This is not to say Biden doesn't have a very long policy record. It's just that, throughout his career, his policy concerns have always been dictated by self-interest and, most especially, serving the needs of his big donors. In trying to explain that record, biographers of Biden's political career will struggle in vain to find any other through-line.
Biden has often voiced a disdain for policy. "When I marched in the civil rights movement," he told a New Hampshire audience in February 1987. "I did not march with a 12-point program. I marched with tens of thousands of others to change attitudes. And we changed attitudes." Actually, Biden never marched in the civil rights movement, not to enact policy, not to change attitudes, not for any reason. On another occasion, he got into an ugly exchange with a questioner and went on a rant against policy:
"[W]e have never, as a party, moved this nation by 14-point position papers and 9-point programs. It seems to me that when we got involved in the civil rights movement, Frank, nobody asked Martin Luther King what his legislative agenda was. He marched to change attitudes. When the women's movement started, it did not move with a constitutional amendment. They marched to change attitudes."He went on to further denigrate policy and to suggest that what's needed instead is leadership, something that, in a political context, is impossible to detach from policy but something he, for his own purposes, presents as entirely divorced from it. The notion that these and every other such movement haven't had pretty extensive legislative agendas--not just as some side-feature but as basic demands driving them--is, of course, absurd and anti-historical but these and other such comments establish Biden's dismissive view of policy. When Biden entered the current campaign, he had no policies at all, presenting his run, instead, as part of "a battle for the soul of this nation."
It is, of course, impossible to run for president without any policy proposals--what else is a candidate to even talk about or run on?--so Biden eventually put his underlings to work creating proposals he could present as his own.[1] As I wrote in a recent editorial, Biden "offers for policy only a string of thin, half-baked and generally very bad ideas slapped together by his underlings that he may say he has something and that are clearly as much a mystery to him as to everyone else."[2] None of them are serious, and he isn't serious about any of them.[3]
Biden is an essentially conservative opportunist in a progressive party. He tries--badly--to fake all sorts of passion at times but there's no core to him; his entire political history is one of a conservative who walks away from retrograde views only if and only when they become politically risky within the Democratic party, and when he judges flip-flopping is safe. He has also been a leader on many issues but all of them--gutting bankruptcy protections for creditor on behalf of the financial services industry, pimping the Iraq war, pushing "tough on crime" policies that obliterate civil liberties, etc.--are toxic to progressives. That's why his scorn for talk of policy; he's been all over the board on the policies that are important to Democratic voters and much of the policy he's pushed is really bad.
The sharp division between Biden's record and where the voters in his party are has led Biden to spend much of his latest presidential campaign either repudiating most of what he has done in the course of his career or lying about it in an effort to make it seem more palatable. Sometimes both.[4]
Biden spent a lot of his career trying to out-"tough" Republicans on crime, leading to, among other things, the mass-incarceration epidemic that has plagued the U.S. for decades. He authored the 100-to-1 crack/powdered cocaine sentencing disparity that targeted the black community. Black voters are an important constituency for anyone pursuing the Democratic presidential nomination, so now, Biden says that policy was "a big mistake." And an example of systemic racism! In July, Biden released a criminal justice "plan." His suggested criminal justice policy? Reverse the "criminal justice" policies he's spent his entire political career supporting. 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.[5] 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.[6] Early in the campaign, Biden was trying to draw some of the progressive reform mojo from Sanders and opposed support for his campaign by super PACs. But October, the complete lack of enthusiasm for his campaign having caused his grassroots fundraising to collapse to virtual non-existence, he reversed course and accepted super PAC support, which was immediately forthcoming. For much of his career, Biden was an advocate for what is misleading labeled "free trade," policies that have stripped wide swathes of the American industrial base in the name of corporate profits. In the mid-'90s, he briefly switched to more populist rhetoric, talking about how the little guy was getting screwed by such agreements, but even during that brief period, he was always hit-or-miss on support for these policies. Once he became Obama's Vice President, it was right back to supporting "free trade" again and particularly the big, proposed pact of that era, the Trans Pacific Partnership. Then, in this campaign, after years of unbroken TPP promotion, he flipped again and said he wouldn't rejoin the TPP "as it was initially put forward"--the deal he'd praised and promoted.[7]
These habits were on display in spades during his Sunday debate with Bernie Sanders.
The day before that debate, Biden announced he suddenly supported bankruptcy reform legislation proposed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. This was the latest in a long line of examples of Biden endorsing a policy that would entirely undo one of the major legislative accomplishments of his career, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA), a noxious law pushed by the financial services industry that put the screws to debtors. In a January article, Adam Levitin, a bankruptcy law professor at Georgetown Law who worked with the Warren campaign on its reform proposal, described the bankruptcy bill as "perhaps the most anti-middle class piece of legislation in the past century." He covered some of its provisions:
"Bankruptcy law offers debtors a choice between a Chapter 7 and a Chapter 13 process. In Chapter 7, debtors surrender their current assets above a minimum level to creditors, but retain all of their future income. In Chapter 13, debtors retain their assets, but are required to devote all of their disposable income for several years to a demanding payment plan. Chapter 7 gives debtors an immediate 'fresh start,' by wiping out most debts. Chapter 13 debtors have to repay more, and many ultimately fail to complete payment plans.During the Sunday debate, Biden was asked about the legislation and manufactured a complex but almost entirely false narrative about his involvement with it:
"As the Prospect detailed Tuesday, BAPCPA made it harder for consumers to file for Chapter 7 by imposing a 'means test' for Chapter 7 eligibility, and by substantially increasing the cost of filing for bankruptcy. This caused debtors’ average total out-of-pocket costs for filing for Chapter 7 to rise from $600 to $2,500. The subsequent result was a permanent 50 percent drop in Chapter 7 bankruptcy filings. BAPCPA made bankruptcy too expensive for the most broke households, making financial stress, mortgage defaults, and foreclosures more likely, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis."
"Number one, let’s talk about the Bankruptcy Bill. The Bankruptcy Bill was passing overwhelmingly and I improved it. I had a choice. It was going to pass, and a Republican president, Republican Congress. I offered two amendments to make sure that people under $50,000 would not be affected, and women and children would go to the front of the line on alimony and support payments. That’s what I did. It passed overwhelmingly. I did not like the rest of the bill. But I improved it, number one.Sanders retorted, "Joe, if my memory is correct, you helped write that bankruptcy bill."
"Number two, I’ve talked with Senator Warren about her proposal. This is the first opportunity we’ve had to make substantial change in what we couldn’t get done in a Republican administration. That's why we talked last... two nights ago, and I supported her proposal. It’s a good proposal, it’s a solid proposal. She should get credit for having introduced it."
"I did not," Biden flatly said. Then, he said it again. He reiterated, "It was going to pass anyway. I made it... Let me finish. I made incrementally better. I did not like the bill. I did not support the bill. And I made it clear to the industry, I didn't like the bill."
The facts: Biden, whose Senate career was bankrolled by the powerful financial services industry in his state, was one of the champions and prime drivers of the bankruptcy legislation. He was one of its earliest supporters and he worked for years to pass it. This wasn't, as Biden would now have it, a case of his reluctantly becoming involved when Republicans controlled the presidency and congress and just trying to make a bad but inevitable bill better; Biden's involvement started under Democratic President Bill Clinton, not Republican George Bush Jr.. Between 1998 and 2005, Biden showed his lack of support for the bill by voting for four different versions of it. That no doubt made it clear to the industry that he didn't like it! FactCheck.org recounts:
"On March 15, 1999, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley announced that he had introduced the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1999 with the support of Democratic Sens. Robert Torricelli and Biden.His current denials aside, Biden did help draft that conference version of the bill. Over Biden's objections, Bill Clinton pocket-vetoed it late in his presidency.
"'Sen. Chuck Grassley today introduced a bipartisan plan to improve the nation's bankruptcy system,' the Republican senator announced in a press release. 'Sens. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey and Joe Biden of Delaware joined Grassley as co-sponsors of the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1999.'
"In 2000, Biden was a member of the House-Senate conference committee that resolved the differences between the chambers' bankruptcy bills before sending a final version to [President Bill] Clinton.
"On the Senate floor the day the bill passed on Dec. 7, 2000, Sen. Orrin Hatch singled out Biden, among others, for his work on the bill--crediting its passage to Biden's 'unwavering dedication to accomplishing the important reforms in this bill.'"
In 2000, Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations committee, took a different tack; trying to pass it by slipping it into an unrelated bill. The New York Times recounted how Biden was deeply in the pocket of Delaware credit giant MBNA:
FactCheck continues:"MBNA has been the No. 1 donor to Senator Biden's campaigns since 1993... What did MBNA get for all that money? While Mr. Biden's main work has been on the Foreign Relations Committee, he has been a consistent advocate for MBNA. He has actively supported the company's favorite federal legislation, the Bankruptcy Reform Act, which would make it more difficult for consumers to escape their credit card debt."Senator Biden shepherded the bankruptcy legislation along by taking the unusual tack of inserting it into a foreign relations bill in 2000, said his spokesman, Norm Kurz."
"...Grassley reintroduced the Bankruptcy Reform Act in July 2001 and Biden co-sponsored it. Biden was a member of an informal conference committee to work on the bankruptcy bill, and the committee was scheduled to have its first meeting on Sept. 12, 2001--which, as it turned out, was the day after the 9/11 terrorist attack. At the time, Congressional Quarterly described Biden as 'one of the measure's most vocal supporters.'The debate over the bankruptcy bill in its various forms sparked a long public feud between Biden and then-Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren. As Warren explained it,
"It wasn’t until 2005 that the bankruptcy bill became law.
"As he did in 2000, Hatch praised Biden for his help on the bill on the day that the Senate passed the legislation. Hatch said Biden had worked 'tirelessly for years on this legislation, and they have taken some tough votes to get it done.'"
"'I got in that fight because [families] just didn't have anyone and Joe Biden was on the side of the credit card companies,' Warren said after an April rally in Iowa. 'It's all a matter of public record.'"This is, in fact, what led Warren to become involved in politics. Biden now praises Elizabeth Warren for her proposal to undo this, one of his own signature accomplishments, but in real time, he dismissed her as a demagogue.
Biden touts his support for a pair of amendments to aid low-income creditors and women getting child-support payments but the impression with which Biden tries to leave listeners is directly the opposite of what he actually did when working on the bill. In an article broadly detailing Biden's long history of serving the financial services industry, Mark Provost writes
"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."Adam Levitin dove into Biden's many votes on proposed amendments to the bill:
"Biden... consistently voted against efforts to soften BAPCPA's blow on vulnerable populations. He voted against three amendments to ease bankruptcy requirements for consumers whose financial troubles stem from medical expenses. He voted against an amendment that would have helped seniors keep their homes. He voted against exempting servicemembers and widows of servicemembers killed in action from the law’s eligibility restrictions. He voted against an amendment to exempt women whose financial troubles stemmed from deadbeat husbands’ failure to pay child support or alimony. And Biden even voted against an amendment that would have ensured that children of debtors could still be given birthday and Christmas presents. Biden also voted against allowing debtors to pay their union dues during bankruptcy, potentially imperiling their employment and ability to achieve financial rehabilitation."Then, there are the amendments Biden supported...
"It’s not as if Joe Biden was opposed to all amendments to the legislation: He voted to enshrine a 'millionaire’s loophole' that allows wealthy, well-counseled debtors to shield their assets from creditors by placing them in asset-protection trusts. Nor did he act to cut off the loophole that shields assets placed by wealthy families in 'dynasty trusts,' such as are offered by Delaware."And even the amendments Biden now touts as supporting women and children:
"Biden claims that he worked to ensure that the legislation protected the interests of women and children by making the repayment of alimony and child support obligations the top priority in bankruptcy. This is false. Prior to BAPCPA, domestic support obligations were formally eighth in line for repayment. Functionally, however, they were second in line, right after the administrative costs of the bankruptcy, because the obligations ranked second through seventh priority, such as emergency bailout loans from the Federal Reserve or money owed to grain elevators, do not exist in consumer bankruptcy cases. The Biden bankruptcy bill rewrote the statute to provide that domestic-support obligations are to be paid first--unless there are administrative expenses. In other words, BAPCPA’s protections for women and children were all window dressing. Women and children still stand behind administrative expenses in bankruptcy. The claim that BAPCPA helped women and children is simply dishonest."At the debate, Sanders pointed out that the legislation contributed to the horrendous student debt crisis. Biden tried to minimize this:
"Let’s get something straight about the bankruptcy bill. The bankruptcy bill already... It did not affect student debt for 90%, because the law had already been passed. You could not declare bankruptcy for those loans that were from private institutions. You couldn’t do it, as the bankruptcy bill did not affect that. It affected 10% of the people, the first Bankruptcy Bill. 10% of the student loans..."This is a misrepresentation of the bill's effects on student debt. Levitin notes that the bill made it harder to wipe out student loans in bankruptcy.
"Not surprisingly, then, by lowering the risk of bad lending decisions, the Biden bankruptcy bill unleashed a glut of aggressive private student lending, which has contributed to the massive rise in student loan debt."But an even more mandible-mashing jaw-dropper is present in Biden's effort to pass responsibility for the student debt crisis away from himself and onto law preexisting the bankruptcy act. A decades-long champion of those laws? Joe Biden. Provost:
"During the 1970s, isolated anecdotes began appearing in the media about students graduating college and then immediately declaring bankruptcy to avoid their debt obligations. Although a 1977 Government Accountability Office study showed that less than 1 percent of educational loans were being erased through bankruptcy, a bill was proposed in 1978 to block students from seeking bankruptcy protections for a set time period after graduation, a landmark change to the 80-year-old bankruptcy laws then on the books.That last is part of what became, a few years later, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.
"Biden was chosen as one of three Democratic representatives on a committee tasked with writing the bill. Although the National Consumer Law Center advised the committee against an 'unwise and unjust' crackdown on students, the committee imposed a five-year exemption on government-sponsored loans from bankruptcy protections. This small hole was chipped away at over years, as bankruptcy exemptions were extended to government loans for vocational schools in addition to higher education in 1984, again with Biden spearheading the effort among the Democratic constituency. Even the unrelated 1990 Crime Control Act included language that further extended the bankruptcy exemptions' waiting periods.
"In 1997, the National Bankruptcy and Review Commission, formed under the direction of President Clinton, advised that student loans be made dischargeable again like any other private, consumer debt. Once again, however, Biden favored the industry professionals' view and limited bankruptcy protection to those who could prove their failure to pay sprang from 'undue hardship.' Common wisdom among law experts is that undue hardship can only be proved if the debtor's economic prospects are impossible to improve, colloquially known by the grim 'certainty of hopelessness.'
"Biden pushed legislation in 2001 that would have stripped bankruptcy protections not just from government-backed or nonprofit loans, but also from loans from private industry."
Biden's history with the bankruptcy bill leaves him in a bind. The bill itself is an atrocity that is pure poison to a Democratic candidate. As he has done so often, Biden worked for years to screw the public in the service of his big donors.[8] He can't stand forthrightly behind it. He can't justify it. He won't admit it was wrong. So he takes his only other option and just lies. And lies and lies and lies.
He did the same on the question of the Iraq war. Moderator Jake Tapper asked,
"Mr. Vice president, sticking with foreign policy, you acknowledge that your support and vote for the Iraq war was a mistake. What lessons did you learn from that mistake, and how might those lessons influence your foreign policy decision making as president?"It should be noted that this question is, itself, an effort to cover for Biden. Biden has never said his vote for the Iraq war was a mistake. What he's done is concoct an entirely false and absolutely ludicrous narrative wherein he was promised by George Bush Jr. there would be no war. His only "mistake," as he tells it, was believing this. Teed up for it, he proceeded to repeat this nonsense:
"I learned I can’t take the word of a president when in fact they assured me that they would not use force. Remember the context, the context was the United Nations Security Council was going to vote to insist that we allow inspectors in to determine whether or not they were in fact producing nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. They were not."He then tried to deflect the issue, as he has in the past, by alleging that, once elected, President Obama tasked him with withdrawing combat troops from Iraq, before circling back around to some shit-talk:
"I admitted 14 years ago was a mistake to have trusted him and I’m prepared to compare my foreign policy credentials up against my friend here on any day of the week and every day of the week."Bernie Sanders set part of the record straight on a particularly offensive part of this:
"Let’s be clear about what that vote was and you were there at the signing ceremony with Bush. Everybody in the world knew that when you voted for that resolution, you were giving Bush the authority to go to war and everybody knew that’s exactly what he and [Dick] Cheney wanted to do."A CNN fact-check offered even more:
"Biden was an advocate of ending the Saddam Hussein regime for more than a year before the war began in 2003. [Biden] was a public supporter of the war in 2003 and 2004--and he made clear in 2002 and 2003, both before and after the war started, that he had known he was voting to authorize a possible war, not only to try to get inspectors into Iraq... In a February 2003 speech in Delaware, before the war began, Biden said, 'Let everyone here be absolutely clear: I supported the resolution to go to war. I am NOT opposed to war to remove weapons of mass destruction from Iraq. I am NOT opposed to war to remove Saddam from those weapons if it comes to that.' In a July 2003 speech at the Brookings Institution, after the war began, Biden said: 'Nine months ago, I voted with my colleagues to give the president of the United States of America the authority to use force and I would vote that way again today. It was the right vote then and would be a correct vote today.'"And it's actually worse than that. Some things CNN missed:
--Biden had actually been advocating a U.S. war with Iraq for at least 5 years prior to the U.S. invasion--over 2 years, in fact, before George Bush Jr. was even elected president.
--From his perch on the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Biden became the leading Democratic voice for Bush's war. Among other things, he held much-publicized hearings on Iraq from which he entirely excluded any critics of the Bush policy, reducing the whole affair to an extended propaganda ad for war, all of this happening amidst months of relentless pro-war demagoguery by Bush and his underlings.
--The very name of the resolution for which Biden voted was the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. Its distinctly non-pacific purpose is right there in the title.
--Biden has often claimed, as he did at the debate, that his vote for the war was merely for the purpose of securing the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq. But the Iraqi government agreed to the return of the UN weapons inspection team on 17 September, 2002. The Bush administration, consistent with its belligerent posture, merely dismissed this. Biden voted to authorize Bush's war on 11 October, nearly a month later.
Displaying both the confidence of a candidate who knows he can tell outrageous lies without the press scandalizing it and the same idiocy Biden has shown throughout his entire career, Biden himself brought up the matter of Social Security, on which he and Sanders sparred earlier in the campaign:
"[S]peaking of negative ads... My lord Bernie, you're running ads saying I'm opposed to Social Security. The PolitiFact says it's a flat lie, and that the Washington Post said is a flat lie."Sanders dug in, asking if Biden had, during his time in the Senate, gone to the floor "talking about the necessity, with pride, about cutting Social Security, cutting Medicare, cutting veterans programs?"
"No!"
"You never said that."
"No."
Sanders gave Biden multiple opportunities to back down. "You’re an honest guy. Why don't you just tell the truth here? We all make mistakes."
"I am telling the truth."
Biden just kept digging in, so Sanders went with that: "All right. Joe, let me repeat it again. I want you just to be straight with the American people. I am saying that you have been on the floor of the Senate time and time again, talking about the need to cut Social Security, Medicare, and veterans programs. Is that true or is that not true?"
"No, it’s not true."
"That is not true?"
"That is not true." But then Biden tried to back away. "What is true is, in terms of the negotiations that are taking place, how to deal with the deficit... Everything was on the table. I did not support any of those cuts, and Social Security or in veterans benefits."
Sanders pounced on this: "Joe, you just contradicted yourself. One minute... you said, 'I was not on the floor.' The next minute you say, 'Well yes, there was a reason why I was worried about the deficit.' Maybe that’s good reason, maybe it's not. All that I am saying is you were prepared to cut, and advocated for the cuts of programs."
"I did not. I never voted to cut Social Security."
Sanders didn't let Biden get away with that dodge. "I’m not talking about voting, Joe. That’s not what I said."
Biden again raised the issue of the "fact-checkers" who, months earlier, sided with Biden over Sanders in the candidates' dispute over this issue.
Sanders came around to the question again: "One more time. Were you on the floor time and time again, for whatever reason, talking about the need to cut Social Security and Medicare and veterans programs?"
"No, I did not talk about the need to cut any of those programs."
The facts: Biden talked about the need to cut those programs repeatedly and for decades, tried to engineer them, bragged about doing so and talked about himself--as he tends to do--as heroic for being willing to take them on. In 1984, he began making what became, over the years, a string of proposals to freeze federal spending. At the time, Biden explicitly addressed criticism that this cut SS: "Yes, that is what I am saying." In 1995, when supporting a Republican balanced budget amendment that would have gutted these programs, he bragged about his many efforts over the years 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..."In 2007, during his 2nd presidential bid, Biden again advocated raising the retirement age. At one point, he appeared on Meet the Press and said that when it came to fighting the deficit, Social Security, Medicare, etc. all had to be on the table. 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. And so on.
As Ryan Grim, writing in the Intercept, put it in January, "Joe Biden has advocated cutting Social Security for 40 years."
Earlier in the presidential race when the Sanders campaign was pointing out these facts, the anti-progressive "fact-checkers" cited by Biden--at the Washington Post and Politifact--decided to ignore them and give ideologically-based negative assessments of Sanders' claims. The Washington Post was particularly bad on this, documenting at some length the fact that Biden has supported these cuts but then arguing, in effect, it doesn't matter, since Biden was doing this in pursuit of things like deficit reduction and isn't, at the moment, calling for such cuts.
Progressive media have pushed back against both Biden and his corporate media enablers on this and these other matters but public awareness of them seems low and is likely to remain that way as long as the major corporate news media outlets continue to cover for Biden and let him not only retreat from his previously-held views but lie to cover up the truth about them. That will, of course, all come crashing down if Biden wins the nomination; Trump will make sure everyone hears about it.
In a way, Biden's appropriation of Elizabeth Warren's bankruptcy reform plan is a good microcosm of his entire career. Fifteen years after the fact, after years of damage and when his previous position has become politically harmful to himself, he does a 180.[9] A point Sanders was trying to make during the debate--but hinting at it ever so gently, as is his own habit--is that for a politician who so often talks about the need for "leadership," Biden is someone who inevitably plays it safe and never leads on anything, except the endless array of disreputable causes from which he now tries to dissociate himself. At the same time, while Biden wants no part of his own record, he perpetually tries to take credit for the work of others. As right-wing writer Byron York wrote in February, Biden has, throughout the campaign, "tried to take credit for virtually every other candidates' initiatives, which he claimed to have accomplished himself at some distant point during his 40-plus year career in government."
Biden disdains policy, blows with the wind, shows fealty only to whatever is safe and perceived beneficial to his career at the moment and to what his big donors want. As with so much about Biden, the parallels to Trump--another clown who is entirely unserious about policy, flips this way and that based on perceived momentary needs then lies to cover his ass--are unmistakable. For those who want--and in so many cases desperately need--real policy solutions to real-world problems, Biden, like Trump, offers nothing, and no one with any serious interest in policy will have any interest in him.
--j.
---
[1] A story from June gives a look at how "his" proposals are crafted. In May, Reuters reported that the Biden campaign was trying to develop a "middle ground" climate policy. This generated a loud reaction among Democrats who recognized the importance of that issue. A few weeks later, Biden released a proposal 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. If the press had been at all interested in stories unflattering to Biden, this would have been a big one; Biden was driven from his first presidential campaign in the 1988 cycle when, among other things, he was exposed as a serial plagiarist who had been ripping off material from others without attribution for years, going all the way back to his college days. 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's underlings had, it turned out, lifted this material--"Biden's" climate policy--from groups created by the fossil fuel industry, the very polluters any real climate policy will have to challenge.
[2] Actually, that whole matter played out pretty closely to the way this author predicted in a May 2019 Facebook post:
"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.'"[3] In Sunday's debate, during a discussion of the coronavirus pandemic, Sanders noted he favored a Medicare For All system and Biden pounced:
"What is it that we need [to deal with the crisis]? Listen to the experts. What do we need? And with all due respect for Medicare for all, you have a single-payer system in Italy. It doesn't work there. It has nothing to do with Medicare for all. That would not solve the problem at all. We can take care of that right now by making sure that no one has to pay for treatment, period, because of the crisis. No one has to pay for whatever drugs are needed, period, because of the crisis. No one has to pay for hospitalization because of the crisis, period. That is a national emergency, and that's how it's handled. It is not working in Italy right now, and they have a single-payer system."Within a few sentences, Biden completely rejects a Medicare For All system, then describes 3 steps for dealing with the coronavirus problem, all three of which would already be in place if the U.S. had a M4A system--cumulatively, they are, in fact, a good description of a M4A system--before swinging back around to Italy to suggest such systems don't work. And, of course, he was completely wrong about Italy too. One could just look at all of this as yet another expression of Biden's idiocy but it's also a perfect example of his complete lack of seriousness when it comes to policy.
[4] Biden has suffered very recognizable cognitive decline, in evidence throughout his current campaign. Because both Biden's pathological lying and his habit of walking away from his own previously-expressed views spans his entire career, I have, for the purposes of this article, characterized Biden's fictions as straight-up lies--fictions consciously offered to mislead--but his cognitive state could be a contributing factor.
[5] Biden has never been a reliable supporter of reproductive rights and has, over the years, been all over the board on the issue, which, if one supports those rights, makes him particularly ill-suited for this political moment, when abortion rights have been under as unprecedented an assault as they've ever been since the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision. The year after that decision, Biden publicly took issue with it, telling the Washingtonian, "I don't like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don't think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body." Biden was straightforwardly anti-choice for the first decade of his Senate career. In the early '80s, he even supported a constitutional amendment that would have entirely voided Roe v. Wade and allowed states to pass whatever abortion restrictions they liked. When, shortly after that, such views were no longer politically safe for a Democratic politician, Biden became more squishy on the issues, arguing that while he believed abortion to be wrong, he wouldn't use the power of the state to curtail it. Still, as Jeannie Rosoff of Planned Parenthood told the Wall Street Journal in 1986, "Joe Biden moans a lot and then usually votes against us." In the decades that followed, Biden continued supporting anti-abortion legislation and declining to support many pro-choice efforts to secure reproductive rights, a history detailed by Branko Marcetic in Jacobin.
[6] During the Sunday debate, Bernie Sanders pointed out he has a 100% lifetime voting rating from the National Abortion Rights Action League. In a crude effort at misdirection, Biden huffed, "I've gotten a 100% rating from NARAL as well."
Sanders didn't let that go unchallenged. "Excuse me, you have a lifetime 100% voting record from NARAL?"
Biden backed off: "I know my record of late from NARAL has been 100%. I don’t know whether it was 25 years ago."
Biden's NARAL ratings are all over the board, reflecting his ever-changing positions on abortion. Patrick Caldwell, writing in Mother Jones:
"Biden might claim that he doesn’t let his own religious views affect his policy positions, but his record in the Senate tells a slightly different story. During the 1990s and 2000s, Biden received hit-and-miss marks from abortion rights groups that scored congressional votes. NARAL Pro-Choice America often granted him perfect scores for his votes in the mid- and late 2000s. But there were several years when Biden received abysmal marks from the reproductive rights advocacy group. In 2003, he got a 36 percent rating (on a scale from 0, for total disagreement, to 100, for complete alignment). He struggled throughout the 1990s as well, getting a 43 percent score in 1996, a 34 percent score in 1997, and a 46 percent score in 1999. NARAL wasn’t alone in taking issue with Biden’s voting record. Planned Parenthood Action Fund also gave Biden less-than-perfect scores, including a 58 percent average between 1993 and 1998."[7] In July, Michael Brooks showed a clip of Biden backing away from the TPP and juxtaposed it with video from his Vice Presidency in which he'd been relentlessly praising it.
[8] Sanders pointed to the obvious idiocy of Biden's present posture of praising Warren's efforts to reverse Biden's own work.
"Well, this is kind of circular logic. We’re going to reform the bill that I voted for. Well, if you hadn’t voted for it, and if you rallied other people as I tried to do in the House voting against it, we might not have the problems with it we have today."[9] The day of his one-on-one debate with Sanders, he also embraced a truncated version of Sanders' plan for tuition-free higher education at public colleges and universities.
