Backward With Biden!

Posted Friday, August 23, 2019.

“The Future’s back there somewhere”: Joe Biden with Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris at the Democratic primary debate in Miami, June 27, 2019. Photo by Jim Watson AFP/Getty via Truthout, Vanity Fair, and NBC News.

Joe woulda won.

I think Bernie mighta won. I’m not convinced he woulda. But he coulda. Warren mighta too.

But Joe woulda.

If…

Buncha ifs. The big if being, of course, if he’d have run. Which means if Beau hadn’t died.

Another if: If Obama was truly in his corner. 

We’ll have to wait for the books and the memoirs.  As of now the two best books I’ve read about how Obama’s White House worked are “The World As It Is” by Ben Rhodes and “From Cold War to Hot Peace” by Michael McFaul. Rhodes was President Obama’s deputy national security advisor and senior speechwriter for foreign policy. McFaul was on the National Security Council and then served as ambassador to Russia. Rhodes’ book is more of a memoir of a working friendship---his and Obama’s---and centers around scenes of the President presidenting on matters of foriegn policy. McFaul’s book is an analytical chronicle of how we got here with or foreign policy in shambles and the current occupant of the White House Vladimir Putin’s sycophant and stooge. Neither book has much to say about Biden. Because of their specialties and the nature of their jobs, neither Rhodes nor McFaul worked with him closely or, apparently, saw much of him. Rhodes’ accounts of his dealings with him are admiring but distant and brief. McFaul seems to have been more intimately acquainted with him and writes about him with more warmth and affection. But since neither one had much to do with domestic politics and that’s what Biden was there to deal with---his main job was to do the kind of inside the Beltway politicking Obama didn’t have time to do and wasn’t temperamentally cut out for anyway---Biden doesn’t feature prominently in either’s book. He’s seen mostly in passing, showing up in both books when he was directly involved with foreign policy decisions. Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, is more of a presence in both, naturally.

But neither one drops any clues to what Obama was thinking about who he wanted to run in 2016. They might not have any clues to drop. My sense is, from how they write about her and from other things I’ve read, that like just about everyone else he simply took it for granted that Clinton would run and would be the nominee and would win the election. I also have the sense that he saw her as the better president-in-the-making. 

I suspect that even before Beau’s final illness he was subtly discouraging Joe from jumping in. Obama loved Joe but he knew his foibles, flaws, and limitations. 

Like I would know. 

But here’s what I think. Not about what Obama was thinking, but what woulda happened if Joe had run.

Like I said up top, I think he’da won. The nomination and the presidency. I think that if he’d run in 2016 he’d have had a great advantage he doesn’t have now. He’d have been running as Obama’s Vice-President. Democrats---and just about everyone who wasn’t a Republican---were wishing mightily that Obama could have run for a third term. They were wishing it even before Trump came to the fore and were wishing it even harder after he became the presumptive nominee.  I believe that one of Hillary’s “flaws” was Barack Obama. She was running as his successor but I think that hurt her. People looked at her and said, “Well, she’s good but she’s no Barack.” And then a lot of them stayed home. I think people would have looked at Joe and said, “Not Barack, but close enough.”

Now, however, he’s running as someone who was, at one time in the past , vice-president. Vice-president is one item on his long resume. The main thing. But not as relevant a thing.

Joe doesn’t seem to have grasped that time has passed and we’ve moved on. We’ve had to. We don’t want someone who’ll continue Obama’s third term anymore. We want someone who will stop Trump from having a second term and undo the damage he’s done during his first one. Part of undoing the damage will be making them pay for the damage they’ve done---Trump, his corrupt and vicious underlings, his henchmen in Congress, anyone who aided and abetted the conspiracy---conspiracies---and helped in the obstruction. The pressure will be on the Democrats to let bygones-be-bygones again. But people need to go to jail. That will take a prosecutorial helping of fierceness in the next President. This is why I’m leaning toward Kamala. She’s fierce. The fiercest of the lot.

Joe isn’t showing a lot of fierceness lately. He seems to be taking things easy...and for granted. That is when he isn’t taking umbrage. There’s a note of “How dare you!” in his responses to criticism of his record. There also seems to be some eye-blinking “What are you talking about?” He should have prepared himself for this before he announced. He shouldn’t have had to do much preparation. But it’s as if he hasn’t thought about it, and not just in the run up to the campaign. It’s as if he’s never thought about his own record. Sometimes it’s as if he doesn’t even remember his own record. I’d like to think that’s just the career political operator showing himself. Biden is temperamentally a let-bygones-be-bygones type of guy. He thinks that’s a key to his success. Politics is politics. What’s past is past. Let’s all live in harmony to fight another day. He seems to expect people to understand how it works and cut him as much slack as he cuts everybody else. “I did what I had to do,” is his unspoken non-apology. But he doesn’t seem to have thought about whether or not he had to do it or if it was right to have done it. That bothers me. Something else worries me.

That he really doesn’t remember.

I’m not simply suggesting he’s losing it. That is a concern. It’s why I keep saying no more presidents older than me. Even before you hit seventy, the decline can be swift. But even if we’re not talking dementia, your thinking slows down like everything else about you as you age. Your concentration weakens. Your focus blurs. Your mind wanders. Your memory becomes more selective and more full of gaps. Things you remembered vividly the last time you thought of them, which may have been yesterday, are suddenly fuzzy, even beyond recall. I’m worried that if you said the names Anita Hill or James Eastland to him, he’d have to think for a minute to figure out who you were talking about. His moments of querulousness when confronted about his record strike me as irritation with himself at not being able to call something he knows he knows to mind.

Something else happens. You grow nostalgic and sentimental. One of my favorite passages from the works of Joseph Conrad is in the opening paragraph of the story “The Inn of the Two Witches”:

Sixty is not a bad age—unless in perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by the majority of us with mixed feelings. It is a calm age; the game is practically over by then; and standing aside one begins to remember with a certain vividness what a fine fellow one used to be. I have observed that, by an amiable attention of Providence, most people at sixty begin to take a romantic view of themselves. Their very failures exhale a charm of peculiar potency.

I think Joe---Biden not Conrad---has been taking a romantic view of himself and doing a bit too much remembering of what a fine fellow he used to be.

Again, like I would know. These are just my impressions. I might as well be writing fiction.

Lately Joe’s taken to referring to the “Obama-Biden Administration.” His having been Obama’s VP is the basis of his candidacy, the reason he’s ahead in the polls, and why he enjoys so much support from (older) African American voters. You’d expect him to make the most of it. But the “Obama-Biden Administration?” That misrepresents his role as Obama’s Vice-President. He wasn’t a chief advisor on policy and he didn’t play a major part in shaping it. His job was to see it got passed into law. That often meant telling the President what he had to do to get it passed---rethink, revise, make particular deals and compromises, hold his ground here, back of it there---a vital job but not one that justifies calling it the Obama-Biden Administration. Probably it’s just the usual campaign hyperbole. It does presume to a degree that imagine causes Obama to wince with passing annoyance but it’s not an outright fabrication. But can’t helping seeing it as Joe doing that self-romanticizing and remembering what a fine fellow he was. Was.

We don’t need was. We need will, as in will do. Which, like I said, isn’t bring us back to was.

I wrote the other day how I haven’t settled on a candidate yet. Although I’m leaning toward Harris, she’s still among my second choices who, on any given day, change. On many of those days, it’s Joe. Not because I think he’s ‘electable.’ Because I think he’s the one who best understands what a President is and does. Despite my misgivings, I think he’s the one who knows what it takes to be a national political leader.

In the movie “Primary Colors”, when Adrian Lester as the idealistic young aide to Jack Stanton, the Bill Clinton-esque candidate for the Democratic nomination, expresses his doubts about his boss’ moral fitness for the presidency, John Travolta---terrific in the part of Stanton---points to the debate stage where his rivals are taking their places and says, “Do you see another President up there? Because I don’t.” It’s easy to imagine Clinton did a similar cold-eyed assessment of his rivals and came to the same conclusion; that he was the only President on stage. And he would have been correct. I look at our crowd of would-be presidents, finally winnowing itself to a manageable number, and I don’t see a President on stage. I see people who’d make excellent Cabinet Secretaries and Cabinet-level Department Head: Harris as Attorney General; Warren as Secretary of Treasury; Castro as Director of Homeland Security; Inslee as head of the EPA. Booker I think would be a good choice for Warren’s Vice-President. He could be any of their Secretary of Labor. When I look at Buttigieg and O’Rourke I think, “Someday, maybe. But not yet.” Biden looks to me like the closet to a President on stage. So I'd be ok with Joe as the nominee, I guess.

I just wish his campaign slogan wasn't essentially: "FORGET EVERYTHING I DID AS A SENATOR AND DON'T LISTEN TO ANYTHING I SAY NOW AND I'LL LEAD US BACK TO 2008!"

Filed under The Presidential Horserace 2020. Related Mannion Re-run: It's Joe.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post and like what goes on around here and you can swing it, please consider making a donation.  It would be a real help and much appreciated.

You can donate through PayPal using this link or the button below or if your bank offers zelle you can donate that way using my email address, lmannion109 at  yahoo.com.

Comments

[Cathie Fonz (formerly Cathie from Canada)]

2016 was Hillary's year, and millions, particularly women but also black people, would not have forgiven the Democratic Party if Joe had tried to scoop it away from her. He might not have made it, either -- she had a lot of the super delegates wrapped up well in advance, and she was more popular than Joe would have been with many democratic voters. In a three-way primary -- Clinton, Biden and Saunders - I think Hillary likely would have taken it.
One thing that Democrats forget now is that Hillary won the popular vote -- she was not a "poor" candidate at all, she came up short in a few states. And in fact I think Jimmy Carter was right when he said that Russia stole the election for Trump.
I will never understand why Democrats are now so apologetic about Hillary -- they should have been shouting to the rooftops that she won the popular vote. Trump expected the Dems to do this, which is why he tried so hard to punch first, with that idiotic election commission he tried to assemble, and also why he was so afraid of Mueller, too.
I think Joe Biden is going to win the primaries -- his only competition really is Warren, and of course there is a chance she will come from behind, but its more likely that she and Saunders will split the "progressive" vote and neither will pick up enough delegates to challenge Biden at the convention.
Also, so many of the primaries are earlier in 2020 that I don't think there is going to be time for Warren to develop momentum the way Sanders did in 2016. Warren would have to win at least two of the February contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina to have a chance on Super Tuesday, which is now when California votes. I think it is more likely that Biden will win two or three of those contests and he will be unstoppable by then.
I liked his recent ad very much "Biden. President." That says what you were saying, basically, that he is coming across as a president compared to everyone else on the stage. And what he has going for him best now is his basic human decency -- his humanity shines through and nobody cares about his verbal gaffes. The media will likely still pounce on every mis-statement, of course, but if people can get over Trumps constant lies and flubs, they won't be holding Biden to a higher standard.

[Chris the cop]

Forget the politics - Biden's too old. So is Bernie. So is Trump. So was Hillary when she ran. Warren's about my limit age wise.