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.
