A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Joe Biden today, in what must have been one of the hardest moments of his life, announced he won’t pitch his tent on the Presidential campaign trail again. He did that twice before, in 1988 and 2008, each time folding his canvas after embarrassingly few voters entered. But after those campaigns he could tell himself there could be another day; he could still be President.
That’s no longer true. Biden’s still hale, but at 72 he knows this was his last chance. His decision not to run was final, even if slightly hedged to save face. He’ll end his career as a successful Vice President and sunny politician, not as a beaten and weary old man who sought one hurrah too many. A man could do much worse, and many have.
Thus the Democratic Party is down to four actively campaigning for the Presidency: Lincoln Chaffee, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Bernie Sanders. Soon, I suspect, there will be three. Lincoln Chaffee, an erudite and accomplished man who was born without gravitas and still seems like he should be wearing a bow tie and short pants, emerged from the first debate as Mr. Helium. He's finished and will pack it in before long.
That leaves Sanders, 74 and hale, Clinton, 68 and edgy, and O’Malley, 52 and all but invisible despite his strong closing statement in the first debate.
The trio left should terrify thoughtful Democrats.
Sanders sings the song of economic equity, music to the ears of Democrats who seek economic justice, now a minority in their own party. But he’s 74, and would be 75 when he took the oath of office. I doubt the Democratic Party will nominate a man that old for President. Is he electable? Under some circumstances, yes. Against Trump, Carson, or Fiorina, he might win by a landslide. But his odds of winning the nomination, while not zilch, are not high.
Clinton, wife of the Democratic President who sold his soul to Wall Street, enemy of single-payer health care, aficionado of gunboat diplomacy, more ambitious than Lady MacBeth, has cobbled together a powerful coalition of gender, racial, and ethnic identity caucuses. But she, too, is old, and will lose at least a percent or two of the popular vote because she’s a woman.
O’Malley, a possible choice for Vice President, and by all accounts a superb administrator, is a better age for a Presidential nominee, but he’s as exciting as a Norkota russet boiled in distilled water. He’s also unpopular with black voters because of his zero tolerance policies as mayor of Baltimore, policies believed to have made a thuggish police department even more thuggish. Still, O’Malley, not Biden, probably becomes the leading possibility for the nomination if Clinton falters from scandal or ill health.
These men, and that woman, are all that stand between Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, progressive taxation, and support for labor, and a horde of Republican reactionaries and radicals that’s hellbent on burning down the New Deal and its legacy and replacing it with a government Ayn Rand would consider too cruel. Knowing that does not help me sleep at night.