Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
Joe Biden should be happy—he’s about to become the Democratic nominee as long as his rivals fail to question his candidacy.
Joe Biden has led in national polling averages for the entire race, Iowa volatility aside. If the toss-up in Iowa goes his way, he’s likely to get a boost that could sweep New Hampshire and Nevada and build on his already large lead in South Carolina and the Southern Super Tuesday states. In other words, Biden is one good showing in a couple weeks away from taking the nomination.
OK, that’s a bit dramatic. Bernie Sanders and others have the resources to fight this out quite a bit longer. And the looming presence of noted meatball Mike Bloomberg adds some uncertainty to any durable lead in the later states. But Biden is the front-runner. Maybe he’s a weak front-runner, but one way that you can change that, aside from just expressing “he’s a weak front-runner,” is to actively work to dislodge him from that front-runner slot. After all, if he’s so weak, it should be easy.
You can do that with ads; Biden hasn’t faced a negative ad in the 2020 race, not even one that contrasts his record against another candidate’s. You can do it with media appearances and policy releases; we seemed to see a rumbling of that last week, but it has not been sustained. And you can do it in high-profile events when engaged voters and the media are watching, like debates.
The seventh Democratic debate started off like it would be taken in that direction, with a sustained sequence on foreign policy. Bernie Sanders strongly stated his anti-war bona fides and briefly drew contrasts with Biden’s vote for the Iraq War. Biden was a bit unsteady here, first trying on an anti-war cloak because his was vice president to Barack Obama, then lying about having “masterminded” the exit from Iraq (we’re still there, for one, and the combat troop presence diminished under Obama-Biden because Iraq would not agree to immunity for their potential crimes in the country), then saying various incursions like Libya were legal because of an authorization to use military force passed after 9/11, which reinforced the maneuvers and games presidents play to bomb foreign nations with impunity.
That was in the first 20 minutes. And that was the end of the weak, mostly implied Biden contrast section.
It was pretty easy to spot the wasted opportunity, in the last debate before voters caucus in Iowa. For months now, Biden has been a front-runner facing next to no questions about his long record, one that’s out of step with the current mainstream of the Democratic Party and even the stated principles of his own campaign.
Outside of inside-baseball media chatter, there’s been nothing delivered on a big stage about Biden’s long dalliance with cutting Social Security. There’s been nothing on Biden’s support for banking interests in his home state of Delaware at the expense of seniors, union members, and people drowning in medical and student loan debt, in the bankruptcy bill. There’s been nothing since all the way back in the first debate about Biden’s propensity to make bad deals with Mitch McConnell. There was nothing about Biden's large group of big-money bundlers powering him to the nomination.
And there was nothing about the continued decline of the middle class, the abandonment of large parts of the country, the strengthening of corporate power, all of which coincided with Biden’s vice presidency and made things easier for Donald Trump’s demagoguery. Biden’s poor judgment, inability to see himself getting fleeced, and willingness to sell out the base of the Democratic Party should be an issue. It isn’t.
Heck, as the debate turned, in ugly fashion, to electability and gender, there was nothing last night about Biden stating out loud, not in a private conversation, that sexism is “not going to happen with me.”
The Democratic Party has internalized a myth that Democratic voters will punish candidates who go negative. They punish candidates who go negative poorly, like Julián Castro. They punish candidates who go negative successfully, like Kamala Harris in her one spotlight moment hitting Biden over busing, and then retreat to the exact same position as the rivals they hit. They don’t punish successful efforts to draw contrasts and diminish competitors: That’s the only reason Pete Buttigieg is still in the race.
Donald Trump enjoyed the same benefits of passivity from the Republican primary field in 2016. He was obviously ridiculous, obviously ill-suited to the presidency, and obviously someone would say that sooner or later and end the misery. But everyone expected the other person to say it, nobody really did, and Trump won in a cakewalk. He didn’t even need to win Iowa to do it.
The punditry talk of “lanes” and various infighting has neglected the donkey in the room. The front-runner in the Democratic primary is running almost entirely on nostalgia and electability. Nobody has yet made a sustained argument that he’s not right for the job. The expectation that Biden will collapse under his own weight because he was a bad presidential candidate 12 and 32 years ago has obviously proven incorrect. He’s on a trajectory to win. And if nobody makes the case that he shouldn’t, he will.
