The former vice-president will have to show he has changed with it
Bruce Springsteen’s “We Take Care of Our Own”, as his friend Barack Obama used to, Joe Biden performed a dress rehearsal for his long-awaited entry to the Democratic primary in Washington,, earlier this month. His audience, burly delegates of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, were the sort of working-class voters the 76-year-old former vice-president is counting on to nullify the hard-left.
As things stand, he owes his lead status to propitious circumstances, including the apparent lack of an outstanding alternative and his association with the revered Mr Obama. There is an obvious risk that he will fizzle as he did during two previous presidential runs, when he was an outsider and much less of a target to his opponents than he is now. Mr Biden is knowledgeable, likeable, right-minded, hugely experienced and polished in the way of an old-style variety show host.
Hence the early attention to the many ways Mr Biden—over the course of a career in Democratic politics that began when the party still contained segregationists—has offended against contemporary liberal standards.
Certain kinds of past transgression are now straightforwardly disqualifying among Democrats. In light of #MeToo, Mr Clinton has become an embarrassment. The more interesting thing about Mr Biden’s case is that he does not appear guilty of anything that was considered inappropriate at the time. His mistreatment of Ms Hill reflected the usual 1980s male chauvinism. It was also intended to help a black man reach the Supreme Court bench.
American politics has a strong redemption tradition. Yet Mr Biden’s career is not merely defined by a relentless and contrite movement towards more liberal positions. Rather, he has always been broadly liberal, but with a propensity to lapse. He started work on the Violence Against Women Act, one of his big achievements, a year before his mishandling of Ms Hill. This makes him, warts and all, as contradictory as most voters, and in that sense a cautionary lesson for the purist left.
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