Evaluating Joe Biden as a Candidate

The Democrats are experiencing the mixed blessing of having a wide range of candidates vying for the presidential nomination.  There are many new faces bringing increased diversity and a leftward shift in policy intentions.  Some observers are concerned that candidates that seem viable in the primaries might be too far left for a general election.  That is a valid concern, but what is the appropriate strategy when the Republican opponents have already moved way far right?  And does a middle of the electorate that could be lost to a left-wing candidate even exist?  Joe Biden is expected to enter the campaign, although as of this writing he has yet to formally announce.  He seems to want to promote himself as the ideal candidate, one who is progressive enough for most Democrats and someone with a record that would suggest he could capture this supposed middle.  Polling suggests he would be a strong candidate among primary voters, but would he really be a good investment for the Democratic voters who seem to be drifting to the left? 

Andrew Cockburn is the Washington, DC editor for Harper’s Magazine.  He delivers not only a “no” to the question of Biden as a candidate, but a definite “Hell No!”  He provided his opinions on Biden in an article for Harper’s titled No Joe!: Joe Biden’s disastrous legislative legacy.  He provided quite the takedown, one that all Democrats should read.

Obama entered the presidency hoping that he would be able to work with the Republicans and presumably selected Biden as his VP because he thought Biden would be an able assistant in that task.  However, the Republicans made it clear that they were never going to collaborate with a Democratic president, particularly a black one.  Obama eventually learned the hard lesson from that experience, but Biden apparently didn’t.  Cockburn provides this perspective.

“Biden has long served as high priest of the doctrine that our legislative problems derive merely from superficial disagreements, rather than fundamental differences over matters of principle. ‘I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart,’ he declared in the Rose Garden in 2015, renouncing a much-anticipated White House run. ‘It’s mean-spirited. It’s petty. And it’s gone on for much too long. I don’t believe, like some do, that it’s naïve to talk to Republicans. I don’t think we should look on Republicans as our enemies’.”

Cockburn presents his view of the Republicans Biden thinks he can consort with.

“…the practitioners of bipartisanship conveniently gloss over the more evident reality: that the system is under sustained assault by an ideology bent on destroying the remnants of the New Deal to the benefit of a greed-driven oligarchy.”

And we must recognize the benefits that bipartisanship has provided in the recent past.  Bipartisanship has meant Democrats like Biden helping Republicans get what they want.

“It was bipartisan accord, after all, that brought us the permanent war economy, the war on drugs, the mass incarceration of black people, 1990s welfare ‘reform,’ Wall Street deregulation and the consequent $16 trillion in bank bailouts, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other atrocities too numerous to mention. If the system is indeed broken, it is because interested parties are doing their best to break it.”

Biden’s bipartisan activities in the past were often aimed at attaining goals that were rather illiberal then and are quite unpopular now.  Consider his contributions to civil rights for African Americans, an area in which he seemed to relish bipartisan legislating with none other than the late Strom Thurmond, a “tireless defender of institutional racism.”

“One such issue, as Branko Marcetic has pitilessly chronicled in Jacobin, was a shared opposition to federally mandated busing in the effort to integrate schools, an opposition Biden predicted would be ultimately adopted by liberal holdouts. ‘The black community justifiably is jittery,’ Biden admitted to the Washington Post in 1975 with regard to his position. ‘I’ve made it—if not respectable—I’ve made it reasonable for longstanding liberals to begin to raise the questions I’ve been the first to raise in the liberal community here on the [Senate] floor’.”

“Biden was responding to criticism of legislation he had introduced that effectively barred the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from compelling communities to bus pupils using federal funds…the Washington Post described Biden’s amendment as ‘denying the possibility for equal educational opportunities to minority youngsters trapped in ill-equipped inner-city schools.’ Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, then the sole African-American senator, called Biden’s measure ‘the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964’.”

Biden did black citizens no favor when he turned his ambitions to the topics of drugs and crime.

“One of his Senate staffers at the time recalls him remarking, ‘Whenever people hear the words ‘drugs’ and ‘crime,’ I want them to think ‘Joe Biden.’ Insisting on anonymity, this former staffer recollected how Biden’s team ‘had to think up excuses for new hearings on drugs and crime every week—any connection, no matter how remote. He wanted cops at every public meeting—you’d have thought he was running for chief of police’.”

The result of this focus was another Strom Thurmond collaboration.

“Together, the pair sponsored the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, among other repressive measures, abolished parole for federal prisoners and cut the amount of time by which sentences could be reduced for good behavior.”

The pair would also collaborate on producing laws that provided much more severe sentences for black users of crack cocaine than white users of powder cocaine, and allowing civil forfeiture of a person’s assets without being charged or convicted of a crime—perhaps the most disgraceful law on our books.

“The bipartisan duo also joined hands to cheerlead the passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and its 1988 follow-on, which cumulatively introduced mandatory sentences for drug possession. Biden later took pride in reminding audiences that ‘through the leadership of Senator Thurmond, and myself, and others,’ Congress had passed a law mandating a five-year sentence, with no parole, for anyone caught with a piece of crack cocaine ‘no bigger than [a] quarter.’ That is, they created the infamous disparity in penalties between those caught with powder cocaine (white people) and those carrying crack (black people). Biden also unblushingly cited his and Thurmond’s leading role in enacting laws allowing for the execution of drug dealers convicted of homicide, and expanding the practice of civil asset forfeiture, law enforcement’s plunder of property belonging to people suspected of crimes, even if they are neither charged nor convicted.”

Biden continued through the Clinton years pushing tough-on-crime legislation that resulted in putting more and more of the Democrats’ most reliable voters into prison.

“Despite pleas from the ­NAACP and the ­ACLU, the 1990s brought no relief from Biden’s crime crusade. He vied with the first Bush Administration to introduce ever more draconian laws, including one proposing to expand the number of offenses for which the death penalty would be permitted to fifty-one. Bill Clinton quickly became a reliable ally upon his 1992 election, and Biden encouraged him to ‘maintain crime as a Democratic initiative’ with suitably tough legislation. The ensuing 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, passed with enthusiastic administration pressure, would consign millions of black Americans to a life behind bars.”

Biden was also culpable as the chair of the committee hearings that led to the replacement of Thurgood Marshall by Clarence Thomas.  In so doing he threw an entire race under the bus.  He could have handled Anita Hill and her accusations against Thomas much differently.

“More damningly, Biden not only allowed fellow committee members to mount a sustained barrage of vicious attacks on Hill: he wrapped up the hearings without calling at least two potential witnesses who could have convincingly corroborated Hill’s testimony and, by extension, indicated that the nominee had perjured himself on a sustained basis throughout the hearings. As Mayer and Abramson write, ‘Hill’s reputation was not foremost among the committee’s worries. The Democrats in general, and Biden in particular, appear to have been far more concerned with their own reputations,’ and feared a Republican-stoked public backlash if they aired more details of Thomas’s sexual proclivities. Hill was therefore thrown to the wolves, and America was saddled with a Supreme Court justice of limited legal qualifications and extreme right-wing views (which he had taken pains to deny while under oath).”

Biden’s history and his effect on the lives of so many potential black voters makes one wonder why he is perceived as a “safer” candidate than some of the younger, more aggressively liberal ones.

It turns out Biden also has a less than admirable record with respect to issues important to another large segment of Democratic voters: women.  He has lacked enthusiasm about Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose.

“Roe v. Wade “went too far,” he told an interviewer in 1974. ‘I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.’ For some years his votes were consistent with that view. He supported the notorious Hyde Amendment prohibiting any and all federal funding for abortions, and fathered the ‘Biden Amendment’ that banned the use of US foreign aid for abortion research.”

Biden has also generated a reputation for hands-on participation in conversations with females.

“’He has a bit of a Me Too problem,’ a leading female Democratic activist and fund-raiser told me, referring to his overly tactile approach to interacting with women. ‘We never had a talk when he wasn’t stroking my back.’ He has already faced heckling on the topic, and videos of this behavior during the course of public events and photo ops have been widely circulated.”

As a senator from Delaware, Biden has always been cognizant of where the power resided in that state.  As an effective tool of banks and credit card companies, many of his most significant legislative actions are inconsistent with his self-proclaimed label of “middle-class Joe.”

“’It’s a corporate whore state, of course,’ the anonymous former Biden staffer remarked to me offhandedly in a recent conversation. He stressed that in ‘a small state with thirty-five thousand bank employees, apart from all the lawyers and others from the financial industry,’ Biden was never going to stray too far from the industry’s priorities.”

Cockburn summarizes Biden’s efforts to provide restrictive bankruptcy laws in order to protect financial institutions from people who couldn’t pay their debts.

“Unsurprisingly, Biden was long a willing foot soldier in the campaign to emasculate laws allowing debtors relief from loans they cannot repay. As far back as 1978, he helped negotiate a deal rolling back bankruptcy protections for graduates with federal student loans, and in 1984 worked to do the same for borrowers with loans for vocational schools. Even when the ostensible objective lay elsewhere, such as drug-related crime, Biden did not forget his banker friends. Thus the 1990 Crime Control Act, with Biden as chief sponsor, further limited debtors’ ability to take advantage of bankruptcy protections.”

“These initiatives, however, were only precursors to the finance lobby’s magnum opus: the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. This carefully crafted flail of the poor made it almost impossible for borrowers to get traditional “clean slate” Chapter 7 bankruptcy, under which debt forgiveness enables people to rebuild their lives and businesses. Instead, the law subjected them to the far harsher provisions of Chapter 13, effectively turning borrowers into indentured servants of institutions like the credit card companies headquartered in Delaware. It made its way onto the statute books after a lopsided 74–25 vote (bipartisanship!), with Biden, naturally, voting in favor.”

Biden has been around a long time.  This allows him to claim the advantage of “experience” in dealing with foreign affairs that should place him above other candidates.  But experience means you also have a track record that must be defended.  As with his social legislation, Biden has very often showed up on the wrong side of history.  Cockburn examines his career as a foreign policy expert in detail.  He reminds us that Biden was “an enthusiastic supporter” of Bush’s Iraq invasion, and of the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, a move that mightily upset Russia and set the stage for our sorry current relationship.  His policy of supporting undemocratic regimes in Central America helped generate the stream of refugees from that area that complicate the situation on our southern border.  This summary is provided.

“Biden’s claims of experience on the world stage, therefore, cannot be denied. True, the experience has been routinely disastrous for those on the receiving end, but on the other hand, that is a common fate for those subjected, under any administration, to the operations of our foreign policy apparatus.”

There is yet one more claim that Biden can make to support his candidacy: electability.  Wrapping his mantle of “middle-class Joe” about himself he will claim the best connection with the white working class that presumably fled to Trump in the last election and will return if the right Democratic candidate comes to woo them.

“To be fair, Biden has earned high ratings from the AFL-CIO thanks to his support for matters such as union organizing rights and a higher minimum wage. On the other hand, he also supported NAFTA in 1994 and permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000, two votes that sounded the death knell for America’s manufacturing economy. Regardless of how justified his pro-labor reputation may be, however, it’s far from clear that the working class holds Biden in any special regard—his two presidential races imploded before any blue-collar workers had a chance to vote for him.”

It is difficult credibly assume one’s electability when one has already had two presidential campaigns end in disaster.  Biden seems unable to keep from sticking his foot in his mouth, and people who have worked on his past campaigns claim he was lousy at organizing them.

“It is this fact that makes the electability argument so puzzling. Biden’s initial bid for the prize in 1988 famously blew up when rivals unkindly publicized his plagiarism of a stump speech given by Neil Kinnock, a British Labour Party politician. (In Britain, Kinnock was known as ‘the Welsh Windbag,’ which may have encouraged the logorrheic Biden to feel a kinship.)”

“Another gaffe helped upend Biden’s second White House bid, in 2007, when he referred to Barack Obama in patronizing terms as ‘the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.’ The campaign cratered at the very first hurdle, the Iowa caucuses, where Biden came in fifth, with less than 1 percent of the votes.” 

Democrats and their constituencies seem about as excited as they have ever been about the upcoming election.  They succeeded in 2008 and 2012 when they had a charismatic candidate who excited their base.  There is much more to gain by increasing the turnout of those sympathetic to your policies than could ever be attained by trying to convince your enemy to come over to your side.  Placing your hopes on a candidate who claims that the opponents are not the enemy and that he is willing to compromise with them seems a strategic blunder of the first order.  Compromise is a tactic one occasionally uses when the limits of one’s power are reached.  The strategy must be based on reaching one’s goals without compromise.  Go for it!  Cockburn seems to agree with this sentiment.  He finishes with this comment.

“Regardless of the current election cycle’s endgame, though, it’s safe to assume that his undimmed ego will never permit any reflection on whether voters who have been eagerly voting for change will ever really settle for Uncle Joe, champion of yesterday’s sordid compromises.”