and becoming the Democrats’ version of Jeb!

A friend of mine just insisted I read an old story (2015) about how a young Joe Biden turned liberals against integration. I don't have the stomach for it. Who wants to proceed from this: "Forty years ago, a contentious battle over racial justice gripped Capitol Hill, pitting the nation’s lone African-American senator against the man who would one day become Barack Obama’s vice president. The issue was school busing, a plan to transport white and black students out of their neighborhoods to better integrate schools-- and at the time the most explosive issue on the national agenda. Ed Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican, was the first black senator ever to be popularly elected; Joe Biden was a freshman Democratic senator from Delaware. By 1975, both had compiled liberal voting records. But that year, Biden sided with conservatives and sponsored a major anti-busing amendment. The fierce debate that followed not only fractured the Senate’s bloc of liberals, it also signified a more wide-ranging political phenomenon: As white voters around the country-- especially in the North-- objected to sweeping desegregation plans then coming into practice, liberal leaders retreated from robust integration policies."

I lived through it and it is part of the fabric that turned me against Biden from when I was still in my 20s. Nothing he's done since then has changed my mind about him either.

Would Arlen Specter's hypocritical bloviating be less obnoxious if he had any real principles besides self-adulation?

A photo not from the senator's website -- where none of
the pictures seem to have been taken in the last 20 years

by Ken

Do you wonder sometimes what some of our pols see when they look in the mirror?

I'm thinking just now of the ever-inscrutable Republican senior senator from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter.

Okay, I suppose Senator Specter isn't that inscrutable. He used to be what was known in those quaint times as a "moderate Republican." In those bygone days he was kind of hard to predict, because you never knew where he would choose to take a stand on his famous principles -- because in those days, sometimes he did actually take a stand and, you know, follow through.

Then his party went galloping off into the dark sunset of the Oh So Far Right (No, Righter, Righer!), and the senator came to his senses. Oh, he often talked about principles, but there was rarely any question any longer where his real priorities lay: perpetuating his own prestige and, especially, power.

I imagine I'm not the only one for whom the turning point came when he assumed the role of ringleader of the gang rape of Anita Hill during the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court nomination. It was perhaps the first time I appreciated the stark contrast between the goals, and not just their strategies, of Ds and Rs on the Judiciary Committee.

Faced with Professor Hill's reluctantly proffered accusation of sexual harassment during her association with the nominee, the Ds -- led by then-Chairman Joe Biden -- obsessed over trying to determine the truth of the matter. Pathetic wretches! As if the truth mattered! The Rs, by contrast, focused on the only thing that mattered to them: winning.

I assume that, like the rest of us, the Rs had a pretty good idea that Hill was telling the truth, which gave them all the more reason not to be suckered into the fool's game of truth-seeking. No, they went straight for character assassination, and nobody did it better than our Arlen, who deployed his full prosecutor's bag of tricks in what was, as of then, the vilest public performance I had witnessed in the U.S. Congress. (I'm not counting the film of Sen. Joe McCarthy in action. But if that's where Specter enthusiasts have to reach to surpass their guy's vileness, I think their case is lost.)

Of course, those were more innocent times. Modern-day Republicans have made that sort of gutter-wallowing their model, and built on it (cf. the 2008 presidential campaign of Young Johnny McCranky, and for that matter most every Republican race across the country).

Of course I respect Senator Specter for his heroic struggles against cancer. But when you look at the use he has made of the additional leases on life he has won, well, "respect" isn't a word that pops to mind.

It was hardly surprising that when it came to the real crunch, which is to say the long darkness for truth, justice, and the American way that was the Bush regime, there aren't many pols who behaved more abominably than our Arlen. Most of the Bush rubber-stampers were at least open about their degraded values. Our Arlen, however, often continued to profess loyalty to the Constitution and legal system that the regime was so ruthlessly dismantling. Every now and then he would make noises that were made to sound like actual acts of defiance of the regime, as in the matter of the blatantly illegal Bush military tribunals. But in the end he always caved. Always, without exception. He racked up what in baseball parlance is known as an ohfer -- 0 for the Bush regime. It's hard to believe that any of the regime malefactors lost as much as a moment's rest over his theatrical posturing.

As the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he can said to have presided over the systematic destruction of the Justice Dept. and the perversion of the federal justice system by people who whose every waking effort was devoted to destroying the country's legal fabric, transforming it all into the enforcement arm of Karl Rove's White House political operation. The confirmation of John Ashcroft as attorney general was bad enough. Who knew that the regime would find him too principled, and come up with a replacement, Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales, whose incompetent and corrupt tenure will be studied by historians and legal scholars for decades if not centuries to come?

While the Justice Dept. was being run by America-hating sociopaths and staffed at all levels -- up to the highest -- by thugs, dilettantes, and idiot children whose legal skills wouldn't have qualified them to take orders at Burger King, Arlen Specter sat on his fat, lazy, self-important, corrupt ass and let the good times roll. Remember that for the majority of the Bush regime's existence, he wasn't ranking minority member but chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Every depradation, every breach of justice and trust perpetrated by the Bush Gang had either the active blessing or the passive I-don't-give-a-fuck sign-off of master hypocrite Specter. Just as everyone involved in the running of the Justice Dept. at least under the Gonzales Reign of Legal Horror should now be under indictment, so should their master overseer and enabler, Arlen Specter.

Now the Senate's Lion of Injustice has announced his intention to throw a monkey wrench into the confirmation proceedings of Eric Holder to be attorney general, if not actually jeopardizing the nomination then at least significantly delaying the start of a task so monumental that there's no time to lose: rebuilding the Justice Dept. from the wreckage left behind by the marauders of the Bush regime.

The goniff Specter has announced that his exalted principles require him to look into Holder's role in the pardon of Marc Rich. Now the Rich pardon was far from the Clinton administration's finest hour, but it wasn't Holder's idea, and if President Clinton and his advisers were determined to do it, it's doubtful that Holder could have stopped them. Moreover, the Obama transition team is said to have sounded out the appropriate officials, presumably including Senator Specter, about the appointment.

What it comes down to, I guess, is our Arlen living up to the Grandstander's Pledge: to always do everything possible to draw attention to himself while solemnly promising never to attempt to accomplish anything of substance. The man who sat by and watched the Justice Dept. be dismantled by thugs and goons has gall beyond imagining to say "boo" to Eric Holder. Instead, he ought to take a good look in the mirror and try to figure out what to do with a man who did as much as anyone on the planet to destroy justice in the United States.

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