Biden = liberal fucktard

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Is Biden the New Humphrey?

A garrulous Democrat struggles to respond to urban violence. Is this 2020—or 1968?

By William McGurn

August 31, 2020

When Donald Trump declared himself “the president of law and order,” comparisons immediately ran to Richard Nixon and 1968. Nixon too had campaigned on law and order, against the backdrop of urban riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and antiwar protesters who clashed with Chicago police right outside the Democratic convention.

So the Nixon analogy is apt. But it is incomplete without its complement: Joe Biden as Hubert Humphrey.

Like Mr. Biden, Humphrey was a garrulous establishment liberal and vice president who had spent decades in the Senate. Each man was nominated by a divided Democratic Party. Both were dogged by the enthusiasm for their more progressive runners-up, Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Bernie Sanders. And these divisions made it difficult for either presidential nominee to sound as tough as his GOP rival.

In September 1968, the New York Times reported a Harris survey confirming that law and order was “one of the most powerful issues running in [Nixon’s] favor this year.” This year’s equivalent came last week on CNN, when Don Lemon complained that Mr. Biden’s strategy of ignoring the antipolice violence in Kenosha, Wis., was a “blind spot” that is “showing up in the polling. It’s showing up in focus groups. It is the only thing right now that is sticking.”

And so, after not mentioning the issue at his convention two weeks ago, Mr. Biden has offered a belated it’s-all-Trump’s fault denunciation. Given the media’s naked animosity for the president, it may well pick up the Biden message. The question is whether Americans watching the mayhem will buy it.

The problem for Mr. Biden isn’t so much the rioters themselves. Those looting shops along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, shooting people in Portland, Ore., or setting cars on fire in Kenosha aren’t Biden voters. The likelihood is they’re not voters at all, regarding America’s political system as rotten to the core.

But it’s impossible to miss the congruence between the rioters’ image of America—systemically racist, economically unequal, sustained by police brutality—and today’s Democratic Party orthodoxy. Consider this Bernie Sanders tweet from May 31, after demonstrations following the death of George Floyd turned to looting and arson: “The looting of America has been going on for over 40 years—and the culprits are the ultra-rich.”

Whether it’s Mayor Jenny Durkan describing the Seattle occupation as a “summer of love,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler joining protesters outside the federal courthouse, or Mayor Bill de Blasio personally painting “Black Lives Matter” on the street in front of Mr. Trump’s Manhattan apartment, the entire nation can see Democratic officials egging on protesters or demonizing and undermining police.

This refusal of Democratic politicians (including district attorneys) to hold lawbreakers accountable is what’s really hurting Mr. Biden’s case. Within the Democratic Party, even the most tepid criticism soon becomes an abject apology. Last Thursday, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut tweeted that “looting and property damage is bad”—only to delete the tweet after less than an hour because of left-wing blowback accusing him of drawing “an equivalency between property crime and murder,” as he put it.

In 1968 Humphrey’s loyal support for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam policy alienated the party’s antiwar wing, while organized labor, arguably his strongest constituency, was repelled by the lawlessness on the streets. It seemed to leave Humphrey paralyzed. Biographer Carl Solberg wrote that “it was ironic—and it must be said pitiable—that in the period from [Robert F.] Kennedy’s death to the convention in August, this most voluble of American politicians had almost nothing to say about the issues that troubled his fellow citizens most.”

In a piece for the Atlantic headlined “This Is How Biden Loses,” George Packer sums up the dilemma for this year’s nominee: “Kenosha has placed Democrats in a trap. They’ve embraced the protests and the causes that drive them.”

In a speech Monday meant to pull Mr. Biden out of this trap, he asked: “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is re-elected?” But the counter is this: If you run a shop in Minneapolis, do you believe Mr. Biden will protect you when you need it?

True, there are differences between 1968 and now. Then, Nixon was the challenger, so he was free to criticize without having to do anything. He had the further advantage of having George Wallace to make him look like the more reasonable alternative.

President Trump, by contrast, is the incumbent. He has drawn a bright red line by promising to restore law and order. If he can’t, he risks emboldening those committing the violence and looking as weak and feckless as the Democratic mayors and governors he rightly criticizes.

Mr. Biden’s challenge is to show Middle America he is strong enough to end the mayhem without alienating the wing of his party sympathetic to those causing it. Maybe he will persuade the American people he’s just the man for the job. But what if they conclude he’s merely the new Hubert Humphrey?

Appeared in the September 1, 2020, print edition.