Joe Biden Would Be A Disaster
In my last newsletter, I explained why Bernie Sanders is the best chance (and possibly the last chance) we have to reshape this country. If this country is to escape its inevitable doom, we can’t accept anything less than a dramatic overhaul of American social and political structures. Bernie’s policies are the only ones that meaningfully address systemic injustice and lay the framework for a society that works for, not against, its most vulnerable members.
I thought this argument was convincing enough on its own, but just to be sure, I also briefly touched on the various problems with the other remaining Democratic candidates. Yet as I look at the voting results from Super Tuesday, I’m forced to draw one of two conclusions: either my argument wasn’t convincing enough, or fewer people read this newsletter than I thought, because Joe Biden won 10 of the 14 Super Tuesday states and is now leading the delegate count for the Democratic nomination. So let’s try this again.
With Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren officially out of the running and Tulsi Gabbard holding steady at one (1) delegate, the Democratic primary is effectively down to Biden and Bernie. That gives us a great opportunity to do something most major media outlets have tiptoed around throughout this primary: vet Joe Biden.
Joe Biden & Women
Before he was tapped as Obama’s VP in 2008, Biden was perhaps best known for a 1988 presidential bid that ended shortly after a speech he plagiarized from British MP Neil Kinnock’s speech led to reporters unearthing numerous other instances of plagiarism and resume inflation. But it was his role as the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for then-nominee Clarence Thomas that firmly planted Biden in the national spotlight. During the hearings, Thomas was accused of sexual misconduct by Anita Hill; Hill was relentlessly grilled by Republican senators seeking to discredit her testimony. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) accused Hill of fabricating her testimony based on passages from The Exorcist, while Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) suggested that the comments Thomas allegedly made to Hill about women’s breasts were “commonplace.”
As head of the Judiciary Committee, Biden could have stepped in and ended the absurd, insulting lines of questioning Hill was forced to endure; he didn’t. However, Biden had no problem exercising his authority when it benefited the nominee, allowing Thomas to testify both before and after Hill. Biden also had the opportunity to call on three other women who were also prepared to testify that Thomas had engaged in sexual misconduct with them; Biden declined to do so.
Clarence Thomas was confirmed, and for nearly 30 years Biden was apparently unbothered by his role in the public humiliation of a victim of sexual abuse. It wasn’t until last April that Biden finally reached out to Anita Hill—conveniently, a few weeks before he announced his candidacy. Biden characterized it as an “apology,” while Hill described the exchange as Biden telling her “I’m sorry that happened to you.” Hill did not accept his non-apology apology and told the New York Times that “she was not convinced that he has taken full responsibility for his conduct at the hearings — or for the harm he caused other victims of sexual harassment and gender violence.”
You may be thinking Well, that was almost 30 years ago! I’ll grant you that this is true, but it’s still a terrible excuse. At the time of Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing, Biden was 43 years old and had almost 20 years in the Senate under his belt. More to the point, this wasn’t an isolated that argument would be
Biden has long had a reputation for being a little too familiar in his interactions with women. In the interest of time, we’ll fast-forward to 2019, when eight women accused Biden of inappropriate behavior. Lucy Flores, a nominee for lieutenant governor of Nevada in 2014, was preparing to speak at a campaign rally, and Biden was in town to lend support and help boost voter turnout. Flores detailed what happened in an essay for The Cut last March:
As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. “Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?”…I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified.
It should be noted that while all eight women said their experiences with Biden were uncomfortable and his behavior was inappropriate, none believed that his actions rose to the level of sexual harassment or misconduct, nor has Biden ever been accused of anything beyond being kind of a creep. Who cares if Biden’s a little handsy, you may be thinking. Our current president was caught on tape bragging about committing sexual assault! And yes, sure: Joe Biden has thus far restrained himself from grabbing women’s genitals willy-nilly. Hats off to him. But is that really the standard we’re settling on for future presidential candidates?
Besides, we don’t need to rely on accounts of Biden’s behavior to know he’s not a big believer in female bodily autonomy. His own remarks make that quite clear on their own.
Joe Biden & Abortion
In a 1974 interview with The Washingtonian, Biden criticized Roe v. Wade, saying [emphasis mine]: “I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” Biden has since backed away from that claim, at least publicly; his long-running stance has been that while he’s personally opposed to abortion, he doesn’t believe the government has the right to tell women what to do with their own bodies.
It would seem, then, that Biden’s position is unambiguously pro-choice, at least in his capacity as an elected official. But his voting record tells another story. In 2003, Biden voted for a ban on late-term abortions without health exemptions for mothers. During his presidential campaign in 2007, Biden said on Meet The Press that he opposed ending the ban on federal funding for most abortions. Recently, a video of Biden resurfaced from a 2006 interview with Texas Monthly Talks, in which he expresses a desire to work with the GOP and find ways to limit abortions:
I do not view abortion as a choice and a right. I think it’s always a tragedy. And I think it should be rare and safe, and I think we should be focusing on how to limit the number of abortions, and there ought to be common ground and consensus on how to do that.
And just in case you’re hoping his views have changed in the past decade, they haven’t: as of June 2019, Biden says he still supports the Hyde Amendment, a restrictive law passed 40 years ago barring federal funding of abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life.
The argument could be made that Biden was speaking from a personal perspective; after all, he’s never shied away from voicing his pro-life views. But that falls apart once he starts talking about specific amendments and finding consensus on how to limit abortions. The more likely explanation is that Biden’s personal opinion on abortion is too strong for him to prevent it from bleeding over into his actions as an elected official. He simply cannot be trusted to fight for abortion rights, no matter how many times he’s tried to convince us otherwise.
And what about his opponent Bernie Sanders? In an interview with Vermont’s Bennington Banner in 1972 (a year before Roe v. Wade), Sanders offered his opinion on abortion [emphasis mine]:
Abortion is an issue which brings out deep feelings in people, and I respect the feelings of those people who are opposed to abortion on moral grounds. I feel, however, that these people should not be allowed to impose their sense of morality or religious feelings on people who hold a different opinion.
It strikes me as incredible that politicians think that they have the right to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her body. This is especially true in Vermont where we have a legislature which is almost completely dominated by men."
Joe Biden & Race
With the possible exception of Barack Obama himself, nobody has benefited more from Obama’s presidency than Joe Biden—especially his perception as, if not a champion, then an ally in the fight for racial justice. Although a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that Bernie Sanders was more popular than Joe Biden among black voters (26% said they would vote for Sanders, while 15% said they would vote for Biden), Super Tuesday saw Biden capturing a majority of the black vote in Alabama, North Carolina and Virginia.
Biden’s popularity among black voters is a bit of a mystery to me. The argument has been made that black voters view Biden more favorably because of his association with our first black president, and it’s a convincing one: Hillary Clinton’s popularity with black voters plummeted during her 2008 campaign against Barack Obama. But when she joined the Obama administration in 2009, her popularity among black voters rebounded and eventually rose to a new high.
In 2016, Hillary won the black vote 88% – 8%, an 8-point downturn in the margin of victory from Obama’s 2012 election. From this we can draw two conclusions: first, that Hillary’s association with Obama made it easier for most black voters to overlook Hillary’s not-so-great history on racial issues. (The most well-known strike against Hillary was, of course, when she referred to black children as “superpredators” in 1996 in a speech supporting her husband’s 1994 crime bill—a bill that directly contributed to the mass incarceration crisis that disproportionately impacts black Americans.)
The second conclusion we can draw is that while Hillary’s Obama connection was enough for most black voters, there were some who were sufficiently unconvinced by her commitment to racial justice that they chose to cast their votes for Donald Trump(!) instead. Assuming this pattern holds true in 2020, it would present a big problem for Joe Biden, whose record on racial justice makes Hillary look like, well…Bernie Sanders. Let’s start with Biden’s early years in the Senate.
(Quick aside: people tend to dismiss criticism of Joe Biden by saying things like But that was 30 years ago! This defense isn’t particularly compelling, partly because “30 years ago” isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things, but also because limiting our criticism of Biden to bad or backwards opinions that he holds at this very moment is implicitly giving him credit for eventually finding his way to the right side of an issue. But it doesn’t change the fact that when things were even worse for black Americans than they are now, Joe Biden was one of the people fighting to preserve a society in which black people were second-class citizens. There will always be marginalized groups in America, and while it’s better than nothing that Biden will eventually accept that those groups are worthy of human rights, it’s clear that he can’t be trusted to lead the charge.)
In 1975, when the busing debate was at its zenith, Biden offered his thoughts on busing in an interview with Newark, Del. publication known as the “People Paper”:
I oppose busing. It’s an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me. […] The real problem with busing is, you take people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s intellectual growth by busing them to an inferior school…and you’re going to fill them with hatred.
In the same interview, Biden also voiced his opposition to the notion of racial inequality:
I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’ I don’t buy that.
Later that same year, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), the third most virulently racist politician of the modern era, introduced an amendment to an education bill that would prohibit the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from gathering information from schools on the racial demographics of their students. Helms’ measure was meant to cripple Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting “discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin” by any program or activity (including public schools) that received federal funding. Without information on the racial makeup of each school, the federal government had no way to identify—and, therefore, withhold funding from—school districts that refused to integrate.
Joe Biden voted for that amendment. When it didn’t pass, he introduced his own measure that barred federal funds from being used by school systems “to assign teachers or students to schools […] for reasons of race.” It was a slightly different approach from Helms’ amendment, but the result was effectively the same. Biden’s measure passed; the NAACP denounced it as “an anti-black amendment,” and Biden’s colleague Ed Brooke, the only black member of the Senate, called it “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.”
In 1977, at a congressional hearing on anti-busing legislation, Biden expressed a desire to “ensure we have an orderly integration of society.” Orderliness was important, you see, because without it, Biden feared his children would “grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point.” If there’s a better exemplar than Joe Biden of the “white moderate” Martin Luther King Jr. warned about, one who tells black civil rights activists to wait for a “more convenient season” for racial equality, I’ve yet to find them.
In the 1980s, Biden worked hand-in-hand on a series of crime bills that tilted the American justice system ever more towards incarceration as the only appropriate punitive measure. Along with Ted Kennedy, Biden’s partner in crime on these crime bills was Strom Thurmond (R-SC), the second-biggest racist in modern politics. (The most well-known racist in modern politics is, for my money, George Wallace; had he served in the Senate, I have no doubt they would have worked together to find that “common ground” Biden seems to enjoy so much.) Most of their efforts were unsuccessful, but one did pass: the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which eliminated the parole system for individuals sentenced to six or more years of imprisonment and created the system of “civil asset forfeiture,” under which the government can seize the assets of anyone suspected of—not charged with, suspected of—illegal activity.
Biden later boasted in a speech to the Senate that he and Thurmond—for whom Biden would eventually deliver a eulogy—were the reason anyone caught with a crack rock as small as the size of a quarter would receive an automatic five-year minimum sentence. The average sentence for possession of crack is approximately 100 times that of powdered cocaine; considering black communities were the hardest-hit by the crack epidemic, it’s fair to say that Biden’s and Thurmond’s efforts in expanding the carceral state in the 1980s played a key role in the disproportionate number of black Americans jailed for nonviolent drug offenses compared to white defendants charged with similar crimes.
Most of you will remember how sharply Hillary Clinton was criticized in 2016 for her “superpredators” comment and her efforts to help pass her husband’s 1994 crime bill. The criticism was justified, though Clinton could at least argue that her role in passing that bill was limited, given she was the First Lady and had no real legislative power. Joe Biden, on the other hand, will have a much harder time ducking criticism. While the bill is most commonly associated with Bill Clinton, it had a different name in the Senate, one that Biden himself used as recently as 2015: “The 1994 Biden Crime Bill.”
Not only did Biden’s crime bill result in the United States imprisoning a higher proportion of its population than any other nation in the world, it also made prison sentences themselves more punitive and draconian than ever before. In 2014, the Brennan Center summarized the effects of the bill 20 years after its passage [emphasis added throughout]:
It expanded the death penalty, creating 60 new death penalty offenses under 41 federal capital statutes. It eliminated education funding for incarcerated students, effectively gutting prison education programs. Despite a wealth of research showing education increases post-release employment, reduces recidivism, and improves outcomes for the formerly incarcerated and their families, this change has not been reversed.
And the bill created a wave of change toward harsher state sentencing policy. That change was driven by funding incentives: the bill’s $9.7 billion in federal funding for prison construction went only to states that adopted truth-in-sentencing (TIS) laws, which lead to defendants serving far longer prison terms. Within 5 years, 29 states had TIS laws on the books, 24 more than when the bill was signed. New York State received over $216 million by passing such laws. By 2000 the state had added over 12,000 prison beds and incarcerated 28 percent more people than a decade before.
In essence, Biden used federal funding as a carrot for states to imprison more of their citizens while also ensuring that anyone who was incarcerated had little to no chance of putting their life back together upon their release.
This was not an unintended consequence; it was Biden’s desired outcome. In 1993, Biden gave a speech pushing his crime bill. The speech, which describes “predators on our streets,” is heavy on Lee Atwater-approved dogwhistles, such that it’s hard to read it without conjuring a mental image of a black teenager in Harlem, or Compton, or the South Bronx:
[There is a ] cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally ... because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity.
[…]
It doesn't matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents, it doesn't matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn't matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn't matter whether or not they're the victims of society. […] And it's a sad commentary on society. We have no choice but to take them out of society.
If you’re wondering how I arrived at the conclusion that Biden is inescapably referring to black Americans, take a look at the first part of that speech. Earlier this year, Biden used that exact same description—structureless households, parents who don’t know how to raise their children—to answer a question about how America can reckon with its history of slavery. Plus, in a speech in Iowa last August, Biden insisted that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”
More appalling is that Biden acknowledges the systemic and structural racism inherent in American society that puts black children at a disadvantage compared to their white peers…right before he says it doesn’t matter and he wants them in prison.
While Biden may have been able to escape criticism thus far (more on that in a bit), his record on racial equality is as lengthy as it is abysmal. If he’s nominated, it’s only a matter of time before Trump opens the floodgates on Biden, and when that happens, not even Obama—whom Biden described in 2007 as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”—will be able to help him.
Joe Biden & Immigration
For many Americans, one of the enduring images of the Trump administration will be of detention centers, overfilled with immigrant children who have been forcibly separated from their parents and made to live in conditions most closely resembling those of a third-world prison. As many have noted, this barbarism is not a bug but a feature; it is the proverbial head on a stake, a warning to would-be immigrants of what will happen to their families if they’re caught.
If you think any of that will change under a Joe Biden administration, you’re sorely mistaken. The cages in those detention centers were put up by the Obama administration, and while they may not have waged war on immigrants with as much evident glee as Trump, their methods were no less dehumanizing. Biden’s views on immigration are in line with what you’d expect from a moderate liberal who once opposed busing and desegregation. In fact, you could copy-paste Biden’s stance on abortion and almost perfectly capture how he feels about immigration: he’d like it to be “safe and rare.” (And everyone should be required to speak English—Biden was referring to immigration when he said that in 2006, though I imagine he’d expect the same of abortions as well.)
Biden did finally acknowledge last month that the Obama administration’s mass deportation of undocumented immigrants with no criminal record was a “big mistake,” but as with his stance on most other issues, it’s too little, too late. It’s also fair to question Biden’s motives for changing his position. He is polling remarkably poorly with Hispanic voters, and less than four months ago Biden told an immigration activist who challenged him on Obama-era deportations that they “should vote for Trump” if they didn’t like his immigration policies.
Of course, the activist is right to wonder what Joe Biden has in store for immigrants if he secures the Democratic nomination and somehow manages to win in November. Biden’s immigration policy proposals are as follows:
Take urgent action to undo Trump’s damage and reclaim America’s values
Modernize America’s immigration system
Welcome immigrants in our communities
Reassert America’s commitment to asylum-seekers and refugees
Tackle the root causes of irregular migration
Implement effective border screening
It’s a short list. Which is probably for the best, as I’m sure Biden’s campaign was running out of ways to say absolutely nothing.
Joe Biden & Poverty
Did you know that Joe Biden was once one of the poorest members of Congress? And that he’s from Scranton, a solidly working-class town in northeast Pennsylvania? Sure you did; it’d be hard to forget, since Biden’s favorite nickname for himself is “Middle-Class Joe.” For decades, Biden has leaned on this everyman backstory to convince voters that he’ll fight for the working class and the impoverished because he knows what it’s like!
Of course, that’s not entirely true. For starters, Biden’s father was wealthy, and while he did lose his job and struggle to find work in Scranton, the family moved to Delaware when Biden was 11 and his father (according to Biden’s own Wikipedia page) “became a successful used car salesman, maintaining the family’s middle-class circumstances.”
Barring his family’s earlier difficulties, Biden’s personal experience with financial hardship ended (at the latest) in 1973 when he got to Congress. If Biden was indeed one of the poorest members of Congress when he entered the Senate and didn’t have any money other than his annual salary, that meant he had to live on a scant $42,500 a year. For comparison, the median annual income in America that year was $11,116—just about one-fourth of what Biden earned. (Oh, and Biden’s healthcare was fully covered.)
By the end of Biden’s Senate career in 2009, he was earning $174,000 per year; not an obscene amount of money, all things considered, but still well above the median income of $50,221. By my math, “Middle-Class Joe” hasn’t been a member of the middle class for the past half-century.
You might be thinking But Bernie earned the same salary, so why do you trust him to fight for the working class and the impoverished and not Joe? For starters, one of the central planks of Bernie’s entire platform is reducing income inequality by making the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes. It’s kind of his whole thing.
For another, Bernie didn’t write an op-ed for the Newark Post in 1988 that read in part, “We are all too familiar with the stories of welfare mothers driving luxury cars and leading lifestyles that mirror the rich and famous,” but Joe Biden did. Bernie didn’t support work requirements for welfare recipients, but Joe Biden did in 1996. (Biden recently called the Trump administration “morally bankrupt” for expanding welfare to work requirements, even though Biden has boasted in the past about being an architect of the welfare-to-work system.) Bernie didn’t parrot modern GOP talking points about welfare creating a “culture of dependence” and the need to replace it with a “culture of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility,” but Joe Biden did.
Bernie didn’t tell wealthy donors at a private fundraiser that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he becomes president; that was Joe Biden. Bernie wasn’t the one who authored legislation in 1978 blocking students from seeking bankruptcy protection on their loans. Nor did Bernie fight to pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act—a bill that made it more difficult for families to receive Chapter 7 bankruptcy protections and made it almost impossible for borrowers to reduce their student loan debt through bankruptcy—during the Clinton administration. And when the bill was vetoed by Bill Clinton after Elizabeth Warren worked with Hillary Clinton to convince Bill not to sign it, Bernie didn’t try again during the Bush administration and finally get it passed in 2005, despite the fact that there was little to no evidence that anyone was abusing bankruptcy protection to get out of paying their student loans in the first place. Who was it that did that? Oh, right: Joe Biden.
Bernie doesn’t want to put Mike Bloomberg in charge of the World Bank, or tap former JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon to be his Treasury Secretary, or make former Morgan Stanley exec Tom Nides his Secretary of Commerce. But Joe Biden does! Bernie’s tax returns don’t show up to $8 million in assets and more than $15 million in reported income in 2017 and 2018 alone. Joe Biden’s do, which also goes a long way toward explaining why multi-billionaire Mike Bloomberg would pay less in taxes under Joe Biden’s tax plan than he would have if he’d gotten elected and enacted his own tax policy:
It’s difficult to see how you can call yourself “Middle-Class Joe” when your proposed tax policies are more favorable to billionaires than even the billionaires themselves think they deserve.
Joe Biden & Climate Change
Joe Biden does not have a plan to meaningfully address climate change. Like most career “liberal” politicians who’ve spent their entire careers taking the wrong position and then being applauded for belatedly taking the right one, there’s a limit to how much he cares about things that won’t personally affect him. Biden’s tepid plans to address climate change also earned an “F-” rating from the climate activists at the Sunrise Movement:
Joe Biden & Joe Biden’s Brain
How does a politician with as lousy a legislative record as Biden’s manage to drum up the kind of support he has enjoyed thus far? On paper, Joe Biden should be regarded in much the same way most of us view Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV): largely despised, occasionally useful, certainly not a viable presidential candidate.
Having combed through Biden’s legislative record, I’m more convinced than ever that the only thing keeping him afloat all these years is that people genuinely like him. He possesses all the qualities that people claim are most important in a candidate when they can’t bring themselves to admit that they don’t care about actual policies. Biden’s a straight shooter, the kind of guy you’d wanna have a beer with, not some Beltway insider; he went to Syracuse Law, not Harvard Law! He gets along with everybody! He stumbles in his public remarks, just like me!
First, I would contend that these are fine traits if the role in question is, say, an office manager; in a zero-sum capitalist system and a nearly-zero-sum political landscape, they’re a recipe for ineffectuality at best, disaster at worst. Second, these qualities assume that, if nominated, we would actually get that version of Joe Biden. But his behavior this primary season lends significant credence to the theory that Biden appears to be, if not sundowning, then in steep cognitive decline.
Biden has never been the most effortless public speaker, but what we’ve seen from him so far on the campaign trail goes beyond simple verbal flubs. Last Saturday at a campaign event in Missouri, Biden referred to himself as an “Obiden-Bama Democrat.” It’s a fairly standard flub for him, but it’s also not the first time Biden’s screwed up Obama’s name: in an interview with CNN last August, Biden called him “Rabrock Obama.” Around the same time, Biden seemed to forget Obama’s name entirely, calling him “President…My Boss” in a speech:
Last month in South Carolina, Biden finished his speech with [emphasis mine] “My name is Joe Biden. I’m a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate. Look me over, if you like what you see, help me out. If not, vote for the other Biden—gimme a look though, okay?”
At the last major debate, Biden claimed that 150 million Americans—or half the country—have been killed by gun violence since 2007. And while I’m confident we’ll hit that number at some point, we’re not quite there yet.
It’s not just pronunciation of names, either: Biden seems to be legitimately struggling to place the right names on people he knows. In just the last six months, Biden has confused his wife with his sister during his Super Tuesday speech, and confused both Angela Merkel and Theresa May with Margaret Thatcher. He also told voters to come out and vote for him on “Super Thursday,” confused Theresa May with Margaret Thatcher again, and started to recite the Declaration of Independence before giving up half a sentence in and saying “You know, the—the thing”:
I won’t cover each and every thing, but if you want more evidence of Biden’s mental decline, Jacobin just published a comprehensive examination.
It’s easy to dismiss this as just “Joe being Joe,” especially if you support Joe Biden. But Biden’s ideological opponents aren’t the only ones pointing out his cognitive deterioration—people who have worked with him and support him are, too. Biden’s old Senate colleague Cory Booker expressed concern about Joe’s mental acuity after a debate, and during a debate, Julian Castro pointedly asked Biden “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?”
And while Biden’s campaign staff has publicly attempted to play off Biden’s increasingly frequent missteps by blaming his childhood speech impediment, it’s clear they know something’s not right. Biden’s campaign has denied repeated requests from Bernie Sanders’ campaign for a one-on-one debate about healthcare, while also lobbying to change the existing debate format less demanding. (Under the current debate format, candidates mainly just have to maintain a single train of thought for a maximum of 90 seconds at a time; evidently this creates an undue hardship for Uncle Joe.)
Biden’s campaign is also declining requests for interviews from cable news outlets, and in some cases, Biden has taken to handing out leaflets to reporters instead of answering their questions. His campaign is even considering limiting campaign events and has acknowledged that Biden’s biggest fumbles tend to happen “late in the day.” (For those of you who don’t know, it’s called “sundowning” because cognitive impairment tends to be at its worst when it’s, uh…late in the day.)
In short, Biden’s campaign has decided to run the political equivalent of the four-corners offense: send surrogates on cable news in the candidate’s place to articulate his talking points, keep him as tightly guarded as possible and, apparently, hope he’ll just sneak into the White House in November. Suffice to say, this strategy will not work, especially when it comes to…
Joe Biden & Donald Trump
At some point, Biden will have to get on stage and debate Donald Trump. If this were eight or even four years ago, it would be…well, it would be annoying to listen to two old gasbags yell at each other. But it would at least offer better odds of shutting Trump up and/or making him look foolish to his base than Hillary intoning “when they go low, we go high” while Trump accused her of personally carrying out the Benghazi attacks or whatever he said in 2016.
Now, however, it would be truly nauseating to watch. Biden would stammer “Now listen, Jack” over and over while Trump gleefully hammered him on everything from mass incarceration to deportations to Hunter Biden’s drug addiction. But Donald Trump is a racist, you think to yourself. He’s in no position to criticize anyone on racial issues! It’s true that he’s in no position to criticize anyone aside from David Duke on racial injustice, but this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. When has “should” ever factored into his decision-making process?
There is this prevailing myth that politicians will only attack their opponents on issues where they themselves are squeaky-clean, because they’re terrified of seeming hypocritical. But Trump, who is a racist, hammered Hillary on racial issues in 2016. And yes, it was hypocritical, but it didn’t matter with Hillary and it won’t matter with Biden. Trump says so many outrageous things that trying to hold him accountable for being a hypocrite is sort of like trying to arrest The Punisher for not having a firearms permit. More importantly, just because Trump is in no position to criticize Biden on race doesn’t mean it’s not a valid line of attack.
Trump is a bully. Taking the high road against a bully—like Hillary did in 2016—might make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside and let you hold your head high because you did “the right thing,” but that’s just something losers say to make themselves feel better. The only way to beat a bully is to face him head-on and win. I have no doubt that Biden wants to take Trump head on, but in his current mental state, it would end in disaster.
Here’s how it would go down: Trump goads Biden with some well-placed comments about Biden’s son. Biden tries to craft a witty retort, only he screws it up because his brain is pancake batter now, so he calls Don Jr. “Hunter” by accident. Trump mocks him even more, Biden loses his temper, lashes out incoherently, then threatens Trump with physical violence. Trump, despite possessing both the physical characteristics and the fighting prowess of a bowling pin, knows that Biden can’t actually hit him, so he threatens Biden right back. The debate ends with a breathless, sweaty and disoriented Joe Biden wandering offstage, leaving Donald Trump as the only reasonable, dignified candidate left.
If you really want to see Trump get his ass handed to him, have him debate Bernie, who has the same confrontational debate style as Biden with none of Biden’s proclivity for glad-handing and backslapping his opponents. Plus, Bernie’s record is consistent—and consistently right, even when it was an unpopular position—so Trump can’t hammer him on flip-flopping. And as an added bonus, Bernie has all of his mental faculties intact. Sure, Trump might try to jab him on his heart attack, but then Bernie could just remind everyone that Trump is a heart attack on two legs, and oh by the way, Medicare For All would cover him too (using his tax dollars).
Speaking of Medicare For All, there’s one more problem with Joe Biden (well, there are a lot more, but I have to stop at some point or I’ll never be able to send this out): healthcare.
Joe Biden & Healthcare
As with racial issues, Joe Biden’s record on healthcare is artificially bolstered by the fact that his association with “President MyBoss” and the Affordable Care Act. But this primary, more than any other, has raised the bar for what many Americans will accept in terms of public healthcare.
Bernie is of course pushing for Medicare For All, which is the right policy. In fact, if you really do want to see change in American healthcare, it’s the only policy that can provide it. As I’ve noted before, any system in which private insurance still exists will effectively kneecap the public option and limit its effectiveness. We have to have a single-payer system.
Biden does not support Medicare For All, instead proposing an expansion of the ACA to cover more Americans, which A) still leaves millions uninsured, B) doesn’t fix out-of-control prescription drug prices, and C) is unable keep pace with what private insurers are willing to reimburse providers, which means providers will just stop taking government-backed insurance.
Biden claims he doesn’t support Sanders’ Medicare For All proposal because he wants everyone to have coverage right away; under the Sanders plan, M4A would be enacted over four years. It’s the same dodge that Elizabeth Warren used when her poll numbers started dropping and she decided to tack to the center by backing away from M4A and reneging on her promise not to accept Super PAC support. It’s a flimsy excuse, not least because under Sanders’ plan, anyone who needed coverage during the phase-in period could buy into a public plan just like they can under the ACA.
But as Biden made clear last night, it doesn’t matter anyway. In an interview that aired last night, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell asked Biden “If Medicare For All comes to your desk, do you veto it?” Biden responded [emphasis mine]:
I would veto anything that delays providing the security and the certainty of health care being available now. If they got that through in by some miracle or there’s an epiphany that occurred and some miracle occurred that said, ‘OK, it’s passed,’ then you got to look at the cost.
I want to know, how did they find $35 trillion? What is that doing? Is it going to significantly raise taxes on the middle class, which it will? What’s going to happen?
So even if Sanders’ bill fulfills what Biden claims is his most pressing requirement—immediate coverage for 100% of Americans—he’d find a reason to veto it anyway. Medicare For All won’t “significantly raise taxes on the middle class,” and estimates show that healthcare costs would go down, so families would end up with more money. But Biden plays the “raising taxes” card anyway. Why? Maybe because he wants to protect his friend Rabrock Obama’s legacy. Maybe he wants to maintain the lie that the ACA is the best we can do. Or maybe it’s because he doesn’t want all his friends, donors and campaign staff who are currently profiting or used to profit off the private healthcare system to lose money. Whatever the reason, the healthcare industry sure was happy when Biden won on Super Tuesday.
How can Biden claim to care about these things and then insist they aren’t possible and aren’t worth trying, and if they do become possible, preemptively announce his intention to prevent them from becoming a reality? How can he claim to care about people when he’s seemingly spent his entire political career in search of new ways to more efficiently ruin people’s lives? It’s tempting to believe he’s just lying, but he can’t keep his mouth shut about anything. If he were lying, he’d have accidentally told us by now.
No, I think Joe Biden is a genuinely affable and—in his mind—kind person whose compassion for individuals simply does not extend to people as an abstract concept. When Biden meets people who have experienced personal loss, he’s been known to give them his personal cell number and tell them they can call him anytime if they want to talk. The problem is, he never thinks about all the others he hasn’t met who are going through the same thing.
His preternatural knack for building relationships means he’ll always prioritize the opinions of the people he knows over those of the people he doesn’t. When Arlen Specter and Orrin Hatch were making a spectacle of a woman sharing her account of sexual misconduct, Biden didn’t step in because Arlen and Orrin? Why, those are his pals in the Senate! He knows them! They’re good guys! Anita Hill, on the other hand…well, she was a stranger. As far as Biden was concerned, she might as well not have existed at all.
Joe Biden’s candidacy is being propped up by the delusion that 2016 was an aberration, and if we can just get rid of Trump things will go back to normal. But “normal” is what led us to Trump in the first place: 30-plus years of people like Joe Biden resisting meaningful change at every opportunity, of sacrificing equality and dignity and even lives on the altar of bipartisanship.
Biden can’t be trusted to fight for future generations or even for disenfranchised members of existing ones. Sure, maybe he’ll meet one or two people who are really, truly struggling, and he’ll probably see what he can do to help them out, maybe make a couple of phone calls on their behalf. And I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt in this hypothetical and assume that he actually follows through on his promise to help out. He’ll do this because he truly cares, but only about those specific people. That’s the fundamental difference between Biden and Bernie: Bernie doesn’t need to put a face to injustice in order to do something about it.
I’d like you to do me a favor and watch this video. I know you don’t really want to and you can just read the tweet for an overview, but if you’re still trying to figure out what Bernie’s all about and what his appeal is, watch it anyway.
Do you know why that man shared his painful, deeply personal story in front of hundreds of strangers at a town hall? Why, when faced with $130,000 in medical debt he couldn’t afford and no strength left to fight his insurance company, he didn’t just kill himself? Why he brought his insurance paperwork with him to the town hall?
Think about that for a second. Here’s a man at the end of his rope, dying from Huntington’s, and he decided that his best shot was at a politician’s town hall. What if it was a town hall for Kamala Harris, or Pete Buttigieg, or Beto O’Rourke, all of whom oppose Medicare For All? What if it was a town hall for Joe Biden? Would we have heard this man’s story? Or would he have stayed home and killed himself because he couldn’t see another way out? We’ll never know. But what we do know is that he showed up to that town hall, and he did it because of Bernie Sanders.
Bernie has said he hopes his campaign helps people “feel less alone” about their financial insecurity. The game is rigged, and part of the rigged game is convincing everyone who doesn’t win that it’s their fault for losing and that they should be ashamed of their failure. Because if they’re ashamed, they won’t share their failure with others; if people don’t share their failure with others, then nobody ever wises up to the fact that the people who lose the game far outweigh those who win it. That’s what Bernie’s fighting for: a new system, one in which basic human rights are afforded to everyone, not just those who can add value to the system.
Before Bernie, millions of people living in poverty or saddled with insurmountable debt were taught, formally or informally, that their financial plight was the result of a personal failing. It’s the unspoken flip-side of the American dream, a condition of zero-sum capitalism: You can achieve anything you set your mind to, but if you don’t, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough. We’re taught that we get what we deserve in life: if you’re successful, you must have worked hard, so of course you should have more money than everyone else. If you’re poor, you didn’t “want it” badly enough and therefore are simply unworthy of having health insurance. If you want welfare, you’d better be ready to work for it; otherwise, we’ll let you starve.
That’s the system Joe Biden represents. That’s the system Joe Biden is fighting to protect. Even if Biden managed to halt his cognitive decline long enough to win (and he won’t), we already know what he’ll do. He’ll implement a slew of mother-may-I policies that won’t change a single thing. Income inequality will worsen. The earth will continue towards its inevitable doom at a breakneck pace. Tens or hundreds of thousands more will die because they don’t have adequate healthcare. Things will go “back to normal” until the next Trump comes along and we realize that our last best chance to stop it from happening was in 2020 and we blew it.
Getting rid of Trump is the first step, but he’s just the symptom, not the cause. If we ever hope to effect truly meaningful change, the next step is getting rid of people like Joe Biden.