Biden: The Democrats’ Flavor of the Week

AT/ Clarice Feldman:

I think there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 Democrats who have thrown their hats into the ring so far. Frankly, I’ve lost count. Each week, as a new hat comes flying, the contender is the recipient of free, often favorable, press doting, only to be followed within hours by attacks on his or her personality, policies and history.

This week’s person-who’s-definitely-going-to beat-the President is Obama’s former vice president, Joe Biden.

He postponed the big announcement several times, and finally, the big day arrived this week.

His party’s theme for some time now has been straight white men bad, and it’s difficult to see how he’ll garner the nomination. But shrewd Joe has a plan: He hired Symone Sanders as his campaign manager just weeks after she’d contributed to another wannabe contender, Pete Buttigieg, the gay mayor of a failing Indiana city.  Previously, she was the spokesperson for Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign. After leaving that position, she announced on CNN “We Don’t Need White People Leading The Democratic Party Right Now.”

That was then. Apparently, we need them now, in campaign official-speak.

You can see why viewing the crazy train of Democrat contenders, party people who want to wrest the White House back, have hitched their star to someone who might appeal to straight white men, a still not insignificant voting tranche to political observers outside newsrooms.

It doesn’t seem likely to meet their expectations. In the first place, Biden is still not very fast on his feet. Watch him stumble through even this cloud-soft interview on “The View,” the idiotic show I imagine is watched largely by shut-ins too weak to change the channel on their remotes.

And if you want to know what ill-informed millennial youngsters think, there’s no better source than Vox, which I think may still be hoping for a totally inexperienced person of the right sexual orientation and ethnicity to grab the Golden Apple:

Mainstream Democrats like other mainstream Democrats. But what it means to be a mainstream Democrat has changed significantly since Biden entered the Senate 46 years ago. As Democrats gear up to take on Trump, the party’s best shot is to do anything possible to avoid repeating the 2016 experience of defending decades’ worth of twists and turns on various issues from the Iraq War to LGBTQ rights to banking deregulation.

Vox noted his then-mainstream positions which are out of synch with progressives in today’s party: He was an Iraq war proponent. He was too tied to the banking industry, He voted for the “discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act” and was a “tough on crime’ drug warrior.” He “mishandled” the Clarence Thomas hearings. (This was before (a) all women must be believed; and (b) before Bill Clinton when some women must not be believed; and (c) Kavanaugh hearings where once again all women must be believed or something.)

Much is made of his habitual groping of women and young girls.

Far more serious handicaps in my opinion, are his apparent corrupt acts to benefit his son, Hunter. He steered $1.8 billion dollars to the then-Russian-linked government of the Ukraine and in return his son Hunter received millions of dollars from a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.

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