Is There Really THAT Much Wrong With Biden?

Norman Solomon wrote a friendly open letter to Status Quo Joe yesterday, published by Common Dreams: Why an "Apology Tour" Is Needed. Addressing Biden directly, he wrote that "News outlets are reporting that you’re determined to prevent your campaign from turning into an 'apology tour' this summer. But your only other option is a campaign of denial-- sinking deeper into a quagmire of unsustainable pretense. After your flip-flop late last week that finally renounced your 40 years of support for the Hyde Amendment’s discriminatory limits on reproductive rights for low-income women, the New York Times reported that your campaign’s 'larger concern' has been 'the implications of Mr. Biden spending too much time reversing or expressing remorse for his past policy stances.' Those implications are easy to understand. Your 'past policy stances' have done so much harm-- to so many people for so long-- that if you start 'expressing remorse,' there might be no end in sight... The days are past when vast numbers of Democrats won’t notice that you’re uttering platitudes about the middle class and being touted as 'Lunch Bucket Joe' after serving the interests of corporate giants as Wall Street Joe. And a whole lot of people will really care as they learn about your political backstory of not-so-subtle appeals to racism on such matters as busing for school desegregation and the draconian 1994 crime bill that fueled mass incarceration... What might an apology tour look like? Here are five recommendations for acknowledging key realities and expressing remorse:

• Teaming up with segregationist senators to oppose busing for school desegregation: “I’m sorry I joined forces with bigots.”
• Treatment of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas hearings: “I deeply regret that I ended up showing more concern for the sensibilities of Republican colleagues than respecting Ms. Hill’s rights.”
• Leading role-- while pandering to racism on the Senate floor-- in passage of the 1994 crime bill: “I was wrong, and I wince while watching video of my Senate floor speech.”
• Career-long services to corporate elites with avid mutual support that continued during the launch of this campaign: “I apologize for catering to credit card companies and other huge corporations.”
• Powerfully supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq: “I hate to think of how many people have suffered and died because of the Iraq war that I helped bring about as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

Now... forget Status Quo Joe-- for now or forever; up to you. You may recall that I was pissed off Tuesday about how the establishment is trying to reset the 2020 narrative to exclude Bernie. I was surprised that so few people picked up on Bloomberg's naked attempt to stick a shiv into the progressive champion. But then I saws the new essay by Matt Taibbi that makes mincemeat of Bloomberg and the billionaires' arguments. He states the Bloomberg attempt to paint Bernie as now "at the fringes of plausibility" and fretting that he could 'fail to reach the delegate threshold' in Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina.

This is absurd, and the absurdity isn’t confined to coverage of Bernie Sanders. It’s early, and stupid, to be making pronouncements about any candidate’s viability.

It was silly back in December when a spate of pundits suddenly decided to run “worries abound” stories about Elizabeth Warren whose campaign months later is doing, surprise surprise, just fine.

It was absurd for New York magazine to run “Joe Biden May Be Less Electable Than He Looks” stories in April as he jumped to a big lead in the polls.

And it was ridiculous for the Washington Post to run four different stories in the span of a few winter days earlier this year about Sanders being a “one-hit wonder” whose moment had “come… and gone” and who was “no big deal the second time around.”

These stories are not based on anything. They’re space-filling guesses usually grounded in some grumbling personal complaint the outlet or pundit in question has about whatever politician they’re trashing

. It’s an annoying and condescending kind of campaign reportage. What makes it particularly ridiculous is that a lot of the people doing it were part of an epic face plant on the horse race front four years ago.

The across-the-board failed prognostications of last election season were a thing to behold. They constituted one of the larger industry-wide failures in a journalism business that has seen a few of them since the Iraq fiasco. Literally every major news outlet called the 2016 election wrong.

The most inexcusable mistakes involved the complete dismissal of Donald Trump’s chances at the nomination at a time when he was either leading the Republican field or in clear contention.

This is similar to what’s going on now with Sanders, who is sitting firmly in second place nationally, at about 17%, as Bloomberg is wondering if he’s “finished.” But what happened with Trump in 2016 was even more bizarre.

Bernstein should know. Four summers ago, when Trump was surging, he penned a piece under a headline, “No, Trump can’t win.” He meant the nomination, insisting (emphasis mine):

Everything we know about presidential nominations screams that Donald Trump has no chance of winning the Republicans’ nod.

Nate Silver, too, placed Trump’s chances of winning the nomination (the nomination, not the general!) at “2 percent.” This was under the headline, “Donald Trump’s Six Stages of Doom.”

FiveThirtyEight wrote multiple articles in 2015 insisting it was a near-mathematical impossibility for Trump to be the nominee. They claimed Trump would play “in the NBA Finals” or cameo in another Home Alone movie with Macaulay Culkin (they really wrote that) before winning the nomination.

Countless pundits made the same mistake. Dana Milbank in the Washington Post wrote:

“I’m so certain Trump won’t win the nomination that I’ll eat my words if he does. Literally: The day Trump clinches the nomination, I will eat the page on which this column is printed in Sunday’s Post.”

To Milbank’s credit, he actually ended up eating that paper.

In the New York Times, Nate Cohn said Trump has “just about no shot” of winning the nomination, adding-- in an observation that was an odious subtext to a lot of these wrongly certain predictions-- that it is “the party elites who traditionally decide nomination contests.”

Silver four years ago correctly noted that “fringe or factional” candidates like Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann tended to fall back to the pack under “heightened scrutiny.”

This did actually happen in that race. Trump slipped in the polls and briefly lost his frontrunner status in the fall of 2015. But the beneficiary of his slide was another non-politician, Ben Carson.

Again, pundits were right that Trump on the surface was a preposterous bet to win the nomination, given that 57 percent of Republicans disapproved of him in the summer of 2015.

But he won anyway, not so much because Republican voters learned to love Trump, but because they couldn’t shake the belief that the other choices were worse. Voters were ready to try anything that was different. On the trail they frequently said things like, “Why not?” and “We have to try something.”

The huge, underreported story of 2016 was the utter failure of the Republican Party Brahmins to be competitive in their own primary. Big-dollar donors poured $150 million into the campaign of Jeb Bush, only to end up with three whole delegates. People simply would not respond to the usual cues.

The failure of all that cash, institutional muscle and media clout to reel voters back to any “traditional” Republican-- to the latest Bush, McCain or Romney-- was evidence of a massive crack in the political establishment.

Trump’s thin Electoral College win against Hillary Clinton was a similar story. One of the most amazing stats from Election Day was that around one in six of Trump’s voters in November 2016 actively disapproved of him. This allowed him to enter the White House with a ridiculously low 38 percent approval rating.

What predictions can you possibly make in a political environment so saturated with ambivalence and pessimism that a person with a 38 percent approval rating can win the presidency? The answer should be none, or nothing obvious.

2016 was an indication that voters had traveled so far off the reservation that any choices they made going forward were likely to be hard to predict.

Pundits however didn’t go back and recalibrate after 2016. A common explanation for Trump’s rise was that he was a “black swan” event. As Vanity Fair noted, this was a concept developed by risk analyst Nassim Taleb to describe “incredibly rare, hard-to-predict events, like the 9/11 attacks.” Trump, it was argued, was someone whose uniqueness defied models, which meant the Great Pundit Whiff of 2016 deserved a mulligan.

But Taleb himself dismissed the idea of Trump as a “black swan” event. When asked why pundits got the last election so wrong, he had a hilarious answer:

“Basically the mainstream media is presumptuous club for people with 1) a lack of understanding of complex systems, 2) a fear of diverging from the norm, 3) zero independent thought.”

This is why people should be careful about any horse race pronouncements about any candidate going into 2020.

Taleb is right: the press is a club full of presumptuous conformists who regularly ignore data they don’t like or understand, and they don’t understand a lot-- beginning with the recent decline in their own influence.

A lot of these “read-the-tea-leaves” pieces-- whether about Warren, Sanders, Trump, Biden or anyone else-- represent a yearning for the old days when a handful of op-ed writers really did have influence over who rose and fell in the polls.

Those days are long gone. Voters today not only ignore pundit pronouncements, they often seem motivated to vote just to spite them.

Editorialists don’t understand that when they write things like, “X candidate can’t win because elites won’t allow it,” that will tend to make people in the current environment vote for that person, not against him or her.

This is why Taleb makes a lot of sense when he says:

“The main surprise event is that the New York Times is now so impotent and weak that it can no longer control America. The Media is gone. Social media are much harder to fully control.”

Not only are news audiences sensitive to the fact that we suck even at our own degraded horse race form of guessing-game politics coverage, they see us as a conflicted part of the power structure whose opinions about candidate viability should probably be ignored on principle.

They realize we can make numbers say pretty much anything. They know if we wanted to, for instance, we could argue that centrist candidates are less electable, while the Bernies and Warrens of the world might be more so, as political economist Thomas Piketty recently did in a new study.

After the disaster of 2016, the 2020 election race represented an opportunity for the press to win back some credibility. The fastest way would have been to go back to the basics, just telling voters what candidates stand for, what their records are, etc.

Not only is this easier, it might result in people hating us less. But we refuse to do it. Sometimes it seems like we’re trying to be disliked.

Status Quo Joe-- Notorious Liar, Is Now Seen As a Major And Easy-To-Pressure Flip-Flopper And Panderer

The Hill headline yesterday, Biden World Shell-Shocked Amid Hyde Furor, exposes the giant crack in the Biden dam, as we mentioned, happily, on Thursday. Biden's being beaten up on the right, on the left and in the center. Everyone feels betrayed by his junior league blunder, the stumbling, incoherent "U-turn on the abortion-related Hyde Amendment." His own closest allies are in turmoil and his creaky, cob-webbed campaign apparatus has been unable to handle it.

The central issue is the former vice president’s long-standing-- but now abandoned-- support for the amendment, which prohibits the use of federal money for abortion services.

One big effect of the Hyde Amendment is a significant limitation on abortions for Medicaid recipients.

Biden’s past position was a matter of public record, but it had not been a prominent issue in this campaign until the publication of an NBC News report early on Wednesday morning.

The report, by Heidi Przybyla, noted not only that Biden had supported Hyde in the past, but that his campaign reaffirmed that he continued to do so.

A firestorm of criticism from advocates of reproductive rights followed-- along with some of the sharpest attacks on Biden so far from his Democratic rivals.

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was asked at a Wednesday evening MSNBC town hall event whether Biden was wrong, she replied firmly “yes” before going on to describe how women would be hurt by his position.

By the next day, it was clear Biden’s stance was unsustainable-- and that the controversy was taking its toll on the candidate himself.

Sources close to Biden said he was out-of-sorts as he traveled around the Atlanta area on Thursday. The former vice president, normally known for his garrulousness, was disengaged from the people around him, these sources said, a pensive mood supplanting his usual ebullience.

Behind the scenes, even some of his own team grumbled that they were uncomfortable with his position. “It was a real problem," one close ally said. "I think a lot of people felt like it wasn't going well.”

By the time he was preparing his remarks for a Democratic Party fundraising event that night, even Biden realized there was no plausible way forward beside switching his previous position.

“I can’t justify leaving millions of women without the care they need,” he said Thursday night. “I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s ZIP code.”

Outside of Biden’s orbit, Democrats were left scratching their heads about what had happened-- and pondering whether the former vice president had suffered any lasting political damage.

“I suspect that his campaign realized very quickly that this is an issue that is non-negotiable in a Democratic primary,” said Karen Finney, a senior advisor to 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Finney, who is not affiliated with any candidate in this cycle, noted that Clinton had pledged in 2016 to repeal the Hyde Amendment and that doing so had also been in the party platform that year.

The other major candidates in this year’s race are also in favor of repeal.

Referring to the Biden campaign, Finney said, “Perhaps they didn’t fully recognize the shift. This is not just in the purview of the ‘far left,’ quote-unquote, this is in the party platform.”

People close to Biden note that abortion has long been a vexing issue for him. A practicing Catholic, Biden is personally opposed to abortion. But he has emphasized that he does not believe his religious beliefs should drive legislation.

Wednesday’s NBC News report noted a recent email to supporters in which Biden said he would “refuse to impose my religious beliefs on other people,” as well as passages from his 2007 book Promises to Keep in which he described his views on abortion as “middle of the road” and acknowledged that he did not have “a right to impose my view on the rest of society.”

A source familiar with Biden's thinking said it was a complicated issue, inextricably intertwined with the former vice president’s Catholicism. “The Biden ethos is family and faith,” the source said. “Always has been, always will be.”

Such explanations beg the question of what justification-- other than cold-eyed political calculation-- could be offered for such a rapid U-turn on an issue that is fundamentally the same as it ever was.

“I think he realized very quickly that the world has changed, even since a year ago. Abortion clinics are closing, Planned Parenthood is in trouble and there aren't a lot of options for underprivileged folks. The climate has completely changed,” said another Biden ally.

The broader danger for Biden may be the way in which the change on the Hyde Amendment invites scrutiny of other parts of his past record that sit uneasily with today’s Democratic Party, where progressives are widely seen as ascendant.

Bakari Sellers, a commentator and former member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, who is supporting Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), described Biden’s contortions this week as a “clusterfuck.”

Sellers added, “Since he has recognized that his position for 30 years has been incorrect and he is now changing that, I think it is only fair he now does that with his position on the Iraq War and his position on the ’94 crime bill-- and the ’88 crime bill and the ’86 crime bill.”

Biden’s support for the Iraq War and draconian crime legislation has long been seen as a vulnerability.

Others on the left look askance at Biden’s attempted explanation for his flip-flop.

“The Hyde Amendment is a racist, classist and sexist law,” said progressive strategist Rebecca Katz, the founder of New Deal Strategies. “It didn’t just become terrible in 2019. It’s always been terrible.”

On the other hand, some progressives saw Biden’s shift as evidence of the left’s growing power-- and therefore something to be commended, rather than met with churlishness.

Jonathan Tasini, a veteran progressive organizer and writer in New York, sought to put Biden’s shift in a much broader context. He highlighted the changes wrought, particularly by female activists, in recent years.

“If the Women’s March had not happened, if the 'Me Too' movement had not mushroomed, I’m not sure that Joe Biden would have felt the pressure to change his position,” Tasini said. “I think progressives are well-advised to not just look at this in the stark, political-horserace calculation but in terms of, we are moving the conversation.”

Beyond that, the question of potential damage to Biden’s bid for the nomination remains open.

People in his camp argue that voters will forgive the change of tack.

But others said that, at a minimum, the former vice president would need to be crystal-clear in his pro-choice positions from now on.

“He needs to find ways to demonstrate his commitment to abortion rights whenever his flip-flop on the Hyde Amendment comes up. It's almost as bad to have two positions on an issue [as] it is to have one bad stance,” said Democratic strategist Brad Bannon.

"His pro-choice positions? Like this one? "I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body." As Justin Charity noted yesterday in The Ringer, Biden's been around for decades but his campaign is completely built on the goodwill from his time as Obama’s vice president. Biden's fan club seems to think the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Obama, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man He made into Biden. Now, like Hillary 4 years ago, Biden is being confronted by Democratic activists while struggling to overcome his own, "inglorious record" of the previous four to five decades.

"After decades of false starts, regrettable accomplishments, terminal gaffes, and marginal polling," wrote Charity, "Biden was rejuvenated while serving as Obama’s vice president, enjoying two terms as the administration’s folk hero. It’s very recent history and, for many Democrats, and many centrists, a happy time: Biden spent eight years at Obama’s side, preaching compassion, bipartisanship, and good humor through a shockingly divisive decade. In January 2007, while vying for the Democratic nomination himself, Biden described Obama as 'the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,' a characterization as insulting to Shirley Chisholm and Jesse Jackson as it was to Obama. By picking Biden as his running mate, Obama wrote a new chapter for Biden’s political career and agreed, with everyone else, to let it go."

New Biden For President Poster

Democrats aren’t necessarily responding favorably to Biden as a candidate in 2020. They are voting for 2010s feel-good Biden, whom even Republican Senator Lindsey Graham will defend as a “friend.” Trumps spends many news cycles attacking Biden these days; he can only imagine his administration polling as high as when Biden served in the White House.

But the 1990s haunt Biden, too. In fact, he confronts more problematic decades than any other front-runner in recent memory. There’s 1970s Biden, the young Delaware senator who courted segregationists while advancing anti-busing legislation in the Senate. On Thursday, Biden withdrew his support for the Hyde amendment, the 1976 provision that bans the application of federal funding toward most abortion services, citing recent abortion bans in Georgia, Alabama, and Missouri as cause for concern. He has irritated modern Democratic activists nonetheless. There’s 1980s Biden, the upstart who flamed out of his first Democratic primary, doomed by personal embellishments and a plagiarism scandal. There’s 1990s Biden, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, who failed Anita Hill in 1991 and who supported the 1994 crime bill, which promoted harsher sentencing guidelines for federal drug offenses and violent crimes. There’s 2000s Biden, the gaffe artist who, in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, challenged Obama and Clinton from the center. There’s 2010s Biden, whom the Obama administration simply recast as an adorable figurehead—an antidote to Dick Cheney’s legacy as a shadow president intent on increasing executive power. Now, there’s 2020 Biden, 76, who, if elected, would be the oldest president in history, a party elder addressing a great rift between generations.

Biden has put forth an ambiguous political platform in a crowded Democratic field that has so far been defined by big ideas and a socialist bent. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, 77, voted for the 1994 crime bill, too-- but Sanders now advances a bold and distinct political project that largely obscures his past blemishes. Sanders is a socialist, and he’s leading a left-wing class rebellion into the 2020s. It is easy to summarize what Sanders represents, even for critics who will then go on to dispute the senator’s wisdom and fitness for the highest office. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, once a Republican, advances a meticulously progressive agenda, allowing some distinction between herself and Sanders, but no confusion about her current policy commitments.

Biden hasn’t conclusively foreclosed the previous decades of his political career. For now, Biden coasts on Obama nostalgia, marketing himself as “an Obama-Biden Democrat,” resisting the many critical efforts to bring the four previous decades of Biden’s political profile into the Biden canon. In the last week of June, the Democratic presidential primary debates will begin, and Biden’s desperate rivals may well force him to relive the 20th century and a few other low moments, including the Iraq invasion, the Patriot Act, and bankruptcy reform in the 2000s. The 2020 Democratic presidential primary will force Biden’s earlier decades into contrast with his “Obama-Biden Democrat” bona fides. He cannot coast on the good feelings which are, themselves, growing old. Uncle Joe now polls at 32 percent-- well ahead of the couple dozen rivals to the left and right of him. But Biden’s previous incarnations all polled much lower.