Like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden is a career politician, an Obama administration alumnus, a wealthy white patrician vying for a base that worships at the altar of intersectionality, and a neoliberal Democrat who refuses to reject capitalism.
But the similarities end there.
Echoing a refrain from the AOC-aligned Justice Democrats, Matthew Yglesias at Vox has asserted that, based on his long-scrutinized record and establishmentarianism, Biden is just the Hillary Clinton of 2020. Mehdi Hassan at the Intercept deemed Biden “Hillary 2.0.”
Biden is a gaffe machine and, if elected, would be one year older on Inauguration Day than Ronald Reagan was on his final day of his presidency. His record on the War on Drugs renders him just as unfavorable to libertarian-leaning Republicans as it does on standard liberals. But Biden has none of the pitfalls that doomed Hillary to the worst presidential campaign in American history.
The most significant factors distinguishing the two are attitudinal. Hillary ignored the Rust Belt out of sheer hubris, referred to those voting for Trump as “deplorables,” and made her contempt for the rule of law abundantly clear with her entire handling of the email scandal. In contrast, Biden is affable, sympathetic and actively appealing to the white working class. He is also sufficiently self-deprecating to offset the fact that he’s clearly power hungry enough to seek the presidency on three separate occasions.
And from a situational perspective, Biden seems nowhere near as entitled to the Democratic ticket as Hillary was. From President Barack Obama’s attempts to keep Biden out of the 2016 primary to the DNC actively rigging the primary system, Hillary was all but coronated to the Democratic candidacy. By contrast, the actual Democratic establishment hasn’t lined up in lockstep to back Biden. The socialist Left had the populist advantage of framing 2016 as a trailblazing outsider’s crusade against a single corrupt, omnipotent establishment figure. 2020 already as 20 candidates, and none have the DNC or even Obama backing them. Obama alums such as Ronald Klain and David Axelrod have tweeted extremely favorably of Biden’s bid, but he’s running far more of a quixotic campaign than Hillary ever was.
Biden’s personal baggage pales in comparison to Hillary’s. No one complained for decades while Biden randomly sniffed women’s hair and got too touchy with random women at public events. The media attempted to manufacture one “revelatory” news cycle, presumably as a last-ditch attempt to dissuade Biden from joining the race, and as a result, Biden lost fewer than half of a percentage point of support from his RealClearPolitics average.
Hillary not only stands accused to complicity in her husband’s multiple rape and sexual assault allegations, but she publicly slut-shamed the 21 year-old intern he seduced. That’s not a mistake or a character flaw. That’s comic book villain levels of evil.
In addition, Biden may be a fixture of the swamp, but he’s self-made. His father was a used-car salesman, and was elected to the United States Senate when not yet 30 years-old. No one for a second believes that Hillary would have ever had a political career without marrying Bill, and after two generations of Bushes and the risk of a third Clinton administration, the American public had dynastic fatigue.
What the Democratic far Left thinks of as Biden’s weaknesses may actually help clear his path to the nomination. The average Democratic voter is substantially more moderate, especially on social issues, than the “Very Online Left.” Biden already polls extraordinarily well with older voters and black Democrats, and if he can spin his tough on crime past as simply aligning with his more seemingly benevolent contributions, such as the Violence Against Women Act, he can solidly secure the liberal vote while 19 other candidates scramble to divide up the support of the fringe.
Biden is the candidate to beat in this race, and given his late start and downright vitriol from the Bernie base, knives from all sides will be out for Uncle Joe. Even with a ten-point lead, such a fractured field presents an uphill battle for Biden, but his candidacy is nowhere near as flawed as Hillary’s.
