“After three months, surprises mark the Democratic campaign,” Dan Balz wrote in the Washington Post as March ended. It’s now clear five months later that he didn’t know half of it.
The party of the young and nonwhite is now led by three white people in their 70s. The one woman among them is known more for her economic and socialist wonkery than for her feminist credibility.
Except for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose branding is different, the women in the field have failed to gain traction. New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the most extreme of them all in her embrace of abortion, is now out of contention, having spent millions in her quest to crack 1% in the polls.
Sensible Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar has failed to stir much excitement, although she at least hasn’t embarrassed herself too horribly. She might yet make a vice presidential pick for a candidate Joe Biden, assuming the stories about her temperament weren’t to damaging.
California Sen. Kamala Harris had a brilliant debut in debate number one, but was massacred in debate number two and never lived up to that movie-star moment. Harris, who is Asian Jamaican, has watched as black voters flock to Biden, as has N.J. Sen. Cory Booker. Biden is about as white as they come (including his hair), but his close association with former President Barack Obama seems to override all else.
Like the nonwhite and the women candidates, the young and the restless — Beto O’Rourke and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg — are also not faring too well. At one point in spring 2017, the millionaire’s son who married the billionaire’s daughter seemed on the verge of becoming a real human being. He was speaking in terms that suggested inclusion. He live-streamed a road trip with Republican neighbor Will Hurd from El Paso, Texas, to Washington when storms closed the airports. He became a sensation, using his rapport with Hispanics to stir memories of the bond between Cesar Chavez and Robert F. Kennedy, and to suggest that if a real Kennedy heir was not then in the offing, a faux one might do just as well.
But that was then. After he announced for president, the Left pulled the plug on everything that made him different. In no time at all, what Vanity Fair once announced was a new kind of Democrat turned into the same old, same old kind of demagogue. He extolled the virtues of late term abortion, dropped the F-bomb with mind-numbing frequency, and slid 10 points or more in the polls.
Something analogous happened to Buttigieg. At his best, he could have been taken as the 21st century’s answer to Adlai Stevenson, an elegant speaker whose eloquent pleas for greater levels of tolerance played very well with people who heard them. But then it turned out, upon closer inspection, that his tolerance seems to be limited to those who agree with him on pretty much everything. The secular Left has its niche, just not on this level. Wave the young and the restless goodbye.
And so say hello now to Uncle Joe Biden, whose surprise, when one looks closely, is how much like President Trump he appears.
They are roughly the same age — Trump is 73, Biden 76 — and Biden will be a staggering 82 if he wins and seeks reelection. Biden and Trump share the strange hair: Remember the hair plugs? They both run on emotions, which they have trouble containing; they have problems with words, which they misuse very often; they have trouble with facts, which they seldom acknowledge; and quite often they both make things up.
Both have sons who made millions from “business deals” with suspect foreign powers due to their fathers’ connections and power, for which no accounting will ever be made.
Some things will change if Biden wins power, but not most of the things that turn out to matter. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone at all.
