Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020

With now 20 candidates for the Democrat 2020 presidential nomination, the obsession of Democrats ought to be determining which candidate can beat Donald Trump.  All else should pale in comparison  and Democrats should avoid repeating past mistakes.  They need a candidate that can generate excitement and not just among their fraction of the party base that border on cultist for that 

candidate.  Rightly or wrongly, Trump generated excitement among the white supremacists, Christian extremists, and those who wanted to blow up the system.  Excitement is what gets voters to the polls.  A winning candidate also needs to be free from as much baggage as possible that drag the candidate down or turn off critical elements of the voter base.  A lengthy piece in Vox makes the case that if Joe Biden is the 2020 nominee, Democrats will be making the same mistake they made in 2016 by nominating Hillary Clinton.  This go round, there are more candidates to choose from and Democrats need to think long and hard about the most important question: who can beat Trump. A candidate's perfection on every policy issue matters matters far less since, if the candidate cannot win, their policy issues are meaningless. Here are article highlights which too me, are on point:

To a certain kind of Democratic Party establishmentarian, Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because she was not “likable” enough — a sentiment that may or may not be thinly veiled code for saying that she’s a woman. Their solution in 2020 is good old Joe Biden.

Biden, on the likability frame, is the opposite of Clinton — a back-slapping pol man who enjoys shooting the breeze with reporters. But the reality is Clinton was plenty likable at key moments in her career. Most notably, one of the main reasons the Democratic Party rallied around her so hard in 2014-’15 is that when she was secretary of state, her approval ratings were far higher than Barack Obama’s, and she was an in-demand midterms surrogate even in states where he was toxic.

Biden, meanwhile, was not especially popular as vice president during Obama’s first six years in office and only saw his numbers rise as he appeared to step out of the electoral arena — swapping places with Clinton as the kind of generic Famous Democrat Who Isn’t Running.

What brought Clinton down was public exposure not to her personality — which was sparkling enough to make her the most admired woman in America for 17 years straight before losing the claim to Michelle Obama in 2018 — but extended public scrutiny of every detail of a decades-long career in public life. This, in turn, is the exact same problem Biden will inevitably face as a presidential candidate. Americans like outsiders and fresh faces, not veteran insiders who bear the scars of every political controversy of the past two generations.

Mainstream Democrats like other mainstream Democrats. But what it means to be a mainstream Democrat has changed significantly since Biden entered the Senate 46 years ago. As Democrats gear up to take on Trump, the party’s best shot is to do anything possible to avoid repeating the 2016 experience of defending decades’ worth of twists and turns on various issues from the Iraq War to LGBTQ rights to banking deregulation.

In 2008, Democrats responded to the evident unpopularity and failure of the 2003 war in Iraq in the sensible way — by nominating someone who'd spoken out against the war when he had a chance. . . . yet Democrats chose to saddle themselves with a nominee who’d been a prominent advocate for it.

[A] well-known Iraq War supporter who, unlike Trump, was actually in the Senate at the time was very poorly positioned to argue against him. And by 2020, there’s simply no reason to do that again. Most of the party’s bench consists of people like Sens. Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, who are young enough not to have participated in the war debate in Congress.

[W]hat’s Biden’s excuse? He was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time — the guy with privileged access to top officials in the American government and around the world. The guy who, though he surely couldn’t have stopped Bush’s folly, certainly could have warned about it.

Foreign policy experience theoretically should be a big Biden advantage over his rivals. But in reality, on one of the only foreign policy controversies voters actually paid attention to or remember, Biden got it wrong in a big way.

[S]ince the founding generation passed away, voters have tended not to want to put veteran politicians in the White House. With only a handful of exceptions, the voters choose to elevate an “outsider” who’s going to “fix the mess in Washington” (or drain the swamp) rather than an inside player who’s mastered the system.

Candidates don’t get credit with voters for mastering Washington. Instead, they end up on defense, defending political decisions that don’t look great in hindsight.

Another major problem for Clinton that emerged over the course of the campaign related to her paid speeches for major banks during the brief window between her service as secretary of state and running for president.

Biden is in no better a position. He spent his whole career in the Senate representing Delaware, a major center of the consumer credit side of the banking industry. He was so close to the local banking giant that he was jokingly referred to as “the senator from MBNA” (which has since been bought by Bank of America).

This made him, among other things, a champion of mostly GOP-supported legislation in 2005 whose aim was to make it more difficult for hard-pressed families to discharge their credit card debt in bankruptcy. . . . Clinton was unusually tight with Wall Street for a Democrat because she represented New York in the Senate, and bankers were her dairy farmers and cheesemakers.

But “I just happen to represent a state whose local business interests are unusually evil” is a terrible public-facing argument (which, of course, is why Clinton didn’t make it). The reality is that very little about Biden’s career is extraordinary. But this, again, is precisely why the voters tend not to choose congressional veterans — people hate business as usual in Washington and want to elect leaders who’ll change the game, not play by the rules.

Biden looks bad in hindsight on a lot of issues.  Marriage equality is in some respects the best example. If you trace the long arc of the Democratic Party’s slow, steady embrace of LGBTQ equality as a cause, then Biden is clearly right there on the journey with everyone else. At a critical moment, he actually led the stampede, as the first Obama administration official to openly embrace marriage equality during the great Obama flip-flop of 2012.

But back in 1996, as a senator, he voted for the viciously discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act. This was, at the time, a totally unremarkable vote — virtually everyone in Congress voted for it.

Biden has, in recent years, been a champion of criminal justice reform just like most Democrats. But in earlier years, when most Democrats were “tough on crime” drug warriors, Biden was a “tough on crime” drug warrior who as a senior member of the Judiciary Committee authored a number of harsh anti-drug laws.

It would be a mistake to see him as some kind of carceral maniac, warmonger, or anti-gay bigot — he was a normal Democrat who had normal Democratic Party positions on a variety of issues over time. But while that extreme normality appeals to party regulars, just as Hillary Clinton appealed to them, the sheer duration of normality means you end up flip-flopping or getting behind the curve in a way that a younger politician wouldn't. And then there are some unique home-state issues.

Had Biden not opted to run, he’d have gone down in history as a senator who was very well-liked by his colleagues and the press, and who served as the popular vice president for one of the most influential presidents of all time. . . . But as a candidate, he’s much too big a fish to be ignored by his rivals, and they’ll have to tear him down.

Some of that will be policy-based, but some of it will probably be personal. Biden has followed Clinton’s footsteps in doing paid speaking gigs while also harboring presidential ambitions — an error that proved costly for her and will likely prove costly for him if it ends up under the microscope. , , , especially because Biden himself can’t seem to decide what he thinks about his handling of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings — alternately apologizing for having mishandled things and griping that it’s unfair for Anita Hill to blame him.

Add it all up and you get a negative portrait of Joe Biden — the buckraker who failed to protect a sexual harassment victim and spent the aughts boosting the Iraq War and bank deregulation after fueling mass incarceration and anti-gay discrimination in the 1980s and ’90s.

Times change, and the 2020 presidential campaign will be waged in this moment. And Democrats deserve a nominee who can either plausibly claim to have been prescient on the big changes that have swept progressive politics or is new enough to elective office to simply be of the current moment.

Joe Biden Isn’t the Answer

As noted before, so far I have not decided on the Democrat presidential nominee contender that I support.  Rather, it continues to be a case of who I do not support: Sanders, Harris, Warren, Castro . . .and others to be identified.  Joe Biden - who still has not announced - will likely be added to that list largely because (i) I see him as too old, (ii) I worry about his elect-ability, and (iii) he has a lot of baggage that we can count on being dredged up and thrown his way should he be the nominee. Baggage that could significantly quell much needed enthusiasm to ensure anti-Trump voters actually go to the polls and cast their votes. A long piece in New York Magazine looks at some of this baggage and suggest how problematical it could be when  high turnout will be crucial from every element of the Democrat base.  Here are excerpts:

It’s still three months before the first Democratic debate, nearly a year before Super Tuesday, and he hasn’t even declared yet, but poll after presidential poll continues to show 76-year-old former vice-president Joe Biden leading an enormous, diverse, and talented Democratic field.

It’s almost poetically appropriate. . . . . He is the gaffe-master, the affable fuck-up, and also, oddly, the politician who’s supposed to make us feel safe. He is the amiable, easygoing, handsy-but-harmless guy who’s never going to give you a hard time about your own handsiness or prejudice, who’s gonna make a folksy argument about enacting fundamentally restrictive policies.

For his whole career, Biden’s role has been to comfort the lost, prized, and most fondly imagined Democratic voter, the one who’s like him: that guy in the diner, that guy in Ohio, that guy who’s white and so put off by the changed terms of gendered and racial power in this country that decades ago he fled for the party that was working to roll back the social advancements that had robbed him of his easy hold on power. That guy who believed that the system worked best when it worked for him.

Biden is the Democrats’ answer to the hunger to “make America great again,” dressed up in liberal clothes. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has in fact argued that Biden’s racial politics have offered a form of Trumpism on the left, a “liberal cover to white backlash.” To that I would add, he has provided liberal cover to anti-feminist backlash, the kind of old-fashioned paternalism of powerful men who don’t take women’s claims to their reproductive, professional, or political autonomy particularly seriously, who walk through the world with a casual assurance that men’s access to and authority over women’s bodies is natural.

Now it seems, That Guy is widely viewed as the best and safest candidate to get us out of this perilous and scary political period. But the irony is that so much of what is terrifying and dangerous about this time — the Trump administration, the ever more aggressive erosion of voting and reproductive rights, the crisis in criminal justice and yawning economic chasm between the rich and everyone else — are in fact problems that can in part be laid at the feet of Joe Biden himself, and the guys we’ve regularly been assured are Democrats’ only answer.

Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, 18 years after Brown v. Board of Education, less than a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and just three years after the Supreme Court case Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education would actually force many schools to fulfill the promise of integration put forth by Brown. Biden took office less than three weeks before Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court and a couple of years before the term “sexual harassment” would be coined by Lin Farley.

The right, meanwhile, was sucking strength from a backlash against disruptive social movements, growing fat and drunk on the language of piety and family values that would undergird its ultraconservative defense of the old power structures, self-righteously fueling up for the Reagan era. Republicans had, for the foreseeable future, won white men — America’s original citizens, the ones around whom our narratives and priorities are calibrated.

Rather than lean into an energetic defense of the values of liberty, equality, and inclusion that might define their role against the racist and anti-feminist backlash of the era, the Democratic Party appeared anxious to distance itself from being the feminized “mommy party,” and shunt to the side — rather than vigorously advocate for — the priorities of women, especially poor women, and people of color.

The party continued to be represented and led by mostly white men. And while officially Democrats remained on the progressive side, supporting reproductive rights, civil rights, and affirmative action, a contingent of Those Guys, Joe Biden notable among them, made folksy rationalizations for abrogating, rather than expanding and more fiercely protecting, new rights and protections.

A young Joe Biden was reliably anti-abortion, claiming that Roe v. Wade “went too far” and that he did not believe that “a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” He voted consistently for the Hyde Amendment, the 1976 legislative rider which forbid government-funded insurance programs from paying for abortion, making abortion all but inaccessible to poor people. In 1981, he proposed the “Biden Amendment,” prohibiting foreign aid to be used in any biomedical research related to abortion. The next year, he supported Jesse Helms’s amendment barring foreign NGOs receiving United States aid from using that aid to perform abortion.

Over the decades, Biden has evolved on the issue, yet into the 1990s and 2000s, he voted for the so-called “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.” And he regularly declined to fully support the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have banned the wide variety of oppressive state restrictions on abortion. . . . Even in the years since he has officially become pro-choice, he’s retained the sensibility first reflected in his comments about how women shouldn’t be wholly in charge of their own decisions . . .

Biden wasn’t simply a comforter of patriarchal impulses toward controlling women’s bodies. Though he campaigned in 1972 as a strong supporter of civil rights, and initially voted in favor of school busing legislation intended to integrate schools in both the North and South, Biden changed his tune a couple of years into his Senate tenure. Faced with angry pressure from white constituents rearing back from integration measures that would mean busing white children into black neighborhoods, Biden previewed his anti-abortion agreement with Republican Jesse Helms by siding with him on anti-busing measures, calling the approach to school integration “a bankrupt concept” and “asinine policy.” Biden’s anti-busing stance offered an out for his Democratic colleagues, several of whom also turned on busing, helping to defeat the legislation.

In later decades, Biden’s legislative efforts reinforced other kinds of racial disparities. In 1988, he co-sponsored legislation that enacted mandatory-minimum sentences for drug possession, including higher sentences for those in possession of crack over powder cocaine, a ruling that specifically targeted poorer African-American and Latino populations, while letting wealthier white drug users off the hook.

But even those constituents — those guys in diners, worried about jobs and mounting debt — haven’t always been served by him. Biden, the senator from Delaware, where many credit card companies and banks are incorporated, has long advocated on behalf of those financial entities. This is one of the ironies of his role as blue-collar Everyman; that guy is regularly screwed by the very companies Biden represents. As beneficiary of enormous campaign donations from his home state’s financial behemoth MBNA, in 1999 Biden voted to repeal Glass-Steagall legislation that, since 1933, had separated commercial and investment banking, paving the way for the financial crisis. Biden was one of a handful of Democrats to oppose a measure that would have required credit card companies to warn consumers of the risks of only paying the minimum due on their credit card bills and worked against legislation that would have increased protections for those whose debts mounted thanks to medical bills and for those in the military.

Then, of course, there was his stewardship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which hit its infamous nadir with the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. . . . Perhaps most crucially, he declined to call any of the three women — Rose Jourdain, Angela Wright, and Sukari Hardnett — who were willing to testify about their own experiences of Thomas’s inappropriate behavior, and thereby corroborate Hill’s claims.

In talking to the Washington Post the year after those hearings, Biden would offer up a pretty good description of the forces that have shaped the political universe, and his role in it, through his decades in political life. “That last hearing was not about Clarence Thomas, it was not about Anita Hill,” he told E.J. Dionne. “It was about a massive power struggle going on in this country, a power struggle between women and men, and a power struggle between minorities and the majority, and it’s a reflection of the schizophrenic personality of the American public now with regard to both those issues, feminism and race.”

Biden is correct that these have been the major power struggles. What he seems less willing to admit is that over and over again, he has been on the wrong side of them.

To be fair to Biden, that is not the whole story of his political career. Because, yes, he has done good and progressive things as well. He has, in many ways, truly “evolved.” . . . As vice-president, Biden famously became an engaged supporter of gay marriage. He has worked to extend the Voting Rights Act and amendments to the Fair Housing Act. In 2010, he supported a bill that reduced those sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine. He has voiced some support for $15 minimum-wage measures and has said that the vote he regrets most was the one to repeal Glass-Steagall legislation.

His great feminist achievement was the Violence Against Women Act, a crucial piece of legislation that Republicans remain eager to let lapse, and which is understood in many circles to have been a form of repentance for Biden’s horrifying failures regarding Anita Hill’s testimony.

Biden has managed to squeak out some mild expressions of regret for the impact of the crime bill and his role in the Hill hearings. But most of them feel empty, as if he is unwilling to acknowledge the active role he actually played.

But his remarks about Hill and his failure to account for his own shortcomings during her testimony — his unwillingness to take issues of harassment seriously, despite his work with “It’s On Us” — are only amplified by his actual behavior toward women. This week, Lucy Flores has written about the discomfort that she experienced when Biden touched her oddly before joining her onstage at a political event, days before the 2014 Nevada election in which she was running for lieutenant governor.

To some degree, the appeal of Biden makes sense. Disruption of social order is scary, eruptive, discombobulating. Middle-of-the-road white men feel safe to a country that was built by and around them. But the lasting power of a politician like Biden shows what happens when a period of reflexive comfort stands for too long. Because when you behave as if your party isn’t actually committed to fighting on the side of the disenfranchised, you don’t fight on the side of the disenfranchised.

[A] Supreme Court and decades of federal legislation shaped in part by Joe Biden and his party have managed to reverse many of the achievements of the 20th century’s most transformative social movements: the very achievements that had provoked the kind of backlash that politicians like Joe Biden were put in place to quell.

Very often, we are told — by people on television and in political media, perhaps by the people in our social circle and our families — that Joe Biden is the only way that Democrats can win in 2020. It’s a version of what we have been told over and over and over again for 50 years. But when I look at these last decades, I don’t actually see how much we’ve won with a party run by Those Guys. I see how much we’ve lost.

Kavanaugh’s Accuser is Credible. Will it Matter?

When the tape of Donald Trump with Billy Bush hit the airwaves, Trump dismissed it all as "locker room talk" and waved off the reality that he is a serial molester of more than a dozen and a half women who have called him out.  Now, we have Brett Kavanaugh - did Trump select him not only for his views that make a occupant of the White House a near king or also because of his anti-women views? - who, if his accuser is to be believed, views sexual assault as an instance of "boys will be boys."  More frighteningly, so do almost a dozen male Republican members of the U.S. Senate.  Sadly, it is all part and parcel of the hyper "macho" mentality of far too many straight males who feel that abusive behavior towards women - and gays - somehow proves their masculinity.  Columns in both the New York Times and the Washington Post (naturally, authored by women) look at this pathetic state of affairs and the toxicity of Trump/Kavanaugh masculinity and Republican enabling of the reprehensible.  First, excerpts from the Times piece: 

Obviously, I believe Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who says that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school while his friend Mark Judge watched and, at moments, egged him on. I believe her when she says that Kavanaugh, who she says was drunk, held her down, covered her mouth when she tried to scream, and ground against her while attempting to pull her clothes off. I believe her when she says this incident haunted her all her life.

There’s rarely hard evidence in a case like this, but Blasey — the surname she prefers to use publicly — has done everything possible to substantiate her claim. Speaking to The Washington Post, she produced notes from a therapist she saw in 2012, whom she’d told about being attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who grew up to become “high-ranking members of society in Washington.” According to her husband, that year she identified Kavanaugh to him by name. When Kavanaugh appeared on a shortlist of potential Supreme Court picks — but before his nomination had been announced — Blasey contacted both The Post and her member of Congress, Anna G. Eshoo of California. By all indications, she wanted to head his nomination off without being forced into the spotlight.

Blasey passed a polygraph administered by a former F.B.I. agent. The utility of polygraphs is dubious, but her willingness to take one is evidence of her sincerity. According to Axios, some Republicans wanted to call on Blasey to testify publicly, assuming she’d decline. But on Monday morning, Blasey’s lawyer, Debra Katz, said that her client is willing to appear before Congress.

Kavanaugh denies the allegation unequivocally; on Monday he said he’s willing to rebut it before the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Judge, who wrote a memoir of his teenage alcoholism, has veered between denying the incident and saying he doesn’t recall it.) But it’s a sign of how credible Blasey seems that, since this story broke, much of the public debate has been less about whether her accusations are true than whether they are relevant.

Some conservatives — though not just conservatives — insist that it is unfair to judge a middle-aged man for things he did as a kid. . . . Such arguments would be more convincing if people on the right weren’t so selective in their indulgence. Donald Trump called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who were 14 to 16 years old when they were arrested. (They’ve since been proven innocent.) Children are regularly put on sex offender registries, sometimes for their entire lives, for conduct less serious than what Kavanaugh is accused of.

[T]his is no longer just about what Kavanaugh might have done 36 years ago. We need to determine, as best we can, if he’s lying now. . . . . Senators should also demand that Kavanaugh’s old friend Judge, who grew up to become a right-wing writer, testify, though Kavanaugh would surely prefer other character witnesses.

Anyone Trump nominates is going to threaten Roe v. Wade. Kavanaugh would at least make plain the power dynamics behind forced pregnancy. We would lose Roe because a president who boasted of sexual assault, elected against the wishes of the majority of female voters, was able to give a lifetime Supreme Court appointment to an ex-frat boy credibly accused of attempted rape. Kavanaugh, helped by an all-male Republican caucus on the Judiciary Committee, would join Clarence Thomas, whose confirmation hearing helped make the phrase “sexual harassment” a household term. They and three other men would likely vote against the court’s three women. The brute imposition of patriarchy would be undeniable.

If the Kavanaugh nomination goes forward, it’s because Trump and his allies believe that a certain class of men accused of sexual assault deserve impunity. The question now is whether any Republican senators believe otherwise.

All, very much on point in my opinion.  The column in the Post while satirical, is also very much on point.  Here are highlights:

“If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.” — A lawyer close to the White House, speaking to Politico.

If, apparently, a single alleged assault at a single party decades ago is to be frowned upon, then no man is safe, right?   . . . How are we going to fill our offices if this is the new rule? I bet you will say I cannot shout at women as they pass on the street before dragging them to a concrete bunker and then still expect to become governor! What next? I’m supposed to make sure everyone I have sex with is willing? If suddenly, as a country, we decide that violently attempting to assault someone is, like, bad, then that knocks out 98, maybe 99 percent of men, just going off the locker-room talk I’ve heard. . . . You’re telling me I am supposed to encounter dozens, hundreds, thousands of women in my life, some drunk and some sober and some with really good legs and just … not assault any of them?

I mean, it’s not as though they’re people, are they? At the moment of conception, yes, but then they come out Daughters, not people! They grow into objects; some become Wives or Mothers, others Hags or Crones. Then they die! If they were people, we would not expect dominion over their bodies, surely; if they were people, we would not feel entitled to their smiles. If they were people, I could read a novel with a female protagonist and not be instantly confused and alarmed.

No. They are an unintelligible something else. . . . . It would just be too terrible if they were people. Then you could not harm them with impunity. Then if you made a mistake (Boys will be boys), you would have harmed a person. Then something else would be at stake in addition to your career, and that cannot be.

If boys cannot be boys, then how can boys be men who rise to the highest offices in the land? If this stops being something you can get away with, then will anyone still be above the law?  Every man should be worried.

Sadly, the column highlights the mindset certainly of Trump and, now it seems far to many Senate Republicans.  It is a mindset that ought to disgust moral, decent people.  I hope women are paying attention and that they correctly direct their wrath at Republicans come the November midterm elections.