Analysis: As thunderbolts crash around him, Joe Biden is facing an urgent question: What exactly is the rationale for his presidential candidacy?
As thunderbolts crash around him, Joe Biden is facing an urgent question: What exactly is the rationale for his presidential candidacy?
The concern, as articulated by his Democratic rivals and a wave of harsh online commentary, is that Biden sees contemporary America through a distorting haze of nostalgia, that his values and assumptions were shaped by the last generation or even the one before that, that he after many years in public life he still lacks the self-awareness or self-discipline to wonder whether modern voters will find his vagrant ruminations about the past as interesting or relevant as he does.
But even if the horde moves on from this episode some of the strategic vulnerabilities it exposed will remain, to be exploited by opponents if Biden doesn’t close them first. There were a couple of big problems with the way Biden put it. One, the notion that Dixiecrats like Eastland or Talmadge represented civility, with their intransigence against civil rights and public use of the n-word, is highly suspect.
This doesn’t mean, obviously, that older people can’t get elected president. But they typically must find a way to find the fountain of political youth even in a context of advanced chronological age. One way to do that is by offering oneself as the leader of an ideological movement. This is what Ronald Reagan, age 69, did in winning the presidency in 1980, and it is what Bernie Sanders, age 77, hopes to do this year.
This history means that the most likely answer to “why Biden” challenge will rest on character. The evidence of the past couple days—redundant to evidence amassed over several decades—is that if voters are going to embrace Biden’s character they must also embrace or overlook his penchant for the cringe-worthy remark. And realize that often the most cringey remarks will flirt with racial themes.
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