Joe Biden: Puffery vs. Reality
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
24 April 19
Let's be blunt: As a supposed friend of American workers, Joe Biden is a
phony. And now that he's running for president, Biden's huge task is to hide
his phoniness.
From the outset, with dim prospects from small donors, the Biden campaign is
depending on big checks from the rich and corporate elites who greatly
appreciate his services rendered. "He must rely heavily, at least at first,
upon an old-fashioned network of money bundlers - political insiders, former
ambassadors and business executives," The New York Times reported on
Tuesday.
Biden has a media image that exudes down-to-earth caring and advocacy for
regular folks. But his actual record is a very different story.
During the 1970s, in his first Senate term, Biden spouted white backlash
rhetoric, used tropes pandering to racism, and teamed up with arch
segregationists against measures like busing for school integration. He went
on to be a fount of racially charged appeals and "predators on our streets"
oratory on the Senate floor as he led the successful effort to pass the
now-notorious 1994 crime bill.
A gavel in Biden's hand repeatedly proved to be dangerous. In 1991, as chair
of the Judiciary Committee, Biden prevented key witnesses from testifying to
corroborate Anita Hill's accusations of sexual harassment during the
Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. In 2002, as
chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Biden was the Senate's most
crucial supporter of the Iraq invasion.
Meanwhile, for well over four decades - while corporate media preened his
image as "Lunch Bucket Joe" fighting for the middle class - Biden continued
his assist for strengthening oligarchy as a powerful champion of legalizing
corporate plunder on a mind-boggling scale.
Now, Joe Biden has arrived as a presidential candidate to rescue the
Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders.
Urgency is in the media air. Last week, The New York Times told readers that
"Stop Sanders" Democrats were "agonizing over his momentum." The story was
front-page news. At The Washington Post, a two-sentence headline appeared
just above a nice photo of Biden: "Far-Left Policies Will Drive a 2020
Defeat, Centrist Democrats Fear. So They're Floating Alternatives."
Biden is the most reliable alternative for corporate America. He has what
Sanders completely lacks - vast experience as an elected official serving
the interests of credit-card companies, big banks, insurance firms, and
other parts of the financial services industry. His alignment with corporate
interests has been comprehensive. It was a fulcrum of his entire political
career when, in 1993, Senator Biden voted yes while most Democrats in
Congress voted against NAFTA.
In recent months, from his pro-corporate vantage point, Biden has been
taking potshots at the progressive populism of Bernie Sanders. At a
gathering in Alabama last fall, Biden said: "Guys, the wealthy are as
patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn't like me saying that, but they
are." Later, Biden elaborated on the theme when he told an audience at the
Brookings Institution, "I don't think five hundred billionaires are the
reason we're in trouble. The folks at the top aren't bad guys."
Overall, in sharp contrast to the longstanding and continuing negative
coverage of Sanders, mainstream media treatment of Biden often borders on
reverential. The affection from so many high-profile political journalists
toward Biden emerged yet again a few weeks ago during the uproar about his
persistent pattern of intrusively touching women and girls. During one cable
news show after another, reporters and pundits were at pains to emphasize
his essential decency and fine qualities.
But lately, some independent-minded journalists have been exhuming what
"Lunch Bucket Joe" is eager to keep buried. For instance:
Libby Watson, Splinter News: "Joe Biden is telling striking workers he's
their friend while taking money from, and therefore being beholden to, the
class of people oppressing them. According to Axios, Biden's first
fundraiser will be with David Cohen, the executive vice president of and
principal lobbyist for Comcast. Comcast is one of America's most hated
companies, and for good reason. It represents everything that sucks for the
modern consumer-citizen, for whom things like internet or TV access are
extremely basic necessities, but who are usually given the option of
purchasing it from just one or two companies." What's more, Comcast supports
such policies as "ending net neutrality and repealing broadband privacy
protections.... And Joe Biden is going to kick off his presidential campaign
by begging for their money."
Ryan Cooper, The Week: "As a loyal toady of the large corporations
(especially finance, insurance, and credit cards) that put their
headquarters in Delaware because its suborned government allows them to
evade regulations in other states, Biden voted for repeated rounds of
deregulation in multiple areas and helped roll back anti-trust policy -
often siding with Republicans in the process. He was a key architect of the
infamous 2005 bankruptcy reform bill which made means tests much more strict
and near-impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy."
Paul Waldman, The American Prospect: "Joe Biden, we are told over and over,
is the one who can speak to the disaffected white men angry at the loss of
their primacy. He's the one who doesn't like abortion, but is willing to let
the ladies have them. He's the one who tells white people to be nice to
immigrants, even as he mirrors their xenophobia ('You cannot go to a
7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent,' he
said in 2006). He's the one who validates their racism and sexism while
gently trying to assure them that they're still welcome in the Democratic
Party.... It's not yet clear what policy agenda Biden will propose, though
it's likely to be pretty standard Democratic fare that rejects some of the
more ambitious goals other candidates have embraced. But Biden represents
something more fundamental: a link to the politics and political style of
the past."
Rebecca Traister, The Cut: "Much of what Democrats blame Republicans for was
enabled, quite literally, by Biden: Justices whose confirmation to the
Supreme Court he rubber-stamped worked to disembowel affirmative action,
collective bargaining rights, reproductive rights, voting rights.... In his
years in power, Biden and his party (elected thanks to a nonwhite base
enfranchised in the 1960s) built the carceral state that disproportionately
imprisons and disenfranchises people of color, as part of what Michelle
Alexander has described as the New Jim Crow. With his failure to treat
seriously claims of sexual harassment made against powerful men on their way
to accruing more power (claims rooted in prohibitions that emerged from the
feminist and civil-rights movements of the 1970s), Biden created a precedent
that surely made it easier for accused harassers, including Donald Trump and
Brett Kavanaugh, to nonetheless ascend. Economic chasms and racial wealth
gaps have yawned open, in part thanks to Joe Biden's defenses of credit card
companies, his support of that odious welfare-reform bill, his eagerness to
support the repeal of Glass-Steagall."
One of Biden's illuminating actions came last year in Michigan when he gave
a speech - for a fee of $200,000 including "travel allowance" - that praised
the local Republican congressman, Fred Upton, just three weeks before the
mid-term election. From the podium, the former vice president lauded Upton
as "one of the finest guys I've ever worked with." For good measure, Biden
refused to endorse Upton's Democratic opponent, who went on to lose by less
than 5 percent.
Biden likes to present himself as a protector of the elderly. Campaigning
for Senator Bill Nelson in Florida last autumn, Biden denounced Republicans
for aiming to "cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid." Yet five months
earlier, speaking to the Brookings Institution on May 8, Biden spoke
favorably of means testing that would go a long way toward damaging
political support for Social Security and Medicare and smoothing the way for
such cuts.
Indications of being a "moderate" and a "centrist" play well with the
Washington press corps and corporate media, but amount to a surefire way to
undermine enthusiasm and voter turnout from the base of the Democratic
Party. The consequences have been catastrophic, and the danger of the
party's deference to corporate power looms ahead. Much touted by the same
kind of insular punditry that insisted Hillary Clinton was an ideal
candidate to defeat Donald Trump, the ostensible "electability" of Joe Biden
has been refuted by careful analysis of data.
As a former Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and
a current coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network
for 2019, I remain convinced that the media meme about choosing between
strong progressive commitments and capacity to defeat Trump is a false
choice. On the contrary, Biden exemplifies a disastrous approach of
jettisoning progressive principles and failing to provide a progressive
populist alternative to right-wing populism. That's the history of 2016. It
should not be repeated.
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Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He
is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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