Joe Biden Is Who We Thought He Was

Joe Biden has been running for president less than 48 hours, and his campaign is already proving as problematic as many of his liberal and progressive detractors had anticipated.

On Thursday, Barack Obama’s vice president formally entered the 2020 race in a video announcement, calling the upcoming election a “battle for the soul of America” and invoking the murder of Heather Heyer, who was slain during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Yet the Biden campaign didn’t see fit to alert Heyer’s parents about the speech until after the video had been released. “I wasn’t surprised,” her mother, Susan Bro, told The Daily Beast. “Most people do that sort of thing. They capitalize on whatever situation is handy. He didn’t reach out to me, and didn’t mention her by name specifically, and he probably knew we don’t endorse candidates.”

Later that day, after announcing he would be attending a fundraising event hosted by Comcast and Independent Blue Cross executives, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, disclosed that he had spoken several weeks ago with Anita Hill. During that call, according to Bedingfield, Biden “expressed his regret for what [Hill] endured” during the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas 28 years ago. “It did not go how he had hoped,” The New York Times reveals. From an April 25 article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Carl Hulse:

In a lengthy telephone interview on Wednesday, [Hill] declined to characterize Mr. Biden’s words to her as an apology and said she was not convinced that he has taken full responsibility for his conduct at the hearings—or for the harm he caused other victims of sexual harassment and gender violence.

She said she views Mr. Biden as having ‘set the stage’ for last year’s confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who, like Justice Thomas, was elevated to the court despite accusations against him that he had acted inappropriately toward women. And, she added, she was troubled by the recent accounts of women who say Mr. Biden touched them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable.

His appearance on The View Friday morning is unlikely to win Hill over, or anybody else for that matter. While expressing remorse for the way that she was smeared, Biden nonetheless maintains that he himself did nothing wrong, despite presiding over the Thomas hearing as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I’m sorry for the way she got treated, but—if you go back and look at what I said and say, I don’t think I treated her badly,” he told Joy Behar. “I took on her opposition. What I couldn’t figure out, and we still haven’t figured it out, how do you stop people from asking inflammatory questions? How do you stop these character assassinations from outside?”

This is not the first time that Biden has seemingly taken a black woman for granted this election cycle. In March, before he had made his presidential bid official, his senior advisers had floated the idea of announcing his run with a pledge to tap former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams as his vice president. Abrams ended the speculation quickly and emphatically, telling The View that “you don’t run for second place.” Although she would subsequently defend him against allegations of unwanted touching, Biden’s run has been a larger source of exasperation in Democratic circles, particularly for women of color. A report from The Associated Press earlier this week found:

In interviews, black women repeatedly pointed to a singular issue plaguing Biden’s candidacy: his handling of the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas and the Senate Judiciary Committee’s treatment of Anita Hill, a black professor who faced a panel of white male lawmakers about her sexual harassment allegations against Thomas. Biden, then a U.S. senator from Delaware, was the committee’s chairman.

[Organizer Roxy D. Hall] Williamson said that she was ‘still salty’ about the role Biden played in the hearing and that ‘it wasn’t OK then and it’s not OK now.’

As tone-deaf or just plain cynical as these blunders may be, however, perhaps none has been as egregious as Biden’s assessment of Donald Trump’s presidency. From his video announcement, emphasis mine:

I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation—who we are—and I cannot stand by and watch that happen. The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America America, is at stake.

Beneath its appeal to the country’s better angels lies a conservative, even reactionary message—one that echoes Hillary Clinton’s refrain on the campaign trail that “America is already great.” If we can just remove Trump from office, he reasons, we can right the wrong of the 2016 election and restore our nation’s “core values.” The irony, of course, is that it is the political choices of men like Joe Biden that have paved the way for our current crisis, that have helped make “America America.” And with a Republican Senate confirming federal judges at a breakneck pace, it will likely remain so for decades to come.

His record has already been explored at length, both in Truthdig and elsewhere, so it need not be revisited here. But if this is Biden’s pitch to American voters, his campaign is likely doomed from the start.