46 | Rolling Stone | August 2019
There are real, heavy ideas underlying the
Democratic primary — more on those in a bit
— but few of them are coming through in these
melees. Mostly the Democrats are taking tweet-
size bites out of one another’s hind parts in
Heathers-style putdowns, or engaging in vir-
tue-signaling contests, like they’re running for
president of Woke Twitter.
The presence of human scratching post
Biden atop the field has contributed to the
not-undeserved impression that the party does
not know what the hell it is doing. Biden has
not only been battered by nearly all of his Dem-
ocratic rivals, he’s also been drawn into flame
wars with Trump, reanimating the 2016 pattern
of TV networks giving Captain Orange masses of
free airtime to flail rivals for sport and ratings.
In a mid-June appearance in Iowa, Biden
tipped off reporters that he’d be making re-
marks about Trump. Dressed in dark-wash dad
jeans and blue shirt, he became the 10,000th
Democrat this year to call the president an “ex-
istential threat.”
Trump wasted little time laying into Biden.
“Joe’s a loser,” he quipped, adding Biden was a
“dummy” who was “even slower than he used
to be.” Saying he’d rather run against Biden than
anybody, Trump said, “I think he’s the weakest
mentally.... I like running against people that
are weak mentally.” He then ripped Biden for
keeping a light schedule, saying, “Once every
two weeks... he mentions my name 74 times in
one speech.... That reminds me of crooked Hil-
lary. She did the same thing.”
Next thing you knew, we were right back
in 2016, with reporters dutifully conveying
Trump’s insults and even kinda-sorta suggest-
ing they were true. “There’s been a lot of ques-
tions about your schedule, and that it’s been a
little lighter than some of the other candidates,”
a reporter asked Biden in Ottumwa, Iowa.
MSNBC gave Trump more than a minute of
airtime for “Joe’s a loser,” while The Washing-
ton Post and The New York Times put the ex-
change on the front page. This is how things
went in 2016. Trump would taunt an opponent,
the opponent would face-plant the effort at re-
turn fire, ratings would go up, and the cycle
would repeat.
The logic of the Biden candidacy is a fac-
simile of our last memory of normalcy, like
if Barack Obama were on vacation, or sick,
maybe. Biden’s labors to remind us he was
the understudy of the last president are pain-
ful. His launch speech contained 35 uses of
the word “folks.” This included a rare double-
folks (“Folks, I know some of the really smart
folks say Democrats don’t want to hear about
unity... .”). He constantly references the
“Obama/Biden administration” and chides au-
diences that “we don’t say often enough as a
party or a nation” that Obama was awesome.
Biden on the trail will spit out the campaign
equivalent of clip art, e.g., “America, folks, is
an idea, an idea that’s stronger than any army,
bigger than any ocean,” or, “America has al-
ways been at its best when America has acted
as one America.” By the end of the campaign,
Biden will be plunked behind podiums to mut-
ter, “America America America America Amer-
ica.. .” And we’ll vote for him.
The problem is that he’s got almost a year of
Democratic primary left, and has to keep say-
ing actual things until he wins. He seems en-
gaged almost daily in cleaning up verbal mess-
es. When Harris oar-smacked him with her
“that little girl was me” busing story (T-shirt
now on sale for $29.99 at store.kamalaharris
.org!), Biden’s response was the debate equiva-
lent of “Check, please,” saying, “My time is up.”
His awesome vulnerabilities on the woke
front have him saying things that sound like
Trump quotes, like his response to Booker on
working with segregationist senators: “There’s
not a racist bone in my body.”
Biden’s early front-runner flubs are rem-
iniscent of Jeb Bush’s $150 million failure to
handle Trump tweets. There are many such
parallels. Biden is Jeb. O’Rourke, running in
what the Times calls the “younger face” lane, is
Marco Rubio. Unseen Steve Bullock is unseen
Jim Gilmore. Bill de Blasio is the same “Why is
he running?” New Yorker George Pataki was.
And this election’s version of John Kasich, the
embittered realist barking, “What are we doing
here?” from the literal edge of the debate stage,
is former Maryland Rep. John Delaney.N
OON ON A WEEKEND, Room 103 of the
Statehouse, Des Moines. John Del-
aney is addressing Iowa’s Asian and
Latino Coalition. Stocky and bald,
the co-founder of a health care lender is the
umpteenth Democrat to address the influen-
tial group, which is full of local small-business
owners. I will later hear this is one of the small-
est turnouts of this group any Democrat candi-
date has yet attracted, a list that includes self-
help author Marianne Williamson.
Delaney seems to sense this and looks
peeved, not with the Asian-Latino coalition but
with the Almighty. In a normal campaign year,
he’d be the “crossover” candidate, praised for
being a straight talker — he’s already gotten
accolades from both George Will and David
Brooks, usually a sign of media love to come.
Yet the love hasn’t arrived. Delaney, wheth-
er on TV or in person, throws off the same “I
can’t believe I’m losing to this field” vibe Ka-
sich often exuded.
Like Kasich, Delaney just wants the Amer-
ican people to get along, and if it’s not too
much trouble, elect him president. But nobody
is complying.
Flipping through Delaney’s book, The Right
Answer, it’s clear he is genuinely saddened by
the state of American politics. The epigram in
the opening pages is from Kennedy, and begins,
“Let us not despair... .” About what is Delaney
despairing? Mainly, it seems, that Bernie Sand-
ers is pulling 15 percent on a promise to give ev-
eryone Medicare.
“Why do we have to go further than Ger-
many and France and Sweden and the Nether-
lands, and throw out the entire U.S. health care
system?” he pleads. “That doesn’t make sense
to me. We should attack the problems, and fix
those. And not mess with what’s working.”He goes on to propose that from birth to
age 65, all Americans be covered by “a fed eral
health care policy, for free, as a right of citizen-
ship.” This plan, he says, would allow Ameri-
ca to avoid a fully government-run health care
program. “Look, maybe in 20 years, people
will like their government health care so much,
they’ll drop their private insurance and we’ll
get to the same place in the end,” he says. “But
we have to live in the real world.”
At the end of his speech, a therapy dog in
the crowd barks. Delaney flashes a look like he
can’t catch a break. He did fine here, and may
have won a convert or two from health care
skeptics, but the “Why not me?” tone of his
campaign captures something. It’s a familiar
narrative: Republican state governments and a
CEO-friendly administration are hacking away
at policies dear to working people, while Dem-
ocrats can’t seem to settle on an electoral for-
mula to stop them.
They’re paralyzed by Delaney’s question: Do
we really have to make radical changes? The
centrists want the progressives to step aside for
the sake of “unity,” while the progressives be-
lieve they’re the new mainstream and are the
better bet in a world where traditional notions
of electability are upside-down. While this ar-
gument rages, traditionally Democratic con-
stituencies are taking losses all over the place.
Mark Rocha, a Communications Workers of
America official, liked that Delaney grew up in a
union household, but he seemed more focused
on the idea that whoever the nominee was, that
person needed to stop the bleeding quick.
Noting that Iowa’s Republican leadership
has passed laws attacking the right of public-
sector unions to organize, he says private-sector
unions are dying too. His CWA once had 1,200
members statewide. Now it has 525, and the
new members can’t pay much in dues.
“If they even come in the door, if I even get
’em to sign, they’re the lower-paid workers,
they make $15 an hour,” he says. “We’re get-
ting beat up.”IN THE 2020 RACE, a succession of Democrats
have already taken star turns as darlings-for-a-
news-cycle, only to splat in polls right after. The
pattern is incredible.
Harris is on her second run up the hill
(her first was a “dazzling” debut in January).
O’Rourke earned the death-knell “Kenne-
dyesque” title, and raised a record $6.1 mil-
lion in the first 24 hours of his campaign, but
cratered in polls even before his 8,800-word
Vanity Fair springboard profile officially hit
newsstands. “How About Pete?” asked New
Yo rk magazine, atop a backlit cover photo that
made the 37-year-old look like a Midwest Jesus;
a South Bend police scandal later, Buttigieg
was polling at zero percent with black voters.
Then came Biden, who soared to 41 percent
after launching to become what CNN called
the “clear front-runner.” He’s lost a third of his
support since then and is struggling to keep
the lead.
Reporters show up at events with anxious
smiles on their faces, like parents looking forTHE
CAUCUS
Iowa is now
one of only
six states —
including
Kansas, Maine,
Nevada, North
Dakota and
Wyoming — to
use a caucus
system for
selecting
nominees. In
the Iowa Dem-
ocratic caucus,
voters are
organized into
roughly 1,100
precincts. To
choose a nom-
inee, precinct
members gath-
er and publicly
announce
their support
for candidates
and try to
persuade one
another to
switch. Since
1976, only two
Democrats
who have won
the Iowa cau-
cus went on to
win the gen-
eral election:
Jimmy Carter
and Barack
Obama.