What Joe Biden Is Teaching Democrats About Democrats [View all]

The prevailing mood toward a Biden candidacy has been a combination of anger that he has the temerity to lead a party that has left him behind and sympathy that he’s too addled to grasp his predicament. A genre of op-ed has developed out of liberals pleading with Biden, with such headlines as “Why Joe Biden Shouldn’t Run for President” (The Week, The Guardian); “I Like Joe Biden. I Urge Him Not to Run” (the New York Times); “I Really Like Joe Biden, but He Shouldn’t Run for President” (USA Today); and, as exasperation has sunk in, “Again, Joe Biden, for the Love of God: Do Not Run for President” (The Stranger).

The poor guy has disregarded all the advice and decided to run anyway. And initial polling has revealed that a large number of Democrats have not left Biden behind at all. He begins the race leading his closest competitors, including early front-runner Bernie Sanders, by as much as 30 points. Perhaps it was the party’s intelligentsia, not Biden, that was out of touch with the modern Democratic electorate.

The conclusion that Biden could not lead the post-Obama Democratic Party is the product of misplaced assumptions about the speed of its transformation. Yes, the party has moved left, but not nearly as far or as fast as everybody seemed to believe. Counterintuitively, House Democrats’ triumph in the midterms may have pushed their center of gravity to the right: The 40 seats Democrats gained were overwhelmingly located in moderate or Republican-leaning districts.

Biden’s apparent resurrection from relic to runaway front-runner has illustrated a chasm between perception and reality. The triumph of the left is somewhere between a movement ahead of its time and a bubble that has just popped.



http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/what-joe-biden-is-teaching-democrats-about-democrats.html