Joe Biden may not be who we want, but he's what we need to beat Trump

In another election cycle, anyone with progressive leanings would want to mothball him. But in this nomination process there is room for one question and one alone

Matthew Norman
Sunday 28 April 2019 16:26 BST
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Joe Biden says he asked Barack Obama not to endorse him

Joe Biden has announced that he is running for president, but it’s too early to fret about his campaign anthem. When that time comes, he could do worse than “You Can’t Get Always Get What You Want”.

The Stones’ classic would be a boldly self-aware choice, brazenly acknowledging that to many Democrats he is exactly what they don’t want. In a field overflowing with thrilling prospects – a forensically dazzling woman of colour in Kamala Harris; the promise and novelty of the young and gay Pete Buttigieg; the sex-on-legs charisma of Beto O’Rourke; the socialist (by US standards) tub-thumping of Bernie Sanders – the 76-year-old Biden, whom Donald Trump has taken to calling Sleepy Joe, seems a wretched fit for the woke generation.

Although he is a year younger than Bernie Sanders, Biden is a centrist Washington antique (decades in the Senate, eight years as Obama’s VP) with none of Bernie’s firebrand charms. He’s also a bit gropey at a time when the clumsy invasion of personal space is blessedly out of vogue.

His mishandling of a Senate investigation into Anita Hill’s blatantly truthful allegations about the sexual misdemeanours of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas back in 1991, and his failure to apologise properly now, will rightly plague him through the campaign.

Biden has the musty whiff of a patriarchal past that wants burying. In another election cycle, anyone with progressive leanings would want to mothball him.

But you can’t always get you want, and in this nomination process there is room for one question and one alone.

Who can slay the kraken? Which of the runners is best placed to remove the incumbent, and spare Americans and the planet another four years of this abomination?

It’s a question that will obsess more than Democrat voters as the primary and caucus approach next January. The world will turn on the result of the next presidential election, as it has spun for 30 months on the axis of the calamity of the last.

So it is that we gaze across the Atlantic with a yearning for what Biden’s friend and former boss knew, in another context, as hope and change. The hope this time is depressingly limited to a change in the occupancy of the Oval Office.

It won’t be easy. The Mueller report has predictably fizzled out into an inner beltway fixation. Last week’s GDP growth figure of 3.2 per cent was unexpectedly strong. Wages are rising faster than inflation, unemployment is at a modern historic low, and the Dow Jones is flirting with all-time highs.

There is plenty of time for Trump to crash an economy dangerously powered by cheap debt, and at the mercy of a car leasing loan scandal, anticipated as the next subprime mortgage-style catastrophe.

But if next November is anything like as superficially healthy as it is today, Trump could be close to indestructible unless the Democrats pick the right weapon.

They have a staggering talent for choosing the wrong candidate, often for the right reasons. Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern were engagingly liberal candidates, and lambs to the slaughter against the brutalist campaigning of Richard Nixon. John Kerry was a fine politician, but too prey to being depicted by the Karl Rove-Fox propaganda machine as a Boston Brahmin elite with fancy foreign tastes and a Heinz billionairess wife to capitalise on George Dubya Bush’s vulnerabilities.

As for Hillary Clinton, massively admirable in many ways though she is, there the Democrats miraculously alighted on the sole candidate who could lose to Trump. She lost for a myriad of reasons (sexism, unrelatability, James Comey’s resurrection of the emails non-scandal, etc). But the one unforgivable reason for her defeat is the one compelling reason why the Democrats should ignore Biden’s failings, and support him.

Hillary Clinton didn’t bother visiting the Rust Belt states, those cauldrons of blue-collar resentment and disappointed dreams where she was loathed, which decided the election. Biden, the Amtrak-commuting high priest of hardscrabble, would have every chance of winning them, and so the White House.

His back story of unbearable suffering (the wife and baby daughter who died in a car crash during his initial Senate run almost half a century ago; the son he lost to brain cancer a few years ago) will touch people. But he won’t win the nomination through the pity he wouldn’t want.

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Enduringly lovable as many find him, no more than Clinton or Trump would he inspire with optics or oratory. He’d make dreadful mistakes, as in 1988 when he had to withdraw from his first presidential run for plagiarising a Neil Kinnock speech, and appalling gaffes (as on his first day on the ticket for the 2008 election, when he praised the first black presidential nominee for being “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”).

Biden would hardly be a perfect candidate like Obama, who dissuaded him from running last time, and won’t endorse him (or anyone else) this time. If I had a vote, the heart would be torn between Harris, Sanders and Buttigieg. But the head would ask itself that one and only question – who is likeliest to take out the sea monster? – and scream Sloppy Joe in reply.

It will take an unusual effort of will for the Democrats to wage the internal battle as old as democratic politics – the struggle between idealism and pragmatism – and accept the wisdom of the suggested campaign song.

You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, as the philosopher Jagger goes on to say, you just might find you’ll get what you need.

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