![]() But October, the complete lack of enthusiasm for his campaign having caused his grassroots fundraising to collapse to virtual non-existence, he reversed course and accepted super PAC support, which was immediately forthcoming. Early in the campaign, Biden was trying to draw some of the progressive reform mojo from Sanders and opposed support for his campaign by super PACs. Then, within 48 hours - after there was some pushback - he was opposed to it again. A couple weeks later, he was suddenly for it again, insisting that his earlier comments in opposition to it were a result of his having misunderstood the question he’d been asked. Then, in May, he suddenly announced he was opposed to it. For more than four decades, Biden has been been an unshakeable supporter of the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funds from being used for abortions. Now that black voters are an important constituency for anyone pursuing the Democratic nomination, Biden says that policy was “a big mistake.” And an example of systemic racism! In July, Biden released a criminal justice “plan.” His suggested criminal justice policy? Reverse the “criminal justice” policies he’s spent his entire political career supporting. He authored the 100-to-1 crack/powdered cocaine sentencing disparity that targeted the black community. Sometimes both.īiden spent a lot of his career trying to out-”tough” Republicans on crime, leading to, among other things, the mass-incarceration epidemic that has plagued the U.S. The sharp division between Biden’s record and where the voters in his party are has led Biden to spend much of his latest presidential campaign either repudiating most of what he has done in the course of his career or lying about it in an effort to make it seem more palatable. He has also been a leader on many issues but all of them - gutting bankruptcy protections for creditor on behalf of the financial services industry, pimping the Iraq war, pushing “tough on crime” policies that obliterate civil liberties, etc. ![]() He tries - badly - to fake all sorts of passion at times but there’s no core to him his entire political history is one of a conservative who walks away from such views only if and only when they become politically risky within the Democratic party, and when he judges flip-flopping is safe. As I wrote in a recent editorial, Biden “offers for policy only a string of thin, half-baked and generally very bad ideas slapped together by his underlings that he may say he has something and that are clearly as much a mystery to him as to everyone else.” None of them are serious, and he isn’t serious about any of them.īiden’s contempt for policy is rooted in the fact that he’s an essentially conservative opportunist in a progressive party. It is, of course, impossible to run for president without any policy proposals - what else is a candidate to even talk about or run on? - so Biden eventually put his underlings to work creating proposals he could present as his own. When Biden entered the current campaign, he had no policies at all, presenting his run, instead, as part of “a battle for the soul of this nation.” The notion that these and every other such movement haven’t had pretty extensive legislative agendas is, of course, absurd but these and other such comments establish Biden’s dismissive view of policy. He went on to further denigrate policy and to suggest that what’s needed instead is leadership, something that, in a political context, is impossible to detach from policy but something he apparently considers to be entirely divorced from it. ![]() When the women’s movement started, it did not move with a constitutional amendment. It seems to me that when we got involved in the civil rights movement, Frank, nobody asked Martin Luther King what his legislative agenda was. “e have never, as a party, moved this nation by 14-point position papers and 9-point programs. On another occasion, he got into an ugly exchange with a questioner and went on a rant against policy: And we changed attitudes.” Actually, Biden never marched in the civil rights movement, not to enact policy, not to change attitudes, not for any reason. I marched with tens of thousands of others to change attitudes. “I did not march with a 12-point program. “When I marched in the civil rights movement,” he told a New Hampshire audience in February 1987. In trying to explain that record, biographers of Biden’s political career will struggle in vain to find any other through-line.īiden has often voiced a disdain for policy. It’s just that, throughout his career, his policy concerns have always been dictated by self-interest and, most especially, serving the needs of his big donors. This is not to say Biden doesn’t have a very long policy record.
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