By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, June 29, 2019
Joe Biden has led the national polls in the race for the
2020 Democratic nomination since last year. He’s ahead in the first three
contests, also, with leads ranging from seven points (Iowa) to 13 points (New
Hampshire) to 28 points (South Carolina). He’s first in fivethirtyeight.com’s
endorsement primary. And though he didn’t launch his campaign until the second
quarter of 2019, at which point Bernie Sanders had raised the most money, his
nonstop fundraising schedule, and great first-24-hours number, suggests that
his second-quarter haul will be impressive. Going into tonight’s Democratic
debate, there was no reason to doubt Biden’s status as the Democratic
frontrunner. Indeed, while head-to-head matchups 16 months before an election
are worthless, one might as well have considered him the frontrunner to become
the 46th president of the United States, too.
And yet there is an air of unreality surrounding the
Biden campaign, a widespread expectation that the former vice president just
can’t last. He’s run twice before, with terrible results. He’s old. He has a
tendency to let his mouth take him places his political advisers would rather
not have him go. And he has baggage. Lots of baggage, from his creepy-uncle
vibe to his votes for NAFTA, the Iraq war, and the 1994 crime bill, to his
devotion to the principles of bipartisanship and civility, including with the
segregationist and racist senators with whom he has served. He’s about as
Washington as you can get. There might not be an Acela corridor without him.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for one, is not impressed. “He’s not a pragmatic
choice,” she says.
One of the questions the 2020 Democratic primary will
answer, then, is whether the party is more like Biden or AOC. Is a long career,
devoted service to Barack Obama, and the purported ability to win the support
of working-class whites enough to win the party’s nomination? Or have the
Democrats moved so far left in recent years that Biden’s experience is actually
a weakness, his geniality a liability, his folksiness a handicap?
The evidence is mixed. Biden’s sustained poll position
has led some analysts to conclude that, MSNBC and CNN to the contrary
notwithstanding, the Democratic party is older and more moderate than people
think. Biden doesn’t need to capitulate to Sanders to win the nomination, he
doesn’t need to apologize to AOC or to Cory Booker. And Biden hasn’t
apologized, not for his sniffing hair or for his remarks about working with
segregationists. And his lead remains significant. Maybe the audience for
identity politics and far-left social liberalism is small.
On the other hand, Biden has had to reverse himself on
taxpayer funding for abortion, signaling just how essential unrestricted
abortion rights have become to the Democratic electorate. And he’s wishy-washy
on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which his former boss, the biggest name in
Democratic politics, negotiated. Biden’s performing a high-wire act, in other
words. He has to navigate the shoals of the Great Awokening that has turned the
Democratic base, white progressives especially, into zealots for social
justice. Up until Thursday, his strategy has been to lay low. Focus on donors.
Avoid interviews. Wrestle with Trump, not with the other Democrats.
No longer. He had to stand on stage with nine of his
competitors Thursday, and answer questions from Savannah Guthrie, Lester Holt,
and Chuck Todd. Next to him was Bernie Sanders, whose “democratic socialism”
has determined the contours of intra-Democratic debate since 2016. And next to
Bernie was Kamala Harris, the freshman senator from California, who basically
defines the idea of “woke capitalism.” And next to Harris was Kirsten
Gillibrand, who’s executed one of the most remarkable political transformations
in American history, from middle-of-the-road congresswoman to feminist warrior
in a little more than a decade. Also, there was Andrew Yang, who wants to give
every American a universal basic income. And Pete Buttigieg, the trendy
multilingual mayor of South Bend, Ind. And a bunch of other people, including
Marianne Williamson, who was visiting from the Age of Aquarius.
And this debate took place a day after Elizabeth Warren
and Bill de Blasio called for eliminating private insurance, Julián Castro
called for abortion rights for trans men, and Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke
spoke in garbled Spanish. The trend of the Democratic party is to the left. And
it’s a trend Biden doesn’t seem all that interested in resisting, as evidenced
by his joining all of the candidates on stage in calling for health insurance
for illegal immigrants while also saying deportation of illegal immigrants
wouldn’t be a priority for his administration.
Biden has encountered the Great Awokening, and he doesn’t
know what to make of it. His instinct seems to be to go with the flow. Maybe
you noticed the weird way he responded to questions where the moderators asked
the candidates to raise their hands. In each case Biden was tentative,
uncertain, looking at the competition. At one point he asked the moderator to
repeat a question, highlighting his age.
If you had been dropped into this debate from Mars, you
would have thought Kamala “for the people” Harris was the Democratic
frontrunner. She brought down the house several times. She got Biden tangled up
on the issue of busing. She clearly represents the future of the Democratic
party. She’s fourth in the national polls, stuck in single digits. But she went
toe to toe with the frontrunner — something that was studiously avoided for
most of the two nights of debates. And she won.
Something is happening to the Democratic party. It’s been
moving left for years. Since Howard Dean’s insurgency in the 2004 campaign, the
number of Democrats who have embraced liberalism, progressivism, and now
socialism has been steadily increasing. The reason is partly generational. My
cohort, the Millennials, embraced the left position on the issues of Iraq and
gay marriage, and if anything, Generation Z seems to be more left-wing still.
The number of liberals is not an overwhelming majority of the party — not according
to polls — but it is a majority. And the number of lefties is so great that it
determines the nature of the interest groups that dictate the party’s agenda
and talking points. It might even determine the nominee.
And if that’s the case, simply judging by his performance
on Thursday night, Joe Biden has got to be awfully worried.
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