Joe Biden Really Is a God-Awful Candidate

Scott Morgan/Reuters via CNBC

I know my last post was also a case against Joe Biden. But I feel entitled to this. That post was my attempt at a rational argument, focusing almost entirely on the "electability" criterion that seems to be bolstering Biden's candidacy. This post is no such thing—no, this one's a spleen-venting session that's for my sake as much as anyone else's. Because, in spite of about a million reasons why Joe Biden should be completely disqualified from even running for president, he is still at the top of the polls. His lead has narrowed significantly, to be sure. And I take solace in the fact that in three of the last five contested presidential primaries, the candidate who was leading at this point was not the eventual nominee. On the whole, I'm cautiously optimistic about the Democratic primary. But I'm also impatient, because Joe Biden isn't just the wrong candidate for this election, or even simply a bad candidate—he is a candidate that, at this point, should be so obviously terrible that he belongs in the single digits, where he stayed the last time he ran for president.

Let's start with the newest reason that Joe Biden should never be president: he seems to be losing his damn mind in front of our eyes. I listed a number of his most recent "gaffes" in my last post, and, well, things haven't gotten any better. At the most recent debate, he accidentally called Bernie Sanders "the president"—the second debate in a row where he's called one of his opponents the president—said that he is (not was) the vice president, and vomited up this incoherent response when asked about school segregation:

Well, they have to deal with the … Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure that we are in a position where—

Look, we talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal of … A raise of getting out of the $60,000 level.

No. 2, make sure that we bring in to the help with the stud—the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need… We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are required—I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them.

Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have three, four, and five-year-olds go to school. School! Not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t know what— They don’t know what quite what to do. Play the radio. Make sure the television—excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night. The phone—make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school—er, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

At one campaign stop, he even seemed to forget Barack Obama's name. In an interview, he pronounced Obama's first name "rap rock." And—although Julián Castro has taken a lot of flak for calling him out on it —he really did appear to forget what he'd said just moments before in the last debate. Here's what he said before the now-infamous moment:

The option I'm proposing is Medicare for all—Medicare for choice. If you want Medicare, if you lose the job from your insurance—from your employer, you automatically can buy into this. 

[...] 

Every single person who is diagnosed with cancer or any other disease can automatically become part of this plan. They will not go bankrupt because of that. They will not go bankrupt because of that. They can join immediately.

[Emphasis added]

And then here he is interrupting Castro's response shortly afterward: "They do not have to buy in. They do not have to buy in." Moreover, Castro was correct about Biden's plan. Even Politifact, which rated Castro's statement "mostly false" for reasons too complex and stupid to get into here, had this to say: "Biden does require those who want Medicare coverage to 'opt in[.]'"

None of these incidents are the signs of a well-functioning mind, and all of them put together should raise major concerns. It is grossly irresponsible not to be asking questions about Joe Biden's state of mind and mental health at this point, and the fact that we can't (or at least shouldn't) put much stock in his mental acuity should be disqualifying already.

However, even if we assume that Biden's mouth is just failing to keep up with his brain and that he is just as mentally sharp as ever—an unwarrantedly generous assumption—he is still an absolutely horrible candidate. For one thing, Biden has a strained, at best, relationship with the truth. For instance, he recently claimed to have opposed the Iraq War before it began, and to have only voted for the resolution authorizing the war in order to "get the Security Council to force inspectors in to see whether there was any nuclear activity going on with Saddam Hussein." This is completely false. Biden was outspokenly supportive of the war both before and after it began, and it was clear at the time that by voting for the resolution he was authorizing Bush to invade Iraq, contra his confused explanation. At the last debate he repeated an at-best-misleading account of his record on Iraq:

I should have never voted to give Bush the authority to go in and do what he said he was going to do. The AUMF was designed, he said, to go in and get the Security Council to vote 15-0 to allow inspectors to go in to determine whether or not anything was being done with chemical weapons or nuclear weapons. And when that happened, he went ahead and went anyway without any of that proof.

I said something that was not meant the way I said it. I said—from that point on—what I was argued against in the beginning, once he started to put the troops in, was that in fact we were doing it the wrong way; there was no plan; we should not be engaged; we didn't have the people with us; we didn't have our—we didn't have allies with us, et cetera.

One could, of course, chalk this up to the possible decline in Biden's mental faculties—but this isn't a new problem for him. Back in 1987, during his first run for president, Biden claimed to have graduated in the top half of his class (he graduated 76th out of 86), received three college degrees (he received one) and gotten a full academic scholarship (he didn't). More weirdly, he plagiarized lines from then-leader of the UK Labour Party Neal Kinnock, including details about Kinnock's family history that didn't actually apply to Biden (unlike Kinnock, Biden was not, as he claimed, the first in his family to go to college, or descended from coal miners). He also repeatedly claimed to have marched during the civil rights movement, even after advisers reminded him that that had never happened. His falsehoods about his role in the Iraq War are entirely in character for him.

But even if we put aside Biden's history of falsehoods, leading up to the present, and his questionable mental state, we have another great reason that he should never be president: his record as a politician is frankly horrifying. Biden ran into trouble earlier this year for talking about his relationship with segregationists early in his political career. The realities are even more disturbing than he let on at the time. We know that Biden devoted a considerable part of his career to limiting desegregation busing—part of why he had such a good working relationship with segregationists. And he was grateful for their support, too: in 1977, Biden thanked James Eastland—an unabashed racist who outspokenly view black people as an "inferior race"—for supporting a piece of anti-busing legislation.

Eastland wasn't the only segregationist Biden had a close relationship with. He also worked with notorious Dixiecrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond, for instance, on a crime bill that, per The Intercept,

increased penalties for drugs, including expanding civil asset forfeiture; created a sentencing commission; and eradicated parole at the federal level... [and] sought to limit access to bail[.]

The bill in question was ultimately vetoed by Ronald Reagan. But, it's worth noting, Biden's relationship with Thurmond went beyond their shared support for horrible pieces of legislation. In 2003, he also eulogized Thurmond—who, for context, had conducted a record-setting filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, never renounced his history as a segregationist, and, as it turns out, fathered a mixed-race child (whom he never publicly acknowledged) with a teenage maid as a young man, and known of this "secret daughter" throughout his career as a vehement segregationist—as a "brave man, who in the end made his choice and moved to the good side."

But let's not pass over that Biden-Thurmond crime bill too quickly. After all, it was just one part of Biden's long and awful record of supporting "tough-on-crime" legislation. To return to the Intercept article:

Biden, who was the ranking Democrat on the committee from 1981 to 1987, and then chaired it until 1995, continued on this trajectory: shaping many of the laws that would...institutionalize a federal drug war. A number of the priorities from the 1982 Biden-Thurmond bill would eventually become law. Biden shaped the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which curtailed access to bail; eliminated parole; created a sentencing commission; expanded civil asset forfeiture; and increased funding for states. Biden helped lead the push for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which lengthened sentences for many offenses, created the infamous 100:1 crack versus cocaine sentencing disparity, and provided new funds for the escalating drug war. Eventually, with his co-sponsorship of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, his long-sought-after drug czar position was created. These and other laws lengthened sentences at the federal level and contributed to an explosion of federal imprisonment — from 24,000 people locked up in 1980 to almost 216,000 in 2013. In short, these laws increased the likelihood that more people would end up in cages and for longer. 

In 1989, Biden criticized President George Bush’s anti-drug efforts as “not tough enough, bold enough or imaginative enough. The president says he wants to wage a war on drugs, but if that’s true, what we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam, not a limited war, fought on the cheap.” Then, in 1994, he pushed through the massive crime bill, which authorized more than $30 billion of spending, largely devoted to expanding state prisons and local police forces. He bragged of his accomplishments in a 1994 report: The “first [national] drug strategy sought a total of $350 million in federal aid to state and local law enforcement, with states matching the federal assistance dollar for dollar. The first drug strategy I offered—in January 1990—called for more than $1 billion in aid to state and local law enforcement—a controversial view at the time.” 

That's right: Joe Biden was actually pushing Republicans to become tougher and more punitive than they already were. And, while high crime rates were certainly an issue, the mass incarceration policies championed by politicians like Biden were of dubious usefulness at best: a study from the Brennan Center for Justice, released in 2015, "concludes that over-harsh criminal justice policies, particularly increased incarceration, which rose even more dramatically over the same period, were not the main drivers of the crime decline [over the past few decades]. In fact, the report finds that increased incarceration has been declining in its effectiveness as a crime control tactic for more than 30 years. Its effect on crime rates since 1990 has been limited, and has been non-existent since 2000."

And now, to top it all off, Biden is running a campaign where—when he's not busy forgetting what year it is—he tries to convince the electorate that progressive measures like Medicare-for-All are bad ("there will be a deductible, in your paycheck" he warned at the last debate, showing he doesn't know what a deductible is) and that instead we should expect the Republican Party, currently the most dangerous organization in human history, to suddenly become a bastion of Reasonable Conservatism once Trump is out of office. And despite his utter lack of useful ideas, complete incompetence as a candidate and horrible history (which I've only highlighted some of the worst parts of), he's still sitting at the top of the polls—hopefully, not for much longer. If he does manage to get the nomination in spite of it all, it will be a sort of sick, miniature version of Donald Trump's victory in 2016: an affirmation that absolutely nothing matters, every principle that we thought applied in the field of politics is void, and Chaos Reigns Supreme. And if it happens, the Democratic Party deserves to be burned to the ground. I don't know at this point if I would vote for Biden over Trump. Four more years of Trump sounds nightmarish, but it will look like a minor case of heartburn compared with what's to come if we don't actually deal with the problems of climate change, inequality and authortarianism, and Joe Biden has absolutely nothing to offer when it comes to any of them. I'm not yet convinced that four (or eight) years of Biden's compromising and ineptitude might not pave the way for some demagogue even more dangerous than Trump.

I haven't even covered all of the major bad things about Joe Biden (Anita Hill, anyone?), but if I haven't made my point already there's no point in carrying on. So, is there anything good I can say about old Uncle Joe? Well, it may just be damning him with faint praise, but he seems like a genuinely well-meaning person—which is more than I can say for a lot of politicians. I wouldn't mind having him as a neighbor, or even a relative—just as a president. To his credit, he was also (unlike the Democrats' last presidential nominee) one of the less hawkish members of the Obama administration, and was right about our intervention in Libya. I don't know that he'd be a worse president than Hillary would have been, it's just that her nomination felt inevitable, and the reasons that Biden is bad seem so much more obvious. But it remains to be seen whether they'll be enough to doom his candidacy.