Joe Biden front and centre
The former vice-president to Barack Obama is now expected to seek his Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
It is the worst-kept secret in US politics. But with each day, Joe Biden is moving closer to formally announcing that he will run for president. This week he told at least a half-dozen supporters privately that he intended to run and he even said as much himself in a speech before quickly correcting himself.
Biden’s imminent entry will mark the true start of the 2020 presidential race.
That may not seem fair to the other 15 Democrats who are already jostling to win their party’s nomination, but it is Biden who towers over all of them to become the instant frontrunner.
This early status is partly because of the universal name recognition for the two-term vice-president, who served in the US Senate for 36 years. It also is because Biden is the seasoned middle-of-the-road candidate that moderate Democrats have been crying out for to counter the cluster of young left-wing candidates.
A CNN poll this week gives Biden 28 per cent support, followed by the Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders with 20 per cent, Californian senator Kamala Harris on 12 per cent, former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke on 11 per cent and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren on 6 per cent.
Each of Biden’s main rivals is notably more left-wing than he is. This is why so many moderate Democrats believe Biden is the ideal candidate to take on Donald Trump, because he is the “safe pair of hands” that Trump voters who are disillusioned with the President will be looking for.
But there are also some big question marks hanging over this 76-year-old. These include his age, his poor performance in previous races, his colourful family, his gaffes and whether he has the ticker for the job.
His candidacy comes at a time when the Democrats as a party are increasingly left-leaning and diverse, and are looking for anything but an old white male to lead them into a new era.
But in the end the party needs someone who can defeat the mercurial Trump, and it may be that the party reluctantly decides it is another old white male.
Biden has always been likely to take this, his third and final bid to become president. He flamed out early in his previous two bids, in 1988 and 2008, before Barack Obama picked him to be his vice-president. In 1988 he withdrew from the race amid controversy that he had plagiarised a speech by former British Labour opposition leader Neil Kinnock. In 2008 he dropped out after he won only 1 per cent of the vote in the first primary contest in Iowa.
But Biden maintains that he could have beaten Trump in 2016 and has made no secret of the fact he thinks Hillary Clinton ran a terrible campaign.
Biden was robbed of that opportunity by family tragedy when his beloved eldest son, Beau, died in May 2015 after a battle with brain cancer. It was the second tragedy of Biden’s life. In 1972, six weeks after he was elected to the Senate, Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and their 13-month-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident while out Christmas shopping near their home in Delaware. Beau and Biden’s other son, Hunter, were seriously injured and Biden was sworn into the Senate while standing next to their hospital beds.
Three years later he met his present wife, Jill, an English professor, and they married in 1997, having a daughter, Ashley, in 1981.
When Beau died in 2015, a devastated Biden both grieved and mulled whether he had the strength and clarity to also run for president in 2016. Eventually he decided against it, possibly losing his best shot at the job.
Biden said at the time that no one should run for president unless “I promise you, you have my whole heart, my whole soul, my energy, and my passion to do this. And I’d by lying if I said that I knew that I was there.”
Biden’s expected decision to run again this time comes despite new family issues that have arisen since Beau’s death. His son Hunter, who was married with three children, left his wife of 23 years for his brother Beau’s widow, Hallie, a year after Beau’s death.
News of the romance leaked out during bitter divorce proceedings between Hunter and his wife, Kathleen. She accused him of spending a fortune on drugs, strip clubs and being unfaithful, while he implied that she had also been unfaithful.
Biden is said to be concerned about how his family and especially Hunter, who has bounced from job to job and was once kicked out of the US Naval Reserves for cocaine use, may cope with potential attacks from Trump.
The question of age has long dogged any discussion about Biden, who would be 78 on inauguration day.
As veteran Democratic strategist James Carville notes: “The only major organisation in the world that has been, and is run, by 80-year-olds is the Roman Catholic Church.”
Yet, as politicians live longer, age is less relevant than it once was. Trump, the oldest president to be elected to a first term, is 72; his vanquished 2016 opponent, Clinton, is 71; and one of Biden’s main rivals in the Democratic race, Sanders, is even older at 77.
Trump is certain to make the most of Biden’s age in any contest.
When Biden last week had a slip of the tongue where he mistakenly announced he was running for president, only to correct himself, Trump portrayed him as old and gaffe-prone.
“Joe Biden got tongue-tied over the weekend when he was unable to properly deliver a very simple line about his decision to run for President. Get used to it, another low I.Q. individual!” Trump tweeted.
But in private, aides say, it is Biden who Trump most fears as an opponent in 2020.
Publicly Trump says he would love to face off against Biden if he won the Democratic nomination.
“I dream, I dream about Biden,” the President says.
“Look, Joe Biden ran three times (sic). He never got more than 1 per cent and President Obama took him out of the garbage heap, and everybody was shocked that he did. I’d love to have it be Biden.’
Biden’s potential strength if he does become the Democratic nominee is that he is from the mid-west rust belt that lurched towards Trump in 2016 and delivered him the White House.
Biden was born in the gritty industrial city of Scranton in northeast Pennsylvania and lived there until he was 10 years old, when his family moved to Delaware. Scranton and the region around it is an example of a former Democratic stronghold that swung heavily to Trump in 2016.
In theory someone such as Biden would have a stronger chance than, say, a Californian senator such as Harris — the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants — of winning back the white, male, working-class voters who defected to Trump so strongly across the mid-west.
Yet Biden has to defeat his fellow Democratic rivals before he can take on Trump.
His advisers say he will position himself as a more centrist candidate and will argue that his experience makes him the best person to restore America’s reputation in the eyes of the world and undo the foreign policy damage of the Trump era.
While Biden has yet to explain his policies in detail, he will advocate for cheaper public college tuition, expanded healthcare, middle-class tax breaks and greater attention to climate change.
He was a staunch critic of Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and the Republican attempt to dismantle Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. He believes in greater gun control and labour rights.
Yet there are skeletons in Biden’s past that may come to haunt him when he takes on his fellow Democrats.
He was chairman of the Senate judiciary committee during the explosive 1991 confirmation hearings on Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, when a work colleague, Anita Hill, accused Thomas of sexual harassment.
The all-white and all-male committee was widely criticised for what many called a character assassination of Hill.
In the Me Too era, Biden is aware that the optics of the committee’s grilling of Hill look even worse these days and last year he publicly apologised for not doing more to stop members of the committee from attacking her.
In a speech last weekend, Biden said the presidential race would be “a battle for the soul of America”.
“Our politics has become so mean, so petty, so vicious that we can’t govern ourselves, in many cases, even talk to one another. It can’t go on like this, folks,” he said.
“Everybody knows who (Trump) is. We’ve got to be clear who we are. We’ve got to understand that we Democrats, we choose hope over fear, we choose unity over division and we choose truth over lies.’
The question is whether the Democrats will choose Biden.
Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.