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At the age of 77 he won a “mirror” election to which Hillary clinton lost in 2016. Much of the industrial Midwest has recovered by a narrow margin, although the recovery of support in the working class has been modest. It did not manage to reconquer Florida, but began to outline a kind of Blue Wall of the Far West, linking Arizona and Nevada with the states of the “left coast” (California, Oregon, Washington).
But who is Joe Biden really?
For him, the year zero is 1972. Marked by two key events: his first election to the Senate and his first family tragedy, the car accident in which his wife and daughter die. In the upper house he arrives challenging a notable Republican. Joe, 30, is a stranger, poor enough, and campaigns with a radical agenda: withdrawal from the Vietnam War, completion of Black civil rights reforms, environmentalism, progressive taxation, public services, government reform. healthcare system.
To be precise, today that agenda sounds radical but at the beginning of the 1970s it was “mainstream”, it was part of the mainstream, in the middle of those issues many Republicans converged. In the White House is Republican Richard Nixon who will end badly – resigning to avoid impeachment – because of the Watergate scandal two years later. Nixon, however, is the president who creates the Environmental Protection Agency, makes revenue policies to meet with unions, invests in public infrastructure, opens up to Mao’s China, and will emerge from the Vietnam quagmire.
The political debut
Placing Biden in the context of his political debut serves to understand that he is the son of his time, in his long political career he has embraced all the convolutions of the American left. He has been very close to the working class from the beginning. As i remember Kamala harris when she was his opponent in the nomination race, Biden opposed the “transportation” policy that with school buses transported black children to schools in white neighborhoods and vice versa, to unbundle America. This policy was precisely opposed by the white working class, because, as always, anti-racist campaigns were carried out at their expense: the children of the rich emigrated to private schools, the children of metalworkers had to take in the most poor people who inevitably brought down the quality of the work. ‘instruction.
Harris has made up for young Biden’s virulent attack on “racism” and has been chosen as his replacement. Also because the two have in common another skeleton in the closet, not very aligned with Black Lives Matter. Let’s jump back to the 1990s, to the Bill Clinton era, to Third Way reformism. Biden supported the crackdown on the Penal Code that helped fill jails for African American and Hispanic youth. Kamala, much later, did the exact same thing when he was Attorney General, California Attorney General: no mercy for repeat offenders.
Biden’s ultra-moderate phase is completed with the neoliberal turn.
The years of the economic boom
Also in the Clinton boom years, the magical 1990s when the first digital business was born and the power of Silicon Valley exploded, Biden was in favor of free trade agreements. He remained that way until his vice presidency with Obama, when he supported the latest in a long series of treaties, the Pacific-area TPP. The opening of borders, from NAFTA (Canada, Mexico) to China’s entry into the WTO, was a propitious period for US multinationals, much less for workers. Relocations, dismantling of factories, impoverishment of the manufacturing sector, decline of traditional crafts. Not by chance Donald trump He tried to give Biden the epithet “Chinese”. It is in the Clinton years when the divorce between the left and the people accelerates, between the politically correct elite of both coasts and the working class trapped in the center of America, with decreasing wages and drug addiction.
The rescue
Biden redeems himself at least in part in 2009, when Barack Obama entrusts his deputy with a delicate task, the supervision of the maxirrescue plan of the automobile industry. Detroit’s big three, Ford GM and Chrysler, are temporarily nationalized. The plan will be a success and Biden mentioned it often during the election campaign. However, it was not enough to expel Trump from the working class of the Midwest who continued to vote by majority for the Republican.
The first election campaign
The 46th President of the United States is a Catholic, from a family of Irish descent, who has experienced ups and downs, injuries and tragedies repeatedly. His first presidential campaign, in 1988, breaks badly in the Democratic primary season when it is discovered that he copied without quoting a speech by British Labor leader Neil Kinnock. In 2002-2003 he approved the invasion of Iraq, of which Obama himself will accuse him. Because in 2008 Biden and Obama are briefly rivals, in the race for the nomination.
The second attempt at the White House
Biden’s second attempt is another failure, he retires with 1% of the Democratic base, which will give Trump the inspiration for one of his infamous nicknames: “Joe one percent.” In 2015 he was struck by a second family tragedy, his favorite son Beau, who won a medal for his bravery fighting in Iraq, dies of a brain tumor at the age of 46. Later, Joe justifies with the pain of Beau’s death his resignation to run in 2016. That resignation is more likely to be attributable to Obama, who pressures his deputy to step aside and let him compete. Hillary clinton. It is the “third” presidential campaign in history: maybe Biden could have stopped Trump as early as 2016?
Beau’s disappearance exacerbates the problems of his second son, Hunter, who goes from a relationship with his brother’s widow to alcoholism, drug addiction. Hunter is at the origin of scandals that could have derailed his father’s campaign in 2020: In Ukraine and China, he used the fatherly role when he was an Obama deputy to win business with local partners.
How will Biden rule?
At the center, both because this is his place in the current balance of the Democratic Party, and because the Senate has retained a Republican majority and this will force him to seek bipartisan compromises. In the primary campaign, Biden made only the bare minimum of concessions necessary to the left wing of his party. At the beginning he had a bad start, in third or fourth position behind Bernie sanders, Pete buttigieg, Elizabeth warren. The vote of African Americans in the South saved him when his third campaign seemed compromised. He had to keep the party together, where the radical wing wants a Green New Deal, a public health. Biden has been wary of the promises, for example ruling out banning fracking technology for oil extraction. He also ruled out the transition to a European-style public health system. In an exchange with Bernie sanders, at the beginning of the Coronavirus, Biden said: “Italy has a public health system and it does not seem to me that it is working well in this pandemic.” It prefers to offer Americans a public option in competition with private insurance.
The first challenges you will face
Your first test will be the dual Covid-recession emergency. You will need to act as soon as possible to stop the second wave of infections. He will have to build a bipartisan consensus to launch measures to help businesses and families. The only positive Trump leaves him with is a recovering economy, where unemployment is falling. With the outgoing president – assuming Trump agrees to take on that role – they have only one thing in common: The two are strictly teetotalers, both for family reasons: too many painful experiences of alcoholism among their family members.
