Joe Biden by Nancy OhanianEventually, Bernie will be up against an Establishment shill for the Democratic nomination. At this moment the most likely corporate Dem to make it that far is Joe Biden (a 76 year old gaffe-machine), who was a U.S. Senator from 1973 to 2009 when he was sworn in as Obama's Vice President. A corporate-friendly party hack in all things, Biden started running for president in 1988, always a fave among big donors, Beltway insiders and clueless media types, but never gaining any traction with actual voters. Monday night, out promoting a book in Missoula, Montana-- this cycle's Hillary Clinton told students that "I'll be as straight with you as I can. I think I'm the most qualified person in the country to be president. The issues that we face as a country today are the issues that have been in my wheelhouse, that I've worked on my whole life. No one should run for the job unless they believe that they would be qualified doing the job. I've been doing this my whole adult life, and the issues that are the most consequential relating to the plight of the middle class and our foreign policy are things that I have-- even my critics would acknowledge, I may not be right but I know a great deal about it." He's the anti-populist corporate America craves.Disclaimer: Unlike former Hillary booster Cher, I've never been a Biden fan. Hillary boosters who refuse to learn the lessons that brought us Trump, tend to like Biden. Biden has nothing to offer anyone except a celebration of his own careerism and a long biography and a mostly dull, sometimes checkered, past. His "vision" is hackneyed and ancient. He defines a kind of status quo ante that looks attractive in light of Trump-exhaustion. He's the return to normalcy candidate, the 2020 Warren G. Harding. Exactly 100 years on! A notorious plagiarizer, I can imagine Biden mouthing "America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality."I never believed Biden's blue collar Amtrak Joe shtik. To me he was always a greasy slime ball politician and Trump-like huckster selling credit cards for the big banks. Mark Bowden likes him but got that aspect right in an Atlantic profile in 2010:
Biden is a salesman-- a high-level one, but a salesman at heart. His father sold cars back in Wilmington, and the son has all the same moves. He is a virtuoso talker. That fluency is not a gift but an accomplishment: attaining it meant defeating a severe boyhood stutter, a feat in which he still takes pride. His prodigious loquacity is not about vanity, as his critics claim-- although Biden is as vain as the next successful man. It’s about selling. It’s about the deal. In fact, that’s one of his favorite expressions: Here’s the deal.In What It Takes, the monumental chronicle of the 1988 presidential campaign, author Richard Ben Cramer had this to say about Biden, then in his first formal run for the presidency:Joe can literally talk fast. It’s like the stutter left it all pent up, and when he starts talking deal, he goes at a gallop … He’ll talk that deal until it is shimmering before your eyes in God’s holy light … like the Taj Mahal.For most of his adult life, Biden has been selling himself. In 2008, he began selling Barack Obama. The vice presidency is a perfectly respectable office, to be sure, but historically it has been a ticket more often to obscurity than to distinction. It has few official duties or responsibilities that rise above the ceremonial. It was most famously described by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s two-term VP, John Nance Garner, as being worth less than “a bucket of warm piss.”
After Obama chose Biden for his ticket, Biden's close relationship to the banking industry was brought up again. ProPublica did a good job just over a decade ago, noting that Biden had been particularly cozy with MBNA, a financial services company from Delaware, a subsidiary of Bank of America and Biden's single largest contributor and his son's employer-- as a lobbyist-- right out of college. A the quid pro quo? Biden has been extremely helpful to MBNA and the credit card industry, the key supporter of an industry-favorite bill-- the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005"-- that actually made it harder for consumers to get protection under bankruptcy. THAT'S Joe Biden.
[Biden] was one of five Democrats in March 2005 who voted against a proposal to require credit card companies to provide more effective warnings to consumers about the consequences of paying only the minimum amount due each month. Mr. Obama voted for it.Mr. Biden also went against Mr. Obama to help defeat amendments aimed at strengthening protections for people forced into bankruptcy who have large medical debts or are in the military; Mr. Biden argued that the amendments were unnecessary because the legislation already carved out exemptions for those debtors. And he was one of four Democrats who sided with Republicans to defeat an effort, supported by Mr. Obama, to shift responsibility in certain cases from debtors to the predatory lenders who helped push them into bankruptcy.
Biden is Bernie's biggest threat for the nomination. Democrats get a chance to pick between another Hillary status quo nothing candidate (Uncle Joe) or... someone actually great. What do you think they'll do? I don't have to do one of these for Michael Avenatti, since-- thankfully-- he became the first potential candidate to drop out. Hopefully CNN President Jeff Zucker isn't taking his place in the roundup. The earlier potential presidential candidates we were less than enthusiastic about:
Part I- Tulsi GabbardPart II- Kirsten GillibrandPart III- Michael Bloomberg