Joe Biden’s Campaign Is What Happens When the Democratic Party Lacks Imagination

RONDA CHURCHILLGetty Images

Someday, someone will have to write a monograph concerning the sweet-tooth that the Democratic Party has for its retreads. At least for the most part, and in the modern era, if you're a Republican who loses a major election, your career goes into the woodchipper while you're still delivering your concession speech. Remember Rick Lazio, the fresh young congressman who ran against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2000 after Rudy Giuliani chickened out? He lost, and then lost a Republican gubernatorial primary to crazy-man Carl Paladino, and Lazio hasn't been heard from since. Scott Brown lost to Democratic women in two states and has been exiled to the Antipodes. It is very unlikely that anyone who lost to the president* in the 2016 primary will ever be a viable candidate for national office again. Republicans cut their losses with ruthless efficiency.

Not the Democrats, though. In 2012, with Barack Obama at the top of the ticket, Nebraska Democrats chose to run Bob Kerrey, a figure as deeply stuck in the 1980s as A Flock of Seagulls. He got crushed by a nondescript state legislator named Deb Fischer who got re-elected as a nondescript U.S. Senator in 2018. That same year, with Republican Bob Corker retiring, the Democrats found themselves facing Marsha Blackburn, a congresswoman whose politics were last seen floating away over the Smokies. The Democrats chose to run Phil Bredesen, a former governor who had left that office 12 years earlier. Thus Senator Blackburn has been inflicted upon the entire nation, with predictably batshit results. This isn't an age deal. Not completely, anyway. This is a profound lack of imagination. Which brings us, inevitably, to Joe Biden.

When the history of this campaign is written, whether it wins or loses, the Biden campaign is going to be reckoned to be the fatburg that clogged up the outflow pipe. Throughout the winter and spring of 2019, Biden walked the parapets of Elsinore, freezing the money and the newshole that might have gone to other, fresher faces, and freezing the race itself until he finally announced at the end of April. At which point, for a number of critical weeks, he was the only story that most of the elite political media wanted to tell. Good old Uncle Joe. Everybody's pal. Say what you will about the candidacies of Beto O'Rourke, Julian Castro, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris, but all of them started in a pretty deep hole. The ones that held themselves aloof from establishment support—with the exception of Pete Buttigieg's campaign—are the ones that weathered the coronation portion of the beginning of the campaign.

Biden's campaign is the result of the Democratic Party's profound lack of imagination.

Ethan MillerGetty Images

Here is the most singular statistic of the 2020 election: this is Joe Biden's third try at the nomination, and he has yet to win a single nominating contest, be that caucus or primary. (He finally may get off the schneid this weekend in South Carolina.) Pete Buttigieg, who was released from the lab in Stepford in January, has won one more contest than Biden has. Moreover, Biden apparently has learned nothing from his previous two calamities, because he keeps making the same dumbass mistakes that sunk him in the past.

In 1988, it was cribbing from Neil Kinnock. In 2008, it was calling Barack Obama "articulate" and "clean." And this week, it was this completely bizarre confabulation about getting busted in South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison. From The New York Times:

But if Mr. Biden, then a United States senator from Delaware, was in fact arrested while trying to visit Mr. Mandela, he did not mention it in his 2007 memoir when writing about a 1970s trip to South Africa, and he has not spoken of it prominently on the 2020 campaign trail. A check of available news accounts by The New York Times turned up no references to an arrest. South African arrest records are not readily available in the United States…

Andrew Young, a former congressman and mayor of Atlanta who was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1977 to 1979, said that he had traveled with Mr. Biden over the years, including to South Africa. But Mr. Young said that he had never been arrested in South Africa and expressed skepticism that members of Congress would have faced arrest there.

For the love of god, Joe. Can you at least make new mistakes?

And, before the 2022 midterms, can the Democratic Party please find some new candidates? It did a great job in 2018 doing exactly that. No more retreads. All the tires on the wagon are blown.

Bill Kristol Wants Bernie Sanders’s Ideas to Die

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

To read the article in English. esquire.com