The Democratic Party needs to defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election. That isn’t just what a left-leaning person like myself wants to see; it is a moral imperative. After four years of an aggressively ignorant, willfully destructive, proudly ignorant, and overtly bigoted hatemonger occupying the White House, our country has sustained crushing and perhaps irreparable damage to both its reputation and its soul (not to mention the environment). This isn’t an extreme view, or it shouldn’t be. But a sizable fraction of the voting population has grown so good at denial and self-deception that we may very well see the least qualified, least competent President of the last 45 years re-elected twelve months from now … that is, unless the Democrats can convince enough people that they have something MUCH better to offer.
The “MUCH” is important. “Better than Donald Trump” is an absurdly low bar for any candidate to reach, but we also saw in 2016 that it didn’t count for a whole lot. Part of the problem, unfortunately, was that Hillary Clinton had too many self-inflicted wounds even before her campaign began: she mishandled the Benghazi operation, she bullied the women who had made credible harassment complaints against her husband, and she voted for military action in Iraq when she and everyone else in Congress should have known better. With this much baggage, it didn’t matter that she was objectively smarter and better qualified for the Presidency than Donald Trump; there were too many ways for him to attack her credibility, and for whatever reason–perhaps because he is a man, perhaps because he’s a reality TV veteran, or perhaps because he’s just so damn loud–voters were inclined to focus their moral outrage on her while completely ignoring the bottomless pit of character defects that Trump represented. Without question, I would have preferred her over him as the 45th President, but at the same time it’s hard for me to ignore how much Hillary Clinton’s hubris and hypocrisy contributed to her own defeat.
Which brings us now to Joe Biden, who, as Mehdi Hasan convincingly argues in The Intercept, is shaping up to be “Hillary Clinton 2.0” as far as the 2020 election is concerned. It is impossible to overstate how big a mistake the Democrats would be making if they were to choose Biden as their nominee this time around. For one thing, he doesn’t have enough self-control to avoid falling into some of the same classless, vulgar behaviors Trump is known for. Take, for instance, Biden’s assertion during a March 2018 interview that if he and Trump “were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him” over Trump’s misogynistic remarks on the infamous Access Hollywood tape that should have torpedoed his 2016 campaign. I’m sorry, but do we really need MORE ultramacho chest-beating from our politicians? Is this what passes for charisma now? And don’t get me started on Biden’s follow-up comment that “any guy who talked that way [in high school] was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.” Attacking your opponent for his appearance–isn’t that straight out of Trump’s cheap-shot playbook? Shouldn’t we at least aim a little higher than this?
Of course, if Biden’s tonal issues were his biggest problem, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to write an entire post about it. But he has failed at a more fundamental level: he hasn’t demonstrated that he has what it takes to move the country forward far enough or fast enough. His refusal to take responsibility for his role in the humiliation of Anita Hill at the Clarence Thomas hearings (see Natasha Lennard’s excellent piece on the subject here), coupled with his general condescension toward women and his failure to respect their boundaries, is a major red flag. So is his unfocused, unconvincing response to questions about his commitment to addressing climate change (which, in case anyone remains unaware, is a crisis rapidly approaching extinction-level proportions). Then there’s his authorship of the 1994 crime bill, which helped trigger the plague of mass incarceration that has disproportionately targeted poor and non-white communities for 25 years. And even if his son’s eyebrow-raising involvement in a Ukrainian energy company doesn’t end up meeting the strict legal definition of corruption, who in their right mind would try to defend the Biden family on that one?
So, to sum up, Biden is more than just a strategic liability to the Democratic Party because of his penchant for ramming his foot into his mouth on live television. If he somehow does win the Presidency, we can expect scant progress (if any) on institutional corruption, systemic racism, misogyny, sexual harassment, or the looming climate catastrophe. And if that’s the best we’re willing to do at this point, does it really matter that it’s slightly better than Donald Trump?
Please, people, for the love of God, don’t fall for the myth of the “safe candidate.” Nominate someone who evolves faster, listens better, thinks harder, and dreams bigger. It’s not a matter of idealism. It’s a matter of reclaiming our basic decency as a country, and making sure we survive long enough to do it.
The Shellshocked Cassowary Rises 