Name: What's behind Joe Biden's mystique? | Thomas Frank
Brand: theguardian.com
SKU: theguardian-com-1132
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

What's behind Joe Biden's mystique? | Thomas Frank

preview

This article is more than 2 years oldThis article is more than 2 years oldThe former vice-president’s brand of centrism no longer fits the times, but he has spoken up for the party’s traditional baseLast modified on Wed 20 Jan 2021 22.21 ESTThe flaw in this viewpoint is that the consensus days of yore were a dreadful time. What bipartisan centrism meant, , was deliberate, state-sponsored cruelty on a scale so vast it is difficult to comprehend. It meant baked-in racial discrimination. It meant imprisoning enormous numbers of our fellow citizens for using drugs – especially crack cocaine, whose users () were singled out for horrendously harsh retribution. It meant three-strikes laws. Mandatory minimum sentencing. Unlimited funding for police departments. A boom in prison construction. And, as it pleased Joe Biden to on the worst of these occasions, “the truth is, every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress – every minor crime bill – has had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, on that bill.”Biden has to walk back the decades he spent transforming America into a penal state. He may succeed in persuading voters to forgive him. But he’s not going to win because the old centrist strategy has worked and Republicans are fatally outmaneuvered by his clever triangulations. These days even the Charles Koch Institute is of where Biden was back in the crackdown era.You can say something similar about Biden’s famous rapport with the working class: it is badly compromised by his actual political record. In the 90s and the 00s, “middle-class Joe”, as he used to be called, was largely complicit in the New Democratic effort to enshrine liberation for Wall Street as the party’s holy cause. He supported certain trade agreements that were great for banks but helped trash the industrial region where Biden grew up. What working people got was austerity: a crackdown on bankruptcy that was designed to fatten credit card companies and that incidentally made it almost impossible to escape .Everything I have mentioned was at the time an act of in-crowd DC consensus politics – which meant the consensus politicians in question had to answer to almost nobody for their votes. But that’s not going to protect Biden now. That old consensus has melted away in the last few years – the last few weeks – like snow under a blowtorch. And thank goodness.To put it plainly, Biden is the product of a completely different world than the Ivy League meritocracy that has taken over the Democratic party. He is an unapologetic child of an industrial town and a middle-class society, and in this sense, he is a relic of an older, warmer kind of liberalism.When it comes to Biden, journalists will never enthuse – as they did with Bill Clinton –about the awesome things that will happen when his Rhodes Scholar friends come together with his Yale Law friends. Biden will never choose to publish summaries of his administration in academic journals, as Obama did.Another thing Biden will probably never do (as the journalist Michael Sean Winters reminded me) is call people “deplorables” or write off the humanity of a large part of the population because they voted for Trump.To understand the Biden mystique, I spoke to Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, a union that as far back as April 2019. He reminded me of the many little-known measures Biden has taken to secure decent pay and bargaining rights for public-sector workers. Noting correctly that lots of politicians have trouble even talking about unions, Schaitberger said of Biden that he has never been “afraid to say the word union, and that every worker should be able to easily join a union and be represented by a union”.Schaitberger went on to say this about the candidate: “He is who he is. He’s real. He’s genuine. He’s a respectful person, and he’s a decent person, and he has great empathy and concern. Particularly for those who have experienced heartache or difficulties or tragedies.” A group, you might say, that ultimately encompasses all of us.An important key to the Biden mystique can be found in a with the New York Times editorial board that the candidate did last December. Seven-eighths of it was the usual evasiveness, in which Biden tried to take credit for everything good while distancing himself from everything bad. But with the Times’ final question, moral clarity seemed to descend on middle-class Joe. Reminiscing about the 2016 Democratic effort, Biden recalled how Democratic strategists told him they intended to “give up on white working-class folks”. “Well, look what’s happened,” he continued.Catering to society’s well-educated winners is no way to run a party of the left: Biden seems to have grasped this“Look what started to seep in, beginning and probably even with candidates during our administration. We stopped showing up at the Polish American club. We stopped showing up, and we all went to you, the really smart people. We had a new kind of coalition we were putting together. College-educated women and college men and boom, boom, boom and so on.”Catering to society’s well-educated winners is no way to run a party of the left: Biden seems to be one of the few mainstream Democrats to have grasped this. He recalled in the interview being told by a Hillary Clinton operative in 2016 that he “had to make a distinction between progressive values and working-class values”.“I said I’ve never found a distinction,” Biden claimed he replied. “Never found them hard to sell.” He told the Times about white working-class enthusiasm for gender wage equality and some other issues, and then he took this shot at the very heart of modern-day liberalism: “We treat them like they’re stupid. They know they’re in trouble, and nobody’s talking to them. Nobody’s talking to them. That’s what we used to do. That was our base.”It is a point in Biden’s favor that he understands this problem. But is he the man to resolve it? Much of Biden’s middle-class talk is, his own patented trick for connecting with voters. Yes, Biden looks and sounds like a great guy. I want to like him. But I also know that when the laws were being made, Biden was a different person: the cops’ and the bankers’ best friend. We got empathy; they got the power.The current protests suggest Biden’s routine may not be enough. On the other hand, given Donald Trump’s malevolent incompetence, perhaps it is the right moment for a man who promises fundamental decency and little else. My own hope – and it is merely a hope at this point – is that somewhere in the soul of that tongue-tied, old-school Delaware pol flickers the forgotten core value of the Democratic party: solidarity.

This article is more than 2 years oldThis article is more than 2 years oldThe former vice-president’s brand of centrism no longer fits the times, but he has spoken up for the party’s traditional baseLast modified on Wed 20 Jan 2021 22.21 ESTThe flaw in this viewpoint is that the consensus days of yore were a dreadful time. What bipartisan centrism meant, , was deliberate, state-sponsored cruelty on a scale so vast it is difficult to comprehend. It meant baked-in racial discrimination. It meant imprisoning enormous numbers of our fellow citizens for using drugs – especially crack cocaine,...

public

Thomas Frank

TheGuardian.com, formerly known as Guardian.co.uk and Guardian Unlimited, is a British news and media website owned by the Guardian Media Group. It contains nearly all of the content of the newspapers The Guardian and The Observer, as well as a substantial body of web-only work produced by its own staff, including a rolling news service.

What's behind Joe Biden's mystique? | Thomas Frank

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS