For Joe Biden, the train has left the station. Perhaps
it never arrived.
Biden, always the coquette, has long flirted with the
presidency and this quadrennial exercise in unrequited love is
proving just as frustrating.
Biden, to put it bluntly, has simply grown too old for
these games. No, we aren't talking about delayed orgasm here, or
even about the ability to reach orgasm. The train is leaving the
station.
The media has been all 'a-twitter' of late over poor Joe
getting caught up in the Me Too Movement, with several women he's met
on the campaign trails who accuse him of violating their “personal
space”, egregiously and, perhaps, ignorantly committing the faux
pas of kissing them on the head or similar acts of transgression.
I can sympathize with old Joe. We are of that age, it
seems, when the entire bill for all the transgressions of western
civilization has suddenly come due, and the rent collector is at the
door. Poor Joe, if he had stood straight and simply, if not limply,
shaken their hands...he would have been accused of being an aloof
elitist. You can't win with the Democratic coalition.
And that's the point. You can't win with the Democratic
coalition. Guilty as charged. Ask Al Franken.
Today's Democratic Party is composed of a loose
coalition of feminists, environmentalists, Gays and others seeking
social recognition, and a few people social justice warriors. The
problem is that there exists no political organization able to forge
this disparate group into a viable political force. Instead the
Democrats have achieved only momentary dominance usually because the
opposition had made a mess of things. The Democrats have simply
become everyone's temporary default party.
The appeal of Biden is that he is a former Vice
President, serving with the newly minted champion of the Democratic
Party, Barack Obama. But let's put this into some kind of
perspective. The Democrats have won a majority of the vote—and the
electoral college—only four times since FDR. First in 1964, but
this was in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and the Republicans
compounded their agony by nominating Barry Goldwater. The last three
times were Jimmy Carter in 1976 against an unelected president in the
wake of the Watergate scandal and Obama's victories in 2008 and
20012. But it took driving the nation—indeed the world—to the
brink of economic collapse to give the Democrats not only their
second majority vote (again with the electoral college) since 1964,
and only their third since FDR, but the nation's first black
president in the bargain. And it was only because the crisis had
been so recent and with the Republicans nominating a vulcher
capitalist that Obama would skate to an easy electoral majority again
in 2012. By 2016, the Democrats won the popular vote but,
significantly, did not win a majority in either the popular vote nor
the electoral college.
The Clintons held the Democracy in thrall because first
they held themselves to be the champions against the evil
Rescumlickans despite the candidacy of Ross Perot catapulting “Slick
Willy” into the White House, not once, but twice. Secondly, her
gender. It was her gender and the overweening need for the Democracy
to make yet another social statement that drove the candidacy. A
constituency of the party demanding their due, damn the torpedoes.
And that's what we have now. The warring factions
within the party will soon consume the lot. A circular firing squad
is being formed as the Democrats once again demonstrate their
remarkable ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
There are many reasons to oppose a Biden candidacy.
There are many reasons that, as with Clinton, fully half the party
will soon break out in open revolt at the prospect of Biden as the
standard-bearer. Already, well in advance of his announcements
Harper's Magazine has already published a hit piece. (1) In
it, Andrew Cockburn lists the litany of Biden's egregious error.
As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden
botched the Clarence Thomas hearings, calling an end to the process
as more witnesses were prepared to come forward. This will not sit
well with the feminists.
His vote to repeal Glass-Steagall, the New Deal era
firewall between commercial and investment banking and his failure to
push Obama to restore it in the wake of the predictable economic
crisis this repeal created will not sit well with the remnants of the
New Deal coalition, intellectuals, or working families who lost their
homes.
His support of the Clinton era “three strikes and
you're out” penal reforms leading to the incarceration of millions
of young black men will not sit well with the African American
community.
His support of the Clinton era welfare reform
legislation will not go down well with progressives.
Lastly, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Biden touts his vast experience on the world stage. But
simply being elevated the committee chair does not, in and of
itself, convey either experience or wisdom.
Nor will he, as Cockburn points out, be eager to stress
his foreign policy experience upon seeking the presidential
nomination. He “would have little to say, for example, about the
well-chronicled involvement of US officials in the overthrow of
Ukraine's elected government in 2014, still less on whether he
himself was involved...(h)is strenuous efforts to funnel IMF loans to
the country following anti-corruption measures introduced by the
government without noting that much of the IMF money was almost
immediately stolen and spirited out of Ukraine [perhaps to tRUMP
properties?] by an oligarch close to the government.” (2).
Nor is Biden likely to tell us about his son Hunter's involvement
in that nation's business affairs via his position on the board of
Burisma, a natural gas company owned by a former Ukrainian ecology
minister accused by the UK government of stealing at least $23
million of Ukrainian taxpayer's money.
“Biden's recollections of his involvement in
Central American affairs are no more forthright, and no more
insightful. There is no mention [in his recent book “Promise
Me] of the 2009 coup in Honduras, endorsed and supported by the
United States, that displaced the elected president, Manuel Zelaya,
nor of that country's subsequent descent into the rule of a corrupt
oligarchy accused of ties to drug traffickers. He has nothing but
warm words for Juan Orlando Hernandez, the current president, who
financed his 2013 election campaign with $90 million stolen from the
Honduran health service and more recently defied his country's
constitution by running for a second term. Instead, writes
Cockburn, we read much about Biden's shepherding of the Hernandez
regime, along with its Central American neighbors El Salvador and
Guatemala, into the Alliance for Prosperity, an agreement in which
the signatories pledged to improve education, health care, women's
rights, justice systems, etc., in exchange for hundreds of millions
of dollars in US aid. In the words of professor Dana Frank of UC
Santa Cruz, the alliance “supports the very economic sectors that
are actively destroying the Honduran economy and environment, like
mega-dams, mining, tourism, and African Palms,” reducing most of
the population to poverty and spurring them to seek something better
north of the border.” (3) One always suspects the heavy hand of
U.S. policy behind the current refugee crisis and Biden's
fingerprints are all over it.
Then there is the question of Iraq. His vote to send us
to war still rankles large segments within his own party, a vote and
a position that demonstrated little understanding and even less
judgment. “Joe will do Iraq” Obama told reporters, “He
knows it, he knows the players.” (4) In 2006, as Cockburn
recalls, the State Department fell upon a little known political
figure named Maliki who proved to be not only a ruthless sectarian,
purging the government of Sunni Muslims and presiding over a corrupt
Shia regime so unpopular as to foment open revolt. Indeed, Cockburn
reports that in his eight years in power $500 billion or half a
trillion dollars was siphoned from government coffers. (5)
“In the 2010 parliamentary elections, one of
Maliki's rival, boasting a nonsectarian base of support, won the most
seats, though not a majority. According to present and former Iraqi
officials, Biden's emissaries pressed hard to assemble a coalition
that would reinstall Maliki as prime minister. 'It was clear there
were not interested in anyone else,; one Iraqi diplomat told me
[Cockburn]. 'Biden
himself was very scrappy—he wouldn't listen to argument.' The
consequences were, in the official's words, 'disastrous.' In keeping
with the general corruption of his regime, Maliki allowed the
country's security forces to deteriorate. Command of an army
division could be purchased for $2 million, whereupon the buyer might
recoup his investment with exactions from the civilian population.
Therefore, when the Islamic State erupted out of Syria and moved
against major Iraqi cities, there were no effective defenses.” (6)
You get the picture. This is why “experience” does
not reverberate, this is why the elites are mistrusted. And Biden,
now at advanced age, has nothing to sell but 'experience'.
The night of the long knives is just beginning
for Joe Biden. The critique in The Atlantic Monthly was
followed this week by an essay in The New York Times entitled
“The Wrong Time for Biden”.(7) Here Michelle Goldberg
exonerates him of being a sexual predator but nevertheless takes the
hapless and aging politico to task for the crime of 'being out of
touch'. Oh the irony. Nevertheless, Goldberg's essay is yet another
voice expressing unease with the candidacy of Joe Biden, if only for
the wrong reasons.
This current imbroglio doesn't rise to the level of
criticism, however 'important' it may be to certain constituencies
within the Democratic Party, and however much Biden feel's compelled
to publicly flog himself and beg for forgiveness. The
Republicans, and the nation, could care less. There is much more in
his record about which the party should be deeply concerned.
To nominate Biden would be to repeat the mistake of
2016, where the country would be presented an alternative as no
alternative; a foil to which our Caesar Disgustus will once again ask
“what has all this experience brought us?” Biden is today's
Walter Mondale, and his ensuing defeat will prove just as crushing.
In nominating Biden the Democrats would, once again, snatch defeat
from the jaws of victory.
“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”
Impeach and Imprison
_________________________
- Cockburn, Andrew. “NO JOE! Joe Biden's Disastrous Legislative Legacy” Harper's Magazine. Vol. 338 No 2026. March 2019. Pages 25-31
- Ibid. Page 30
- Ibid
- Ibid. Page 29
- Ibid
- Ibid Pages 29-30
- Goldberg, Michelle. “The Wrong Time for Biden” The New York Times. Tuesday, April 2, 2019.
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