The First Question of Joe Biden’s Presidential Run

Joe Biden’s last day as Vice-President of the United States was two years and three months ago, but in political terms an entire epoch has elapsed. Donald Trump is in the White House, breaking all the rules of political survival while threatening constitutional order and anyone or any group that gets in his way. The Republican Party has fallen in line behind him—despite his taste for tariffs and trade wars and dictators; despite his history of burning those who work with him; despite his transparent racism and sexism—and, in exchange, has been rewarded with tax breaks for the wealthy, the rejection of climate science, conservative judicial appointments, and a hollowing out of the regulatory state. Meanwhile, a faction of Democrats on the left, emboldened by Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Presidential run and the success of certain candidates in the 2018 midterms—most notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in New York—have made a break with neoliberalism and incrementalism and embraced ambitious, full-throated social-welfare politics and policies. Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, tuition-free college—these ideas have been widely embraced in the 2020 Democratic Presidential field. Several leading candidates, including Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, have acknowledged the new political landscape by apologizing for non-liberal positions that they held in the past.

Now comes Biden, whose entry into the 2020 race has been anticipated for months. The arguments in his favor were that the race was fractured; that he was famous and polled well; that voters would associate him with the still-popular Barack Obama; and that, with the rest of the field moving left, there was room in the political middle. Still, there were questions about his age (he’s seventy-six) and his reputation as a loose, undisciplined politician. He has recently been dogged by his lamentable handling of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, in 1991, and—not unrelated—the way his penchant for “avuncular pawing,” as Michelle Goldberg, of the Times, put it, had in several instances left women feeling uncomfortable and smothered. Biden had been a dissenting voice on several of the Obama Administration’s more hawkish foreign-policy moves, but it seemed that if he ran, more attention would be paid to the role he played in the passage of the 1994 crime bill or his stance on busing in the nineteen-seventies.

The accusations of inappropriate physical contact prompted him to release a video pledging, essentially, to knock it off, and he’s made public statements of regret about the crime bill and the Thomas-Hill hearings. But the first question of the Biden candidacy will be whether he can, or needs to, truly reconcile himself to this moment. His campaign-launch video, which he released on Thursday, is built on a relatively narrow discussion of the white-supremacist march and murder of a counter-protester that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017—and President Trump’s response to it. “We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” Biden says. “I believe history will look back on the four years of this President, and all he embraces, as an aberrant moment in time.”

There are other Democrats in the field putting themselves forward as centrists or compromisers—Amy Klobuchar most explicitly, and, in their own ways, Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke, too. But they, like everyone else in the race, even older candidates such as Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have made their national names in just the past few years. They’re offering arguments about today, or tomorrow. Biden is unique in the Democratic field in being a figure from the country’s political past. He first ran for President when Buttigieg was five years old. There was no mention, in his announcement video, of jobs, health care, or education. His offer is a return to normal, a break with this “aberrant moment”—and it assumes the viewer knows what normal means. “We have to remember who we are,” Biden says. “This is America.”