Since the moment he declared he was once again running for president—in fact since well before then—Joe Biden has floated near or at the top of the public opinion polls. He’s the vice president of a very popular previous Democratic president. He’s an experienced hand at a time when America is being buffeted by the costs of inexperience—a theme he returned to repeatedly during the latest Democratic debate. And, as a backslapping son of a middle-class family, born in coal country in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, he’s seen as a candidate who can pull Trump voters back to the Democratic fold in November.
All of this makes Biden something more than a frontrunner. He’s the Democrats’ default candidate: the one who doesn’t inspire big rallies, isn’t the face of a movement, but is just, you know, expected to win.
And that means, if history shows anything, the Democrats have a problem.
There’s a TV ad slogan: “Just OK is not OK,” AT&T tells us, as its commercials portray incompetent surgeons, ethically challenged tax accountants and dangerous amusement park rides. There's good reason to think it applies to presidential races, too. What happens when a party nominates a candidate who triumphs because of familiarity, or because “it’s her turn,” or because he’s steadily ascended the party ranks despite no defining passion or cause? The track record of these “default” nominees, at least in modern political history, is bleak.
Hillary Clinton is the latest and, for the Democrats, still most painful example. The combination of her experience, her family ties and the sense that (in the words of a proposed campaign slogan) it was “her turn” drove every potentially serious rival out of the 2016 race. Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong primary challenge was a foreshadowing of her vulnerabilities, even if the signal was mostly dismissed until about 9 p.m. on election night in November.
Four years before Hillary Clinton was defeated, the Republicans trotted out the reliable, central-casting Mitt Romney to lose to President Barack Obama, a campaign that seemed to rhyme with the time the Dems unenthusiastically fell in line for John Kerry against President George W. Bush in 2004. Keep going back, and you see candidates like these over and over, marching under flags of pale pastel, all going down to defeat in November: Al Gore, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, Gerald Ford, Hubert Humphrey and even Richard Nixon, in his first run, in 1960.
Not every election has a default candidate: The race between Obama and John McCain, for example, pitted a “maverick” Republican against an inspirational Democratic newcomer. But most do, and they tend to lose to rivals who can claim novelty or outsiderhood: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Obama, Donald Trump. (During the 2016 campaign, Trump knocked his own party’s default candidate, Jeb Bush, out of the primaries.)
The seemingly obvious implication is that a candidate who wins without enthusiasm is doomed, that a candidate who inspires is a better electoral bet than one who has simply endured. Find a candidate who can trigger turnout among the most reliable Democratic voters, the argument goes, and the party will have a much better chance than trying to beckon back disaffected Democrats with a safe, familiar face who may not be magnetic but who will not repel. That’s what Sanders means when he talks of a political “revolution” that will sweep his ambitious economic program into law. That’s what Elizabeth Warren argues when she inveighs against cautious incrementalism. And didn’t the past two Democrats (as well as the current president) take the White House by challenging and defeating the safer, more familiar choices?
There is, however, another side to this argument—a category of underappreciated “defaults” who can win. And there’s a good chance Biden belongs in this second group.
Harry Truman came into 1948 so unpopular that many Democrats looked hard for an alternative (one appealing possibility: Dwight Eisenhower, who had not yet declared himself a Republican). Sure, Truman was an incumbent president, but he wasn’t elected to the office and had to prove he could win a presidential campaign. Few believed him when he declared, in a post-midnight acceptance speech, that “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that!” But, as America and The Chicago Tribune learned, he did.
In 1988, George H.W. Bush had to battle “the wimp factor,” as a Newsweek cover put it, the impression that he was not only a trust-fund kid but also a politician without conviction. As one New York journalist put it, “He reminds every woman of her first husband.” As it turned out, most wives are still married to their first husbands—and the country voted to give Bush the equivalent of Reagan’s third term. If we have to change horses in midstream, Bush asked in his effective acceptance speech, “doesn't it make sense to choose the horse that’s going the same way?”
There’s a lesson here: If you're a former vice president, you’re a cut above the typical default candidate. First, the nomination is yours for the taking. George H.W. Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, is the only former veep to have sought and lost the party nomination in the primary era. Second, you’ve got a real shot in November. The general-election losers in this category were nearly winners: Nixon in 1960 effectively tied JFK in the popular vote; Humphrey in 1968 lost by less than a percentage point; Ford would have won in 1976 with the shift of a few thousand votes in Mississippi and Ohio; Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and lost by 537 votes out of 6 million in Florida. Hillary Clinton wasn’t a former vice president, but as the “her turn” nominee last time and the heir to the legacies of two different Democratic administrations, she won a 2.6 million popular-vote plurality.
Like Truman and the first Bush, Biden is the former VP of a president still hugely popular with his party, so he’s in the small group of defaults with a fighting chance to win (or, less hopeful for Democrats, to barely lose). Defaults aren’t usually winners, but there are moments when they're what America is looking for.
It’s fair to question the political appeal of a default nominee, but it is also reasonable to ask whether a candidate steeped in familiarity might be able to beckon voters who are unsettled by a clarion call to ideological battle, however mild the enthusiasm behind that vote—particularly if the familiar candidate offers a respite from the endless turmoil triggered almost daily by an emotionally unmoored incumbent. A vote accompanied by a shrug counts just as much as vote accompanied by a clenched fist.
Maybe there’s even a new slogan for Biden to play off that series of TV commercials: “Just OK is a hell of a lot better than what we’ve got right now.”
"make" - Google News
January 19, 2020 at 07:00PM
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Biden’s the Safe Choice. Does That Make Him Dangerous for Democrats? - POLITICO
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