Joe Biden may be running for president — and then again, maybe he’s not.
Joe Biden may be running for president — and then again, maybe he’s not.
M any argue that 2020 will be the most important election in history, given the wide divergence between the Trump administration’s view and those of Democratic Party’s hard Left, which seems to have captured the Joe Biden candidacy.
Perhaps. But most will at least agree that the 2020 campaign is certainly the strangest, craziest and most absurd in the last 120 years.
Joe Biden may at 77 be the oldest major candidate of either major party ever to have run for president. But in this eerie 2020 landscape of pandemic, lockdown, recession, and riot, far stranger than Biden’s frailty is his campaign routine — or lack of same.
Until mid August, Biden more or less stayed ensconced in his basement, campaigning by electronic projection. Not since James Garfield and William McKinley ran their 19th-century presidential campaigns from their front porches has an American presidential candidate simply abdicated from the campaign trail and remained inactive and almost mute.
Biden certainly does not weigh in on many issues. We have no idea whether as president he would join the Jacobin pack to pack the Supreme Court, push to end the Electoral College, enact the full Green New Deal, or seek statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.
Does he unequivocally condemn the national rioting and looting? Would he reopen the border, stop deportations of illegal aliens, take down the new wall? Would Biden end fracking as part of his stated vow to phase out fossil fuels, as he has inferred in the past? Is China really a mere rival rather than an enemy? And if so, would he revoke Trump’s China-rollback policy? He has bragged of his role in the Iran Deal — would he bring that back? Biden’s silence only highlights the mystery, and magnifies the importance, of the first Biden–Trump debate — given that millions of voters are curious to meet for the first time the nominee of the Democratic Party and thereby will learn at last why, these past months, he either should have, or should not have, gone into hibernation.
And what so far are the likely reasons that Biden went mute and invisible?
In a word, because he can.
Let me explain the various reasons why he has gone from the flesh to the shadow world.
The virus, the lockdown, the recession, and the anarchy in our cities clouded Trump’s once winning issues of job creation, a strong economy, and record-low minority unemployment. After all, it is a long tradition that the president gets credit or blame for times of either boom or gloom, whether or not warranted.
Biden saw his polls climb in March when he went into internal exile and by default let the campaign unfold as the story of Trump vs. COVID-19, Trump vs. the national quarantine, Trump vs. the recession, and eventually Trump vs. George Floyd.
For Biden, such recalibration of the race was a godsend because, by sequestering according to public-health protocols for people his age, he avoided facing the press, giving interviews, holding rallies, and doing town halls — the venues in which a sometimes cognitively challenged and shaky Biden had all but blown up his primary candidacy.
Presidents Garfield and McKinley won their races when immovable on their front porches. But they still outsourced the electioneering to an army of spokespeople and surrogates, and in the pre-electronic age let the press swarm into their homes.
In contrast, Biden’s basement has proved more of a tomb than a front porch. And his vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, the avatar of the “Harris Admiration,” seemed almost as scarce as Biden. Until now, both thought it wiser to let Trump Agonistês flail at his existential enemies and to let the press do its now-accustomed work of churning out periodic hit jobs on Trump. When Biden gave a rare scripted interview, his obsequious interviewers grimaced as they sought to prop him up when he bizarrely claimed that he had served 180 years in the Senate or that 200 million Americans had died from the coronavirus.
Technology has allowed Biden to hobble along now and then with Zoom and Skype. Hidden teleprompters and a conspiracy of toady journalists have passed off fake press conferences as spontaneous rather than scripted events.
Biden was never up to 16- to 18-hour days, as we learned in the year-long primary fights. So staying home purportedly also gave him rest and the chance to run an occasional on-screen Wizard of Oz campaign — and again let the ram Trump beat his head against the media, the virus, and the chaos of the cities.
So without current technology, a slavish media, the weirdest year in American history, and strong polling, Biden could not have gotten away by disappearing from a presidential campaign for months on end.
Yet there were other reasons that the once loquacious motor-mouth Biden never really campaigned. He became a virtual candidate in quite another sense: He has acted as an emissary for a Bernie Sanders socialist agenda that otherwise would have stayed underground after expiring and being buried in the Democratic primary. A prisoner of ideology, Biden found it wiser not to rebel and comment on the issues — well aside from the pragmatic worries of his handlers that he might detour to yet another “You ain’t black” revelation.
If Biden were to openly oppose any of the hard-left ideologies that his handlers and masters embrace — if he endorsed fracking, issued a list of liberal rather than hard-left judges, or objected to dismantling the Electoral College — he would lose his new base and with them a close election.
And yet if Biden were to explicitly and publicly advocate the Sanders, AOC, or Warren neo-socialist agenda, he would also lose, turning off his supposed swing-voter and independent suburban constituents.
So Biden in the vortex stays nearly mute — a quietude certainly well suited to his age, the prior news cycles of 2020, his cognitive limitations, and his hope that he can win with a rope-a-dope, run-out-the-clock strategy.
And now? The polls tighten. This strange year is gradually normalizing. Biden should be rested, after his months-long hiatus. And so will he in the eleventh hour actually conduct a campaign? Yes and no.
His strategists still seem to suffer from the Hillary disease. As in 2016, Trump is frenetic in the swing states, the Democratic candidate is virtually nonexistent.
As in 2016, Biden and the Democrats talk of a 70 to 90 percent likelihood of victory and an Electoral College blowout. They speculate about who will be the nation’s next cabinet officers, oblivious that such arrogance only feeds their blindness.
As in 2016, a few polls — Rasmussen, Trafalgar, Emerson, Zogby — show Trump nearly even or ahead in some states and are thus dismissed. Mainstream polls, as in 2016, likely “prove” their absence of bias by under-sampling working-class Democratic constituencies and over-sampling suburbanites, many of them Republicans — as if they cannot be accused of party asymmetries even as they do not reflect accurate ideological affinities.
And the polling outfits that in 2016 assured a Clinton victory are now once against cited for their reassurance that the Democrat remains clearly ahead.
As in 2016, when millions would not reveal their preferences and were written off as mythical voters, so too now we are told that the proverbial stealthy Trump voter remains an exaggeration and a likely no-show.
As in 2016, when Hillary dismissed Trump’s road-runner-like feverish visits to swing states as an ossified strategy, at least compared with the tactics of her twentysomething technical wizards, so too Biden’s youngsters now laugh off Trump’s calcified ideas, such as knocking on millions of doors to talk to voters in person.
And as in 2106, when Hillary’s social-media masters and tech experts proved incompetent, so too Biden’s scripted tele-campaigning is often plagued by glitches, inadvertent glimpses of teleprompter reflections, and prompts left on the script that Biden dutifully speaks out loud, giving the game away.
Long ago, we knew that Biden was physically not up for a normal campaign. Yet the freakish year of 2020 gave him the chance to outsource his candidacy to the weird cycle of events that drove down Trump’s polls.
But it was not just sitting on a fourth-quarter lead that muted Biden — and not only his inability to withstand the rigors of the campaign.
After his resurrection in the primaries, Joe Biden had become an ideological and electoral prisoner. In his role as a progressive surrogate, Biden was unable to honestly sell to voters the Left’s unsellable agenda. And yet, given his new take-no-prisoners masters, Biden is forbidden by the Left to move to the center by playacting his old Joe from Scranton schtick. Instead, he is unleashed only to attack Trump and to utter platitudes and bromides that reveal nothing about his real agendas. And so he is absolutely forbidden to disagree with or, contrarily, to openly endorse his leftists puppeteers.
No wonder that 77-year-old Biden could never transparently and fully answer who or what he was — even had he known, and even had it been a normal election year. The result is that for the first time in our history, we are having an election without a campaign and a ballot without a candidate.