History Shows Joe Biden 3.0 Is a Bad Idea
Joe Biden stands in profile at a podium
Joe Biden delivers the keynote speech at the First State Democratic Dinner
at the Rollins Center in Dover, Delaware, on March 16, 2019.
Bastiaan Slabbers / NurPhoto via Getty Images
By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout Published April 26, 2019
There is no present or future only the past, happening over and over
again now. Eugene ONeill
So Joes in now, and really, thank God. The corporate neoliberal center is
dreadfully under-represented in the current tiny field of potential
Democratic nominees. In the event candidates Buttigieg, Harris, ORourke,
Booker, Klobuchar, Moulton, Inslee, Hickenlooper and Gillibrand fail to
successfully advocate for continuing 30 years of failed conservative
centrist Democratic policies, former Senator and Vice President Joe Biden
(D-Delaware) will be there to shoot the gap.
:facebrick:
The third times lucky, reads Alexander Hilsops 1862 compendium of
Scottish proverbs. I guess were all going to find out how true that is over
the course of the 79 weeks standing between this ragged little patch of time
and the 2020 presidential election. Senator Bidens first run at the brass
ring began on June 9, 1987, and ended in searing disgrace only 106 days
later after his campaign was subsumed by plagiarism accusations and his
questionable relationship with the facts of his own life.
Biden ran for president for the second time 20 years later, after dancing
right up to the edge of declaring his candidacy before stepping back in 1992
and again in 2004. Biden managed to stay in the 2008 race for 11 months
while never polling above single digits, finally withdrawing after placing
5th in the Iowa caucus. He did get noticed, however, and ultimately accepted
the number two slot on what became a victorious Obama/Biden ticket.
Biden kicked off his third presidential run on Thursday with an ominous and
somewhat cumbersome 6:00 am tweet [E]verything that has made America
America is at stake. The announcement tweet failed to mention Bidens
plans to attend a big-dollar fundraiser hosted by David Cohen, chief
lobbyist for Comcast, the most despised company in the country. This,
morosely, is par for a very long course.
Though he labels himself a friend to working people, Biden has a record of
harming workers that spans decades. His energetic work on behalf of the
credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry,
wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2002, and protected him from any well-funded
challengers for his Senate seat.
State laws have made Delaware the domicile of choice for corporations,
especially banks, writes Andrew Cockburn for Harpers, and it competes for
business with more notorious entrepôts such as the Cayman Islands. Over half
of all US public companies are legally headquartered there. Joe Biden spent
36 years as a Delaware senator until Obama raised him up in 2008, and during
that time he served his core constituency with vigor.
Biden has a record of harming workers that spans decades.
Biden voted in favor of one of the most ruthlessly anti-worker bills in
modern legislative history, the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and
Consumer Protection Act, depriving millions of the protections provided by
Chapter 7 bankruptcy. For this, and for his pro-corporate labors stretching
all the way back to 1978, he has earned the financial devotion of the
too-big-to-fail club many times over.
Millennial voters are touted as the sleeping giant of the 2020 election:
Turn them out in large numbers, goes the thinking, and you can practically
start measuring the drapes in the Oval Office today. If this is true, and I
believe it is, candidate Biden began his campaign behind an eight-ball
roughly the size of, well, Delaware.
Student debt broke $1.5 trillion in the first quarter of 2018 according to
the Federal Reserve, writes Mark Provost for Truthout. Twenty percent of
student borrowers default on their loan payments. Delawares own senator and
former vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, is at the center of
the decades-long campaign by lenders to eviscerate consumer debt
protections.
Biden became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987, at a time
when Republicans were running actively racist campaigns under the gossamer
veil of being tough on crime. Chairman Biden, who was about to spend 106
days failing to become president at the time, was not about to miss the
boat. By 1994, he had become the Democratic champion for the Violent Crime
Control and Law Enforcement Act, a vicious piece of legislation which
ushered in an age of mass incarceration that lawmakers today are still
laboring to dismantle.
Bidens problems on the matter of race go far beyond his full-throated
support for the 1994 crime bill. 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,
he said in 1975 regarding school desegregation. 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 dont buy that.
You can expect to see that quote at least once a day for as long as his
campaign remains active. One can try to shrug off a 44-year-old quote as the
words of a man whose opinions on race have evolved he shared the ticket
with Obama! but his record on the issue is unavoidably long and bleak.
Joe Bidens greatest strength is that hes been in the mainstream of
American politics for the last 50 years, writes the NBC politics blog, The
Fix. And thats his greatest weakness, too.
Bidens problems on the matter of race go far beyond his full-throated
support for the 1994 crime bill.
In this, Biden mirrors the history of the party whose nomination he seeks, a
party that was firmly on the wrong side of racial justice until the middle
of the 1960s. My state was a slave state, he told Fox News in 2006. My
state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest Black population in
the country. My state is anything [but] a Northeast liberal state. Later
that same year, before a mostly Republican crowd in South Carolina, Biden
joked that Delaware only stayed in the Union during the Civil War because
we couldnt figure out how to get to the South.
Joe Biden voted in favor of George W. Bushs invasion and occupation of
Iraq. I have spent the last 17 years of my life writing about that horrific
war, and expect to still be writing about it right up until they wind me in
my shroud. There is no lack of irony to be found in the fact that Biden
ultimately decided not to run for president in 1992 because he voted against
George H.W. Bushs Gulf War resolution, believing that vote irretrievably
damaged his chances for victory. Some 26 years later, his vote in favor of a
different Iraq war will be around his neck like a blood-soaked millstone,
and justly so.
And then there is the matter of Anita Hill, which rolls many of the most
pressing issues of the day womens rights, the patriarchy, racism, the
conservative balance of the Supreme Court, collusion with a Republican Party
that thinks bipartisanship is hilarious into a very hard ball.
Joe Biden was the ringleader of the hostile and sexist hearing that put
Anita Hill, not Clarence Thomas, on trial, writes Shaunna Thomas,
co-founder and executive director of the womens group, UltraViolet. In
doing so, Biden caused tremendous harm to all survivors, he set back the
movement, and he helped put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. This is
not a subject he can sweep under the rug. This is not something he can just
get out of the way before announcing his candidacy. This is not something
one line in a speech or interview will fix.
Prior to announcing his candidacy, Biden expressed regret for his treatment
of Anita Hill, going so far as to say Im sorry on the Today show in
September 2018, which speaks volumes about how long he has been
contemplating this campaign (Hill was not present in the studio to hear the
apology). On the day he announced this third run, CNBC reported that Biden
had spoken to Hill personally. They had a private discussion, said a
campaign spokesperson, where he shared with her directly his regret for
what she endured and his admiration for everything she has done to change
the culture around sexual harassment in this country.
According to The New York Times, however, Hill was having none of it. Ms.
Hill, in an interview Wednesday, said she left the conversation feeling
deeply unsatisfied and declined to characterize his words to her as an
apology, reported the Times. She said she is not convinced that Mr. Biden
truly accepts the harm he caused her and other women who suffered sexual
harassment and gender violence.
I cannot be satisfied by simply saying Im sorry for what happened to you,
Hill is quoted as saying. I will be satisfied when I know there is real
change and real accountability and real purpose. The focus on apology, to
me, is one thing. But he needs to give an apology to the other women and to
the American public because we know now how deeply disappointed Americans
around the country were about what they saw. And not just women. There are
women and men now who have just really lost confidence in our government to
respond to the problem of gender violence.
Joe Bidens first three public endorsements from conservative Democratic
Senators Chris Coons (Delaware), Bob Casey (Pennsylvania) and Doug Jones
(Alabama) tell you all you need to know about who is rooting for his
candidacy. A significant number of the policies he has devoted his life to
are simply terrible. Hes a bannerman for a failed Democratic Party
experiment, and the only people who dont seem capable of perceiving that
failure are the centrist Democrats cheering him on.
Joe Biden voted in favor of George W. Bushs invasion and occupation of
Iraq.
Biden is planning to run on the same But I can win! platform that worked
out so poorly in the last election. The politics blog Crystal Ball labels
him as potentially The Most Experienced New President Ever, which was also
what some people were saying about Hillary Clinton in 2016. Even in the
short time between now and then, a great many Democratic voters have
demonstrably left him behind.
Three decades of watching conservative Democrats assist Republicans as they
drove the country to the right is enough already. Alexander Hilsops
proverb, I strongly suspect, is dead wrong on this one. Joe Biden is leading
in the polls at the moment, but if hes still in the race after Super
Tuesday, I will be stunned. At least hell know how to find the exit. Hes
done it before.
Time is running out.
