Former vice president Joe Biden has all the looks of a man who will be running for president in 2020, according to observers.
A report in The Hill states that Biden's campaign stops on behalf of Democratic candidates in the midterm elections, especially focusing on parts of the country won by President Trump in 2016, indicate a third run for the White House is in Biden's future.
“You can kind of see what his strategy is not just in terms of 2018 but in terms of 2020,” a Democratic strategist told The Hill.
“He’s essentially going to the places Democrats need desperately if they want to win in the midterms and the presidential election. This is very much a pre-presidential campaign campaign.”
Party Killer
Biden may very well be positioning himself for a tussle with Trump, but the main problem for him and Democrats as a whole is that he seems more like a rerun of Hillary Clinton.
No, not Hillary vs. Trump. We're talking Hillary vs. Bernie Sanders - the Democratic nomination battle that revealed major tensions between the party establishment and progressive activists.
Biden as establishment war horse will not play well with progressives who feel energized by 2018 primary victories by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over party heavyweight Rep. Joe Crowley, and Ben Jealous in Maryland's gubernatorial race.
Like Hillary, Biden will be able to effortlessly raise enormous amounts of cash from well-heeled Dem donors, raising the specter that he will purchase a fixed nomination, as Bernie Sanders supporters still believe Hillary did in 2016.
The Aug. 25 decision by Democrat officials to strip superdelegates of their weighty role in the party's nominating process is a direct result of Sanders supporters' bitter ire, which still smolders two years later.
Also like Hillary, a Biden candidacy could be seen as a "my turn" moment echoing the pathetic campaign of 1996 GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole.
And once again like Hillary, Biden will bring heavy baggage into the race garnered over the course of a long political career. Progressives loathe Biden for what they see as his lack of support for Anita Hill's sexual harassment charges against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas way back in 1991 and his vote for the Iraq War.
Along with Hillary, he also supported the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act, which is seen by leftists as a notorious vehicle for the "mass incarceration" of black Americans.
Out of Touch
A fawning Vanity Fair feature article on Biden in October 2017 – complete with photographs by Annie Leibovitz (how liberal hip – if this were 1980) – actually has the tone-deafness to suggest the following as a key feature to Biden's appeal:
He represents an old-fashioned ideal of bipartisan cooperation that many Americans crave, maintaining amicable, ongoing relationships not only with John McCain but also, he says, with Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, and Rob Portman.
The establishment Dem capable of reaching across the aisle to establishment Republicans!
Not only would such a campaign slogan deeply repel most Trump voters, it would be nothing short of embarrassing in the battle for the Democratic nomination.
Unappealing Options
So while establishment Dems are correct in believing that potential 2020 progressive candidates such as Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts or Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont will do nothing to help the party reach the vast population of Americans who reside outside the liberals' coastal bubbles, they fail to see just how antagonizing another veteran machine politician will be to their leftist base.
The Old Establishment is out of fashion with the base, and the young progressives can't win a general election.
Either way they pivot, it looks like the Dems will once again be on a Road to Nowhere in 2020.
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