So now this saga is over. Joe Biden achieved his lifelong dream which begun in earnest over thirty years ago to become President of the United States. One which he was first on the public record for before anyone outside the state of Georgia had heard of Jimmy Carter. This is a man who I believe will be looked back kindly on for his list of legislative achievements with a split senate and a level of tribalism from the other side that crossed into the unhinged. He had a far more tumultuous period to be president than most. Inheriting the pandemic, an economy in tatters, chaos and fractured institutions and alliances from his predecessor and as mentioned not the congressional majority to easily pass his agenda. I think he has generally handled Ukraine’s fight well and rallied the rest of the world although his handling of Israel-Palestine has soured that to a point. Nonetheless overall I think he is on substance a good president who I would argue is better than Bill Clinton on records of achievements (Clinton IMO got the easiest time period in modern history after the Cold War to be president and ran the show on charisma and an autopilot economy). His age and communicative problems will not allow him to probably crack the top 20 of all time as the ability to inspire and explain to the public is a key part of being president and he has aged a lot. I think he can be a Jimmy Carter type of figure though who in hindsight and perhaps some poor successors down the line people reevaluate policies that are Biden build whether it was rebuilding American infrastructure or making the party more in the position of heavily pro-union and crafting industrial policy in that vein. I think if Kamala Harris gets over the line and puts the nail in the coffin of Donald Trump’s political career his decision will be hailed too as a great act of putting the country first. He has a lot to be proud of.
Nevertheless there is one issue that has stuck with me for many years. Joe Biden being pushed out because he is too frail to mount the fight against Trump again carries a cruel twist of fate. For I believe if he was the nominee in 2016 this country would have been spared from Trump ever setting foot in the White House and his political project ever setting root in the psyche of half the country. Go back to 2016 for a moment. Biden was the incumbent Vice President. He was serving a popular president and his personal approvals were quite good too. The reason Biden’s decline now is so prevalent is he went from being a scrappy yet charming vice president in his 70s to this barely audible and often incoherent president in his 80s. That is a travesty that the world didn’t quite get peak Biden who in his 2016 convention speech gave the best repudiation of Trump I have ever seen from a major politician and who had decades long union connections, support among working class people, a relatability to ordinary people, not a figure of longstanding hate unlike the Clintons, and the Obama coattails to have taken the party over the line.
I understand that he was a father in grief after the passing of his son from cancer. I also have read accounts including from the man himself that it wasn’t quite the full stop to the Biden 2016 train as it subsequently became portrayed but rather the culmination of a discouraging effort by leading Democrats to promote Hillary instead as the successor. A lot of Trump’s 2016 support was anti-Hillary than pro-Trump. They became the cult of Trump after he took office and served for four years. I firmly believe Biden in 2016 would have maintained the Obama coalition and not see an exodus of white working class voters while adding the moderate suburban class voters he eventually put in the democratic corner in 2020.
Those leading Democrats are some of the same people who rightly pushed Biden out of the race eight years on. But the travesty in my view is the fear of him not being capable of stopping Trump in 2024 ending up as the reason to turn on him is ironic as had they prodded him to join the race in 2016, there would be no Trump to worry about now.
I think you’re right. If Biden is running, Bernie probably stays out because I think he respects Biden despite their political differences. If it’s head to head Biden against Clinton, well, given that Hillary Clinton has never in her life won an election that she didn’t have a massive head start in, seems most likely that Biden wins the nomination and becomes President.
Trump is forever branded a loser and leaves the political stage. Biden probably loses in 2020 (just based on the general rule that it’s really hard for a party to win more than two Presidential elections in a row), but the Republican winner would be an improvement, possibly a vast improvement, over Trump.
The counterargument is that it would have been a long and expensive primary that would have left divisions and hard feelings within the party. But, hell, we had one of those in 2008 and it worked out OK in the end.
I’m not sure Trump just goes away. He got a taste for the big grift and the rubes loved cheering him on. I bet the MAGA cancer would have returned in 2020…when Biden would have been saddled with Covid. He would have handled it better, but that and the on-hold economy would most likely have led to a 2020 Orange Asshole victory.
“What might have been”, yes — he would have been in an excellent position to hit DJT hard.
But part of the issue I suppose was a Failure of Imagination. Surely a nation that elected Obama twice was not going to go rogue like this? Surely they’d be ready for another historic “first”?
A Trump loss in 2016 you mean, and yes, it would not lead to a Republican party that feels they “owe it” to Trump to keep him as standard-bearer. They’d revert to their usual and customary “we should have nominated a Real Conservative” excuse. Sure, in 2020 some member of the socially respectable wing of the Freedom Caucus would have been in the race, but not someone trying to burn it all down.
I believe the rumor that trump never thought he’d win in 2016, and was really running for the publicity, so he could start a Limbaugh-like ‘trump network’. I remember seeing, though I can’t seem to find it now, a pic of the trump campaign room immediately after they learned they’d won. Many in the room were cheering, but trump looked positively grim, as if he was thinking “what have I gotten myself into?”
So yeah, an alternate 2024 universe in which Biden ran and won in 2016 would probably have trump as some sort of blathering media personality, but never again taken seriously as a politician. At least not seriously enough to be able to run again. And maybe there would be far fewer elected Greenes, Gaetzs, Jordans and Boeberts.
My impression is that Obama specifically pressured Biden into not running, because he wanted to avoid an expensive and divisive primary (possibly also to fulfill a promise made to HRC in 2008?). I don’t think this has ever been absolutely confirmed, but it’s pretty widely believed.
TL; DR: Life is not fair, hindsight is 20/20, the Democratic party plays favorites with presidential candidates, and the DNC management decided that champion fundraiser Hillary Clinton would be a better candidate than aging white guy.
None of this changes the fact that Trump or not, the GOP has been moving the country toward authoritarianism and divisiveness long before Donald Trump got it in his wormy brain that he could hijack that glacial process by just being crass and brazen about is aspiring demagoguery. If not Trump, then someone like Trump (and maybe much smarter) was probably going to do this anyway. And frankly, one can equally speculate about the hypothetical that a Biden presidency in 2016, hamstrung by legislative constipation and McConnell et al blocking judicial appointments, topped by an unexpected pandemic, might have just primed the country for something even worse, i.e. a J.D. Vance-type character with enough charisma and smarts to actually pull off a stealth coup into a proto-fascist White Christian Nationalist government (which still might happen).
Alternative soothsaying sure is a fun pastime, though, ain’ it?
I believe a Trump loss to Biden in 2016 would have been a blowout. And as a result the GOP establishment does an “i told you so”. Remember there was doubts over him from the evangelicals too in the race. Post 2016 Trump turned doubters in the movement to hardcore cultists. I think a Ted Cruz gets a second crack at it in 2020 and a President Biden or normal Dem beats him.
I see this a lot and I am curious - who, exactly, is the DNC management? Who are these people making backroom deals to elevate one candidate over another? Are they still in power and pulling the strings? Serious question.
I thought the narrative for 2016 was that Biden was in mourning after the death of his son Beau and not that Obama ‘forced’ him out. Seems a silly idea; if Joe wanted it, he would have run.
There’s always room for counterfactuals but the idea that Biden would blow out Trump in 2016 approaches the fantastical.
I guess that depends on how one defines a “blowout”. If that means picking up a couple more states in the electoral college, I can see that. If that means winning nearly all of them? That beggars belief given the now obvious divides in the country.
Biden’s own retelling is Obama was not encouraging in their meetings. And Obama aides who do the media circuit now warned him an entry would mean ending in 3rd place behind Bernie Sanders in Iowa. Furthermore a behind the scenes book on the Clinton campaign talked about a shadow primary where then (and current) Biden aides like ex Chief of Staff Ron Klain and NSA Jake Sullivan joined the Clinton campaign. The point being Biden was boxed in without a campaign apparatus as the leading talent joined the Clinton campaign in 2015 while he was weighing up a run.
I am pretty confident Biden keeps the blue wall including Ohio. He won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2020. Ohio moved further to the right. But he had strong union appeal Hillady never really had so in 2016 I think he holds together the Obama coalition. And I do believe the backdrop of 2016 Biden who was crisp and charming on the stump vs bombastic Trump would strike a chord along with the elephant in the room that it would not be tarred with sexism.
I think that this is a really tricky issue. It’s possible that we needed one Trump term to illustrate that democracy is fragile and that without that Trump term we might have “Tea Partied” into competent and irrevocable totalitarianism. Or maybe not. As well, my suggestion being useful is predicated on Harris being elected with a sizable and credible majority.