Editor’s Note: There appears to be more vacillation and confusion on the Biden 2020 horizon this morning. Yesterday the Philadelphia Inquirer indicated that Charlottesville was scuttled as a launch site and the timing of the event is now up in the air for Joe Biden’s campaign for president. Perhaps they were listening to Liberty Nation’s James V. Capua as he explores why the Commonwealth of Virginia might not be the best starting gate for Uncle Joe.
On Saturday, April 20, Charlottesville’s Daily Progress reported that Joe Biden might decide on the “capital of the resistance” as backdrop for the official end of the longest wait for a presidential candidacy announcement in American history. Not for nuthin’ Joe, but there are a lot of political banana peels strewn about on that Downtown Mall, and you are notoriously accident prone. Find someplace else.
During his last campaign, in August 2012, a little bit down the road in Danville, Old Joe told a “diverse crowd … including many African-Americans, that the presumptive Republican nominee would ‘put you all back in chains,’” CBS reported. And with that clumsy pander, he was contrasting himself and Barack Obama with the aggressively inoffensive Mitt Romney! Imagine the flights of rhetorical overkill Old Joe will muster to bludgeon Donald Trump of “good people on both sides” fame, cheered on by a Charlottesville crowd of the permanently aggrieved, for whom it is still August 12, 2017, and always will be.
For Old Joe, blasting Trump as a racist boor will actually demonstrate a political un-wokeness as egregious as jokingly asking for permission to paw persons gender-identifying as female. There is already evidence that the Obama crowd has left Old Joe and his creaky ways behind, and are reportedly now embracing “a new, young person in this race … the opposite of Trump in a good way … trying to find solutions … not attacking anyone.” The guy every educated suburban matron would want her son to be like if he were gay – Mayor Pete Buttigieg. The young and hip Trump irredentists and angry women in funny hats won’t, in the end, be with the Old Guy any more than the establishment smart money “moderates.” The Wall Street donors and the bundlers are increasingly convinced that this time the Educated Suburban Women Who Run America want young Mr. Rogers, and not an aging palooka.
Another banana peel lurking in Charlottesville is, of course, the still unresolved Commonwealth of Blackface drama. Old Joe’s usual hash of tired Great Society rhetoric and empty, working-class tough-guy talk won’t be able to distract from the necessary absence of Virginia’s top elected officials from any Biden announcement festivities in Charlottesville. A Democratic candidacy in 2020 must rest on a cornerstone of intersectionality, and is not likely helped by a glaring reminder of the party’s lapses. And of course, if the old Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe appears as substitute local support, it would provide little beyond an early infusion of the faint whiff of Blue Emu that inevitably will envelop any 2020 Biden campaign.
Charlottesville’s next banana peel comes in the form of what the armies of planners and regulators who swarm the place call “The Built Environment.” Looming over the Downtown Mall is a metaphorical peril for Old Joe in the very “streetscape” he will face while declaring how he will throttle Donald Trump. A decaying tribute to the ineffectiveness of progressive governance-by-symbolism rather than competent execution: Charlottesville’s aptly-named, and decidedly derelict, shell of a Landmark Hotel. Conceived in pre-2008 crash frothiness as the centerpiece of a grand scheme that would turn the main thoroughfare of the “former cattle town into a street of elegance, excitement and distinction." Years of political posturing and City Council inability to make a deal have put the decaying structure “in limbo as the tenth anniversary of the end of construction approaches,” according to the semi-official voice of Charlottesville progressivism. Imagine it – Old Joe promising prosperity and progress in the shadow of exactly the kind of miserable failure his and Barack Obama’s big talk and malignant policies made of the entire country.
And if all this were not enough, there is, finally, a little Sin of Entitlement banana peel lying around on the Mall; an awkwardly discordant note to any likely Biden riff on the monstrous narcissism of Donald Trump. Apparently, even though he plans to announce somewhere next week, Old Joe has not gotten around to notifying Charlottesville. The Daily Progess reports: “Local officials and political experts in Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and at the University of Virginia said that they have not yet heard anything from Biden’s camp regarding an event in the area. Spokeswomen for lawmakers at the state and federal level said they did not yet know of any potential event … Biden did not respond to a tweet seeking confirmation on his plans.”
Perhaps, like Barack Obama did in 2012, Biden plans to give those aforementioned and always-overwhelmed Charlottesville “local officials and political experts” only 72 hours notice that he plans on appropriating their Downtown. What difference does it really make, though? We are reminded constantly of Charlottesville’s permanently wounded soul. Surely it yearns, even on such short notice, to smite the devilish Trump and all such “white supremacists,” and its pols will seize every opportunity to feed a festering rage that even an NCAA Championship could not assuage. Besides, no one in the Democratic Party or government of the Commonwealth is going to leave planning and execution of the great event to the sorry Charlottesville authorities anyway, so it will work out fine. Or so whoever is behind this scheme thinks.
Don’t believe it, Joe: Charlottesville will not work out well for you. If you are determined to go through with this candidacy thing and thereby showcase your rich history of failure, why not go big? Try the embattled future location of the Obama Library and World Heritage Site on the south side of Chicago.
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