By launching his 2020 campaign with shameful images of what happened in Charlottesville 20 months ago, former vice president Joe Biden has put the focus on what should be the central question of the 2020 election.
More than any of the other 19 announced Democratic contenders, Biden has called for a reckoning: Should someone with President Donald Trump's glaring deficiencies of character continue to lead this nation?
In Charlottesville, "we saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open, their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging, and bearing the fangs of racism. Chanting the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the '30s. And they were met by a courageous group of Americans, and a violent clash ensued, and a brave young woman lost her life," Biden said in his announcement video.
The former vice president recalled the most disgraceful statement Trump has ever uttered: There were "some very fine people on both sides."
Virtually without exception, earlier announced Democratic candidates offered opening arguments that conspicuously avoided any direct mention of--or even allusion to--Trump's moral failings. Biden, on the other hand, said these threaten to "forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation."
It may be that the other contenders have over-learned the lessons of Hillary Clinton's inability to make that argument stick against Trump in 2016. Clinton, however, was a flawed messenger; decades-old questions about her honesty and trustworthiness were inflamed by the controversy surrounding her use of a private email server, which was vastly overplayed in the media. There was also still hope--long since dashed--that Trump would change once in office.
There is always the possibility that the booming economy over which Trump is presiding will matter more to voters than the fact that he is shattering every norm of governance. Or more disturbingly, that Americans have grown inured to his behavior.
It may well be that 2020 turns out to be one of those moments when Americans go looking for a corrective.
They turned to moralizing born-again Jimmy Carter in 1976, after the wrenching experience of Watergate. And in 2000, with memories fresh of a president's extramarital affair with an intern, Republican nominee George W. Bush promised to "uphold the honor and dignity" of the Oval Office.
Though Biden is, by virtue of his name recognition, the front-runner of this crowded field, most senior Democrats I talk to are skeptical that he will make it through the primaries.
While his announcement video was pitch-perfect, Biden made the tactically questionable decision to follow it up with a fundraiser with big-dollar donors. His first public event, on Monday, will be a rally with labor union leaders. All of which sounds as if he is running a state-of-the-art campaign--if this were 1988.
Still, in his eloquent rationale for his candidacy, Biden has offered his party something far more significant and enduring than his much-talked-about ability to connect with the older white voters of the upper Midwest who defected to Trump in 2016.
Biden may well be the Democrats' strongest bet to win back the White House next year. But he may never get that far. And if he doesn't, whoever wins the nomination could do far worse than to pick up where Biden leaves off.
Editorial on 04/26/2019