2020 election

Remember Betomania? It seems an age away, yet just three months ago, Beto O’Rourke was still being hailed as the Democratic messiah. There was all that gush about how his campaign in Texas inspired the country, even though he lost. There was the mad drooling over his Medium and Instagram posts. There was that appalling, emetic Vanity Fair cover through which he revealed he was running: ‘I was born to be in it.’ There was that competing rally with Trump on the Texan border, where he stood for openness as opposed to bigotry.He was cool, he was cute, he was impeccably progressive on issues such as climate change, gun control and LGBTQ rights. But he wasn’t too dangerously threateningly left to freak out the elites.

In recent weeks, Elizabeth Warren has emerged as the mainstream media’s favorite candidate – for now, at least. Warren’s polling has largely been stagnant over the course of the race for the Democratic nomination, but you wouldn’t know it from the fawning coverage – coverage that just so happens to consistently echo the Warren campaign’s exact talking points. The New York Times asks ‘Elizabeth Warren is running an ideas-first campaign. Will it work?’ The Washington Post writes, ‘Warren’s nonstop ideas reshape the Democratic presidential race — and give her new momentum.

They warn generals not to fight the last war. The same admonition might apply to presidential races. Donald Trump was out on the White House lawn attacking Joe Biden with his usual battery of epithets — ‘dummy,’ ‘loser,’ and so forth — and it sounded like déjà vu all over again. Even as he derides Biden as ‘slower than he used to be,’ it is Trump who is starting to look as though he’s losing his mojo. In 2016, Trump ran a guerrilla campaign in which he was able to sneak up on the enemy, first the Republicans vying for the nomination, then Hillary Clinton. No one took Trump that seriously.

If Joe Biden snatches the White House from Donald Trump in 2020, he will govern as a modern liberal. This week’s Hyde Amendment snafu is proof positive. But only Mr Biden knows if his beliefs have really changed. It doesn’t matter, because his party has. The famously gaffe-prone Biden would lead a censorious party. Whatever he thinks of the new Trump line on China, it’s clear that the elder statesman — who has considered running in nearly every presidential race since 1980 isn’t going to let his best shot yet — and his last shot —  get mired in the details. Joe Biden, architect of the 1994 crime bill, will not reverse Trump’s reform of it.

Like the poor according to Jesus of Nazareth, Joe Biden we will always have with us, or so it seems. Can anyone remember when he first ran for president? It was more than 30 years ago, in 1988. I looked it up. Many of the people who work for me weren’t even born when Biden plagiarized his first speech. And now, just as he should be stocking up on Geritol and Viagra and preparing for that Acela Express to the beyond, he is at it again. Running for President. Of the United States of America. Joe Biden and 6m785 other Democratic hopefuls. Opinions about Joe’s potency — as a political candidate, I mean — vary widely. I have several well-informed friends on both sides of the chasm who believe that he will be the candidate.

‘Biden is their nominee until further notice,’ a source close to the White House told me recently. The candidacy of Joe Biden, and his ballistic rise in the polls, has suddenly made the 2020 race for the Democratic nomination seem far less competitive than everybody had assumed. Biden always seemed a blue-chip entrant. He was the principal lieutenant of the first African American president. He had north of four decades’ worth of national name recognition. For months, however, a sense that time had passed him by pervaded his primaveral flirtations. No more. Having formally announced last month, Biden has – to the surprise of most of the smart set – effectively lapped his nearest competitor, Bernie Sanders, in opinion polling.

Bill de Blasio is the only candidate running for president whose entry into the race is perhaps a tad surprising. With the others, even those with miniscule odds of actually securing the Democratic nomination, there is some modicum of sense: get your name out there, promote your pet issues, accrue some political capital to burnish a future bid for another elected office, and if worst comes to worst you’ll still have ‘former presidential candidate’ in your title – which is sure to bring forth generous speaking fees and book deals. MSNBC might even give you a TV show. But with de Blasio, at least at first blush, the logic gets much hazier. His liabilities are so manifestly obvious that even his own staff reportedly begged him not to run.

On Tuesday evening, I left my office suited up in a raincoat and a t-shirt that featured a picture of the nightmarish and internet-famous Philadelphia Flyers mascot, ‘Gritty.’ I was going to Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s rally in Washington Square Park, where thousands were expected to turn out despite the rainy weather (or, as my friend Cody commented, Blade Runner weather) to see the tech entrepreneur give his pitch for the presidency. I wasn’t quite sure what people would wear to a rally for Yang, a candidate who rose to prominence through memes and podcast appearances and whose supporters have been known to wave around signs that say ‘MATH’ and chant out ‘PowerPoint! PowerPoint!

A common fallacy circulating among the pundit class is that every presidential election cycle will be as ‘disruptive’ as 2016 undoubtedly was. Or in other words, the lessons of that year – which marked a genuine ideological upheaval across the political spectrum in the United States – are extrapolated into the aphorism that such all-consuming disruption will be the ‘new normal’ going forward. But there’s a decent chance that 2020 instead brings a reversion to the predictable and the banal.

Who’s the biggest loser? Joe Biden’s third try for the White House might look as doomed as Hillary Clinton’s run in 2016, but so far, Biden has followed a different and more promising trajectory. Instead, it’s Bernie Sanders who’s shaping up to be the Dems’ high-profile also-ran. Clinton peaked in popularity — and polling — ahead of her 2015 announcement. Her status as the assumed nominee helped her clear the field. Only the villain from The Wire dared challenge her in the establishment lane at any length; big names like Biden, John Kerry and Andrew Cuomo all preferred not to obstruct the Clinton succession.

The media verdict is clear: the Democrats abhor President Trump’s foreign policy, and the Democrats aren’t really going to talk about it. ‘Democrats want to challenge Trump’s foreign policy in 2020. They’re still working out how,’ reports Vox. ‘Democrats are playing down foreign policy. It’s shrewd — and it may be a mistake,’ opines the Washington Post. ‘Why Aren’t Democratic Presidential Candidates Criticizing Trump’s Foreign Policy?’ wonders Reason magazine. And on it goes. Behind the scenes, however, it’s a frenzy, with the hiring of foreign policy advisers way up. For the Democrats, 2016 was a two-horse race, with a heavy front-runner in the familiar form of Hillary Clinton.

Ah Biden, Sleepy Joe, the gaffe machine from Scranton, Penn. He’s familiar to everyone, but an unknown quantity as a presidential candidate for 2020. Yes, he has failed before, twice. Yes, he’s doddery. But he keeps coming top in the polls and we keep being told that President Trump fears him the most. One thing is certain, however: for as long as Biden’s campaign goes on, he’ll boob and boob and boob again. His ability to say something stupid is mind-boggling. And in a perverse way, it is one of his strengths as a candidate. His near-senility makes him strangely memorable. Recall the Summer of Trump in 2015, when the Donald blew up the news cycle at least once a day with some outrageous remark?