By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Joe Biden’s case for himself is this: “If I was good
enough for Barack Obama, I’m good enough for you.” Biden literally made the
good-enough-for-Obama argument when challenged during a recent debate about his
occasional racial gaffes: “Barack Obama knew exactly who I was,” he said. “He
had ten lawyers do a background check on everything about me on civil rights
and civil liberties, and he chose me, and he said it was the best decision he
made. I’ll take his judgment.” It’s the ultimate “My Black Friend” card.
But Joe Biden does not seem to understand Barack Obama’s
judgment on the interesting matter of Joe Biden.
Biden may not remember, but Barack Obama was in a
peculiar position in 2008.
He had been sworn in as a senator on Jan. 3, 2005, and
announced his presidential campaign on Feb. 10, 2007. Before that, he’d been a
relatively obscure member of the state senate in Illinois and mainly was known
for having made one rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. He was
inexperienced and callow — no less a Washington fixture than Joe Biden himself
had declared Obama “not yet ready” to run for the presidency — but he had some
reason to be confident: Hillary Rodham Clinton had been running for the
Democratic nomination since the day after her husband’s reelection, if not
earlier, gloried in a Senate seat formerly occupied by Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
enjoyed easy access to money and a vast network of political connections, and
signed her autograph with what was, at the time, the best brand name in
Democratic politics short of Kennedy or Roosevelt. And Obama, a gifted nobody,
had dispatched her — and been cocky while doing it: “Likable enough,” etc.
Obama makes a great deal about the racial aspect of his
political career; and, of course, that was a big deal — probably the most
significant thing about his presidency — but he either misunderstood or
misrepresented it. His being black was, on balance, probably an asset, even
given the reality that there remain a non-trivial number of Americans who would
vote against him based on that and nothing else. There is race hatred, but
there also is a hunger in our nation for some event that will allow us to in some
sense close the book on the saga of race in America. This is, of course,
wishful thinking: Neither Gettysburg nor Brown v. Board nor the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 nor the election of Barack Obama was going to do it, because
it cannot be done. But still Americans, including Republicans, were eager for
the historical milestone of an African-American president. A great many
Republicans would have danced all night long after the swearing in of President
Condoleezza Rice.
But that eagerness does not liberate us from seeing
public events within the inescapable frame of race. Obama’s understated
radicalism was not the radicalism of the Black Panthers or Louis Farrakhan — it
was Harvard Law radicalism, but Obama was correct that his African ancestry and
his exotic-sounding name set him apart and together were apt to imbue him with
an alien quality among many voters. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, along with Donald
Trump and the rest of the “birther” conspiracy nuts, were clever to emphasize
Obama’s “lack of American roots,” as Mark Penn’s strategy memo put it.
Race inflects our views in ways great and small: The
Black Lives Matter critics exaggerate the problem of police conduct, but it is
reasonably well-established fact that black men are perceived as being more
dangerous and more threatening than white men; black men are even perceived as
being larger than white men of the same size. Obama understood that much. The
racial frame is inescapable, even in trivial things: Obama likes gold Rolex
watches but never wore one as president. Dwight Eisenhower wore one, and so did
Lyndon Johnson. Why not Barack Obama? Because in America a gold Rolex means
something different on a black man. Practically every line of criticism
directed at President Obama was dismissed at some time as a racial dog-whistle;
again, an exaggeration, but there certainly was a racial resonance to the
endless talk-radio complaints about Obama’s travel spending, and especially
that of his wife. The fact that Democrats make similar complaints about white
Republicans does not really change that.
And so Obama’s balancing act: a Wilsonian-Johnsonian
commitment to expanding the welfare state and regimenting critical sectors of
the economy under Washington’s direction; all that dopey, content-free “hope
and change” stuff that worked so well for Bill Clinton; and, in both international
relations and sensitive domestic cultural affairs, a politics of respectability,
which was often enough in practice a politics of condescension — and
insincerity. Senator Obama, you’ll recall, was too much of a social
conservative to stand a chance in today’s Democratic party — he opposed
homosexual marriage and cited his religious beliefs in service of that
position, meaning that 2008’s great progressive hope is 2019’s irredeemable
hate monster. Not many people thought that he actually believed any of that,
but they admired the calculation and the so-called realism of his
self-conscious positioning. Democrats do not mind being lied to if they are skillfully
lied to — Bill Clinton left the White House a hero.
Barack Obama is famously unsentimental, including on
racial questions, for instance in shaping his romantic life in a way that would
comport better with his political ambitions. When it came time for him to
choose a running mate, his short list consisted exclusively of white, moderate,
establishment Democratic figures, mostly with Catholic backgrounds: a governor
of Kansas, a governor and senator from Indiana, a governor of Virginia, and Joe
Biden, an eternal Senate fixture who had chaired two committees important to
the Obama campaign: Foreign Relations, which might help provide some heft on
international relations that Obama’s own résumé wanted, and Judiciary, which
would make the vice president a potential asset in high-court confirmation
hearings. It was put out that Mrs. Clinton was under consideration, but Obama
himself apparently never took that idea seriously.
It is common for a presidential candidate to seek
“balance” from his vice president, though Bill Clinton chose another young,
moderate, white man from the South as part of his “double Bubba” ticket. The
“balance” that Biden brought wasn’t exclusively racial. Part of it was age:
Biden was an old hand and a known quantity, and Obama uncharacteristically
miscalculated that his age would dissuade him from a presidential run of his own.
But it is very difficult to imagine Obama’s having selected another African
American for the No. 2 spot, or anything other than a moderate, familiar, white
male. Given the ways in which unreasoning racial fear historically has been
wrapped up with reasonable fears about violent crime and good-faith efforts to
combat it, Biden’s role as author of an important Clinton-era crime bill might
also have been considered a vaccine against a particularly enduring strain of
American racial politics.
Obama did not bring a designated driver to the party — he
brought a designated white guy.
***
“In other words,” Ed Kilgore writes in New York
magazine, “Team Obama was looking at Biden strictly as a veep, and perhaps as
someone who could help out with congressional relations and international
matters — but not as any sort of heir apparent or successor as leader and
shaper of the Democratic Party.” And yet Biden, at this moment, leads in the
Democratic primary polls, 13 points ahead of the pack overall, up only four points
in California but nine points in Iowa and 21 points in North Carolina. That may
not actually mean very much. In the summer of 2015, former Florida governor Jeb
Bush — a respectable conservative with a very good record in office and
practically universal name recognition — was leading the Republican field; in
the actual primary elections, Republicans went a different way. It may be only
that Democrats know the name “Biden” and that they remain personally fond of
Barack Obama, even as his policy record among Democrats has turned rancid
faster than gas-station sashimi in August. If it is the case that Democrats
really are well disposed toward Biden rather than merely familiar with him —
why?
Sometimes, organizations that are redefined for a time by
a single charismatic leader pull back and reconsolidate their ranks once that
leader has left the scene: The Catholic Church chose the quiet and retiring
Cardinal Ratzinger to follow the world-shaking and sainted John Paul II; the
Republican party after Ronald Reagan leaned away from crusading ideologues,
nominating Vice President George H. W. Bush and then Senator Bob Dole, an
admirable man who possesses the cure for charisma; Apple replaced the visionary
Steve Jobs with Tim Cook, a logistics man who once compared the firm to a dairy
operation. Seen from that point of view, Biden’s promise to the Democratic
party in 2020 would be the same as it was in 2008: that he is a reliable and
steady hand on the steering wheel and not shy about using the brakes if needed.
That is an unlikely case for Biden: For one thing, he no
longer seems very reliable or steady to anybody, possibly even to himself. His
once-endearing penchant for blurting out whatever is passing through that
three-pound wad of meat in his skull is a considerable liability in this age of
hysterical and performative social-media outrage politics. He is an atavistic
creature that evolved in a different environment and is ill-suited to thriving
in this one. And the Democrats looking toward 2020 do not seem to be very much
in search of a brake pedal. They are the mirror image of Republicans in 2016
contemplating the prospect of nominating Donald Trump as their presidential
candidate: They do not merely want to win the upcoming election — they also
want a national cultural repudiation of the incumbent. It is not enough that
they win the office; it must be understood that their doing so is a
precondition for their cultural project, which is, of course, to “Make America
Great Again,” as they understand it.
Joe Biden is an unlikely instrument of that deliverance.
“The assumption that Biden would be too old to run for
president in 2016 is rather interesting now that he’s running four years
later,” Kilgore continues. “But it does help explain why there was little
apparent worry over Biden’s touchy history on racial issues. The Obama–Biden
ticket had more than enough biracial bona fides to cover a multitude of old
sins and associations.” That may in fact be too meek of an explanation. It may
be that 2008 Biden’s value came from his prefiguration of 2019 Biden. Professor
LaFleur Stephens-Dougan, writing in the Washington Post, detects
something deeper in Biden’s awkward racial talk:
Biden’s “gaffe” may have been more
strategic—an example of what my research calls “racial distancing.” Racial
distancing is a political strategy whereby politicians try to win over racially
moderate and conservative whites by making it clear they will not disrupt the
existing racial hierarchy, with white Americans at the top of social, political
and economic institutions.
This would suggest that Obama chose Biden in 2008 for the
same reason he pretended to be morally opposed to homosexual marriage: His
“hope and change” talk, and his promises to “fundamentally transform” the
country, were by design amorphous and lacked well-defined focus or boundaries;
the caution on homosexual marriage almost certainly was intended at least in
part to signal a wider and more general cautiousness and moderation on
questions of cultural or even economic radicalism, a concern that was
intensified in the general electorate by his racial identity and his Muslim
name. Biden, who spent decades courting and flattering Democratic
segregationists in the Senate (from the unreconstructed to the reformed),
offered another indication that President Obama would emphasize conventional
Democratic lunch-bucket issues — the creation of new welfare benefits and other
modes of income redistribution — that he was not, in spite of his millenarian
happy-talk, looking to usher in the Age of Aquarius, that his banal
speechifying on racial issues was likely to be, in effect, the extent of it.
That is one promise President Obama mostly kept.
***
Paul Begala and other critics are correct to point out
that there is a deep division in the Democratic party between “pain-in-the-ass
white liberals,” as Begala calls them, and more old-fashioned Democrats more
oriented toward issues touching jobs, wages, and economic security. In today’s
Democratic party, the moderate wing is largely black and Hispanic, while the
more radical left wing is disproportionately white. That’s a funny little
pickle for the 2020 primary candidates: Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s designated
white guy, is probably closer to most black and Hispanic Democratic primary
voters than is, say, Cory Booker, who is trying to present himself as the
racial-justice candidate. Kirsten Gillibrand has spent a great deal of time
lecturing other well-off white women about “white privilege,” while Kamala
Harris is fending off criticism that she is too much of a law-and-order
candidate, in part because she worked as a prosecutor during a period in which
legal norms were deeply influenced by Joe Biden’s sweeping 1994 Violent Crime
Control and Law-Enforcement Act and its famous “three strikes” provision. It is
a funny old world.
What can be derived from all this is that almost none of
what made Joe Biden attractive to Barack Obama as a vice president in 2008 is
likely to prove helpful to the candidate in 2020, and that much of it is likely
to prove encumbering to him. He is the designated white guy in a party that
does not want one this time around or believe itself to need one. And three
cheers for that: Joe Biden’s political redundancy might, from this point of
view, be welcomed as a kind of milestone in American racial politics, not quite
so significant as Barack Obama’s election to the presidency but certainly
complementary to it.
Barack Obama is, as of this writing, maintaining an
absolutely prudent and practically monastic silence on the 2020 Democratic
primary. If he had been so circumspect as president — if he had had just a
slight touch of Calvin Coolidge upon his soul — he might have become the great
unifier that had been so intensely hoped for by many of his admirers and more
than a few of his critics. But he was what he was, and his presidency’s main
bequests to the country are an even more deformed body of health-insurance
regulations and a heightened feeling of whatever product you get when you
multiply cynicism by paranoia.
Whatever we do, let us please abandon the notion of Joe
Biden as an avuncular, conciliatory, reasonable politician of the courtly old
school. Whatever his contribution to Obama’s presidency, Biden’s legacy already
is fixed and has been since long before anybody cared about that stirring young
state senator from Illinois: Joe Biden will be remembered for his central role
in the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, during which he arguably did
more than any other living American to convert ordinary partisanship into
scorched-earth culture war. Dopey old “Uncle Joe”? He is as vicious and
conniving a man as the politics of our time has thrown up. But even his
viciousness will not save him in 2020. In that, the teacher has been surpassed
by his students. If they tear him apart, as I expect them to, there will be some
poetic justice in the spectacle.
Joe Biden was good enough for Barack Obama in 2008. This
is not 2008.
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