The secret is out: President Barack Obama doesn’t want his vice president to assume his former office. He wants someone younger, newer to the scene, and more progressive.
This surely seems true, but it also seems true that no one has done more than Obama himself to deplete his own party of young, vibrant candidates. It is his fault that such people will never break through.
It was Obama who, given the choice of a vice president, picked Joe Biden. Then, in two midterm elections, he forced his most loyal subjects to walk the plank in defense of a healthcare bill that was toxic to voters.
Think back to those golden days of 2005-06 to see how the Democrats built and broke their majority. President George W. Bush had just won reelection, carrying with him the House and the Senate. A number of Democrats, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi among them, gathered to work out together how they could turn things around. They came up with the innovation of actually picking candidates who fit their states and their districts well, ignoring bitter ideological litmus tests over things like abortion and guns.
It worked like a charm, and Democrats took over both houses of Congress. Two years later, Obama swept into office with help from the financial crisis. For several months, they even had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
In early 2009, Republicans feared they were doomed to extinction. Democrats dreamed of 20-plus years in power. Then, Obama came up with a healthcare proposal that thrilled liberals and sent other Democrats, especially those in red and swing states and districts, shivering with fear.
The sign that things were going badly came in January 2010, with the special election to fill the seat of the late Senator Ted Kennedy. Obama faced a choice at that point between his healthcare bill and his congressional majorities. He chose the bill.
That November, Democrats were wiped out in the House, and their large majority in the Senate was halved. Obama won reelection in 2012, but Democrats suffered even worse defeats in 2014 as his health law took effect. Republicans gained nine Senate seats and took full control of Congress.
If you’re wondering what became of those bright, young liberals Obama had hoped might succeed him, look no further than those two elections of 2010 and 2014. From the U.S. Senate all the way down to the state legislatures, those elections wiped out Democrats’ gains from 2006-08, clearing the benches of promising, young up-and-comers. Obama killed off the farm team that he had hoped would succeed him. And now, there’s nothing he can do.
With the choice of the already ancient Biden as his veep, Obama forfeited his best chance to groom a successor. And with his healthcare bill, he killed off a whole generation of Democratic candidates. So Biden is just the symptom, not the cause, of his party’s disturbance.
