Sleepy Joe Biden shows why he’s the pick

Joe Biden delivers a strong performance at a town hall meeting in Oskaloosa, Iowa, on Tuesday. Picture: AP

Could it be that the Democrats want to give themselves a chance of beating Donald Trump and taking the presidency after all?

Joe Biden, still the candidate most likely to beat Trump, put in a brilliant display at an Iowa town hall meeting on Tuesday.

To everyone’s surprise, Biden seems to be beating back the challenge from more leftist candidates such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and has reconsolidated his position back at the top of Democrat primary polls. He has also taken a poll lead over the other Democrats in the early primary-voting state of New Hampshire.

Biden is the most centrist of the Democrat heavyweights, and though this would help him against Trump, it was seen as a problem for him in a party trending leftwards.

But in Oskaloosa, Iowa, where he appeared alone before a large audience, he was much more comfortable in owning his centrist position.

Warren wants to nationalise US health insurance and provide “Medicare for all”. That’s OK, Biden said, but it’s going to cost trillions, it means big tax increases, it won’t pass congress and it would force people who like their private insurance to give it up.

Even though he is 76, Biden seems to be growing into his own skin as a campaigner.

There was a touch, just a touch, of the Ronald Reagan about his folksy, friendly, emotionally available style.

And like the Gipper, he had some good lines: “I know this guy Putin doesn’t want me to be president, and I know that guy Trump doesn’t want me to be the nominee”.

It’s still likely that the behaviour and record of Biden’s son Hunter in China and Ukraine, where he seems to have profited from his father being vice-president, will hurt Biden, but every single candidate, including Trump, has their weaknesses.

Biden will need something better on the issue than bluster, but Trump has shown that can take you a long way.

The questions to Biden were polite, and the format kind, but his answers were crisp and effective, mixing anecdotes with policy prescriptions.

Above all, he demonstrated a kind of emotional availability, to the people in the hall and to Americans generally.

Like Reagan, he had a miscellany of facts, or at least factoids, at hand.

Only 1 per cent of Americans served in the military, he said, but the rest of us have an obligation to look after them. More veterans commit suicide than get killed in battle. A large number of soldiers are coming back from Iraq with brain cancer. I’m not sure if all those claims are exactly correct but Biden’s love of veterans was not tangled up in any intersectional, woke, identity politics. He just loves and honours veterans.

He doesn’t want standing US armies fighting in the Middle East, but he does want strategic US bases and capabilities maintained around the world.

On China, his position was everything Canberra would want. China steals intellectual property and conducts cyber attacks, he said. This is not best addressed by a tariff war.

If the US withdrew totally from Asia this would lead to complete Chinese strategic domination of the region.

This was a much softer format than a debate but, then again, pundits said George W. Bush would never win because he surely couldn’t match Al Gore in a debate.

But the affect of a candidate, the way they connect to voters, is complex and mysterious.

Biden is a long way from being nominated and an even longer way from beating Trump. But he would have the strongest appeal of any Democrat, especially to working-class white voters, in the midwest.