OPINION

BRADLEY R. GITZ: The meaning of Joe

Two survey results tell us most of what we need to know about how the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is going, however early.

First and most obvious is the roughly 20-point lead that Joe Biden continues to hold in the RealClearPolitics poll, a lead that looks even more daunting when considering that he is dominating among non-white Democrats who will be more important after whiter Iowa and New Hampshire (where he also leads).

Second is a recent Wason Center for Public Policy survey wherein 56 percent of self-identified Democrats label themselves "moderates" and another 9 percent even identify as "conservative." That's roughly two-thirds of prospective Democratic voters who aren't self-identified liberals, let alone socialist woke warriors.

That Biden has at least some kind of lead at this point isn't surprising, given the importance of name recognition early on in a ridiculously large field (see Trump, 2016). Political junkies might closely follow the campaign trials and tribulations of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris but most other people haven't been. They don't know much about them and are unlikely to have even heard of Kirsten Gillibrand, Steve Bullock or John Hickenlooper.

Biden doesn't just have the name recognition; he also has as close an association as one can get to Barack Obama and what many Democrats see as the golden age of Democratic Party politics. Warm and fuzzy thoughts come to mind in such precincts when hearing the phrase "Obama administration," much to Biden's benefit.

No, the surprising part isn't that Biden has the early lead but that his lead is so big, two to one over the other Democrat with comparable name recognition, Bernie Sanders. That Sanders is so far behind suggests that his 2016 candidacy was something of a fluke, a one-hit wonder representing more anti-Hillary Clinton sentiment and a desire to throw a wrench into a planned coronation by the Democratic Party establishment than genuine support for him and his socialist ideas.

If anything, Sanders increasingly appears to be a man out of time, a relic so thoroughly marinated in the 1960s counterculture that a new idea hasn't penetrated his mind since Woodstock and bell bottoms. The grooves in his speeches are as well-worn as those in my copies of Rubber Soul or Beggar's Banquet.

Comrade Bernie's appeal stems from his still unflagging belief that a socialist nirvana lies just around the corner if only we can shake off oppressive capitalism. His disadvantage is that he appears to have learned absolutely nothing from the dismal fate of socialist experiments or the superior performance of market economies over the past century; to listen to him spew the same old Marxist, class-warfare dreck is to be transported back to a time when protesters were marching about with Viet Cong flags chanting "Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today" and useful idiots of the Venceremos Brigades were cutting sugar cane in the fields alongside Fidel's minions.

The results of the Wason Center poll further illuminates "Crazy Joe's" advantages because they're suggestive of a serious tactical miscalculation on the part of the rest of the field. Assuming that all the heat coming from the "woke" Twitter mob was representative of the sentiments of the Democratic electorate as a whole, the pack moved as far left as fast as they could go, leaving Biden just about alone in the "center-moderate" lane. That mistake was huge and will likely prove decisive--by overestimating the size of the noisy but tiny online woke left, most of the Democratic contenders now find themselves figures of ridicule fighting over a small chunk of fringe voters while Biden gets a much bigger chunk virtually to himself, effectively positioning him for both the primary and general election.

Harris, Booker, Warren and the other would-be revolutionaries didn't know it, but that supposedly huge Twitter mob consisted of just the same eight or nine underemployed 20-something guys tweeting over and over again while munching Doritos in their pajamas from the couches in their parents' basements.

The irony in all this is two-fold.

First, that Biden isn't really much of a "moderate" and never has been; rather, he is pretty much a stock issue, paint-by-numbers liberal who, to borrow some football terminology, has always been positioned safely within the "red zone" (the 20-yard line on the leftward side). His advantage is that the rest of the field is now first and goal within the five with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and the socialist band cheering from the end zone.

Even more ironic is that amid the Democratic Party's fervent embrace of intersectionality theory and identity politics and the underlying assumption therein that old white guys are evil, two (very old) white guys are at the top of their polls.

One of those old white guys got 2 percent of the vote as a senatorial candidate of the socialist Liberty Union Party of Vermont in the same year the other old white guy actually got elected senator from Delaware.

That was the year that Richard Nixon's re-election was only slightly complicated when his operatives were caught trying to bug Democratic headquarters at the Watergate.

------------v------------

Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 06/03/2019

Upcoming Events