Opinion: Joe Biden’s toughest 2020 opponent Is Joe Biden
As he prepares to enter the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden is carrying with him nearly a half a century in the major leagues of American politics. When Pete Buttigieg was born, Biden was had been a U.S. senator for almost nine years. He has cast votes on conflicts in Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the confirmation of 14 Supreme Court justices and the impeachment of a president.
It would likelier be a lot easier for Biden if he were a Republican. One of the signal features of the 2016 campaign was the capacity of GOP voters to sweep aside Donald Trump’s past, both his words and his deeds. The once “strongly pro-choice” Trump, the Trump who embraced a substantial wealth tax, who openly celebrated a sybaritic life style, became a heroic figure among supply-side economists and evangelical Christian leaders.
It’s not at all clear that Democrats, especially this year, view the past with such forbearance.
As a general rule, there are three approaches a presidential candidate can use to handle a problematic past. One is to hope that tough questions simply do not arise. It sometimes even works. Al Gore in 2000 was never seriously pushed on his views, as a House member from Tennessee, on abortion and guns. In a time when a speech of decades ago is available on social media with the flick of a finger, that doesn’t seem like an option for Biden.
The third approach is both the most direct and the most difficult: to try to show voters what was happening years, even decades ago, that explains your actions. Busing school kids to achieve racial balance, for example, was a lot more complicated than a struggle to overcome the hostility of racist whites to integration—though that was surely part of the story.
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