I think it’s a separate question whether Joe Biden is wrong about the Republican Party or he is just saying these things because it feeds into what people want to believe.
As Joseph R. Biden Jr. made his way across Iowa on his first trip as a 2020 presidential candidate, the former vice president repeatedly returned to one term — aberration — when he referred to the Trump presidency.
“Limit it to four years,” Mr. Biden pleaded with a ballroom crowd of 600 in the eastern Iowa city of Dubuque. “History will treat this administration’s time as an aberration.”
“This is not the Republican Party,” he added, citing his relationships with “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”
I write about the importance of leadership a lot, and I think it’s true that there are a lot of things about Trump that are unique to Trump. He is influencing the GOP is negative ways, and a different leader could take them in different directions. Even if Trump tapped into something latent or pathologies that were deemphasized, he has succeeded in amplifying these things and bringing them to the forefront where they can do more damage. So, I don’t think it’s entirely wrong for Biden to say that Trump is having an aberrant and possibly temporary affect on the Republican Party.
I would generally not place my focus on this somewhat optimistic take however because I believe Trump’s influence will not quickly fade. He has reshaped the electorate and the makeup of the Republican base, making it harder and harder for moderate Republicans to win in contested primaries or suburban areas of the country. This is why defeating Trump won’t return us to the status quo ante. To the extent Biden is suggesting otherwise, I think he’s wrong.
There is no disagreement among Democrats about the urgency of defeating Mr. Trump. But Mr. Biden’s singular focus on the president as the source of the nation’s ills, while extending an olive branch to Republicans, has exposed a significant fault line in the Democratic primary.
Democrats, like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, see the president as a symptom of something deeper, both in a Republican Party overtaken by Trumpism and a nation cleaved by partisanship. Simply ousting Mr. Trump, they tell voters, is not enough.
This doesn’t quite capture the divisions on the left. Democrats naturally have a passing interest in how the Republicans behave and would like them to rejoin the community of the sane and somewhat moral. But progressives and liberals have their own agenda they’d like to pursue and advance. So, if defeating Trump might get the GOP to behave in a less appalling manner, that would be nice, but doing something to address climate change or gun violence or police brutality is more important and certainly more within the left’s control.
The real splits on the left are more economic in nature or just boil down to differences of opinion about how the deep the rot in our society has become and how far we need to go to fix it. Warren and Sanders are in the camp that sees little comfort in returning to the past. Biden offers more of a band-aid approach. If we can fix what’s gone wrong, we should be able to gets things back in order.
It’s a debate that goes beyond the policy differences separating a moderate like Mr. Biden from an insurgent like Mr. Sanders, elevating questions about whether the old rules of inside-the-Beltway governance still apply. And it has thrown into stark relief one of the fundamental questions facing the Democratic electorate: Do Democrats want a bipartisan deal-maker promising a return to normalcy, or a partisan warrior offering more transformative change?
Many people on the left simply don’t want a return to normalcy, and Biden is not going to be their first choice. But I think the larger electorate is actually approaching desperation in their desire for the insanity to stop. They’re going to like what Biden is selling even if it is based on delusions.
I don’t know what Biden actually believes, but I’m confident that what he’s saying is wrong in important respects. The GOP is much farther gone than he’s willing to acknowledge. Yet, I think his approach is probably good politics even if it makes liberals insane.
JFC – was Biden in a coma during the eight years Obama was president? Long before Trump, the republican party went off-the-rails and became an irrational force for evil — not some group that could be reasoned with, and certainly not a group that would in any serious way partner with democrats to govern in a bi-partisan fashion.
What is Biden thinking or drinking? The Great Tax Giveaway was not Trump’s idea! That was a purely republican plan, as is dis-mantling the ACA, and cutting/gutting medi-care and slashing social security (because, gee, look at that deficit, we better cut spending).
These are not people who will ever work with a democratic president — they just proved that in spades BEFORE the rise of Trump.
Biden has got to go — and I have not even brought up what his treatment of Anita Hill really means for the democratic party if he becomes the nominee.
Where was Biden for the last twenty years? His ‘ can’t we all just get along’ sing song doesn’t even come close to winning my vote. He is worse than an old man. Somehow he figures the good ole days with Mitch are just around the corner. Those days are long gone, long gone.
If we think the GND and Medicare for all and college education are important to us and to the younger kids who gave us back the House, Biden must go. I don’t have much money but I will only give what I have to progressive candidates, not this hack. Apologies to all of Joes supporters here. You get my vote if you win, that’s it. Nothing more.
The Democratic House majority was powered by suburban voters who hate Trump. They’re not “liberal left”, but they’re also not exactly what I would call “conservative” either. Old labels are dying hard and they’re not properly encapsulating what’s happening. It’s not just the United States either, because if we look at the current mess in the U.K., suburban voters still trended away from the Tories and towards Labour — with someone from the hard left leading the party! Something is going on beyond Trump and beyond Republicans, and I don’t know how it will sort itself or how to stop it. I don’t think we can stop it, so new coalitions and definitions of party are forming.
That’s a long way of saying that yes these suburban voters want a return to normalcy. But they also want someone to stand up for their values and fight for them. Biden’s video was actually pretty good on these points. But he needs to connect Trump to the rest of the Republicans. There’s this refusal to grapple with how the suburbs are changing demographically, and what they care about politically. They might not be all about class war and shy away from taxes, but it also won’t stop them from voting for Bernie Sanders in a general election against Donald Trump. In this sense, shirking away from impeachment is a mistake. People are not going to have some backlash against it. They want you to fight the ogre in the White House!
I argued against running against Donald Trump the person in 2016, and that was obviously correct then. Now that he’s an incumbent, however, we should bring the hammer on him. All of our politics is being defined by “Trumpism” and we can’t define it by something else without taking him out first.
I think you are right. The world is changing, driven by migrations and climate change. In this world we cannot live with Trump and his elitist view on everything. Impeach the bastard!
I will start by saying I don’t expect I’ll vote for Biden in the primary. But I will also say that at some basic level our political structure operates on the building of coalitions to produce electoral majorities. Obama’s 2008 campaign was premised on the idea that you find the single point of broadest agreement that moves forward in a progressive direction. In 2008, that was “hope.” It wasn’t bulls**t. It was the one thing that everyone who might have voted against McCain agreed on. Right now, as far as I can see it, the one thing that the broadest group of people who might vote against Trump agree on is “Trump’s gotta go.” Clearly Biden’s campaign is about that and strategically it has a precedent in 2008 however different the substance of the messages might be.
Why do we even bother with a primary if all we are supposed to get is more of this? Seriously, why bother??
Democratic Prez Primary Results (past fifty years): 1968 – Humphrey/Muskie, 1972 – McGovern/Shriver, 1976 – Carter/Modale(w), 1980 – Carter/Mondale, 1984 – Mondale/Ferraro, 1988 – Dukakis/Bentsen, 1992/96 – Clinton/Gore(w), 2000 – Gore/Lieberman, 2004 – Kerry/Edwards, 2008/12 – Obama/Biden(w), 2016 – Clinton/Kaine. Few folks even remember any of these people any more, they lost so badly, or they won and accomplished so little.
The only times we “(w)on” were when outsiders were nominated. But in fifty years now, no Democratic presidency has gone on to win a successive third term. To find the time when the Democratic Party won and was able to enact meaningful, lasting changes in policy, you’ve got to go back about ninety years, to Roosevelt, of course, and Truman (and most reports say it was WWII that was the actual catalyst for the political, economic, and social transformations of that era).
Republicans have been bad for the country going back over a hundred years when they gave us the first great Depression, so Biden is clearly wrong about them. Democrats, arguably, only fifty (since they started acting like Republicans).
Primaries are for promotional purposes. See what sells; what doesn’t. I blame Capitalism.
This is a little out of left field but anyway— Unemployment is at its lowest in fifty years and the stock markets are humming. By itself this will be a major Trump talking point for 2020. You can count on it. It strikes me as odd that the democrats and Nancy are still talking about pay go. Gotta have it paid for or nope, can’t do it. Time for a revamp of that policy. The Dems now have to measure up to full employment and not talk bullshit about it. Maybe we need a follow on to the WPA and CCC, call it a federal job guarantee so the unemployment never gets below where we are today.