When I say Joe Biden ran the best campaign, I mean the best of a sorry lot. Joe Biden’s message was simple:
I was Barack Obama’s right hand man, and I know how to get this country back on track.
It’s not a clever message, but it has a reassuring quality to it, and reassurance is what people could most use right now.
Biden has not seemed sharp in debates or on the trail. But the framing of his campaign was pitch perfect. I’ve seen it suggested that Biden shows early signs of dementia, if so, that just means that he’s forgotten more about American politics than any of his competitors know.
I am not someone who is ordinarily inspired by politicians, but I was deeply inspired by Barack Obama in 2008. The message of Obama’s campaign still resonates with me, though I hear it spoken of dismissively all of the time.
People frequently say all that Obama ran on was “hope and change” and people just projected their hopes onto him. If inspiring people were as easy as being a blank slate, there were plenty of options for that this go round.
Take the word hope. By itself, it isn’t much, but I thought the way that Obama defined it was meaningful, beautiful, and inspiring. He said:
Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it. Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.
It was not easy for Obama to become our first Black President. I remember feeling like it was all going to come tumbling down in the heat of the primaries when all of a sudden clips of Rev. Jeremiah Wright saying “Goddamn America!” were playing in a continuous loop on cable news. And then Obama gave his “A More Perfect Union” speech, and performed what almost seemed like a political miracle — he basically killed the controversy by talking to the American people like adults:
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand — that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle — as we did in the O.J. trial — or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina, or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st-century economy. Not this time.
Obama took office at a very difficult time and was faced with thousands of terribly difficult decisions right out of the gate. Can you imagine what sort of shape we would be in today if Trump had taken office under similar circumstances? There were a lot of political obstacles and he was given disappointingly little leeway by American voters in overcoming those obstacles, but I view the Obama record as a record of very solid achievement that is underappreciated because he took over the Presidency when our economy was in mid-collapse. Had we hit rock bottom, before he took office, as happened with FDR and the Great Depression, I believe he would be far better appreciated. You get many more plaudits for rebuilding after disaster than for mitigating and helping avert it, but some things you cannot control. You can only play the hand you are dealt. I think we are all probably much better off for Obama’s having taken office in January 2009, than if he hadn’t taken office until January 2010 or 2011 after two more years of Bush dealing with the crisis.
I took this big detour about Obama, in order to say Obama could have gotten angry or curled up into a little ball when the Jeremiah Wright stuff came out, and that would have been his right. And most of us would have agreed with him and said, “you know what? Jeremiah Wright was right, Goddamn America!” But Obama did not curl up into a little ball, he stepped up and handled it, calmly.
There is no denying that historically white men have been in the catbird’s seat, and that in many arenas of public life they continue to be. But with each passing year that is increasingly untrue of Democratic politics. This year, a lot of pretty well qualified men threw their hats into the ring and failed to gain any traction at all: Jay Inslee, Bill DeBlasio, Michael Bennett, John Hickenlooper, Steve Bullock, John Delaney. None of these guys even got a serious sniff.
This is my list of people who were taken at all seriously in this process: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Michael Bloomberg, Cory Booker, and Joaquin Castro, The guys I listed above, are all straight, white, Christian males. The people who had a headlock on the U.S. Presidency for centuries, but Joe Biden is the only straight, white, Christian male who is on the list of candidates taken seriously. Pete Buttigieg is gay, which would be a first, Sanders and Bloomberg are both Jewish, which would be a first, Cory Booker is black (which, of course, would not be a first), and Joaquin Castro is non-white latinx. Our last nominee, Hillary Clinton, was a woman, before that, it was a Black man, and this time we had four women — Warren, Klobuchar, Harris, and Gillibrand — all of whom received very serious attention for their campaigns.
My point is not that misogyny does not exist or that it is not something that has to be overcome in a campaign. Misogyny, like racism, does continue to be an important factor. But it is not insurmountable. You just have to run the right campaign.
Klobuchar, Harris, and Gillibrand all failed to have strong enough messages. And Warren had the wrong message.
Warren should have run as what she is, a smart, able, technocrat, but she reached for the fool’s gold of left wing populism. She should not have taken Medicare for All on board. She should not have tried to talk the talk of the revolutionary. She thought she could hug Bernie tight and mug him for his followers. Warren should have been battling Biden for the slot he is running in. She should have been running as the legacy to Obama. She should have been praising what was accomplished in the Obama administration and proposing ways to improve the ACA, the CFPB, and Dodd-Frank. Warren came out of the gate hugging Bernie and slugging Biden, when she should have done just the opposite, she should have hugged Biden and slugged Bernie. She would not have generated quite as much excitement for her campaign as quickly. She should have eschewed the angry millionaires and billionaires talk, and the gimmicky campaign finance pledges.
As for Bernie, his campaigns in both 2016 and today are largely an outright rejection of Barack Obama style politics, and a call for revolutionary change. Bernie’s message is overwhelmingly economic, as was Warren’s. It is just the wrong message right now.
Biden’s message is much more resonant right now. The restoration of decency, competence, and democracy. These are values that are shared by people with a broad spectrum of political views. These are unifying values.
As Trumpist fascism takes deeper and deeper hold, that is what I think a lot of us are hungry for right now — someone who has a message that people of good will with vastly different views on economics like Justin Amash, William Kristol, Bernie Sanders, and AOC can all happily get behind.