Joe Biden’s announcement video starts with a nod to Thomas Jefferson, only later to qualify it, providing a revealing insight into how the former vice president will navigate running for office in a drastically changed Democratic Party.
Though 19 other candidates have already announced they are seeking the Democratic nomination in 2020, Biden is the consistent leader in polls, so with his entrance, the field has finally taken shape.
But Biden is in a unique position. Though he brings a wealth of experience, high name recognition, and a long association with the popular former President Barack Obama, he is also 76 years old, and is trying to run as a traditional Democrat in a party that has become more diverse and has moved further toward the Left. So he is seen as a vulnerable front-runner.
Biden’s announcement video shows how he’ll try to thread the needle between showing he can appeal to a broader part of the electorate than rivals, giving him a better chance of beating President Trump, while also signaling he is sufficiently “woke” to represent the modern party. This is exemplified in his treatment of Jefferson.
In his video, Biden framed his opening message around the neo-Nazi riot and clash with counterprotesters in Charlottesville in August 2017.
He started by saying, “Charlottesville, Virginia is home to the author of one of the great documents in human history” and then quoted Jefferson’s famous words about all men being created equal. He then went on to caution, “We haven’t always lived up to these ideals. Jefferson himself didn’t.”
Biden, in other words, wanted to couch his announcement in one of the founding documents of American history, but wanted to signal to younger viewers that he understands Jefferson’s legacy was problematic.
The change in attitude toward Jefferson in the past several decades is a good indicator of how much the party has changed over the course of Biden’s career.
In 1993, when Biden had already served as a U.S. Senator for two decades, Jefferson was so non-controversial that Bill Clinton made the third president a centerpiece of his inauguration.
In the days before taking the oath of office, Bill Clinton, along with Hillary and the Gores, took a televised tour of Jefferson’s Monticello and used that as the jumping off point for the bus journey to Washington for his swearing in ceremony.
“We wanted to begin here at Monticello not only because Jefferson was the greatest president, but also because he believed in the power of ideas that made this country great,” Clinton said.
Clinton’s admiration for Jefferson had been so well known during the campaign that it led to a famous quip from Ronald Reagan in his last major national speech. Clinton kept a bust of Jefferson in his office both as governor of Arkansas and as president. In giving a tour of the Oval Office to C-Span’s Brian Lamb early in his presidency, Clinton showed off the bust, as well as an original copy of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, and two contemporary biographies of Jefferson, the second of which was given to him as a birthday present by then-Vice President Al Gore.
Clinton regularly quoted Jefferson unapologetically. He did so in his first inaugural address in 1993 and when he signed the Telecommunications Act in 1993.
In the decades that followed, Jefferson’s legacy has taken a nosedive, and this has coincided with a time when younger liberals have been less willing to forgive the sins of our founding fathers.
Jefferson’s slave owning and a 1998 DNA test confirming that there was a genetic connection between the Hemings family and a male Jefferson has left many historians to conclude that Jefferson did have children with his young slave, Sally Hemings, although some still insist it was more likely another male Jefferson, perhaps his younger brother.
Following the Hemings DNA test, many prominent books came out that elevated the legacies of Jefferson’s rivals, such as David McCullough’s John Adams and Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (made extra famous by the musical) so those naturally made Jefferson come off worse.
This change in attitudes toward Jefferson is emblematic of the more dramatic changes that have occurred on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and a litany of policy issues over the course of Biden’s long career. He will now have to answer for, among other things, his authorship of a crime bill that liberals blame for mass incarceration, and his opposition to school busing in the 1970s.
Biden’s challenge is to signal to the younger Democratic electorate that he gets that things have changed and he has evolved with the times, while also avoiding the radical policy lurch that has occurred within the party, that would undermine his pitch that he’s better positioned than other candidates to win over moderates and bring back swing voters who defected to Trump in 2016.
After the Jefferson reference, the rest of the Biden video is a mix of the old and the new — jingoistic language, black and white images of the Statue of Liberty and American troops in World War II intermixed with footage of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and counterprotesters clashing with torch carrying neo-Nazis. Trump’s equivocating reaction, Biden said, showed that, “we are in the battle for the soul of this nation.”
Biden wants to project the idea that he can revere the heroic and inspiring elements of our past, but still is self-aware enough to filter it so it can be adapted for modern times.
