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.

Break Up the Big Banks

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It is rare nowadays that I agree with George Will on much of anything.  The man has become almost as nutty as today's Republican Party for which he typically acts as an apologist.  But in a column today in the Washington Post he talks about an issue where in my view he is directly on point:  it is time to break up the big banks who have been given a "too big to fail" status and all kinds of special privileges but have not been held to any increased accountability or responsibility.  Dealing with some of these banks on behalf of clients regularly the picture that emerges is one of arrogance, incompetence, and an utter unwillingness to work with even meritorious customers - despite receiving huge bailout sums themselves that were intended to flow down to borrowers and customers.  Here are highlights from Will's column:

If in four weeks a president-elect Mitt Romney is seeking a Treasury secretary, he should look here, to Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Candidate Romney can enhance his chance of having this choice to make by embracing a simple proposition from Fisher: Systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs), meaning too-big-to-fail (TBTF) banks, are “too dangerous to permit.”

The problems posed by “supersized and hypercomplex banks” may, Fisher says, require anti-obesity policies equivalent to “irreversible lap-band or gastric bypass surgery.” The land of TBTFs is “a perverse financial Lake Wobegon” where all crises are “exceptional,” justifying “unique” solutions that are the same — meaning bailouts. This incurs “the wrath of ordinary citizens and smaller entities that resent this favorable treatment, and we plant the seeds of social unrest.” 

Endorsing the axiom (attributed to Napoleon) that one should “never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence,” Fisher says that TBTF banks “are sprawling and complex — so vast that their own management teams may not fully understand their own risk exposures, providing fertile ground for unintended ‘incompetence.’ ” 

Fisher’s rejoinder to those who impute “economies of scale” to such banks is that there also are “diseconomies of scale.” Fisher, among many others, believes the component parts of the biggest banks would be “worth more broken up than as a whole.”

“For all its bluster, Dodd-Frank leaves TBTF entrenched. . . . In fact, the financial crisis increased concentration because some TBTF institutions acquired the assets of other troubled TBTF institutions. The TBTF survivors of the financial crisis look a lot like they did in 2008. They maintain corporate cultures based on the short-term incentives of fees and bonuses derived from increased oligopoly power.”

Capitalism — which is, as Milton Friedman tirelessly insisted, a profit and loss system — is subverted by TBTF, which socializes losses while leaving profits private. And which enhances the profits of those whose losses it socializes. TBTF is a double moral disaster: It creates moral hazard by encouraging risky behavior, and it delegitimizes capitalism by validating public cynicism about its risk-reward ratios.

It is inexplicable politics and regrettable policy that Romney has, so far, flinched from a forthright endorsement of breaking up the biggest banks.

Vatican Calls for Global Economic Authority and Condemns " Idolatry of the Market"

I will be the first to admit that I rarely agree with anything emanating from the bitter old queens in dresses at the Vatican who all too often turn Christ's Gospel message upside down in their quest for power, control, and most importantly money. But I guess once in a while even such people get something right. Hence the Vatican's condemnation of the cult of free market controls which often morphs into a struggle of the survival of the fittest (or most greedy) with the vast majority suffering in poverty and varying levels of neglect as the amoral and greedy waltz away with most of the profits and resources. The interesting thing to watch will be to see how this new Vatican announcement plays with the Christian Right adherents of the prosperity Gospel and the Tea Party crowd who would throw most citizens to the wolves as they hoard money and possessions for themselves. Candidly, nothing would please me more than to see a rift develop between conservative Catholics and the greedy hate merchants of the Christian Right and GOP. Reuters looks at this in some ways surprising development. Here are some highlights:

The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn.

“Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions. “The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” it said.

It condemned what it called “the idolatry of the market” as well as a “neo-liberal thinking” that it said looked exclusively at technical solutions to economic problems. “In fact, the crisis has revealed behaviours like selfishness, collective greed and hoarding of goods on a great scale,” it said, adding that world economics needed an “ethic of solidarity” among rich and poor nations.

“If no solutions are found to the various forms of injustice, the negative effects that will follow on the social, political and economic level will be destined to create a climate of growing hostility and even violence, and ultimately undermine the very foundations of democratic institutions, even the ones considered most solid,” it said.

It called for the establishment of “a supranational authority” with worldwide scope and “universal jurisdiction” to guide economic policies and decisions.

Asked at a news conference if the document could become a manifesto for the movement of the “indignant ones”, who have criticised global economic policies, Cardinal Peter Turkson, head of the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department, said: “The people on Wall Street need to sit down and go through a process of discernment and see whether their role managing the finances of the world is actually serving the interests of humanity and the common good. “We are calling for all these bodies and organisations to sit down and do a little bit of re-thinking.”

After the Massachusetts Massacre

Frank Rich has a column in today's New York Times that looks at the mess confronting Barack Obama and the national Democrats - a mess, in my view, largely of their own making given their inability to control the political debate and utter unwillingness to deliver the change promised during the 2008 campaign. While many things can happen between now and November, 2010, and November, 2012, if team Obama and the Democrats do not get their shit together NOW, Obama could well be a one term president unless the GOP nominates a total nutcase as his opponent (e.g., Sarah Palin or someone equally unhinged). Here are highlights from Rich's column:

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Tuesday’s special election was a dire omen for this White House. If the administration sticks to this trajectory, all bets are off for the political future of a president who rode into office blessed with more high hopes, good will and serious promise than any in modern memory. It’s time for him to stop deluding himself. Yes, last week’s political obituaries were ludicrously premature. Obama’s 50-ish percent first-anniversary approval rating matches not just Carter’s but Reagan’s. (Bushes 41 and 43 both skyrocketed in Year One.) Still, minor adjustments can’t right what’s wrong.
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Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.
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It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards — with ever-rising fees.
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Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere — frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”
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Worse, the master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery — or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain.
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It’s too late to rewrite that history, but it may not be too late for White House decisiveness. Whatever happens now — good, bad or ugly — must happen fast. Each day Washington spends dickering over health care is another day lost while the election-year economy, stupid, remains intractable for Americans who are suffering. On the economic front, Obama needs both stylistic and substantive makeovers.
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The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses. This means taking on bankers who were among the Obama campaign’s biggest backers and whose lobbyists have castrated regulatory reform by buying off congressmen of both parties.
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Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Kennedy,” reporters were left “literally gasping.” The young president called out big steel for threatening “economic recovery and stability” while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”
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Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.

New Homes Sales and Construction Fall to 25 year Low

Today's Virginian Pilot looks at the abysmal state of real estate in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia - an area that by many reports is relatively "stable" compared to housing markets in areas such as Florida, California, Arizona and Nevada, and where unemployment and job losses are not as severe as the national average. What's driving this trend? In my view it's very simple. The banks and financial houses that were bailed out with taxpayer money are not lending (even as obscene bonuses are being paid out to many of their personnel). Other than lower end homes - i.e., homes typically under $200,000 being purchased by first time home buyers - people cannot get mortgage financing. And as the price tag of homes goes up, so does the difficulty in securing financing. Indeed, the only larger loans we are seeing are refinances where the owners have huge amounts of equity. Things are equally bad in the commercial lending realm. Unless and until Obama and Congress get banks lending again, the economy will never recover. Here are some story highlights:

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New-home construction and sales in Hampton Roads last year fell to their lowest point in more than two decades despite a tax credit for first-time home-buyers and record low interest rates, according to a report released today.
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A similar trend was seen across the country. The number of building permits issued in 2009 fell 37 percent, according to figures released this week by the U.S. Commerce Department.
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The report also showed that less expensive new homes dominated the market. About 70 percent of the single-family detached homes sold in Hampton Roads last year cost less than $400,000.
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The Dragas Cos., which specializes in less expensive homes, led the region, selling 233 homes for $51 million in revenue. The company also led the region in sales in 2008. Helen E. Dragas, president and CEO of the builder, said in an e-mail that the market for homes costing less than $200,000 is likely to remain strong this year.
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Housing powers a huge portion of the economy and until it revives, expect the recession to continue. Also, expect home prices to fall, leaving more borrowers "upside down" and owing more than they can sell their homes for in today's market.

Another Retrospective on Today's GOP

While it still unclear whether the Obama stimulus plan will be enough to pull the economy out of its nosedive - Martin Wolf at the Financial Times laments that the plan is not large enough and will not get enough money into the economy quickly enough (listening to him today on CNN, I suspect that he may be right given the increasingly huge drops in private sector spending ) - one thing that is clear is that the GOP seems totally out of touch with reality. Indeed, the Party's main fixation appears to be political games and stunts that excite the Lunatic GOP base which has no concept of economic issues and remains focused on God, guns, abortion and gay bashing. Frank Rich has a great column that looks at the increasingly marginalized GOP. Here are some highlights:

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The good news for Obama is that he needn’t worry about the Republicans. They’re committing suicide. The morning-after conservative rationalization of Jindal’s flop was that his adenoidal delivery, not his words, did him in, and that media coaching could banish his resemblance to Kenneth the Page of “30 Rock.” That’s denial. For Jindal no less than Obama, form followed content.

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The Louisiana governor, alternately smug and jejune, articulated precisely the ideology — those G.O.P. “policies” in the Times/CBS poll — that Americans reject: the conviction that government is useless and has no role in an emergency. Given that the most mismanaged federal operation in modern memory was inflicted by a Republican White House on Jindal’s own state, you’d think he’d change the subject altogether.

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But like all zealots, Jindal is oblivious to how nonzealots see him. Pleading “principle,” he has actually turned down some $100 million in stimulus money for Louisiana. And, as he proudly explained on “Meet the Press” last weekend, he can’t wait to be judged on “the results” of his heroic frugality. Good luck with that. He’s rejecting aid for a state that ranks fourth in children living below the poverty line and 46th in high school graduation rates, while struggling with a projected budget shortfall of more than $1.7 billion.

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If you’re baffled why the G.O.P. would thrust Jindal into prime time, the answer is desperation. Eager to update its image without changing its antediluvian (or antebellum) substance, the party is trying to lock down its white country-club blowhards. . . . What such G.O.P. “stars” as Sanford and Jindal have in common, besides their callous neo-Hoover ideology, are their phony efforts to portray themselves as populist heroes. Their role model is W., that brush-clearing “rancher” by way of Andover, Yale and Harvard.

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Rich, however, also notes that the GOP's self-destruction does not guarant Obama success in and of itself. The nation has great hopes in him and he must find a way to deliver. In doing so, I hope he will ignore the far right, abandon "bipartisanship" and be more bold in his programs. Here are Rich's further remarks:

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But that good news for Obama is countered by the bad. The genuine populist rage in the country — aimed at greedy C.E.O.’s, not at the busted homeowners mocked as “losers” by Santelli — cannot be ignored or finessed. . . . Therein lies the Catch-22 that could bring the recovery down. As Obama said, we can’t move forward without a functioning financial system. But voters of both parties will demand that their congressmen reject another costly rescue of it.

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Handing more public money to the reckless banks that invented this culture and stuck us with the wreckage is the new third rail of American politics. If Obama doesn’t forge a better plan, neither his immense popularity nor even political foes as laughable as Jindal can insulate him from getting burned.