"Electability" & Its Discontents

Maybe it's too early to be writing this. Though the 2020 presidential race is already into its "shadow primary," it's still the better part of six months before a single vote will be cast in the first primary/caucus contest. Maybe it's too late; the poll I'm going to examine is a month old. But I'm seeing a trend creeping into the polling on the race  that seems worthy of some mention.

It's a trend I noticed and about which I wrote in 2016. At the time, Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders were locked in a struggle for the Democratic nomination and Clinton had her surrogates using the "electability" argument against Sanders--the idea that Sanders' progressive views put him too far outside the mainstream and that her more conservative views made her more electable. Pollsters would ask who was more likely to win the general election; respondents would pick Clinton. But at the same time, when the same respondents in the same polls were asked if there was one between the two candidates whom they wouldn't support under any circumstances, Clinton always drew more negative numbers. In short, these polls were showing that people believed Clinton was more electable but that Sanders was actually more electable.

Something like this is happening again.

This time, former Vice President Joe Biden and his surrogates are deploying the "electability" argument, insisting Biden's Clinton-clone campaign is the one to beat Trump and throwing the same shade on Bernie Sanders' chances, and on those of any progressive. Last month, the University of New Hampshire released its latest Granite State Poll of adults in that state. Here are some of the findings:

--67% of New Hampshire Democrats say they have a favorable view of both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren--a tie for first place. This compares to only 57% for 3rd-placed Biden.

--14% of Dems said they wouldn't support Joe Biden "under any circumstances"--the most negative response of any of the many Democrats. Only 6% said the same of Sanders. Further, Biden's negative number on this question has increased with every new Granite State poll for months--it has more than quadrupled since February (which only 3% said they'd never vote for him). Sanders' negative number has dropped over that same period (it was 8% in February).

--When asked what issue is most important to their primary votes, the largest number--20%--chose healthcare. The 2nd-largest number--14%--chose climate change policy/the environment. Respondent were then asked which candidate was best able to handle these issues. On healthcare--something Bernie Sanders has made a cornerstone of his campaign--the single largest chunk--34%--picked Sanders as best; only 16% chose Biden, putting him in 3rd place behind Warren. On climate policy/the environment, the story is the same: 30% chose Sanders, while Biden finishes in 3rd place with only 13%.

Sounds like great news for Bernie Sanders, right?

Except when asked to name the candidate for whom they would vote if the New Hampshire primary were held now, the largest portion--24%--said they would vote for Biden. Sanders and Warren are tied for 2nd place with 19%.

Notably more New Hampshire Dems have a favorable opinion of Sanders than of Biden--a 10% advantage for the former--but when asked which candidate is "more likeable"--a question which leads respondents to speculate on who they think everyone else will like more--Biden ties with Sanders at 20%.

Sanders is more liked than Biden, voters think he's better on their top issues than Biden and more than twice as many respondents said they would never vote for Biden as Sanders, yet Biden leads the race and when asked which candidate they think has the best chance to win the 2020 general election, the biggest portion of respondents--45%--chose Joe Biden. Only 16% chose Sanders. Sanders' numbers on this question have collapsed dramatically in recent months; in April, the same pollster had 30% of New Hampshirites--the largest portion of respondents--identifying Sanders as the candidate with the best chance to win the general. This isn't an organic development; it's something that's being intentionally pumped into the public mind.

This isn't a national poll, so it doesn't make the same case as those 2016 polls, and it's a single poll, which may prove to be anomalous, but to the extent that it accurately reflects what's happening, it does show that New Hampshirites are choosing, for the moment, to get behind a candidate they, themselves, consider inferior on all of the big metrics measured by the poll. When this poll asked about specific issues, Biden does score better than Sanders on who would best handle "gun policy" and "jobs/the economy," but those issues were only listed as top priorities by, respectively, 1% and 5%of respondents. On guns, Biden finished in 2nd place behind Elizabeth Warren (though Warren, Biden and 3rd placed Sanders were all within the poll's margin of error on that issue). Biden isn't preferred on anything else here, yet respondents think Americans will find him more likeable and think he has a better chance of beating Trump.

This isn't just a case of respondents in a state believing Americans are more pro-Biden than themselves--people are often bad at judging the views of their fellow Americans. It's also the result of a conscious effort by the Biden campaign, its supporters, pro-Clintonite-right media, etc. to drive into people's minds the idea idea that Clintonite-right candidates and Biden in particular are more "electable" than progressives and Sanders in particular. When asked which candidate they believed was more progressive, 45%--by far the largest portion--chose Sanders, while Biden finished in a distant 4th place with only 4%. This particular notion of "electability" falls apart under any more than cursory examination--Biden is by far the weakest of the major Democratic campaigns, and the extensive issues polling to which Americans are subjected makes clear the public is overwhelmingly progressive--but many are buying into it. Many bought the same story in 2016 with disastrous consequences.

Progressives and the campaigns they support would be wise to begin devoting a lot of attention to countering this.

--j.

Give Me A Break: The Sad, Sorry Spectacle of Joe Biden

UPDATE (25 Jan., 2019) - The Medium introduction to this article (because, hey, the original wasn't already long enough, right?):

This is an article I wrote in August, 2019. The issues with which it deals are still an ongoing concern. Joe Biden is still in the Democratic race and still the frontrunner (though that last part finally seems to be changing). I’ve written this new introduction for its Medium debut:

On 12 Sept., 2019, the Democratic candidates for president held a debate in Houston. During the course of it, Joe Biden referred to his rival Sen. Bernie Sanders as "the president." At another point, Biden forgot Sen. Elizabeth Warren's name and fell back to referring to her as "my distinguished friend, the senator on my left." At still another, he seemed to forget Pete Buttigieg’s name and also settled for "my friend." He boldly declared "I'm the Vice President of the United States," a declaration that would certainly come as a surprise to Mike Pence.

Biden was asked a question about the legacy of slavery. His response, rattled off in the rapid cadence of one who is quite sure of himself, was so utterly incomprehensible it's difficult to even transcribe:

"Well, they have to deal with the-- Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved I started... dealing with that. Redlining. Banks. Making sure that we're in a position where-- Look, talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from 15 to 45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise that equal raise to getting out... the sixty-thousand dollar level. Number two: make sure that we bring into the help the-- the student, the, the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need-- We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It's crazy. The teachers are reca-- Now, I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have, make sure that every single child does in fact have three, four, and five year-olds go to school-- school, not daycare. School. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It's not that they don't wanna help, they don’t want-- they don't know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, the-- excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the-the-the-the phono… make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.”

At this point, the questioner thanked Biden but he wasn’t done yet--if his comments weren't already baffling enough, he then plunged down a rabbit hole that left everyone scratching their heads:

"No, I'm going to go like the rest of them do, twice over, okay? Because here's the deal. The deal is that we've got this a little backwards. And by the way, in Venezuela, we should be allowing people to come here from Venezuela. I know Maduro. I’ve confronted Maduro. Number two, you talk about the need to do something in Latin America. I’m the guy that came up with $740 million to see to it those three countries, in fact, change their system so people don’t have to chance to leave. You're all acting like we just discovered this yesterday!"

All of this in answer to a question about the legacy of slavery. When Biden referred to "record player," a medium of decades past, he'd caught himself and appeared to be in the process of offering "phonograph" as a substitute before catching himself again.

On health care, Biden said, "the option I’m proposing is Medicare For All"  before catching and correcting himself and retreating to "Medicare For Choice." Biden rather viscerally opposes the progressives' Medicare For All proposal and had been attacking it using the same rhetoric as Donald Trump (something he has continued to do). Biden described his plan (which, if one is honest, isn't really a plan at all but just something slapped together to pretend as if there is one):

"If you want Medicare, if you lose the job from your insurance-- from your employer, you automatically can buy into this. You don't have-- no pre-existing condition can stop you from buying in. You get covered, period."

Minutes later, Julian Castro noted that his own plan doesn’t require a buy-in and contrasted this unfavorably with Biden's, at which point the former Vice President insisted the Biden plan, contrary to his own clear words only minutes earlier, didn't require a buy-in either. It led to a testy exchange in which Castro challenged, "Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?"

The allusion to Biden’s obviously impaired cognitive state brought gasps from the audience. Biden didn’t hear what Castro was saying and had to lean over and ask Bernie Sanders about it.

Nothing about any of this is unusual for Biden. It is, in fact, typical of his public appearances. He wasn't just having a bad night. This is what’s left of him now. When I wrote this article--weeks prior to that Houston debate--I described Biden as "a real mess--confused, forgetful, stumbling over words and slurring them like a drunk, displaying lots of arrogance and bluster but no command of basic facts, including those regarding 'his' proposals, which are clearly as much a mystery to him as to everyone else..." Biden's September debate performance would have immediately ended the campaign of any other candidate as dramatically as it would have completely.

This is why I've gone into it here:

CNN’s Chris Cillizza:

"Overall, Biden looked strong and presidential although it wasn't perfect… [A] good night for the vice president."

Dan Balz of the Washington Post:

"With all the leading Democratic candidates on the same stage for the first time this year, former vice president Joe Biden on Thursday delivered the kind of performance his supporters have been waiting for--combative when needed and in the thick of the action throughout.Biden did not dominate from start to finish and did not make it through the evening mistake-free. But on balance this was the kind of evening he needed..."

Doug Shoen of Fox News:

"[T]he first 30 minutes of the debate during the health care discussion were arguably Biden's best moments on the campaign trail to date. Though the former vice president's performance was not perfect, he exhibited a much-needed display of strength and preparedness. He was the night's big winner."

T.A. Frank in Vanity Fair:

"In Houston, Biden managed to be combative without being nasty, and he was one of the few candidates onstage who stayed in the realm of genuine argument rather than sloganeering... [O]verall he seemed alert and presidential..."

Stephen Collinson, CNN:

"Joe Biden was as good at Thursday night's debate as he’s been in the entire campaign and perhaps close to as good as he could be."

And so on. Such gaslighting wasn't universal across corporate media by any means but it was disturbingly common. Biden was widely declared the winner of the debate, his endless fumbles written off or barely even addressed. More to the point, Biden's painfully obvious cognitive decline was neither treated as an important story, nor, beyond a handful of small outlets, as any real story at all. It's as if it doesn’t exist. Perhaps worse still, Julian Castro, the only candidate who raised a question relating to it, was ubiquitously condemned for doing so--he got three days of bad press out of it. That isn't just covering over the problem; that's aggressively trying to discourage anyone from talking about it.

Consider the days leading up to that debate:

--On 9 August, 2019, Biden referred to British Prime Minister Theresa May as "Margaret Thatcher," who hadn't been Prime Minister since 1990 and hadn’t even been alive for over 6 years (Biden had made the same blunder back in May). At the same event, he talked about using biofuels to power "steamships" and proclaimed "poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids!"

--That same day, at a different event, Biden declared "We choose truth over facts!"

--Two days later, Biden described how the survivors of the Parkland massacre had come to see him when he was Vice President, but the massacre happened over a year after Biden had left office.

--Five days after that, at an event in Delaware, Biden recalled making a speech a few days earlier in Vermont, when he'd actually made the speech in question in Iowa.

--A few days later, Biden recalled how Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were killed in the late ‘70s.

--A few more days: Biden was in Keene, New Hampshire but thought he was in Vermont.

--A few more: Biden had often told a moving story about going to Konar province in Afghanistan to pin a Silver Star on an heroic soldier who didn't want it. He buttons up his recitation with "That's the God’s truth. My word as a Biden." The Washington Post revealed that "almost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect." Biden had apparently been mashing together real incidents from years apart with fabrications to create this tale.

--The next day, Biden, in South Carolina, forgot Barack Obama's name.

--A few more days, then Biden said he only voted for Bush’s Iraq war because he thought doing so would get inspectors back into Iraq but that when Bush actually launched the war, he immediately came out against said action. "Immediately, that moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment." And, "From the moment 'shock and awe' started, from that moment I was opposed to the effort, and I was outspoken as much as anyone at all in the Congress and the administration." In reality, Biden had banged the drums for war with Iraq for years before voting for it. In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion, Biden had been the major Democratic voice promoting it. Saddam Hussein had agreed to allow the UN inspection regime to return to Iraq a month before Biden cast his vote, and Biden continued to support the war for years after it began. This eventually blew into a significant controversy and Biden eventually retreated from many of his false claims, though he continued to deflect any real responsibility.

This only covers a few days and is by no means a comprehensive accounting of such incidents. Many of them were never reported in the "mainstream" press at all; when they’re reported anywhere, it's often just in small, usually right-wing, publications. Several of them cracked the majors but they're treated as merely "gaffes," like some perhaps charming personality quirk rather than a sign of a serious problem. There were some articles about how these "gaffes" could negatively impact Biden's "electability"--the thing Biden has made a cornerstone of his campaign--but there's no ongoing focus on the problem (which isn't treated as a problem anyway). And then came that debate. And its treatment in the press.

Biden is not a serious candidate for the presidency. He continues to be a factor--and a presence--in the Democratic race only because the corporate press has largely opted not to make an issue of this or to report in any sort of sustained manner on his long and appalling record. It seems fairly obvious that if Biden was to become the Democratic candidate (a circumstance that still seems extremely unlikely), Trump certainly wouldn’t show this reluctance to address this. It would, in fact, seem a fool’s errand to assume he wouldn't exploit it constantly, loudly and in the most obnoxious way possible. As of this writing, it's only a few days until the first contest of the primary season. If Democrats don't deal with their Joe Biden problem now, they could end up being forced to deal with it in the Fall, when it will be too late.

---

The original article:

The sad, sorry spectacle that is Joe Biden and his presidential campaign has bred with Biden's current position as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination to produce an awe-despairing aspiration vampire whose suction is sufficient to drain every last ounce of hope from even the heartiest optimist among thoughtful, intelligent adherents to liberal democracy. Given the state of the U.S., it's no surprise that a trainwreck candidacy like Biden's exists. It beggars the imagination that it ever led the Democratic field for as much as 3 minutes. It has led that field for 3 months.

Biden is one of the last gasps of the Clintonite right, the long-running "Third Way" effort to recreate the Democrats as a Republican Lite party by dragging it ever rightward in order to curry favor with the same Big Money sources that fund the Republicans. Part of what's so dismaying about Biden's current position atop the Dem heap is that when it comes to presidential elections, America has already experienced what should have been that particular last gasp. In 2016, Hillary Clinton entered the race as the legacy candidate of one of the major political machines in the U.S.. With her own party cheating on her behalf, nearly the whole of the corporate press promoting her and a war-chest built up to twice the size of her opponent by one of the most aggressive campaigns of prostituting one's future office to the highest bidder that American politics have ever seen, Clinton went down in humiliating defeat to a protofascist half-wit--a reality-show-host joke who was the most hated major-party presidential candidate in the history of polling. Trying to salvage some dignity from the loss, Clintonites point to Clinton's relatively modest popular-vote advantage over Donald Trump but Clinton didn't win the popular vote, as is so often asserted. Nearly 52% of voters in that election voted for someone else.

The Clintonite right still holds undue power within the party. It runs the official party apparatus and controls the entire congressional Democratic leadership, save Bernie Sanders (whose position as head of outreach in the Senate was created just for him). The last few years have seen a raging battle between the Clintonite right and the progressives, who actually represent the views of the Democratic base instead of just a handful of wealthy elites and large, self-concerned business and financial interests. And though the dinosaurs continue to rule the party for the moment--with any political sea-chance, they're always the last to go--the progressives have won the argument. While most of the many Democratic presidential campaigns are still Clintonite-right, they've all been doing their best to sound like Sanders. The issues being debated in the presidential contest are the progressives' issues, the language with which they're debated that of the progressive reformers.

Even Joe Biden has insisted he's a progressive. In a speech to the Delaware Democratic party a few weeks before he joined the presidential race, Biden asserted, "I have the most progressive record of anybody running for the..." and then he caught himself, as he wasn't yet officially a candidate and there were some potential legal questions involved, before continuing, "anybody who would run [for president]."

That's very different from the self-assessment Biden offered the Washingtonian back in 1974, early in his national political career:

"When it comes to civil rights and civil liberties, I’m a liberal but that's it. I'm really quite conservative on most other issues. My wife said I was the most socially conservative man she had ever known. I'm a screaming liberal when it comes to senior citizens because I really think they are getting screwed. I'm a liberal on health care because I believe it is a birth right of every human being--not just some damn privilege to be meted out to a few people. But when it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I’m about as liberal as your grandmother. I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion [Roe v. Wade]. 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. I support a limited amnesty, and I don’t think marijuana should be legalized. Now, if you still think I'm a liberal, let me tell you that I support the draft... I vote my own way and it is not always with the Democrats."

This kind of crowing about how he doesn't go along with the progressives in his own party--and trying to make it sound heroic and all independent-minded--is something Biden has done a lot over the years, and his subsequent career would prove his commitment to civil rights and civil liberties--his "liberal" issues--essentially non-existent.

Biden spent the '70s--right after saying all that--tag-teaming with open racists in support of segregationist policies. As NBC reported,

"political experts and education policy researchers say Biden... did not simply compromise with segregationists--he also led the charge on an issue that kept black students away from the classrooms of white students.His legislative work against school integration advanced a more palatable version of the 'separate but equal' doctrine and undermined the nation’s short-lived effort at educational equality, legislative and education history experts say."

Up until only a few weeks ago, Biden was still publicly taking great pride in pointing out his work with these racists, going so far as to romanticize it as an element of an era when politicians who didn't always agree could work together. Bringing back such cooperation is one of his campaign's major themes but it apparently never occurred to him that this only makes for the heartwarming anecdote he intended if he had worked with the racists to accomplish something good. He was just working with them in order to maintain school segregation. He kept peddling this particular narrative right up until presidential rival Kamala Harris used it to take his head off during the first Democratic debate a few weeks ago. At first sticking to his guns in the face of the critique, Biden eventually backed off and apologized (after some polls showed his African-American support dropping dramatically).

The kind of appalling obliviousness all of this so painfully illustrates is part of Biden's DNA. Like the "president" he now looks to unseat, he's a blithering idiot, one who, with distressing regularity, says mind-numbingly stupid things--the kind of things that, in politics, very suddenly end a campaign. Biden has spent much of the present campaign trying to walk back his entire political career. He often comes around to a more progressive view--or becomes more willing to pretend he has--but it's 20 or 30 or more years after the fact, when it's safe and his previous view has become politically untenable.

As his '70s self-assessment suggests, Biden was also anti-choice on abortion for the first decade of his Senate career. In 1981, he even supported a constitutional amendment being pushed by the hard right that would have allowed states to overturn the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision. In order to maintain his own political viability, he turned squishy on the issue after that, advancing the view that he was personally opposed to abortion but would no longer try to use the power of the state to ban it. For more than four decades, Biden has been been an unshakeable supporter of the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funds from being used for abortions. Then, in May, he suddenly announced he was opposed to it. A couple weeks later, he was suddenly for it again, insisting that his earlier comments in opposition to it were a result of his having misunderstood the question he'd been asked. Then, within 48 hours (after there was some pushback), he was opposed to it again, saying he'd been wrong during those four decades he's so loudly and unerringly supported it.[1]

The alleged commitment to civil liberties Biden touted in the '70s proved illusory as well, as, throughout the '80s and '90s, he styled himself a crimefighter and wallowed in rhetoric all too familiar to those looking back on it from the era of Trump. This was a time when Republicans were, on the crime "issue," completely out of control, perpetually demanding that more and more things be made crimes while insisting on anti-crime measures of escalating severity and relentlessly demagoguing anyone who disagreed as "soft on crime." Rather than resist this at a time when resistance was most desperately needed, Biden opted to join in the fun, repeatedly running to the Republicans' right in an ongoing effort to out-"tough" them. No matter how bad they got, no matter how authoritarian, how punitive, how unreasonable and no matter how many racist dogwhistles they crammed in, Biden would show up on the news the next day insisting they were too soft and pimping some new, "tougher" measure.[2] A few years later, Donald Trump would adopt this same schtick.

Biden's work on the terrible 1994 crime bill has gotten some attention, as it should--Biden authored it and, up until a few months ago, still bragged about it. Among other things, it expanded the federal death penalty to 60 more crimes while also restricting the ability to appeal a death-sentence conviction, added dozens of new federal offenses, poured a fortune into prisons and increased federal penalties for a range of offenses. This is really just the tip of the iceberg though. Biden played a key role in changing asset forfeiture law from a process whereby the state could seize property used in a crime upon a conviction into a system of legalized, arbitrary theft by law enforcement at both the federal and the state and local level, requiring no conviction or even charge. By 2014, American law enforcement was, by this approach, stealing more property from Americans than burglars of the officially criminal variety. Biden authored the infamous 100-to-1 crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity that targeted the black community. He was long an enthusiast for harsh mandatory minimum sentences, which removed sentencing discretion from those who had actually heard individual criminal cases and led to America's mass-incarceration epidemic (the '94 crime bill expanded these). Today, the "Land of the Free" has, for many years, imprisoned more of its residents than any other country on Earth, and Joe Biden was a key figure in creating that sorry state of affairs.

While Donald Trump could certainly admire it, what part of that is supposed to be remotely appealing to civil libertarians or progressives in general?

Biden has mouthed all the hoary myths of even anti-marijuana crusaders--that marijuana is a "gateway" to other drugs, that it's comparable to heroin and cocaine, that it can't be used responsibly. This can't possibly play well with a Democratic constituency--and general public--that long ago embraced marijuana legalization and is moving toward support for ending the War On Drugs [tm] entirely, so in May, Biden's campaign suddenly said that he now favors "decriminalization"--not legalization--of marijuana, rescheduling it to a schedule 2 drug (instead of just descheduling it) and expunging the prior criminal record of anyone convicted of possession. Biden didn't announce this remarkable break with his entire political career at a big campaign event or major television interview; he announced it one day through a random spokesman. So we know he's very serious about it--a proposal that doesn't even rise to the level of a half-measure in the first place.

The black community, which bore the brunt of the crack/cocaine sentencing disparity Biden worked so hard to enact, is an important Democratic constituency, so Biden now says that policy was "a big mistake." And an example of systemic racism! On the 1994 crime bill, he said in May that "this idea that the crime bill generated mass incarceration--it did not generate mass incarceration." Which is, of course, just a dodge, since no one had said mass incarceration was invented with that bill. The criticism was that it encouraged and contributed to mass incarceration, and it did. In July, Biden really took the cake when he released a 10-page criminal justice "plan." His suggested criminal justice policy? Reverse the "criminal justice" policies he's spent his entire political career supporting.

Biden-in-practice has hardly proven to be, as younger Biden put it, "a screaming liberal when it comes to senior citizens." In 1984, Biden proposed an across-the-board freeze on federal spending, including Social Security and Medicare, on which so many seniors depend. He did this repeatedly over the years. He's a longtime supporter of Republican balanced budget amendments that would have gutted those programs. In 1995, when supporting one such amendment, he bragged about his many efforts to freeze them:

"...I'm going to remind everybody what I did at home, which is going to cost me politically. When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security, as well. I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once--I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time. Somebody has to tell me in here how we're going to do this hard work without dealing with any of those sacred cows..."

When he ran for president in 2007, Biden again called for Social Security cuts--a hike in the retirement age. Branko Marcetic, writing in In These Times, details how Biden spent a great deal of time during his Vice Presidency trying negotiate with Republicans deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

This is Biden's history but in July, his latest presidential bid inspired him to suddenly become a progressive again and argue for "protecting and strengthening Social Security" while vowing to "protect and strengthen Medicare as we know it..."

That "as we know it" part is, for Biden, an important qualifier, as one of the top progressive Democratic priorities at the moment is creating a Medicare For All single-payer healthcare system, a policy Biden vehemently opposes. A few weeks ago, Biden launched a crusade of lies intended to discredit and defeat M4A, employing many of the same "arguments" against it being advanced by Donald Trump. At an AARP forum in Iowa, Biden said that under M4A, "Medicare goes away as you know it. All the Medicare you have is gone." This is, of course, entirely false--M4A, as the name implies, just significantly expands the existing Medicare program--but it also mirrors what Trump wrote in an op-ed back in October devoted, in part, to attacking the policy. According to Trump, "so-called Medicare for All would really be Medicare for None. Under the Democrats' plan, today's Medicare would be forced to die." Biden has repeatedly employed Trump's Orwellian characterization of M4A as taking away health coverage, rather than expanding it. "[T]he Democrats would eliminate every American's private and employer-based health plan," wrote Trump. Biden:

"How many of you like your employer based healthcare? Do you think it was adequate? Now if I come along and say you’re finished, you can’t have it anymore, well that’s what Medicare for All does. You cannot have it. Period."

Trump appeals to the absolute worst, most selfish "got-mine" entitlement psychology. "[Medicare For All] means that after a life of hard work and sacrifice," he wrote, "seniors would no longer be able to depend on the benefits they were promised." Biden incorporates all of this--without attribution, of course--into his own recent anti-Medicare For All ad.[3] Biden has also dusted off and inflated the grossest lie about M4A offered by the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign. While M4A is meant to supplant the Affordable Care Act, the Clinton campaign told America that M4A advocates wanted to repeal the ACA, leaving millions of people with nothing while they started over and tried to pass a new healthcare law. Biden is Clinton 2.0 on steroids. Or crack:

“I don't want to start over. How many of you out there have had someone you’ve lost to cancer? Or cancer yourself? No time, man. We cannot have a hiatus of six months, a year, two, three, to get something done. People desperately need help now."

Medicare For All is supported by most of the public and the overwhelming majority of Democrats--80% or more. Even the Democratic presidential contenders who don't really support it have tried to coopt it and/or use the language of its supporters. Biden's forceful opposition is a product of his out-of-touch conservatism but there is, of course, more to it than just that. In politics, after all, conservatism always comes with benefits. Biden kicked off his campaign with a massive fundraiser held for him by, among others, a health insurance executive. He employs as his campaign chairman Steve Ricchetti, "a longtime lobbyist for health care and other corporate clients." And he's been sucking up donations from healthcare interests opposed to M4A. In July, Bernie Sanders announced he would be rejecting donations from the PACs, executives and lobbyists of pharmaceutical and health insurance companies and challenged his rivals to do the same. Biden's campaign refused; spokesman TJ Ducklo suggested Biden stands up to the insurance companies[4] sniffing, "we're not expecting too many contributions." In reality, Biden is the top recipient among the Dem candidates of donations from these sources:

And so on.

The profound personal idiocy, anti-crime antics and anti-Medicare For All rhetoric certainly aren't the only areas where Biden and Trump mirror one another. Some other examples:

--In November 2006, with his official presidential campaign announcement imminent, Biden spoke before the Rotary Club of Columbia, South Carolina--a conservative audience--and got all warm and fuzzy with the Confederate "heritage" crowd, joking about how his state of Delaware was a slave state and would have joined the Confederacy if there hadn't been a few states in the way; Trump, of course, has aligned himself with the same chuckleheads. A few months before that, Biden had made the case--on Fox News, no less--that his presidential candidacy could play in the South because "my state was a slave state." And no one was laughing.

--The wall Trump wants to build on the Southern border has become a symbol of Trump's noxious view of America as a xenophobic fortress under perpetual siege but in 2006, Joe Biden not only supported a border barrier, just like Trump, he used, to sell it, some of the same kind of ugly rhetoric as Trump would a few years later. In that same Rotary Club appearance, Biden bragged about his support for a border barrier, called immigrants "illegals," spun a lurid tale of their hauling tons of drugs across the border, called for a crackdown on employers who hire them--because that's why people bring tons of drugs into the U.S., to get dirt-wage work as farm laborers and roofers, right?--and denounced Mexico as "corrupt." As is so often his custom, Biden relished breaking with the liberals on this:

"'Folks, I voted for a fence. I voted, unlike most Democrats--and some of you won’t like it--I voted for 700 miles of fence... [P]eople are driving across that border with tons, tons, hear me, tons of everything from byproducts for methamphetamine to cocaine to heroin, and it's all coming up through corrupt Mexico."

Trump's war on sanctuary cities has run throughout his administration; during his presidential campaign in 2007, Biden came out against sanctuary cities, and raged against the Bush Jr. administration for being weak and allowing them to continue.[5] These days, Biden the 2020 presidential candidate argues for compassion toward immigrants, attention to the root causes of their plight and is very critical of the parade of horrors Trump has created at the border:

"Under Trump, there have been horrifying scenes at the border of kids being kept in cages, tear-gassing asylum seekers, ripping children from their mothers' arms--actions that subvert American values and erode our ability to lead on the global stage."

Brings a tear to your eye, doesn't it? Until, at least, one realizes that Trump has been carrying out all of this with authority granted him by laws supported by--wait for it--Joe Biden. The cages in which those children are penned were constructed during Biden's Vice Presidency; Trump's deportation machine was built up by the Obama/Biden administration.

--Trump has often expressed his view that burning the American flag in protest should be made a crime. Shortly after his election, he suggested flag-burners should be subjected to a year in jail or loss of their U.S. citizenship. Joe Biden, too, has repeatedly supported such a ban. In 1989--immediately after the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional statutes banning flag desecration--Biden introduced federal legislation to roll back the ruling. Since the court had struck down these statutes as violations of free-speech rights, Biden's workaround was to simply ban all mutilation of the flag, across the board, regardless of whether it was done in protest or not (though that was the target of the legislation). And his bill called for a penalty of a year in jail, just as Trump would later propose, and a $1,000 fine. In 1995, when Republicans attempted another ban, Biden pushed this same line in an attempt to aid their efforts: "I think that we can and that we should tell everyone they can't burn the flag," he argued. "I agree with Justices Scalia, Fortas and Black--the right to burn the flag does not sit at the heart of the 1st Amendment."

And so on.

With the birth of Clintonism, Biden and other conservative "Democrats" found their level. They congregated around the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), an operation (now mercifully defunct) bankrolled by corporate interests and intent on breaking whatever remained of the Democratic party's commitment to progressive values. Bill Clinton's ascendancy to the presidency in 1992 was treated as a watershed--in Clintonite-right mythology, the thing that saved the Democratic party after years of crisis. Bill Clinton embraced destructive right-wing priorities on crime, welfare, "free trade," deregulation, deficit reduction, foreign interventionism and so on. Proponents called this a "Third Way," though it was really just a continuation of exactly the same Republican rule the U.S. had experienced for years prior to the Clinton presidency but with a less reactionary approach to a handful of social issues. An ever-widening flood of dirty money from appreciative big business and big finance washed the Clintonites into control of the party. They calculated that this money would give them strength over the hated progressive populists and Dem voters would still back them without regard to their anti-progressive heresies because in a two-party system, those voters had nowhere else to go. Exploiting Americans' self-image as moderate pragmatists, they campaigned using "triangulation" tactics--throwing progressives under the bus in order to present "both sides" as "extreme" and position themselves as an artificially-created "sensible center."

The Joe Biden who, today, offers a superficial pretense of being a "progressive," openly aligned himself with this from the beginning.

Writing in Jacobin, Branko Marcetic resurrected some comments Biden made to the National Journal from 2001. This was just after George Bush Jr. had defeated Al Gore in the 2000 cycle, returning Republicans to the presidency. Faced, in Gore, with another Clintonite conservative, consumer advocate Ralph Nader had joined the race as the candidate of the Green party, to at least ensure progressives had some space on the general-election ballot. This was Biden's frequently delusional assessment of where things stood with his party at the time:

"[Bill] Clinton got it right. I was one of those guys in 1987 who tried to run on a platform that Clinton basically ran on in 1992. And that is, for a lack of a better phrase, his 'Third Way.' It worked. It’s where the American people are. It's where the Democratic Party should have been. Al Gore abandoned it without an alternative, and [Sen.] Paul Wellstone [D-Minn.] thinks we lost because we didn’t take care of Ralph Nader’s voters. One of the things I’m most angry about in the [aftermath of the] 2000 election, we’re now renegotiating as a party what the hell our message should be and who we are, when for me it was settled in 1992... The idea now, and it’s credible, is that class warfare and populism is the way we should conduct the next election. We do that [and] George Bush will be a second term president, regardless of how bad a job he may do."

Democrats followed Biden's "reasoning" by, in the next cycle, nominating John Kerry, rather than a progressive. Kerry's Clintonite-right campaign led to Bush's reelection. In 2008, Barack Obama was seen, fairly or not, as a break from that way of doing business; he defeated Hillary Clinton and did so by explicitly running to her left. The party remained largely unreformed though, and during Biden's Vice Presidency, this, along with Obama's own increasing embrace of Clintonism, led the party to disaster, costing it over 1,000 elected seats across the U.S., reducing it to its weakest state in a century and leading, ultimately, to Trump's victory in 2016.

In 2002, Biden voted to give George Bush Jr. authority to start a war with Iraq, the major U.S. foreign policy disaster--and crime--of the 21st century. It's bad enough that Biden did this at all and it's even worse that he repeated all of the Bush administration's lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and tag-teaming with al Qaida to justify doing so but with Biden, it's never really bad enough, so he also gaslit critics of the administration, telling the Senate:

"President Bush did not lash out precipitously at Iraq after 9/11. He did not snub the U.N. or our allies. He did not dismiss new inspection regimes. He did not ignore Congress. At each pivotal moment, he has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation, and I believe he will continue to do so. At least, that is my fervent hope. I wish he would turn down the rhetorical excess in some cases because I think it undercuts the decision he ends up making. But in each case in my view he has made the right rational calm deliberate decision."

This narrative, of course, bore no resemblance to what was actually happening at the time--an administration hellbent on war at all costs and aggressively lying the U.S. into it. While Biden was talking about the administration's "moderation and deliberation," the administration was insisting that Iraq--in ruins and starving at the time--posed a grave and gathering danger to the U.S., browbeating U.S. intelligence to manufacture some sort of case for war, rejecting every effort at a diplomatic solution, dismissing the idea of further weapons inspections and telling America that failing to attack could result in a mushroom cloud over a U.S. city. At the time, Biden--the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee--was helping this along, becoming arguably the major Democratic voice for Bush's war. He held hearings on Iraq in July 2002 but made sure no skeptics of the administration were on the witness list, reducing the whole affair to an extended propaganda ad for war. At the same time, he was playing both sides of the fence; when speaking to more general audiences, he was the cheerleader for war but before liberal audiences, he would make a show of being more skeptical. Biden's two-facedness--another persistent Biden attribute--continued long after the invasion proved beyond any doubt that Bush's allegations regarding Iraq's capabilities and intentions had been lies. Even well after that, Biden said, in August 2003, "I voted to go into Iraq, and I’d vote to do it again." By 2005, Biden was describing the use-of-force authorization as a "mistake," but he deflected the issue of his own culpability--and that of everyone else who went along with it--by insisting the only problem was that Bush had used the authority given to him unwisely.[6] Biden argued against withdrawing from Iraq for years as well, repeating the then-in-vogue Republican talking-point that planning a withdrawal will only encourage the enemy, then, during his presidential campaign in 2007, he ran ads calling for ending the U.S. presence there. Two months ago, at a presidential debate, Biden--who is making his alleged foreign policy experience a selling-point of his campaign--was asked about Iraq; his only real response was to dodge the issue entirely, saying he'd been responsible, during the Obama administration, for getting troops out of Iraq.

That withdrawal policy, by the way, was, in reality, inherited from the Bush administration and was carried out at the behest of the Iraqi government. Biden oversaw it but he wasn't in any way responsible for it, and that's as good a place as any to note that Biden, while frequently dodging responsibility for things he's actually done, likes to claim credit for things for which he doesn't really deserve much. Or any. And, of course, he likes to brag about having done things about which no Democrat should brag. Or do.

Into the latter category falls his support for the USA PATRIOT Act, one of the more infamous pieces of legislation from the Bush Jr. era, when the chief executive was gleefully trying to blow up portions of the constitution and laying the groundwork for a police state. Among its many charming features, the law authorized indefinite detentions of immigrants, granted a wide array of new surveillance powers and removed meaty chunks of the due process that is supposed to precede such spying and/or deter its abuse. Biden wrote much of what eventually became the law. He, in fact, had been pushing for it for years. And boy does he ever love bragging about that! In his telling, he was way ahead of the curb on that one.

Biden often gets credit for being ahead of the curb on the question of same-sex marriage but that's a fairly dubious claim. During am appearance on Meet the Press in 2012, he said he was "comfortable" with it, and this was celebrated as a watershed moment. In reality, most Americans had, by then, been supporting some form of legal recognition of homosexual relationships for years. For a while, pollsters asked if respondents preferred "marriage" or "civil unions," but by 2010, most just dropped the "civil unions" language, as a majority of the public by then favored "marriage." Two years later--long after it was politically safe to do so--Biden came along and became "comfortable" with it. Back in 1996 though, when it was a tougher political sell, Biden voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex unions and gave the states cover to do the same. Many years later, after he became Vice President, he flip-flopped and vowed the administration would repeal it. This never happened though. During Obama's second term, the Supreme Court voided the law.[7]

When it comes to technology-related issues, so critical in the Information Age, Biden's record is, as in so many other matters, abysmal. In the '90s, he set out to force companies to work back-doors into their equipment and software that would allow the government to snoop around in your electronic communications. Twice, he introduced legislation that would have, in effect, banned encryption. He pushed to make it a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to publish bomb-making information on the internet that is readily available anywhere. In 2007, he attempted to restrict Americans' ability to record music sent out over the internet or satellite radio. He hasn't supported net neutrality, which is central to how the internet will continue to develop. In 2006, he argued it was unnecessary; a year later, he declined to support a bill that would have written it into the law. There have, in fact, been multiple efforts to do this; Biden has never supported any of them.

In a poll by the University of Maryland in late 2017, a whopping 83% of respondents favored net neutrality. That included 89% of Democrats, 75% of Republicans and 86% of independents. Just about the only opposition to net neutrality comes from industry that stands to reap great rewards from beating it back, and the politicians they purchase. Among the latter: Joe Biden. Comcast, one of those big telecoms standing against it, donated nearly $100,000 to Biden's Senate campaigns. Earlier this year, Biden kicked off his presidential campaign at a union hall, playing up his ludicrous "working class Joe" persona (Biden is actually quite wealthy); after it was over, he moseyed right over to a big-dollar fundraiser for his campaign being held at the home of the Comcast executive responsible for that company's lobbying efforts.

As their entire enterprise involves abandoning progressive values in exchange for campaign cash, Clintonite-right politicians are fundamentally corrupt. Corruption isn't, for them, an aberration from a more honest, honorable state, it's a central feature of their project, one of their defining characteristics. When a young senator in 1974, Biden appeared on PBS and talked about how he entered national politics looking to sell out:

"I didn't have many larger contributors, and the only reason... See, I went to the big guys for the money. I was ready to prostitute myself... but what happened was, they said 'come back when you're 40, son,' so I had to go out... I had to go to a number of small contributors."

Biden certainly overcame that "problem." Soon, he was an enthusiastic prostitute, peddling his senatorship to whichever high-dollar johns wanted to buy a piece of it. Perhaps most noteworthy among them was MBNA, a big financial services company in his state, which bankrolled his career as his top donor for decades. Biden dutifully threw himself into crafting policies that, while screwing over the public, served his financiers' needs. Walker Bragman's evaluation of Biden for Paste--a good, concise dissection--writes about this:

"As one might expect, Biden was a reliable 'yea' vote for President Bill Clinton's bank deregulation. He voted for the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, enabling commercial banks to do business across state lines, and the Gramm-Leach-Blilely Act of 1999, overturning Glass-Steagall, which separated commercial and investment banks. According to the Senate report on the subprime mortgage crisis, 'Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse,' the effect of these two laws was to centralize the decentralized US banking system, consolidating power and risk into a few institutions now referred to as 'too-big-to-fail.'"

In these changes was born what would eventually play out as the devastating financial collapse of 2008, which threatened, at its worst, to spiral out of control and take the entire U.S. economy down the drain. As usual, Biden only decided he'd been wrong nearly 20 years later, after it was far too late to matter; in a speech shortly before the end of his Vice Presidency, he called that 1999 vote "the worst vote I ever cast in my entire time in the U.S. Senate."

Bragman continues:

"Biden also demonstrated his fealty to finance in 2005 when he, like Hillary Clinton, backed the innocuously named Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, heavily pushed by MBNA, which weakened bankruptcy protections for consumers. As the New York Times noted in August of 2008, Biden was one of the earliest supporters of the bill, voting for it four times until it passed. He 'was one of five Democrats in March 2005 who voted against a proposal to require credit card companies to provide more effective warnings to consumers about the consequences of paying only the minimum amount due each month.'

Mark Provost, in a piece that takes a deeper dive into Biden's decades-long history of pushing for lender-friendly legislation designed to put the screws to debtors, covers some of the proposals Biden teamed with Republicans to defeat:

"Usually, Biden opposed even modest protections for borrowers. For instance, he voted against one amendment that would protect mothers who failed to receive their child support or alimony. He voted against setting a limit of 30 percent on loan interest. He also voted against special protections for bankruptcy among former military, victims of identity theft and those with unmanageable medical debt."

Through years of this fight, Biden's son Hunter was working as a consultant for MBNA, and that part of the story gets even better: Hunter was simultaneously working as a lobbyist in Washington for a firm he co-founded.[8] Biden was publicly parroting industry talking-points about how debtors were irresponsible and criminals; Provost notes that "the lending industry as a whole has contributed an estimated $1.9 million in total to Biden’s various election efforts."

One of the more visible effects of Biden's bought-and-paid-for efforts on behalf of the banksters is the current student loan debt crisis, as, with the explosion in the cost of education, outstanding student loan debt has ballooned to more than $1.5 trillion. It's now the 2nd-largest breed of consumer debt. Some may look at that as an unconscionable burden on those who are just starting out in life and think someone so central to causing it should at least feel some compassion for the kids. But that "some" doesn't include Joe Biden. Last year, speaking with Pat Morrison of the Los Angeles Times:

"The younger generation now tells me how tough things are--give me a break. No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break."

His generation, Biden suggests, had it much harder. Newsweek's Summer Meza didn't seem terribly impressed by this disgusting display:

"Whether Biden agrees or not, there is evidence to support the idea that millennials, the generation born between the early 1980s and mid-'90s, have inherited a slew of problems that have put them at an economic disadvantage compared to previous generations. Millennials are more likely to have advanced college degrees, but earn 20 percent less than baby boomers when they were the same age. Healthcare, housing and education are more than five times more expensive than they were just a few decades ago, writer Michael Hobbes tells NPR. Student debt has skyrocketed, making homeownership unrealistic for many, reports Bloomberg. And the struggle to advocate for civil rights continues today, as recent movements like #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter and #TimesUpNow have demonstrated."

Carl Gibson, writing in GritPost, compared the situation faced by Millenials with regard to higher education cost, housing costs, wages, etc. to that faced by Biden. "Joe Biden's early adulthood was a cakewalk compared to the harsh reality most millennials face today," he concluded.

Biden talked up how great he considered his generation--the one that has left its children with such problems. "We decided we were going to change the world," he said, "and we did. We did. We finished the civil rights movement to the first day, the women's movement came into being..."

This wasn't a new theme for Biden. In June, for example, the New York Times recalled:

"'When I marched in the civil rights movement, I did not march with a 12-point program,' Mr. Biden thundered, testing his presidential message in February 1987 before a New Hampshire audience. 'I marched with tens of thousands of others to change attitudes. And we changed attitudes.'

"More than once, advisers had gently reminded Mr. Biden of the problem with this formulation: He had not actually marched during the civil rights movement. And more than once, Mr. Biden assured them he understood--and kept telling the story anyway."[9]

Biden's basic message, when he finally got around to it, was that if young people don't like the world, they should get involved in the political process and change it. For a people who believe in liberal democracy, that would be an entirely defensible, even positive, one if he hadn't buried it in such an ugly callousness toward young people and the dire situation his wonderful generation--and he, in particular--have imposed on them. The author of their misery mocking them for it.

At the AFSCME forum a few days ago, Biden doubled down on those earlier remarks.

"We have an obligation to get engaged. You all have an obligation to get engaged. Don't tell me how bad it is. Change it. Change it. Change it. My generation did it... I just don’t want people telling me on a college campus, 'Oh, woe is me, I’ve got it so bad.'... Come on."

Biden now says these things while sitting atop the Democratic presidential race, telling young people to get involved while using name-recognition and his association with Obama to nostalgize the elderly into backing his Quixotic, anti-hope campaign and thus sucking the oxygen away from the candidates favored by those same young people. It's the same complete lack of self-awareness that led him to mock those young people after spending so much time making life so much harder for them in the first place. If one attributes to Biden the basic intelligence necessary to understand this, his comments are appalling. It isn't really clear that the likely alternative--that he's just too fucking stupid to understand how inappropriate that is--is any less so.

Biden isn't a fan of populism. He is a fan of caricaturing it. When Bernie Sanders condemns wealthy business and financial elites that abuse the public, Biden makes it a point to castigate such talk and stand up for the poor, oppressed rich. "I know some want to single out big corporations for all the blame," Biden wrote in Sept. 2017, censuring those who would "cast business as the enemy." The next month, he replied to Sanders' condemnation of Trump's tax-cuts for the wealthy, telling a rally for then-Alabama Senate candidate Doug Jones:

"Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are."

Appearing at the Brookings Institute in May, Biden said

"I love Bernie, but I'm not Bernie Sanders. I don't think 500 billionaires are the reason we're in trouble. The folks at the top aren't bad guys... I get in trouble in my party when I say, 'Wealthy Americans are just as patriotic as poor folks.' I found no distinction."

In June:

"I got in trouble with some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side, because I said, ‘You know, what I’ve found is, rich people are just as patriotic as poor people. Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money."

You get the picture. Those last remarks were, not inconsequentially, offered to a room full of wealthy potential donors to whom Biden was peddling shares in his potential presidency. Such sentiments are consistent with Biden's long record of slavish service to oligarchs and special interests at the expense of the broader public--after all, what good would a toadie be if he didn't take an adversarial view toward his paymasters' enemies?--but in the 2020 cycle, it also rubs shoulders with a certain contrary political reality: if a Democrat wants to succeed, he needs to sound at least a little like Bernie Sanders.

So Biden, whose brand Politico's Bill Sher once described as "anti-populism," has developed a second maw, one from which simultaneously streams populist rhetoric. At a speech in May:

"Our Constitution doesn’t begin with the phrase 'We the Democrats' and 'We the Republicans.' And it certainly doesn’t begin with the phrase 'We the donors.'"

If anyone thinks this sounds strange coming from a guy who, as the New York Times reported, was, at the same time he offered it, plotting a major binge of high-dollar fundraisers, well, you're not supposed to notice that. From Biden's campaign kick-off speech in April:

"Let me say this simply, clearly. And I mean, this, the country wasn't built by Wall Street bankers, CEOs, and hedge fund managers. It was built by you."

And there's this, from the Washington Post in July:

"A spokesman for Biden said the candidate 'is committed to fighting the influence of big money in politics and elevating the voices of the American people over special interests.'... 'We’re relying on the support of grass roots donors across the country to power this campaign--not corporate PACs or lobbyists,' the Biden campaign tweeted on the last day of the recent campaign-filing deadline."

Even as he wants no part of that populism stuff, Biden wants people to think he's all about it. "Say anything and let them hear what they want" seems to be the operative theory behind his very mixed messaging (if there is any theory behind it). That remark about "grass roots donors" is particularly amusing. If an inability to attract large donors was ever really a problem for Biden (as he claimed as a new senator), it hasn't been in decades. Thanks to Bernie Sanders, the candidates in the current presidential race have come to wear their small donations from ordinary people as a badge of honor and Biden has attempted to do the same, but in reality, Biden, though having near-universal name-recognition and polling as the frontrunner since he entered the race, is in a distant 5th place when it comes to the number of donors--barely 250,000 so far, compared to Bernie Sanders' 750,000.[10]

Angling for another piece of that populism pie, Biden has followed Sanders' example in swearing off money from corporate PACs, lobbyists, etc. The other Democratic campaigns have done the same, and the only thing more amusing than so many profoundly corrupt Clintonite rightists like Biden making such pledges has been watching how they get around them. Last month--in the same article with that "grass roots" comment--the Washington Post reported that "every Democratic primary candidate this year has sworn off financial support from certain industries despised by the Democratic base... Yet federal filings show campaigns have accepted plenty of money from influential donors in those industries..." Biden and co. are, for example, using an excruciatingly narrow definition of a "lobbyist"--only registered federal lobbyists. Wide swathes of lobbyists aren't registered or are registered as lobbyists in various states instead of with the federal government, and the campaigns take plenty of money from them.

"Biden has taken donations from several government relations specialists, including Denise McGraw, who is not a registered lobbyist but is a partner at the lobbying firm Hill, Gosdeck & McGraw, whose clients include Facebook, AT&T and MillerCoors."

Though Biden joined with others in pledging not to accept money from fossil fuel companies, the Post reported that "Biden received the maximum $2,800 donation from the president of Marathon Energy Corp., a New York-based oil, gas and electricity supplier."

For Biden's tough talk about "Wall Street bankers," the Wall Street bankers don't seem to be confused about who's side he's really on. From CNBC:

"Executives at Wall Street's biggest banks have begun throwing financial support to their early favorites in the 2020 Democratic presidential field: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.

"All three candidates combined to receive contributions during the second quarter from at least 15 bank executives from Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America, according to Federal Election Commission records."

And shady associations are just a way of life for Biden. He has a long history, for example, of hiring corporate lobbyists to work for him in official capacities--another trait he shares with the current occupant of the White House. The Hill rattles off some of his K Street associates:

"Biden's allies run deep on K Street, where a number of former aides from his time as a senator now hold high-level positions at powerful lobbying firms.

"Christopher Putala, who founded the lobbying firm Putala Strategies, was a lawyer on the Senate Judiciary Committee for Biden, as was Jeffrey Peck, now a lobbyist at Peck Madigan Jones.

"Biden also has allies in Tony Russo, a lobbyist at T-Mobile, who served as his legislative counsel in the Senate... and Ankit Desai, a political assistant to Biden in the Senate and now a lobbyist at Tellurian."

In his present presidential bid, Biden has, as noted earlier, appointed lobbyist Steve Ricchetti as his campaign chairman. He has hired Nicholas Burns as his national security adviser. Besides being a consultant for Goldman Sachs, Burns works for a lobbying firm that represents weapons manufacturers. Were Biden to be elected president, Burns--another supporter of the Iraq misadventure--would be up for one of the top national security posts in his administration. Larry Rasky, who was communications director on both of Biden's former presidential campaigns, runs a lobbying and public relations firm that works for, among others, defense contractor Raytheon. He's raising money for Biden's current race. One of the hosts of Biden's first big-money fundraiser of the season is a lobbyist for U.S. subsidiaries of foreign-based companies, working to undermine reformers' efforts to tighten rules regarding lobbying by foreign interests. Then, there's this guy:

"John Anzalone, an adviser and pollster for Joe Biden, is working for an industry-funded lobbying group formed to help pass President Donald Trump’s NAFTA 2.0, which unions have thus far opposed... "Anzalone... is joining Trade Works for America, an organization co-founded by Marc Short, who is now Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff. Funding for the group, which expects to spend $15 million to $20 million, comes from 'the pharmaceutical industry, oil and gas, the automotive and agricultural sectors, and traditional GOP donors.'"

And so on.

Anzalone is as good a reminder as any that Biden himself has a fairly long history as a supporter of "free trade" agreements. Such agreements, despite the nomenclature, have virtually nothing to do with trade and are principally concerned with changing the regulatory environment in pro-corporate ways that could never pass through the regular democratic process. Said changes are extremely unpopular, particularly among the Democratic base, but except for a brief period during the Bush Jr. administration, Biden has been all in on them.[11] Hillary Clinton held the same pro-"free trade" views as Biden, and in 2016, Trump ran to her left on the issue, heavily touring critical Rust Belt states whose economies have been devastated by such policies and hammering them relentlessly--promising to roll them back. Trump won the presidency by carrying a handful of those states that were regularly Democratic, and that's how he won them. Once in office though, Trump flip-flopped. He created the U.S./Mexico/Canada Agreement--his "NAFTA 2.0." Its major difference with NAFTA is the title. Initially withdrawing the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership as he'd promised, Trump reversed course and now wants to rejoin the TPP. These moves could provide Democrats with the stake to drive through the heart of Trumpism in those critical Rust Belt states. Unless, of course, Joe Biden becomes the nominee.

Biden has never wavered in his support of NAFTA--"[I]t made sense at the moment," as he put it earlier this year--and he spent the latter portion of his Vice Presidency as a major cheerleader for the TPP. Prior to 2016, Hillary Clinton had a long history of pretending to turn against such agreements whenever there was an election in front of her then "evolving" back to supporting them after the election had passed. When Clinton suddenly came out against the TPP in 2016, no one believed her. Biden saw her multi-faced approach as the most likely for securing passage of the TPP, and he's trying that same two-step now. After years of unbroken TPP promotion, he said at a Democratic debate in July that he wouldn't rejoin the TPP "as it was initially put forward"--the deal he'd praised and promoted. Instead, he said, he'd craft a new agreement with the same partners, which sounds just like Trump's approach to NAFTA: just call it something else. The potential attack ads write themselves. Michael Brooks showed a clip of Biden at the debate backing away from the TPP and juxtaposed it with video from his Vice Presidency in which he'd been praising it as the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Biden has often voiced his view that politics isn't about policy, and while his general incompetence, his near-complete lack of serious policy proposals and the awful, dollar-driven policies he's actually pursued mean it would certainly be wise for him to try to avoid policy discussions as much as possible, it also makes him a poor fit for an increasingly progressive era in which policy has assumed greater importance than it has in a very long time. There was an amusing occasion during his 2007 presidential campaign wherein he decided to get tough with a questioner and, sounding astonishingly like the Trump we have today, talk up his own IQ and go on a long rant touting his own allegedly great academic credentials and how he's more intelligent than the reporter questioning him. In the course of this, he started hitting that policy-doesn't-matter theme, insisting that Martin Luther King Jr. didn't march in the civil rights movement to enact some legislative agenda. "He marched to change attitudes!" The idea that the civil rights movement and King himself didn't have a pretty extensive legislative agenda at the heart of their cause is, of course, as bizarre as the idea that Biden is an intelligent man. Everything Biden said about his academic credentials turned out to be false.

Beyond whatever helps his donors or may politically harm him, Biden remains indifferent to policy. He doesn't make serious policy proposals, nor does he seriously engage in policy debates. People who want to run for president generally do so because they want to use the presidency to do some things but when Biden officially entered the present race in April, he had no policies at all, premising his campaign, instead, on "a battle for the soul of this nation."[12] In May, Reuters reported that Biden was trying to develop a "middle ground" climate policy. This generated a loud reaction among Democrats who recognized the importance of that issue. Biden's response was to release a proposal a few weeks later that, it turned out, was "developed" by going around to the websites of various orgs and plagiarizing some of the things they'd written on the subject.

This stood out so prominently because Biden was driven from his first presidential campaign in the 1988 cycle when he was exposed as a serial plagiarist who had been ripping off the speeches of others without attribution for years. Biden's initial response, this time around, was to lie, telling Business Insider that "several citations were inadvertently left out of the final version of the 22-page document. As soon as we were made aware of it, we updated to include the proper citations." But the Biden camp hadn't just failed to cite these sources; whoever wrote the document had worked minor tweaks to the wording they stole in order to try to conceal the plagiarism. And it got even better; Biden had lifted this material--"his" climate policy--from groups created by the fossil fuel industry--the very polluters against which any real climate policy will have to battle. Oh yeah, and a Biden adviser on climate policy has been, for years, an executive of a natural gas company.[13]

Biden's initial strategy for 2020 was a top-to-bottom duplicate of Hillary Clinton's 2016 general-election strategy. Avoiding serious policy discussion, focusing on just bashing Trump at every turn and trying to tie himself as closely as possible to the still-personally-popular Barack Obama. He has even been replicating Clinton's rhetoric. His campaign realized that, like Hillary Clinton, the more people see of Biden, the less they liked him (something that, in his case, will only be exacerbated by his dramatic cognitive decline), so they decided to keep him out of the public eye as much as possible (in the 2016 cycle, Clinton infamously refused to hold a press conference for 278 days). Biden's "campaign" has barely made any campaign stops, and it's just as well, because all of this has yielded similar results. For most of the 2016 cycle, Hillary Clinton was incapable of drawing enough of a crowd to fill a high-school gymnasium. Journalists present to cover her events often outnumbered non-journalist supporters. With Biden, it's the same--he generates a complete lack of enthusiasm.

Biden knows where his real constituents are. As of the end of June, while the other presidential campaigns had been hard at work on the campaign trail, the number of high-dollar fundraisers Biden had held (23) outnumbered his campaign stops (19). Because he is trying to win the Democratic nomination, his schedule often inspires a sardonic fascination. In June, he joined 9 other presidential hopefuls at the Poor People's Campaign presidential forum, where he suggested his administration would address the root causes of poverty in the U.S.. Immediately after that event, he went to a megabuck fundraiser in the home of wealthy hedge-fund chieftain, Jim Chanos, where he explained to the oligarchs assembled there to buy a piece of him that under a Biden administration, "nothing would fundamentally change."

How's that for an inspiring campaign slogan?

Biden is hustling to a population weary of Trump's outrages a return to Normal, that "Normal" being the same deadening pre-Trump status-quo Hillary Clinton tried to sell the last time around. Entirely setting aside the right's descent into reactionary darkness, Republicans' ruthless obstructionism and their enabling of Trump, the narrative he's spun is that Trump, not the poisonous protofascist atmosphere on the right that birthed him, is the problem, that Republicans are just swell guys whom Trump has managed to put into something akin to a state of hypnosis and who, with Trump gone, will just be dying to sing "Kumbaya" with Biden and work with him to craft bipartisan solutions to the nation's many ills. The word "delusional" doesn't even begin to cover this; it's so comically divorced from even Biden's own experiences as Vice President from only a few years ago that even the most hardened cynic can meet it only with utter incredulity. The reaction to it should have been to immediately consign Biden to sub-1% irrelevance, an object of ridicule--a sideshow to the present campaign and nothing more.

That it hasn't had this effect is a harsh comment on a not-insubstantial faction of the Democratic party, one made even worse by the fact that Biden, having passed on policy, is making "electability" a major selling-point of his campaign--the idea that he's the guy who can beat Trump. This is another repeat of Clinton, whose campaign used the same argument to beat back "socialist" Bernie Sanders. And, of course, that's why we now have President Trump instead of President Sanders. It beggars belief that anyone who lived through 2016 could possibly think it was a good idea to support a clone of the endless shit-show  that was that year's Clinton campaign.

Even when he was younger and at his sharpest, Biden was a dimwit. Now, he's an old man in the way people mean "old man" when they use it as a dismissive pejorative. In the two Democratic debates to date, he's been a real mess--confused, forgetful, stumbling over words and slurring them like a drunk, displaying lots of arrogance and bluster but no command of basic facts, including those regarding "his" proposals, which are clearly as much a mystery to him as to everyone else, and he's tried to paper over all of this by saying "Obama" over and over again.[14] Except, of course, when anyone brings up something unpopular Obama did.

When his campaign began, Biden had been out of the public eye long enough that people had forgotten just who and what he is, and while he's so far managed to skate on that Obama association and his near-universal name-recognition in a crowded field, his record keeps making the press. Corporate media have tried to ignore it but that becomes increasingly difficult when there are so many rivals bringing up pieces of it, and the more ink it gets, the more Biden's primary support base--low-information voters--erodes. He has addressed this by flip-flopping on nearly every major position he's ever taken, trying to obfuscate his history, lying about his record and most recently, he's advanced the notion that his entire career should be off limits when it comes to criticism and that those who bring up any of it are only trying to help Trump win reelection: "What I want to make clear is this going back 10, 20, 30 years is just... a game to make sure that we hand Republicans an election coming up," Biden told reporters on 1 Aug.

It's shameful that such a creature leads the Democratic race. The longer he leads that race, the more damage he does to the Democratic brand.

Biden's ascendance is rooted in the long-running but demonstrably false notion that the U.S. isn't a progressive nation and the accompanying conclusion that a progressive can't win a national election. Biden's conservative record, his profound corruption and slavish devotion to the donor class at the expense of everyone else, his cretinous idiocy (which he so prolifically displays), the chronic unreliability he's shown via his constant flip-flopping (which also speaks to his long history of getting everything wrong), his lack of policy substance, his enthusiasm-murdering admission that "nothing fundamentally would change" under his rule, nothing about the man is going to make Democrats or the larger public want to show up to vote for him, except that he isn't Trump, which he's tried to make the center of his Clinton-clone campaign but that is actually a trait he shares with every other candidate in the race. It's not just that he alienates critical Dem constituencies, it's that his portfolio of unsavoriness is so extensive he has something to alienate everyone. And nothing to inspire anyone.

Its possible Biden could defeat Trump. It's hard to rule out such an outcome given Trump's chronic unpopularity. One thing is certain though: while the corporate press may try to sweep Biden's record under the rug to get him through the primaries, Trump won't. He'll make sure everyone hears about its every nook and cranny, and while Trump only speaks at a 4th grade level, Biden these days is often incapable of either offering coherent words or putting them together into coherent sentences. He stumbles all over himself and Trump would eat him alive. Joe "Electability" is the weakest of the major Dem candidates, the one who would have the least chance. Even if he wasn't a ludicrously out-of-touch conservative opportunist and a blithering idiot, he's a corrupt slug, and we've had quite enough of all three of those. And while Biden has established a long record of sometimes coming around to an acceptable view 20 years after the fact, he isn't running for the president he would be 20 years from now, when he finally figures things out. If he were elected, we'd be getting real-time Biden--the one who always gets it wrong.

Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be much chance of his ever becoming the Democratic nominee. When Biden entered this race, 56% of Democrats said they preferred someone else. That number has since increased to around 70% (higher in a few polls). He has participated in two previous presidential races and after a great deal of press hype on both occasions, he washed out early and in humiliating low single digits. He has always proven to be his own worst enemy, and there's no reason to expect he'll do any better the third time around.

But there's no good reason he's been leading the polls for months either.

--j.

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 [1] Sometimes, Biden's flip-flops are pretty quick. In 2008, for example, he was, within only two days, both for and against off-shore drilling.

 [2] This continued for years. Branko Marcetic of Jacobin has written a good, compact run-down of Biden's atrocious record as "mass incarceration zealot." In the past few months, Marcetic has been producing a steady stream of excellent articles dissecting Biden.

 [3] As noted, Biden, having worked for decades to cut Medicare, now vows to protect. it; Trump does as well, writing that he has "made a solemn promise to our great seniors to protect Medicare." Don't you feel safer already?

 [4] Biden's own "healthcare plan," which he rolled out a few weeks ago, is a non-plan that, while incorporating some progressive elements, just tinkers around with Obamacare, leaving the rapacious private insurance industry in the saddle and millions of Americans with nothing.

 [5] In May, CNN dug up some video of all of this and, remarkably, reported it. Unfortunately, the coverage of this by both CNN and the relatively few press outlets that picked up on it was one-and-done, and what should have been a big scandal was quickly swept away and forgotten.

 [6] Donald Trump supported the Iraq invasion then later turned against it but his flip-flop appears to have been a gradual evolution. While Biden tried to play both sides in real time, Trump's own mendacity comes from the fact that he has repeatedly denied having ever supported it at all.

 [7] In 1993, there was a big fight over Bill Clinton's suggestion of ending the ban on homosexuals serving in the military. The ban wasn't written into law. It had just been an executive policy for many years. Clinton could have ended it with the stroke of a pen. Instead, he hemmed, hawed, and, after facing some political heat, backed off and threw his weight behind what was misleadingly described as a compromise, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue." This basically allowed closeted gays whose sexual orientation wasn't discovered to remain in the military but it still defined homosexuality as fundamentally incompatible with military service. Worse, it wrote that approach into U.S. law, making it very hard to change in the future. And, of course, Biden supported it  Years later, he flip-flopped and supported repealing it. Biden's record on gay rights in general is mixed in a fairly predictable way; he becomes favorable to them as it becomes politically safer to do so. He's certainly never been a leader on the issue but his record on it isn't irretrievably terrible.

 [8] Throughout Biden's career, his sons and his brother have undertaken extremely questionable ventures aimed at cashing in on his office.

 [9] Biden, in fact, makes a regular practice of telling very melodramatic and stirring tales about major events in his life that, it later turns out, he simply made up on the spot. In 2008, he explained that he understood the threat posed by Afghan reactionaries because, while visiting Afghanistan, his helicopter was "forced down" on "the superhighway of terror," as if it had been shot down by the Taliban. In reality, the helicopter simply landed to wait out some snow.

[10] Faced with over 20 candidates, the DNC--primarily, one suspects, as a means of trimming the field--has established rules that require a candidate to meet a threshold in the number of donors they attract in order to participate in the debates. The threshold is raised with each subsequent debate. This has sent candidates without appreciable grassroots support scrambling to attract small donors and spending, in fact, a lot more to get them than the donors contribute. The New York Times reported in May that "two campaigns said digital vendors are currently quoting them prices of $40 and up to acquire a new $1 donor." Some of the campaigns are grumbling that this makes them spend resources poorly but it also has the effect of making it look as though campaigns that are primarily supported by a relative few big donors have much broader popular support than they have.

[11] During  Bush Jr., Biden announced he had moved away from "free trade" to "fair trade," but even then, his record was very inconsistent. In 2003, he voted against the Chile Free Trade Agreement and the Singapore Free Trade Agreement but the next year, he voted for the Australia FTA and the Morocco FTA; in 2005, he was opposed to the Dominican Republican-Central American FTA. Then, of course, when he became Vice President, he was back to being a "free trade" cheerleader.

[12] Shortly after Biden entered the race, I wrote on Facebook about what his "policies" would look like when he finally got around to offering any:

"Eventually, [Biden's camp will] come up with some phony platform that will be as vague as possible. Most of his proposals will be watered-down-to-nothing versions of progressive policies or rightist policies that he'll try to sell using progressive language. None of this is serious; he will introduce it in order to triangulate his opponents--throw the real progressives under the bus in order to position himself as an artificially-manufactured 'sensible center,' from which he will argue that his 'policies' are more 'pragmatic' and 'realistic' and 'doable' than the actual progressive policies, which will be presented as 'extreme.' His fans will toe this line, accusing everyone who points out what I just did of being an entirely unreasonable 'purist.'"

And that's pretty much exactly what has happened so far.

[13] And "Biden's" plan itself was described by green groups as inadequate.

[14] Last year, Biden's idiocy blended with his mercenary tendencies to see him make what was, in effect, a campaign appearance--for pay--on behalf of embattled Michigan Republican incumbent Fred Upton, then in a razor-thin race. He called Upton "one of the finest guys I've ever worked with," Republicans ran ads with this and while Democrats won in a big wave in the elections, Upton, buoyed by Biden's support, won reelection.

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Update (3 March, 2020) - In 1998, National Journal did an analysis of Biden's 1997 votes and ranked him as one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate. Nothing shocking there, but Biden then fired off a press release bragging about it: