Joe Biden had a simple plan. To win the Democratic presidential nomination, he wouldn’t have to worry about competition from candidates to his left because he doesn’t share their radicalism, and the candidates on his right were irrelevant and he didn’t want to bother with them. All he had to do was stay in his moderate-to-liberal lane. It’s where he’s ideologically comfortable and where he’s situated himself since he was elected to the Senate in 1972 from Delaware at the age of 29. It’s where elections are won.
Usually.
The Biden plan has met strong and unexpected resistance from the Left. Rather than respected as a member of the Democratic party’s elite, he is treated as a ghost from its far less bold and fearless past. In the recent debate in Detroit, his rivals attacked him as a relic of the past century. Democrats are not simply tacking to the left as a strategy; they are seeking to excise their party’s history and atone for its bouts of centrism.
That means Joe Biden must be canceled.
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey claimed the 1994 anti-crime bill that Biden championed had ruined Newark, New Jersey, the city of which he was mayor. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York seemed suspicious of whether his attitude toward women is sufficiently modern, dredging up a decades-old newspaper op-ed with a clumsy headline about working mothers, though surely Biden had no hand in the headline. Biden was taken aback. He responded that Gillibrand has always praised his fight for equality. “I don’t know what’s happened except that you’re now running for president.” Sen. Kamala Harris of California accused Biden of doing “nothing to hold insurance companies to task for what they’ve been doing to American families,” then dinged him on past support for the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortions. Biden pointed out that the Hyde Amendment governs spending bills and thus, “Everybody on this stage has been in the Congress and the Senate or House has voted for the Hyde Amendment at some point.”
Biden was knocked off stride by the attacks, at least momentarily. “Everybody’s talking about how terrible I am on all these issues,” he said. He suggested President Obama knew better when he picked Biden as his vice president. “He chose me and he said it was the best decision he ever made.”
There were no references to Biden’s age, 76. But it appeared to have accentuated the generation gap between him and the other candidates. Booker was 3 years old when Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972, Gillibrand was 6, and Harris 8.
Whether the attacks will affect Biden’s status as frontrunner in the Democratic presidential race is unclear. At the first debate, Harris knocked him repeatedly for his long-ago opposition to forced busing as part of school desegregation. A post-debate poll had Harris surging to third place, past Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Yet Biden’s lead over the field held steady through the second debate. What happens in the heat of disagreements this early in a presidential campaign usually has only a fleeting effect.
But the clashes can’t help him. He’s already stuck with a reputation as a poor campaigner. He’s gaffe-prone and, at best, a mediocre debater. His performance in Detroit, however, was a distinct improvement over his weak response to Harris’ criticism of his fraternizing with segregationist senators and opposition to school busing in the first debate in Miami in June.
Biden was more energetic and eager to fight back this time. He had no trouble going after Harris, who looked frazzled at one point. Before the debate began, he was overheard telling Harris, “Go easy on me, kid.” She didn’t take that advice.
He lectured Booker for mistakes he had made as Newark mayor. But Booker took a jab at him that played on the notion Biden is a ghost from an earlier era. “There’s a saying in my community,” Booker said as they talked about criminal justice, that “you’re dipping into the Kool-Aid and you don’t even know the flavor.” Biden had no comeback to that zinger.
Even before the debate, Biden had been moving nearer to Booker, Harris, and Gillibrand and toward the left lane in the campaign. On healthcare, crime, and other issues, he’s quietly added new wrinkles to his long held positions.
He defends Obamacare aggressively, but it’s not the same Obamacare enacted in 2010. He’s added a “public option” to the program that offers health insurance that anyone can buy or get for free if they can’t pay for it. It’s a step toward a single-payer plan that he resisted in the past.
Biden is trying to soften his image on criminal justice after being blamed by Booker and Harris for the “mass incarceration” that supposedly is a result of the 1994 bill. He’s announced that he will propose to abolish the death penalty, among other reform measures.
In June, Biden unveiled his “Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice.” It would have a costly price tag: $1.7 trillion over 10 years. The money would come from “reversing the excesses of the Trump tax cuts for corporations, reducing incentives for tax havens, evasion and outsourcing, ensuring corporations pay their fair share [and] closing other loopholes.” That sounds like something Warren, also a left-wing critic of Biden, would favor.
There are two ways for Biden to fight back. The first is to continue to cloak himself in Obama’s armor. After the second debate, Obama’s allies pushed back on the attacks on Biden’s record that made Obama collateral damage. This has the advantage of also situating Biden squarely in the 21st century, a reminder that he and the young president he served left office a mere two years ago.
The second is to defend the ideas themselves, playing up his accrued wisdom. On Aug. 4, the psychoanalyst and author Erica Komisar wrote in the Wall Street Journal that in the Biden-Gillibrand dust-up the facts are on the former veep’s side. Biden had wanted the government to provide funding to enable families to avoid having to put kids in daycare. “Family — including extended family — is the best way to care for children,” Komisar wrote. “Day care is the least healthy option, especially in the first three years. It leaves children bereft, anxious and depressed. Mr. Biden was right to suggest that parents who can afford it shouldn’t farm out the care of their children to others — especially if those of modest means have to subsidize it.”
How far Biden is willing to go to update his agenda is unclear. He doesn’t want to join the leftists on their terms and has no need to at the moment. But he doesn’t want to be dismissed by his party’s burgeoning left wing as a Democrat whose time has passed.
Nor does he want to appear like an old candidate who cannot keep up with his younger rivals. But he did start his campaign later than most of his rivals. And he’s held many fewer campaign events than they have, campaigning at roughly the pace of Ronald Reagan, who was one of the older candidates in his day.
Biden has also repudiated some of the positions he took in the 20th century. He has tossed aside his support for the Hyde Amendment. And he said in the Detroit debate that he believes he was wrong to back the war in Iraq.
The press has not played up Biden’s shifts to the left as significant. That may be because reporters covering the campaign already seem to regard him as a candidate of the 20th century, but not the 21st.
Fred Barnes, a Washington Examiner senior columnist, was a founder and executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
