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When Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president, he once met with a British government minister.
They met alone, without assistants. The Brit asked Biden how he wanted to be titled. Biden looked around the room to make sure no one else was there.
– It seems that we are alone, so why don’t you call me Mr. President and I call you Mr. Prime Minister?
American Democracy it’s up for grabs in today’s presidential election. But also the career of a 77-year-old man.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has run for president twice before. Today’s elections are the last chance.
If Biden loses tonight, he will learn to face the same cruel fate as Hillary Clinton. Clinton has been almost completely invisible in the election campaign this fall, as if the party viewed her as a burden. Who would miss Joe Biden?
If Biden loses, for the second time in a row, the Democrats have placed their trust in a representative of the Washington nomenclature, a symbol of the political establishment. If Biden fails to defeat Trump, in the midst of a pandemic that has claimed more than 230,000 American lives and caused massive unemployment, the party finds itself at a dead end, in a deep ideological and existential crisis.
Trump could continue to devastate social media as a private person
Donald Trump, for his part, unlike Biden, he does not learn to disappear from the public eye if he loses the election. Trump could continue to tour the United States and devastate social media as a private person.
One can easily see former President Trump facing him on an eternal campaign trail, a political martyr who has retained control of a quarter of the country’s souls. An opposition leader operating from Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence, is free to establish alliances with the world’s illiberal forces. Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, recently said that Trump would run for president in the 2024 election if he loses this week. “This is not the end for Donald Trump,” Bannon said.
The Democrats are a divided party. Republicans, on the other hand, remain Trump’s party. In the long run, you may have to wash your tummy. But it seems very left to self-examination. Even the party’s supposed future moderate names, like former UN Ambassador and Gov. Nikki Haley, are loyal to Trump.
When Haley resigned from the Trump administration, experts believed she would keep her reputation away from the White House to return as a Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election. Gear in the Trump machine. A political calculation that confirms Trump’s tight grip on Republican voters.
A loss for Trump of course, it would disappoint its bases. But they would maintain Trumpism as a consolation, the ideological resistance movement. If Donald Trump suffers a heart attack or is prosecuted and convicted of a financial crime in one of the criminal investigations that are being carried out in New York, his son Donald Trump Jr. could manage his father’s political project. Or son-in-law Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump.
Joe Biden’s designated heir, his favorite son Beau, died in the suites from brain cancer in 2015. Beau’s younger brother Hunter has a long history of alcohol and drug abuse that Republicans have speculated about during the culmination. of the electoral campaign. Hunter is the Achilles heel and weak cards of Biden’s campaign. After Joe, there is no Biden in line and hardly anyone Bidenism, an ideological popular movement that points a way forward for voters. The road ends with Joe.
Is something fragile about Joe Biden, his age, cracked voice and floating gaze. The fragile contributes to the feeling of a choice of destiny. Just over 95 million Americans have already gone to the polls or sent a ballot by mail, a large chunk of the 138 million who voted in a total of the 2016 presidential elections.
But that doesn’t necessarily reflect deep enthusiasm for Biden. But perhaps more of a fear of what Trump would invent if he were to be very even in the election. The fear that Democrats will not be able to defend democracy if Trump refuses to accept the result. It is beautiful that people vote in such a volume, but at the same time the preparations bear witness to the lack of trust of the people in democratic institutions.
It’s easy to get cynical when two white forty fight for power
In Washington DC he has businesses and institutions have already begun nailing wooden planks outside their windows, as if store owners are bracing for a storm on Election Day. My local bank branch in the quaint Georgetown district closes early Tuesday. Friends who work at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in large office complexes around the corner from the White House, have been urged to stay away from the city center. The peaceful handover of the presidency feels distant. Election day shouldn’t be so strange in a democracy.
It’s easy to get cynical when two white forties fight for power. At the end of the election campaign, it is as if Donald Trump has cut ties with reality. He claims that the pandemic is about to subside even as the death toll rises across the country. “Don’t let the coronavirus dominate your lives,” the president said, calling the government’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, an “idiot.”
But there is something easy surreal about Joe Biden too. During the summer and fall, Biden has appeared at times as a Forrest Gump for our time. A man who almost by chance managed to pinch the Democratic nomination and now faces the fateful task of saving America from being transformed into an authoritarian state in the hands of Trump. How is Biden doing? Even convinced liberals can appear concerned about Biden’s ability when they leave the polls and have cast their vote, a genuine concern that makes the election even more unstable.
But we probably underestimate Biden for his frail appearance. His lead over Trump in opinion polls is significant, bigger than Clinton’s in 2016.
Evan Osnos, a sharp 43-year-old Washington journalist who just published a biography of Joe Biden, says the man is more vital than he seems. And more than that: in Osno’s book, Biden appears as a politician who makes mistakes but has the ability to learn from them. A forty-something artist who has grown more humble over the years.
Biden’s sense of responsibility, his political conscience, separates him from Trump
When Barack Obama asked Biden if he wanted to be his vice president before the 2008 election, Biden had never worked for anyone else before, never been number two. He asked his wife Jill: How should I handle it? She replied “mature”.
Osnos points to other times Biden has been forced to investigate himself. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden was responsible for the unworthy treatment of Anita Hill when she testified about the harassment of her former chief Clarence Thomas, a future member of the Supreme Court.
Biden tried to make up for her deficiency by contributing to the Violence Against Women Act, a package of laws that sharpened penalties for abuse of women.
Joe Biden’s political career it is so long that individual farms may seem insignificant overall. But Biden’s sense of responsibility, his political conscience, separates him from Trump. Trump is running as an anti-politician, intact for four years in Washington. But the group of voters who saved Joe Biden in this spring’s primary, African-Americans, know how insidious Trump’s rhetoric is. Older blacks in America, who were born during segregation, know something about politics. They are realistic and they voted for Joe Biden.
