Let’s Be Honest About Joe Biden
The following opinion article does not express the views or opinions of Medium, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, or the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. They are those solely of the author.
Scranton, P.A. may be known to most nowadays as the location of the hit American TV Show “The Office”, adapted from the British mockumentary series with the same name. But what many don’t know about Scranton is that it is also the hometown of one Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr..
Biden, who we now recognize as the former vice president of the United States, would move to Delaware later on in his childhood.
It’s from Delaware that Biden would serve as U.S. senator. It’s also from Delaware that Biden, in his third and most recent run for the presidency, delivered a speech incredibly critical of the Trump Administration’s efforts to fight COVID-19, or the coronavirus strain currently affecting the world as a whole. The prompter speech not only panned the handling of the pandemic, but was delivered in a way which made Biden look as if he was already president.
That is perhaps the strong suit of the Biden candidacy. Incontrovertibly, Biden is no stranger to the executive. As a result, Biden loves to tout his experience as vice president, and nary neglects to mention that he is good friends with the former president, Barack Obama. Whether this is from genuine brotherly love for Obama, or because the first African-American president polls incredibly well within the base of the Democratic Party, Biden nonetheless has this factoid in his toolkit and wears it as a badge of honor.
I’m not here to deny that Biden has experience. I’m also not here to try to dismantle the idea that Biden would be a very presidential president. If anything, I think that this is exactly where Biden can perform; he is undoubtedly a man who can bring respect and professionalism back to the office.
What I am here to discuss however is my fundamental belief that the promise of professionalism in the office of the presidency is the bare minimum of what should be expected in a presidential candidacy. Joe Biden does not promise anything except this.
“Joe’s Vision” as his campaign puts it, is so vaguely defined that it boggles the mind. His platform is painted with incredibly broad strokes, leaving policy positions ambiguous enough to leave you wondering whether or not Biden is actually a Republican. Therein lies the problem. Biden could pass as a Republican. And in fact, it seems sometimes he would prefer to.
Biden, in a seeming swipe at his primary rival, loves to claim that he has been a card-carrying Democrat for decades, and the fact of the matter is that he is. But the Democrats throw out such an incredibly massive net for what defines being a Democrat, that Biden’s qualification can exist in name only. The fact that Democrats as a whole have never gone through the critical process that Republican politicians did with RINOs, or Republicans In Name Only, is fascinating.
The reason why is less mysterious. Most of the well-respected Democratic politicians don’t actually sit well with the progressive base of the party, and Biden is included in this. Biden’s policy and voting history is an undeniably dark and conservative one.
Biden has historically been against women’s rights. He used to be blatantly against Roe V. Wade. He later evolved to simply be against federal funding for abortions and against institutions which may support women in accessing critical healthcare. To his benefit, after supporting these positions for decades, he’s since miraculously changed.
He’s historically been in favor of cutting social security, veteran’s benefits, and medicare/medicaid. He’s voted numerous times through the decades to do just that. He’s also historically taken the side of pharmaceutical corporations and corporations in general. Again, voting in their benefit. In regards to the banking sector, he was in favor of eliminating Glass-Steagall, and we all know what that caused.
He was for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, for banning gay service members, and against gay marriage. All positions he’s since changed on. With the Biden amendment in the 70s, he acted to strike a blow to busing policies which were so crucial to helping fix segregation in American schools.
He had also decided to praise segregationists like Strom Thurmond and James Eastland. The latter called for the abolishing of the African-American race, and Biden had praised him on Juneteenth of just this past year.
One could go further, continuing to unveil a past and present far more conservative than what was and is compatible with the Democratic party. That’s why it should come as no surprise to anyone that out of all the centrist candidates in the running, Biden appeared to have the most vague platform. His political career had and in a way still continues to be a history of capitulating to the inevitable grinding gears of social progress in our country.
It has been theorized that Biden’s selection as President Obama’s running mate was predicated on his establishment credentials, a calming counter point to the relatively unknown senator from Illinois.
Fast-forward to 2016 and we were offered two realistic choices in the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton. Clinton, a respectable woman with plenty of experience under her belt, was part of a political dynasty. It was one which had roots deeply sown into the Democratic Party.
She was revered and admired by both the party and its members. After losing to Obama in 2008, she began the process of setting herself up as the heiress presumptive to the 2016 nomination. Sanders, despite caucusing and voting with Democrats for years on end, was not a Democrat. He had not administratively built up the DNC over the course of eight years to assist in his candidacy. His choice to run spit in the face of many in the establishment.
Nevertheless, we all know how this story ends. Clinton would lose in the general after winning the nomination. Her failure can be attributable to multiple causes, namely Russian interference, and a lack of a true campaign, which I’ll define later.
I don’t deny the severity of Russian electoral interference, in fact I fear that electoral interference will happen again this year in an even stronger manner, and we remain gravely under-prepared to fight it. The president refuses to acknowledge the severity of electoral interference and Congress has yet to properly legislate against it.
But I believe there is an even more present threat to the Democratic Party goal of flipping the White House and to the party as a whole. The party cannot continue to run candidates which do not have true campaigns.
We can define a true campaign in the following: we must recognize that a candidate works to offer not only an alternative, but a real passion for change. The candidate must have a platform with actual policy decisions, and not a promise to maintain the status quo. Lastly, the candidate must energize voters.
Nowadays, I personally could care less about Sanders’ candidacy in particular. I do not believe he is an incredibly strong presidential candidate. But what Sanders had that Clinton didn’t, and Biden still to this day does not, was a real passion for change. Sanders had and probably will have till the day he dies a platform with actual policy decisions. And Sanders, to the annoyance of the DNC, could never commit to maintaining the status quo he audaciously sits outside of.
Sanders, whether you love him or hate him, also energizes voters. He will never energize the more persistently conservative base of the Democratic Party: the one which got Clinton the nomination, and will likely give Biden it too.
These are voters cowed into timidity by years of the party meeting neo-conservative demands. But these are also voters that Democrats can count on come the election. These are registered Democrats who very clearly may not prefer Sanders, but know to stand up straight and complete their civic duty to the party and to the country.
Independents however? Blue-collar workers fed-up with status-quo centrists with broad-stroke campaigns running on experience? These are the people by the thousands who decide elections in the modern political sphere.
Energizing these people requires someone who sits outside the box. Donald Trump was that person in 2016. Simply put, if the Democrats run Biden, they’re playing electoral roulette.
Biden is a candidate who does not promise to fix the fact that there are people who cross the border into Mexico every single day to buy the insulin and medication they need to survive. Biden is a candidate who instead is running on the fact that he is not Trump. And because of how outrageously horrendous of a president Trump has been, it’s quite likely that Biden will be able to pull it off.
But Biden runs this candidacy at the risk of losing it in four years. He runs at the risk of continuing to allow our environment to collapse, to allow the middle-class to dissipate, to allow students to get buried in loans, and to allow the military-industrial complex to fester and grow like the corrupt debt-creating monster President Eisenhower feared it would become.
Biden promises stability and respectability; and I applaud that. If he wins the nomination, I look forward and encourage everyone to vote for him come November. However, what Biden is promising us is the textbook definition of a president.
We ought to have done better as a party. We ought to have aimed higher, and offered more regardless of whether or not individual platform positions were feasible to pass through Congress.
It strikes at the very heart of what we want the Democratic Party to be. Are we a party of the people, for the people, or are we a party that masquerades around as if it was for the people, but is led by the few and inevitably and naturally only for the few?
Let’s be honest about Joe Biden, about his failings, his dark past of conservative roots, and the fact that his vision does not speak to so many of the critical issues the Republic faces and the very real and inescapable plight of everyday Americans.
Let’s be honest with ourselves today, so that when it comes time we know exactly what pill we’re swallowing to avoid a second term of a fascistic president, and we know exactly what we need to change as a party come the future, a future which so many cannot afford to wait for.
Let’s be honest not for some focus groups, to appease some base, or even for the party’s sake, but for our nation and for Americans from sea to shining sea.
