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Editor's note: We couldn’t be more proud of one of our teammates, Isaac Rose-Berman, who penned his first op-ed this week in USA Today: “How college students can bridge American divides: 'Study abroad' in Alabama or New York.” Please give it a read, and share far and wide!
“Former Vice President Joe Biden condemned ‘a white man’s culture’ as he lashed out at violence against women and, more specifically, lamented his role in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings that undermined Anita Hill’s credibility nearly three decades ago… Biden called on Americans to ‘change the culture… It’s an English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. It’s got to change.’” AP News
A recent “poll found that 35 percent of Democratic voters are most likely to vote for Biden in the Democratic primaries should he jump in the race. That is more than twice the number of voters who pointed to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as their top pick.” The Hill
The left is critical of Biden’s recent comments, and argues that he will have to overcome several weaknesses in order to be successful in the Democratic primary.
The ‘white man’ “comment will leave a mark (toxic masculinity might have been a better framing). It is ready-made for Fox News and other conservative media, which have already pushed the idea that white men are under assault and that Democrats are particularly hostile to white men. The statement will also undermine one of his key selling points, which is that he has a unique appeal to white, working-class Midwest voters who feel alienated by the Democratic Party's progressive shift on racial and gender issues…
“Leave it to Joe Biden to trip -- and then trip again -- as he tries to navigate what might be called the woke era of the Democratic Party.”
Nia-Malika Henderson, CNN
“Biden has baggage, and cartloads of it. That’s no surprise for a 76-year-old career politician. But his biggest liability among progressives isn’t just that he made mistakes all those years ago. It’s also that he doesn’t believe he could have avoided them…
“Biden argues that the attitudes of the day stopped him from demanding more respect for a woman who came forward to say that a powerful man, about to be made more powerful, had abused her. But bowing to the attitudes of the day ignores the need for progress. And progress is exactly what the Democratic candidate for the presidency has to be able to promise… The problem is not that Joe Biden owes Anita Hill an apology. The problem is he doesn’t think he does.”
Molly Roberts, Washington Post
“The former vice president might want to pause to consider an excruciating prospect: He could end up as this cycle’s Jeb Bush… The high points in Biden’s career tower over anyone who could be on the ballot in 2020. He wrote the Violence Against Women Act, he oversaw the implementation of the stimulus that prevented a depression, and he got out ahead of President Barack Obama to lead on same-sex marriage…
“But Biden also has a nearly unparalleled collection of Achilles heels… There’s his connection to Delaware’s financial sector… [and] Ta-Nehisi Coates recently said that Biden ‘has more than just criminal-justice baggage when it comes to race.’ Biden not only played a key role in the 1994 crime bill that helped lead to mass incarceration of African-Americans, he also was one of many Democrats of the last century who tried to neutralize conservative attacks by moving to to the right of Republicans on issues like busing.”
Jason Sattler, USA Today
“Biden would be betting that math—white and older voters still outnumber millennials—is stronger than cultural momentum, and that Democratic primary voters will value ‘electability’ against President Donald Trump above all else. But the longer he avoids joining the fray, the less confident Uncle Joe looks about his chances of winning the nomination.”
Chris Smith, Vanity Fair
“To state the overly obvious, we simply can’t be sure whether Biden would maintain his polling advantage until he actually enters the race and starts facing more scrutiny and the attacks from his competitors that come with a real candidacy. Hillary Clinton is the classic example of a politician enjoying soaring approval when they aren’t perceived as an active office-seeker and seeing that sky-high favorability rapidly tumble once they enter the arena… The real wild card is: What if Biden doesn’t run? Where does his 30 percent slice of the primary pie go?... nobody knows.”
Dylan Scott, Vox
Many note that “Biden’s opposition to [marijuana] legalization… puts him at odds with the great majority of Democrats, 75-plus percent of whom back legalization. Biden’s opposition even puts him at odds with the median Republican, with polls showing that even a majority of Republicans support legalization. Politically, then, legalization should be low-hanging fruit… Yet Biden is not quite there… It’s an especially bad look for Biden. He has a long record of pushing for punitive criminal justice and drug policies — not just supporting but actually writing many of the laws in the 1980s and ’90s that helped shape America’s modern war on drugs. For Biden to hang on to marijuana prohibition, then, just reinforces one of the major concerns that criminal justice reformers like Booker have about him.”
German Lopez, Vox
Others argue that “Biden was almost the only one on the stage who talked like a normal person. There was a point near the end of the debate when he was talking about getting men involved in stopping domestic violence and he said that we need to keep ‘punching’ at it… I knew that the twitterati and the analysts would tut tut. Ol’ Joe is just out of touch! He doesn’t know you can’t use words like that. Meanwhile, every non-political junkie watching the debate thought there was nothing wrong with this. Biden was just using ordinary language, not worrying too much if it was fully approved by the woke brigade.”
Kevin Drum, Mother Jones
The right is critical of Biden’s attempts to pander to progressives, and argues that he should be apologizing to Clarence Thomas, not Anita Hill.
The right is critical of Biden’s attempts to pander to progressives, and argues that he should be apologizing to Clarence Thomas, not Anita Hill.
“As an old white guy whose political career dates back to the early 1970s, Biden adopted many positions over the years that put him at odds with the younger and much more diverse modern Democratic Party… Biden's biggest problem in the primaries isn't necessarily his age but the fact [that] he's outdated in a party that looks a lot different than the one in which he spent his formidable political years. The fact that he's spent the run-up to any announcement apologizing for his past is not a good long-term sign for his candidacy.”
Philip Klein, Washington Examiner
Biden’s “gestures toward woke culture have won him few friends. Many Progressives can’t forgive him for not being able to stop Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court three decades ago. His paeans to diversity only remind Democrats of his age, sex, and pallor… Biden is reminding Democrats of his flaws, when he should be using this time to make an affirmative case for his candidacy that goes beyond airy assertions of ‘electability.’”
Matthew Cotinetti, National Review
“He’s an experienced Democratic politician with a resume most candidates can only dream of. And he’s from the moderate, old guard of the party. Turning around now and talking about the ‘inherent problems of whiteness’ or toxic masculinity is going to come across as pandering… he should probably just focus on letting Joe be Joe. It’s served him well over the years and the early polling seems to indicate that his voter base isn’t holding his past, his skin color or his gender against him.”
Jazz Shaw, Hot Air
Regarding Anita Hill, “though history remembers [her] as having been scorned, the senators did not, in fact, treat her discourteously. They did question her closely about her charges. They demanded details. They probed for inconsistencies and asked reasonable questions about her dealings with Thomas and how and why she had stepped forward to accuse him. That was enough to raise doubts about her testimony in the minds of the public and the committee…
“The reckoning for a culture in which sexual harassment and even assault were not treated as serious crimes was long overdue. But the idea that those who make such accusations should not be questioned closely or that the accused have no right to defend themselves or their reputations against what they consider to be false charges is not consistent with American traditions of justice no matter who is placed in the dock.”
Jonathan Tobin, National Review
“‘English jurisprudential culture’ is, of course, the foundation of American governance and our Constitutional rights. It’s unlikely any culture in history has brought more freedom and prosperity to more of humankind… Those who demand acts of contrition over ‘English jurisprudential culture,’ seem to have a problem with ideals of blind justice and due process that stop us from sacrificing people to the whims of an aggrieved mob…
“It was Biden, with the assistance of a bunch of other white men, [who] helped smear a black man with an impeccable record and no corroborating evidence of wrongdoing simply because he held the wrong kind of views. It was to Biden that Thomas was responding when he famously called the hearings a ‘high-tech lynching for uppity blacks’... If anything, Biden should be apologizing to Thomas.”
David Harsanyi, The Federalist
“If a dozen drones or missiles can do the kind of damage to the world economy as did those fired on Saturday—shutting down about 6 percent of world oil production—imagine what a U.S.-Iran-Saudi war would do to the world economy. In recent decades, the U.S. has sold the Saudis hundreds of billions of dollars of military equipment. Did our weapons sales carry a guarantee that we will also come and fight alongside the kingdom if it gets into a war with its neighbors?… the nation does not want another war. How we avoid it, however, is becoming difficult to see. John Bolton may be gone from the West Wing, but his soul is marching on.”
Patrick Buchanan, The American Conservative
Others note, “I’d hate to be a Democratic member of Congress trying to convince Joe Sixpack that this is a whole new ballgame. The transcript shows Trump being Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky trying to ingratiate himself with the big dog by, for instance, mentioning that he stays at Trump hotels. Trump’s conversation is typically scattershot, wandering all over the field, leaving a reasonable listener puzzled about what the takeaways are supposed to be…
“I think Joe Sixpack’s response is going to be a hearty shrug. After all that has emerged about Trump so far, his approval rating is closely tracking Obama’s approval at the same point in his presidency. To get Mr. Sixpack’s attention you are going to have to do better than this.”
Kyle Smith, National Review
“President Trump should be happy. As much as Warren is articulate, obviously intelligent, and energetically supported by Democrats, she would also be far easier to defeat than Joe Biden… Considering Trump's economy, the president is well placed to defeat Warren.”
Tom Rogan, Washington Examiner
A libertarian's take
“After adding in the ultra-millionaire’s tax and factoring in the other capital taxes Warren wants to levy — on financial transactions, on unrealized capital gains, on corporations — we’d be asking every billionaire to hand over more than two-thirds of their total wealth over a 10-year period. If the government actually managed to collect it, their fortunes would rapidly erode — and so would tax collections. The plan might be a good way to smash wealth, but it’s a terrible way to fund the nation’s health-care system…
“If Warren makes it to the White House, and tries to pass a plan, the Congressional Budget Office will eventually attach more reasonable numbers, with more defensible assumptions, sparking an even more spectacular political blowback than the one that greeted Friday’s announcement. Outside of the progressive Twitterati, there isn’t necessarily an enormous constituency for spending $20.5 trillion to herd every American into a national health insurance program; there would be even less support for spending what Warren’s plan would actually cost.”
Megan McArdle, Washington Post
Musicians make a splash with underwater opera.
KLEW
