Mr. Biden entered the race billing himself as the party’s best hope to beat Republican President Donald Trump, but he is only another gaffe away from becoming a punchline in 2020.CHRISTOPHER ALUKA BERRY/Reuters
Wednesday’s Democratic presidential debate was not a total train wreck for Joe Biden. The former U.S. vice-president, who turned 77 on debate day, scored points (sort of) by pointing out that he has passed more bills and has more experience than all of his rivals combined.
Yet, it was hard not to feel sorry for Mr. Biden as he boasted about having been endorsed by the “only” black woman elected to the U.S. Senate, all while the second African-American woman elected to the Senate stood just a few feet away from him. Or how he emphasized his commitment to ending violence against women by saying, in the same breath, that “no man has a right to raise a hand to a woman in anger other than in self-defence” and that the only way to change the culture is to “keep punching at it and punching it and punching at it.”
Mr. Biden never did seem to clue in as to why his onstage rivals were grinning. He had gotten too worked up at their baiting of him as yesterday’s man, an impression he only seemed to reinforce when Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris accused Democrats like him of taking African-American voters for granted. “I come out of the black community,” Mr. Biden retorted.
No wonder the Democratic establishment is beginning to panic. Mr. Biden entered the race billing himself as the party’s best hope to beat Republican President Donald Trump. But he is only another gaffe away from becoming a punchline in 2020.
Still, the party establishment is even more terrified about what might happen if either Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren or Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who have similar platforms, becomes the party’s nominee in 2020. Both propose to abolish private health insurance in favour of a public system similar to Canada’s. To help pay for it, Ms. Warren’s plan includes US$20.5-trillion in new taxes on corporations and the wealthy. She also vows to decriminalize illegal border crossings, abolish tuition fees and break up Facebook and Google.
The prospect of Ms. Warren or Mr. Sanders at the top of the Democratic ticket has former president Barack Obama sufficiently worried that he has abandoned his vow to stay silent.
“The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it,” Mr. Obama told a group of wealthy donors this month. “There are a lot of persuadable voters and there are a lot of Democrats out there who just want to see things make sense.”
Mr. Biden retains an overall polling lead among his rivals for the nomination. But he is rapidly losing momentum in early primary states, with fewer than three months to go before the voting begins. He is no longer the oddsmakers’ favourite to win the nomination, having been edged out of first place by Ms. Warren. Together, Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders enjoy so much support that, if one drops out early, the other would likely run away with the nomination.
Every primary contest has its surprises, of course, and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who has surged in the polls in Iowa, could turn out to be the big surprise of the 2020 season. Establishment Democrats fear that the 37-year-old former Navy reservist, who happens to be gay, is too inexperienced to win against Mr. Trump among older voters, who turn out in big numbers. And Democratic strategists fear that too many black voters would stay home if Mr. Buttigieg is the nominee, clearing the way for a Trump victory in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which he won in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.
A Gallup poll released this week showed that 57 per cent of Americans (within a four-percentage-point margin of error) approve of Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy, up from 50 per cent in May. Those numbers alone could make Mr. Trump unbeatable, the correlation between a strong economy and presidential re-elections being all but airtight.
If Democrats think impeaching Mr. Trump will make whoever wins their party’s nomination a shoo-in in 2020, they are deluding themselves. They looked desperate this week by suggesting that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland’s testimony before the House intelligence committee provided all the evidence needed to prove that Mr. Trump engaged in “bribery” by making a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky conditional on Mr. Zelensky opening an investigation into Mr. Biden.
That “quid pro quo” doesn’t qualify as bribery. Making nearly US$400-million in military aid conditional on a Biden investigation might, but the Democrats have yet to make that case.
It’s not clear that most Americans would care if they did. Most already know that their President is morally corrupt. And that alone might not stop enough of them from voting for him.
Konrad Yakabuski