The 2020 presidential race as it's shaping up is a depressing commentary on the inability of some to learn the most obvious lessons. The 2016 contest should have imparted a lot of those to a lot of people but it seems far too many of those who so badly needed them never learned a thing. Professing that the current regime keeps them at a perpetual boil, that it represents an assault on everything they hold dear, that it is simply intolerable, intolerable, intolerable, they're nevertheless insisting--quite adamantly insisting--on the very course of action most likely to lead to its continuation for another term.
Such is the candidacy of Joe Biden. Like Hillary Clinton, another weak, Clintonite-right loser with enough baggage to pack the entire train and whose big argument for his own ascension to the presidency is "Isn't Donald Trump just awful?" And Biden can't really even make much of a case for
that, as, in so many ways, he is, himself, a version of Trump. Both are dimwits. Both are profoundly corrupt. Both are ill-tempered. When in a political scrap, both are full of arrogance and bluster but have no command of basic facts on most subjects, and neither care that they don't, as both are pathological liars. Biden promotes a return to Obama-era
"normalcy"--a direct reactionary mirror of Trump's own
"Make America Great Again." Biden's opposition to progressive policy priorities murders enthusiasm among the Democratic base--as Hillary Clinton learned the hard way, "No, We Can't" just isn't a stirring rallying cry. At the same time, Biden disdains policy and offers nothing to those looking for--or in desperate need of--policy solutions to problems facing them in their lives. What he pawns off as "his" policies are an insult, half-baked notions slapped together by his underlings that fix nothing, that excite no one and about which he's entirely unserious anyway. The Trump regime is one big, slimy, stinking wad of Suck--a total
shitshow from the day it was inaugurated and a target-rich environment for a political opponent. Democrats, who could use that
endless parade of Bad to help bury Trump, are instead poised to nominate
the one candidate who entirely neutralizes any use they may have made
of wide swaths of it. Biden, who has no real strengths, comes equipped with an endless array of weaknesses that seem tailor-made for Trump to exploit.
One of Trump's most damnable traits--and a particularly damnable trait in any public official--is his chronic dishonestly. He lies endlessly. It's his instinct. He does it even when the truth would serve him better. In January, the Washington Post
reported that, during the first three years of his presidency, Trump "has made more than 16,200 false or misleading claims."[1]
There doesn't appear to be any single project devoted to so comprehensively documenting Biden's lies but they stretch the length of his time in national politics and there's no end to them. He regularly crafts dramatic but entirely false narratives, often casting himself in a visionary or heroic role. As this writer covered in a recent article, Biden's efforts to
ingratiate himself with black voters in recent months "was to fabricate a
personal history wherein he attended an historically
black college (
he never did), was involved with the civil rights movement (
he wasn't) and claim he was arrested in the '70s while trying to see the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela in Apartheid South Africa (
he wasn't)." When that last was exposed as a lie, he just offered another lie in its place.
Like Trump, Biden is a
blowhard who likes to brag about his accomplishments, even when they aren't his. On 13 March, Biden held a virtual townhall and claimed, "One of the things that I did early on in my career as a U.S. Senator was
I was one of the sponsors of the Endangered Species Act." Biden
never sponsored--or co-sponsored--the Endangered Species Act. During the Democratic debates, he tries to take personal credit for every positive thing the Obama administration did, while laying blame for every less-than-praiseworthy thing at Barack Obama's feet, a maneuver which, over time, drew objections from
Cory Booker,
Julian Castro and
Bernie Sanders. He constantly tries to take credit for other candidates' initiatives. At a Democratic debate in October,
for example:
"It's unlikely... that
anyone on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s prep team had considered the scenario
that arose Tuesday night: What if former Vice President Joe Biden
angrily takes credit for your signature achievement?
"After Biden said on stage that he was
the only [candidate] who had gotten big things done, Warren noted that she had
ushered into being the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, over the
objections of Wall Street and many in her own party.
"Biden objected. 'I
agreed with the great job she did, and I went on the floor and got you
votes,' he said, his voice raised, pointing at Warren. 'I got votes for
that bill. I convinced people to vote for it. So let's get those things
straight too."
There's no record of Biden having ever gone to the Senate floor to whip votes for the CFPB. The Intercept spoke with several people involved in the legislation. They either said Biden played no real role at all in its passage or couldn't remember him doing anything for it.
Trump, of course, does exactly the same thing. He has, for example, repeatedly tried to
take credit for the opening of energy industry facilities that, in reality, companies decided to build during the Obama administration. Then, there's
this:
"Trump said he passed a private-sector health care program, Veterans
Choice, after failed attempts by past presidents for the last '45
years.' That's not true. The Choice program, which allows veterans to
see doctors outside the government-run VA system at taxpayer expense,
was first passed in 2014 under President Barack Obama."
Trump has repeated that one
many times.
While trying to take credit for the work of others, Biden has been quite reluctant to take credit for a lot of what he, himself, has actually done. At the most recent Democratic debate, Biden fled, in a most scandalous way, from one of the major legislative achievements of his entire career, the big 2005 bankruptcy bill aimed at putting the screws to debtors. At the debate, Biden spun a narrative whereby he was just some guy who came along late in the process, recognized it as a bad bill that a Republican-dominated congress and presidency were going to pass anyway and tried to make it less harsh. None of this was true. Biden, who was in the pay of the financial services industry, worked to pass the bill for
years, starting under the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton. He'd even written a version of it (something else he denied) and had, at one point, slipped the text of it into an unrelated foreign services bill to try to secure its passage. Far from trying to make the bill less harsh, he'd worked to defeat a wide range of Democratic amendments intended to do so. This writer covered the matter at some length in
a previous article. Another example: At Vice's Black & Brown Forum in January, moderator Antonia Hylton
asked Biden, "
Do you think it's fair though for voters to question your commitment to Social Security when in the past you've proposed a freeze to it?"
Biden replied, "No, I didn't propose a freeze." But Biden not only advocated a freeze on Social Security--which is to say, cutting the program--he did so repeatedly. Here's video of Biden on the floor of the Senate bragging about having advocated these freezes 4 times over the years, presenting himself as politically courageous for having done so.
Trump does the same thing. Fond of
blaming Obama for absolutely everything, Trump often blames the former president for his own administration's actions. Earlier this month, as he was taking some heat for the slowness in the distribution of diagnostic testing kits for the COVID 19 virus raging across the U.S.,[2] he blamed an Obama administration rule, one he said he has since removed. In reality, Obama imposed
no such rule. When Trump's policy of separating families who come across the Southern border became a scandal, Trump
tried to blame the policy on Obama--a policy Trump enacted in 2018, over a year after Obama had left office.
It's a policy that led to the imprisonment of large numbers of children in concentration camps along the Southern border, and the image of "kids in cages" provoked a great deal of public outrage. In
an op-ed in the Miami Herald last Summer, Biden tore into Trump on his maniacal border policies:
"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."
It will probably surprise most readers to learn that Trump has been carrying out his border chaos with authority granted him by laws supported by--wait for it--
Joe Biden. Trump's deportation machine
was built up by the Obama/Biden administration.[3] The cages in which those children are penned
were constructed during Biden's Vice Presidency, and it was that administration--Obama's--that first filled them with children, until a federal court
ordered an end to this practice.
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. Trump rarely passes up an opportunity to rant against criminal "illegals" from corrupt nations streaming North into the U.S. to commit mayhem. These are Trump at some of his ugliest moments.
But in 2006, Joe Biden not only supported
a border barrier, just like Trump, he used, to sell it, some of the same breed of
ugly rhetoric. In a November 2006
appearance before the Rotary Club of Columbia, South
Carolina, 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, 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.
Biden isn't a candidate who can use any of this against Trump.
At the last Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders questioned Biden repeatedly on Biden's history of advocating cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other programs. With an extensive record backed up by plenty of video documenting the facts, Biden flat-out lied over and over again, denying he'd ever done so--denying, in fact, that he'd ever even talked about the need to do so. Sanders gave him every opportunity to back down, say he'd made a mistake, but Biden just doubled down then tripled down.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump
very firmly and repeatedly stated that if elected, he would
not cut Social Security, Medicare, etc. Then, once elected, Trump has called for cuts to these programs in
all 4 of his annual budget proposals. Most recently,
Vox from February:
"President Donald Trump posted
a tweet... vowing, 'We will not be touching your Social Security and
Medicare in Fiscal 2021 Budget.' One day later, the Wall Street Journal
published
a report indicating that Trump is doing exactly that with his budget proposal.
"The Journal's report, which came a day ahead of the
administration officially releasing its budget on Monday, indicates that
Trump's $4.8 trillion budget includes 'steep reductions in
social-safety-net programs,' including cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and
Social Security disability programs..."
At the same time, Trump has been
dropping hints in various quarters that if reelected, he'll also be looking to cut these programs. Trump then sent out his press secretary to gaslight the public and insist he didn't really say what he'd said. A Democratic candidate like Bernie Sanders, who has always opposed cuts to these programs and has, in fact, consistently advocated expanding Social Security and Medicare, could use this as a powerful weapon against Trump. If Biden tried to do the same, the Trump campaign would only have to point out Biden's own history.
Biden also used part of that recent debate to lie about his efforts to bring about the invasion of Iraq, as he has throughout this campaign. Biden was advocating such a war for years before even the election of George Bush Jr., who carried it out. In the run-up to the war, he's been the major Democratic voice in support of it. Later, he concocted an absolutely ludicrous narrative wherein he only voted for war in order to secure the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq--something to which, in reality, the Iraqis had agreed a month before Biden's vote--and because Bush had assured him there would be no war--something which never happened at all and that Biden just made up. Earlier in the campaign, he'd insisted he'd turned against the war from the night it began, which was also false; he'd supported it before, during and for years after it was launched.[4]
Biden's Iraq lies mirror those of Trump, who also supported the war, turned against it much later and has spent years lying about his support for it, claiming "I was totally against the war in Iraq." At a Republican debate in 2015, he said he "
fought very, very hard against us... going into Iraq." He has even insisted the Bush White House tried to silence him because of his opposition to the invasion. All of the name-brand fact-checkers have destroyed these claims.
Trump cinched the presidency by heavily campaigning in Rust Belt states and railing against NAFTA and other grant-superpowers-to-multinationals agreements that are misleadingly called "free trade" deals. Such agreements have devastated economies within those states for decades, facilitating the mass-export of well-paying manufacturing jobs to low-wage nations, and Trump hammered them at every stop, promising to roll them back. Trump narrowly won three key states in the region and that gave him the presidency. Once in power though, he created
the U.S./Mexico/Canada Agreement--his "NAFTA 2.0." Its major difference
with NAFTA is the title. After keeping his campaign promise to withdraw the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), he has also
floated the idea of the U.S. rejoining it. A Democratic candidate could use this to help bury Trump.
Unless, of course, that candidate is Joe Biden. Except for a brief period during the Bush Jr. administration, Biden always supported these "free trade" agreements. Even when he briefly made a show of turning against them and declaring himself a supporter of "fair trade," his voting record was distinctly mixed, sometimes opposing them, sometimes supporting them, and one strongly suspects his token opposition during this period was driven by his political need to distance himself from Bush, as, once he became Vice President, he was right back in the "free trade" camp. Biden's enthusiastic support for NAFTA when it was under consideration probably took any weaponized use of Trump's "NAFTA 2.0" off the table, but just to make doubly sure, Biden then
came out in favor of Trump's new version. Biden raved about the wonders of the TPP for years. While VP, he was even assigned the job of being Obama's
lead pitchman for the agreement. Now, he says he
wouldn't rejoin the TPP "as it was initially put forward," but as with Clinton's sudden 2016 opposition to the TPP, no one is likely to believe him.
Medicare For All healthcare is currently progressives' top priority but if the general election features Biden v. Trump, they don't have a candidate in the race. Trump and Biden have the same position on M4A--they're very,
very against it, and have, in fact, used the same lies and mischaracterizations to attack it and try to undermine support for it. In a
long article about Joe Biden in August, this author covered some of this:
"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."
Though it's Biden's anti-M4A attacks that cut-and-paste those of Trump, Biden has tried to lump in supporters of the policy with Trump's efforts to completely dismantle Obamacare. In perhaps his lowest moment of the current campaign, Biden
produced an ad in August that exploited tragic deaths in his own family to argue against M4A in a way that may have made sense to whatever is left of Biden's mind but that certainly won't to anyone else. Over sappy music and stark black-and-white photos of Biden looking prayerful, Biden reads this script:
"I was sworn into the United States Senate next to a hospital bed. My wife and daughter had been killed in a car crash. Lying in that bed were my two surviving little boys. I couldn't imagine what it would have been like if we didn't have the healthcare they needed immediately. Forty years later, one of those little boys, my son Beau, was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given only months to live. I can't fathom what would have happened if the insurance companies would have said for the last six months of his life 'you're on your own.' The fact of the matter is, healthcare is personal to me. Obamacare is personal to me, and when I see the president try to tear it down and others propose replace it and start over, that's personal to me too. We've got to build on what we did, because every American deserves affordable healthcare."
"Starting over" is how Biden has characterized M4A. Whereas Obamacare has left millions in the same nightmare scenarios Biden says he "can't imagine" and "can't fathom" and while his own healthcare "plan," if one can so abuse the word by applying it to what Biden has produced, leaves millions in that
same predicament, M4A wouldn't leave
anyone in it. Biden is quite wealthy; he never had to worry about healthcare for his family. The notion that extending healthcare to everyone would dishonor Biden's dead family-members is equal parts befuddling and appalling.[5]
At the Democratic debate in November, Biden said, "The fact is that right now the vast majority of Democrats do not support Medicare for All," which is an absolutely
outlandish lie. A Kaiser Family Foundation
poll published earlier that same day found what every other real poll has found, that the vast majority of Democrats
do support M4A, 77% in that poll. M4A also had the support of most of the public (53%). Democratic support for the policy has shown up across the full length of the Democratic primaries and caucuses this year as well; even with exit-pollsters using inappropriate conservative framing to try to drive down the stated support for it, M4A has had plurality or (usually) majority support among Democrats in every state that has so far voted. Democrats have named healthcare as their top concern in every state as well.
In a 9 March interview with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, Biden was asked a hypothetical question; if he was elected and
Bernie Sanders managed to pass Medicare For All through congress, would
he sign it into law? But even even as the policy was drawing support from Democratic voters in every primary state--and even during a growing pandemic wherein the
U.S. is severely disadvantaged because of its lack of a M4A system--Biden suggested
he would veto it. Those are Biden's political instincts; some deluded progressives may have extended him the benefit of a doubt but even when confronted with a purely hypothetical question, he goes out of his way to murder any hint of hope they may have.
While a lot of the 2020 exit-polling of Democratic contests has been somewhat limited in the questions asked, they do point to a serious problem with a Biden candidacy. What can be said for sure is that Biden's wins are being driven by voters who support policies Biden opposes. The data strongly suggest a combination of low-information voters and badly misinformed voters, with Biden coming out on top via the votes of those who don't yet realize Biden doesn't support their issues, wrongly believe he
does support them and, perhaps most importantly, those who have set aside concern for issues because they've bought into the press narrative that Biden is more "electable" in a general than Bernie Sanders, an idea not at all supported by the general-election polling but heavily propagandized by the corporate press. This writer more extensively examined this subject in a
recent article.
For our purposes here, it's just another indication that Biden is unlikely to inspire any real enthusiasm from the Democratic base. If he's the nominee, he's going to be up against Trump, a "president" with a fanatical following, the maximal leader about which those who have become his own base have always dreamed. No matter what happens, they're guaranteed to turn up in force, just as they turn up in force for Trump's endless rallies. Biden has been
unable to draw significant crowds and has been forced to hold his campaign events in small venues, with journalists often outnumbering non-journalist Biden supporters.
Interacting with his public is Trump's meth. Biden, on the other hand, has experienced what appears to be significant cognitive decline and his handlers, recognizing that greater exposure would make this more obvious and could sink his candidacy, have mostly kept him
out of sight during the campaign. His big-money fundraisers, in which he aggressively prostituted his future administration to throngs of oligarchs,
outnumbered his campaign events.
In August, after a string of mind-melting comments led to some mild questioning of Biden's cognitive state, his supporters argued for making him even less visible, which was done. Prior to his South Carolina win, Biden hadn't held a single campaign event (except some big-money fundraisers) in a single Super Tuesday state in over a month and didn't even have campaign offices in many of them.
This writer
has covered Biden's cognitive impairment:
"Biden can sometimes appear relatively lucid when tightly scripted and
well-rehearsed but get him speaking off the top of his head and he loses
names, events, can't correctly remember even relatively recent things.
At his worst--which, disturbingly, is where one finds him as often as
not--he can barely form coherent words, can barely marshal the words he can
manage into coherent sentences and doesn't even seem to know where he
is; he can talk for minutes at a time without it being at all clear
what he's trying to say or what he's even talking about. His habit in
recent months of trying to speak at a faster clip and often yelling--a
poor effort to simulate Bernie Sanders' passionate delivery--have made
it even worse."
When discussing Biden's presidential prospects, this isn't an elephant in the room; it's a whale. Biden offered maybe my own favorite example a few days before the South Carolina primary, when, appearing at the
Democratic party's First in the South Dinner, he boldly declared:
"My
name is Joe Biden. I'm a Democratic candidate for the United States
Senate! Look me over. If you like what you see, help out. If not, vote
for the other Biden! Give me a look though."
At the Worker's Presidential Summit in Philadelphia in September, Biden said:
"You get a tax break for a racehorse, why in God's name couldn't we
provide an $8,000 tax credit for everybody who has childcare costs? It would put 720 million women back in the
workforce."
There
are only 165.92 million women in the United States and only 327 million
people. Biden has faced stiff criticism in the past week for disappearing from public sight instead of acting as spokesman for the Democratic response to the coronavirus pandemic. He finally reappeared on Monday but his appearances so far suggest Democrats should maybe be more careful what they wish for. In
an address beamed from his own basement, Biden got badly tangled up trying to explain even relatively simple ideas for a federal response to COVID 19, even with his entire script written for him and scrolling away on the teleprompter before him:
"...we need to build an arsenal of democracy in, as we did in 1940. We can take... we, we, we can make a personal productive equipment... Look, here's the deal, we have to do what we did in the '40s and the '20s in 2020. And we can do that. We need to build a medical arsenal here."
At another point, Biden's teleprompter jammed. His ability to speak without it wasn't any better:
"And, uh, in, in addition to that, uh, in addition to that we have to, uh, make sure that
we, uh, we are in a position that we are... Well, let me go the second thing,
I've spoken enough on that."
At still another, he praised Republican governors, including "Gov. Charlie Parker in Massachusetts." Jazz legend
Charlie Parker isn't the governor of Massachusetts; he has, in fact, been dead since 1955. Biden appeared on the View on Tuesday and, when asked about a cure for COVID 19,
declared, "We have to take care of the cure, that will make the problem worse, no matter what." And so on. So far, the press has largely joined Biden's handlers in sweeping all of this under the rug but that simply isn't something that can continue into a general election. The nature of such an election won't allow it. Trump and the Republicans won't allow it. Nominating Biden means having a candidate who, forced by the needs of the campaign to be perpetually in front of cameras, comes across so badly that he says things on a regular basis that should end his campaign. And if one doesn't do it, that's ok; they'll accumulate. Day after day, week after week, month after month.
Trump is a master of mockery and one of the worst attributes a potential Trump opponent could have is thin skin. Biden's was virtually transparent when he was firing on all cylinders, and his cognitive decline just seems to be
exacerbating the problem:
"Most experienced politicians know what to do when confronted with a
skeptical but non-hostile voter. Be friendly, address their concerns as
best you can, tell them you hope you can win their vote and wish them
well. When, during the present presidential campaign, Biden deals meets
such voters, he becomes standoffish, belligerent, dismissive, blowing
off their concerns and telling them to vote for someone else, sometimes
putting his hands on them in an aggressive manner. During a November
appearance by Biden in South Carolina, a member of an immigrant support
network, asked
Biden a question of suspending deportations of undocumented immigrants;
Biden shot back, 'Well, you should vote for Trump. You should vote for
Trump.' As a December event in Iowa, a voter questioned
Biden's age and about the propriety of his son Hunter's work in
Ukraine. Biden exploded. 'You're a damn liar, man.' Biden called the
fellow old and fat and challenged him to both a push-up contest, a
running contest and an IQ test. When video of the incident emerged, it
managed to get some negative press. The Biden campaign later denied
Biden had called the fellow 'fat'--though it was clear from the video
Biden did that very thing--and claimed he had said 'facts' (he hadn't).
That same month, Biden was asked by an environmental activist about one
of his climate policy advisers, who has taken millions from the fossil
fuel industry. Biden's response
(grabbing the man's shoulders and getting in his face): 'If you looked
at my record and you still doubt about my commitment, then you should
vote for somebody else.' In Des Moines in January, Biden became angry
with a man who had some questions about environmental policy; Biden
poked his finger in the man's chest, grabbed the man by the jacket, told him 'you have to go vote for someone else.'"
At a February event at Mercer University in New Hampshire, Biden was asked by a student in attendance why voters should believe he can win a national election. Biden asked, "Have you ever been to a caucus?" When she nodded, Biden
replied, "No, you haven’t. You're a lying, dog-faced pony soldier." On 10 March, Biden got into a
confrontation with a Detroit
auto-worker; while visiting the man's place of employment, Biden said he
was "full of shit," a "horse's ass" and threatened to
"go outside with your ass." The impression one gets from these encounters is that Biden is a short-fused, entitled, imbecilic asshole whose political instincts are so bad--or so badly degraded--he doesn't see the problem in behaving this way with
voters. Ripe pickings for Trump.
When it comes to corruption, "our democracy is literally at stake," claims
Biden. "It's not a joke. This is the most corrupt administration in modern American history." A tall claim but entirely justifiable. Trump ran on "drain the swamp," then proceeded to build a swamp unlike any ever seen in the lifetime of most of those reading these words today. Trump built an administration full of grifters, crooks and conflicts of interest. He filled government posts
with employees of the very industries they were being charged with regulating. You'd barely know it from the press, which was, throughout much of Trump's regime, obsessed with Russia conspiracism, but it's been
one scandal after another. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have tallied
more than 3,000 conflicts of interest related to Trump's decision to retain his business empire. Trump's children have been able to
leverage their father's presidency into millions of dollars.[6] Plenty a reformist Democrat could use.
Not Joe Biden though. Biden is, himself, profoundly
corrupt, a man who has spent most of his adult life pursuing policies aimed at aiding the well-heeled interests who bankroll his career. Biden has supported the priorities of the financial services industry for decades--
screwing consumers on behalf of credit companies and banks while being financed by that same industry and creating, among other things, today's terrible student debt crisis. The
New York Times on credit giant MBNA:
"MBNA executives and employees contributed roughly $200,000 to Mr.
Biden’s campaigns from 1989 to 2010, making the company his largest
corporate donor during that time, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics."
These executives
did this "though CEO Charles Cawley and all but two of his 28 top executives were Republicans and gave even more to the national GOP." Biden always made sure they got their money's worth, regardless of the harm it did to the public. In January, anti-corruption specialist (and Bernie Sanders supporter) Zephyr Teachout wrote
an article on Biden. A taste:
"On 25 April, the day he announced his campaign, Biden went straight to a fundraiser co-hosted by the chief executive of a major health insurance corporation. He refuses to sign a pledge to reject money from insurance and pharma execs and continues to raise money from healthcare industry donors. His campaign is being bankrolled by a super Pac run by healthcare lobbyists.
"What did all these donors get? A healthcare proposal that preserves the power of the insurance industry and leaves 10 million Americans uninsured... Biden signed a pledge not to take money from
the fossil fuel industry, then broke his promise. Right after a CNN town
hall on climate change, he held a fundraiser hosted by the founder of a fossil fuel conglomerate. He is pushing climate policy that has gotten dismal reviews from several leading environmental groups.
"There are plenty of other examples that raise questions, like housing and social security. Big real estate moguls are playing a major role in Biden’s campaign. Unlike his rivals, he has no comprehensive housing plan. When he pushed for cuts to Social Security, was he serving donors or his constituents?"
In a Jacobin
article, Branko Marcetic covers several examples, Biden taking contributions from Coca-Cola then co-sponsoring legislation to allow Coke to get around antitrust laws. Biden being one of only two Democrats to vote against a measure to expand consumer rights to sue over price-fixing--a measure being pushed by Biden home-state megalith DuPont.
"There's also Biden’s history of close relationships to lobbyists. A number of Biden’s longtime staffers passed through
the revolving door that led from Biden's office to the lobbying
industry--and back. He’s been known to attend weekend retreats with
lobbyists, and from 1989 to 2008 the industry donated $344,400 to him, a little more than the $300,000 given by finance and credit card companies. Mega-lobbyist Gerald Cassidy says he and Biden are 'good friends.'"
When Biden entered the current presidential race, he was trying to draw some of the Sanders progressive reform vote and swore off support by super PACs but as the campaign went on and he found he was unable to raise money from the general public, he flip-flopped,
dropping any resistance to a super PAC. Thus was born Unite the Country,
led by lobbyists, corporate consultants and big-money fundraisers, which became a vehicle for attacking Bernie Sanders. Financial disclosures from Unite the Country
recently revealed it was being bankrolled by, among others, big Republican donors, including at least one big Trump donor. Read into that what one will. And as with Trump, Biden's family has
traded in on Biden's offices over the decades for personal fortunes.
Teachout realizes why this makes Biden such a poor choice for the Democratic nomination:
"[N]ominating a candidate like Biden will make it far
more difficult to defeat Trump. It will allow Trump to muddy the water,
to once again pretend he is the one 'draining the swamp', running
against Washington culture."
Choosing Biden would nullify
many of the big weapons Democrats could use against Trump. Joe
Biden certainly isn't someone who can trash Trump as a liar,
a dimwit, corrupt, an authoritarian or a hundred other things policy-related and
otherwise. Neither can Democrats, if Biden is their standard-bearer. It would be laughably hypocritical. Worse, it would be a full embrace of the worst sort of Trumpian political nihilism to take the position that yes, Trump and Biden are both, for example, compulsive
liars but Biden is
our compulsive liar. The lying isn't bad; it's
just who's team the liar is on. That political nihilism is Trump's domain, his trademark, and should be one of the primary reasons people want to replace him. If, instead, they embrace it, they'll have reduced American politics to a state that can't be fixed by this or any other election.
Pulling back from
that abyss, Biden is a conservative opportunist in a progressive party, with a long and really awful record that can not only be used by Trump to render absurd many potential anti-Trump attacks but can be weaponized against Biden in other ways. From
abortion to
desegregation to
trade to
criminal justice issues, Biden has, at some point in his career, been on the wrong side
of nearly every major issue near and dear to the progressive base of
the Democratic party. From gleefully helping generate the
mass-incarceration epidemic to helping create the student debt crisis to
pimping Bush's Iraq war, he's spent his many years in federal offices pushing government actions that harm his fellow Americans. Most of this is a secret well-kept by the press, which has largely refused to inform the public. Trump will. Trump can actually run to Biden's left on some of these issues but the real damage he could inflict is in using them to suppress Democratic turnout (and turnout in general, which would benefit him).
Millennials, for example, are a critical Democratic constituency. They already dislike Biden and have overwhelmingly voted against him in every Democratic contest. Their lives have been made far more difficult by legislation backed by Biden but
this was his response to their problems:
"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."
The ads write themselves.
The black vote? A Democrat has to have that to win. Run ads about Biden's long-running lies about his involvement in the civil rights movement, which includes video of Biden confessing he was never part of the movement. Then, video of his going back to repeating his earlier lies after those confessions. As a cherry on top, throw in material about Biden's segregationist part. Run ads about Biden's "criminal justice" record, which devastated the black community and destroyed civil liberties.
Find out how endearing Biden is to Democratic women by running ads about his decade as a pro-life Senator--the constitutional amendment he once supported to overturn Roe v. Wade would be particularly prominent--and his long subsequent
history of anti-abortion votes, even as he adopted a more squishy, personally-opposed-but-closer-to-choice position.
And so on. Trump doesn't have to get any votes out of telling the public the things about Biden the press won't (and probably
wouldn't get any out of it) but in a race that may very well conclude with a photo-finish ending, he just needs to suppress Democratic enthusiasm and turnout by tiny percentages. If Biden is the nominee, that's going to be a
lot easier to do, because making him the candidate means breaking the massive grassroots movement that has grown up around the Sanders campaign. The activist base of the party will already be totally demoralized if their will is--again--thwarted by the shady means presently
being used to foist Biden on them. Trump can spend months rubbing their noses in it, and Biden, who has no grassroots movement backing him, offers them nothing they can get behind.
Attacks on candidates who flip-flop on issues, showing themselves to be cynical opportunist with no core principles, are a perennial favorite in election years. Biden has been on
both sides of virtually every major issue, and videos of it are readily available. "Free trade" to fair trade to "free trade" again. Over 40 years of unbroken support for the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funds from being used for abortion, then, within a matter of weeks, against it,
for it, then
against it again (that last flip within 48 hours). In support of tuition-free education at public colleges and universities, then
against it, then
for it again. The number of such potential attacks when it comes to Biden are nearly limitless.
Because of his cognitive impairment, Biden is the only Democratic
candidate who, after months of brain-breaking comments, could eventually convince millions
of reasonable people who outright despise Trump and wouldn't ordinarily
even think of voting for him that Trump is actually the safe,
responsible choice. It's reasonable to assume Trump and the Republicans will do everything that can to make sure every news cycle is dominated by some new mind-melting thing Biden has just said. The past 11 months have made clear that Biden will
provide a steady supply.
With Biden, Democrats would be gifting Trump, who already has all the advantages of incumbency, with a
terrible weapon to use against them.
As a candidate, Biden is all weaknesses and no strengths. Young people don't like him. Latinos don't like him. He brings nothing new to the table in terms of voters; his base of support is elderly Democrats who would vote for the Democratic candidate in a general regardless of who it may be. Up against an incumbent with a rabid following, he generates no enthusiasm; he has to rely on big-money fundraisers and a super PAC because he was incapable of successful grassroots fundraising; he has to hold his few campaign events in small venues because no one shows up for them. He offers no policy solutions to those who need them. He opposes the key issues of the progressive base of the party and is winning primaries despite this because of a propaganda narrative from the press about his greater "electability"--a narrative a general election would quickly expose as a fiction, just as in 2016. He is Hillary 2.0, the Trump-like low-budget knockoff direct-to-video sequel. He struggles just to form coherent words and sentences. He has no sense of humor but he is farcical. He wants his campaign to be "a battle for the soul of America" but is incapable of making any meaningful moral case against Trump in the service of that lofty-sounding abstraction because of his own inveterate lying, corruption and lack of principles. The greatest weapon against him is himself. His
only real promise even if he does win? "Nothing would fundamentally change." He is a lesson not learned.
Biden is developing, in slow motion, into a major disaster. The attentive can see it but seem unable to stop it. Until relatively recently, this writer believed it was impossible to say for certain that Biden
couldn't defeat Trump. Trump has just been too disliked to rule it out. One could have
always said with a high degree of certainty that Trump would have far
less trouble defeating Biden than he would Bernie Sanders or pretty much any of the major Democratic contenders this cycle. My thinking has shifted; a Biden victory over Trump, which began as a long-shot, is seeming increasingly unlikely. I no longer think Biden, under ordinary circumstances, could win such a contest.
That brings us to the caveats; this election ain't lookin' like "ordinary circumstances." Democratic elites backing Biden aren't saying it but they seem to be counting on a disaster to finish off Trump--a
recession, for which the U.S. is due, or Trump's bumbling response to the COVID 19 pandemic. The idea that, when the economy goes South, the public will support whoever they
nominate isn't entirely unwarranted--election-year
economic downturns have a habit of washing away incumbent regimes--but
this cynical gambit would, given the circumstances, seem a dangerous gamble for those most
vulnerable to Trump's rule. COVID 19 is a crisis, and in crises, Americans' tendency is to rally around the government. That is, in fact, already happening; Trump's response to the virus has been terrible, bumbling, full of misinformation that endangers public health, and they have delivered to him the
highest approval ratings of his presidency. If the awful economic downturn, which is only just beginning, comes to be perceived by the public as attributable to the virus, Trump could end up smelling like a rose and ride rising public sentiment right into a 2nd term.
Something else one can say for certain: if the general election is Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump, then no matter who wins, America loses.
--j.
---
[1] Despite the Post's suggestion of its own thoroughness, that is by no means a complete accounting. It's also the case that this comes from the Post's "Fact-Checker" squad, so some of them probably aren't actually false or misleading statements. They full number is given above only to give some scale of the problem.
[2] Trump's dishonest efforts, before recent days,
to downplay the danger of the virus, actually put Americans' health and
lives in jeopardy. It's the sort of thing that should bring down an
incumbent regime in a
wave of public outrage. Joe Biden can't raise much of a
stink about it though. When, even in the face of the pandemic,
irresponsible election officials in 3 states proceeded to hold their
primary contests on 17 March, Biden
encouraged his supporters to go to the polls,
tweeting,
"If you are feeling healthy, not showing symptoms, and not at risk of
being exposed to COVID-19: please vote on Tuesday." But, of course,
people who contract COVID 19 can be asymptomatic
for extended periods but still be contagious, and anyone taking part in
large gatherings of people--like at voting precincts--are, by
definition, at risk of being exposed to it. For Biden, exploiting the
chaos in an effort to extend his lead over Bernie Sanders was more
important than public health; like Trump, he put his own political
fortunes first.
[3] Obama, whom immigration advocates came to call the "Deporter-In-Chief,"
deported far more people than Trump.
[4] In
a previous article, this writer dealt in more detail with Biden's lies during the 15 March debate in three categories--cuts
to Social Security and other programs, Biden's history with Iraq and with a 2005 bankruptcy bill Biden championed. In the first 2020 debate in which he didn't have a wide array of competitors behind which to hide, Biden lied constantly, and not just on these 3 subjects, but that article gives a glimpse of the depths of Biden's depravity. For a broader look at Biden's Iraq lies,
Branko Marcetic's articles in In These Times are recommended.
[5] Biden has spent much of his political career exploiting these tragedies for political gain. A passage from a Politico Magazine article covering the subject reads like satire:
"Those close to him say he's wary of feeding the perception he's in any
way using the death of his son to advance his career. But he has talked
about his grief in speeches. He’s talked about it with Stephen Colbert. He talked about it in his eulogy for John McCain. And he wrote about it in his 2017 book, Promise Me, Dad."
He lies about them as well. During his 2nd presidential race in 2007, he told this tale, as
recounted by the New York Times:
"Let me tell you a little story," Mr. Biden told the crowd at the
University of Iowa. "I got elected when I was 29, and I got elected
November the 7th. And on Dec. 18 of that year, my wife and three kids
were Christmas shopping for a Christmas tree. A tractor-trailer, a guy
who allegedly-- and I never pursued it--drank his lunch instead of
eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly, and
killed my daughter instantly, and hospitalized my two sons, with what
were thought to be at the time permanent, fundamental injuries."
While that no doubt made the hearts of the potential caucusgoers in that early state bleed for Biden,
the truth is that his wife caused the accident, driving into an intersection in the path of an oncoming tractor trailer. Its driver, Curtis Dunn, fought his vehicle so hard to try to avoid her that he wrecked it, to no avail. Police investigators said alcohol was
not a factor. Biden publicly told the drunk driver lie multiple times but only after Dunn died in 1999 (and thus could no longer sue him for libel).
In 2015, when contemplating entry into that cycle's presidential race,
Biden leaked to the New York Times the story of his son Beau's alleged dying wish, "painting a tragic portrait of a dying son, Beau's face partially
paralyzed, sitting his father down and trying to make him promise to run
for president because 'the White House should not revert to the
Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.'" Did any such thing ever actually happen?
"Before that moment and since, Biden has told the Beau story to others.
Sometimes details change--the setting, the exact words. The version he
gave Dowd delivered the strongest punch to the gut, making the clearest
swipe at Clinton by enshrining the idea of a campaign against her in the
words of a son so beloved nationally that his advice is now beyond
politics. This campaign wouldn’t be about her or her email controversy,
the story suggests, but connected to righteousness on some higher plane."
Biden went out of his way to plant the story, and the tale of his son has every hallmark of a standard Biden bullwinder; his conception of the presidential campaign sounds just like his present "battle for the soul of America" talk. The reader can draw his own conclusions.
[6] This writer will be tackling Trump's corruption in an article in, hopefully, the near future.
