{"id":829313,"date":"2019-05-01T10:42:38","date_gmt":"2019-05-01T14:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=829313"},"modified":"2019-05-01T13:34:41","modified_gmt":"2019-05-01T17:34:41","slug":"joe-biden-ballot-2020-democratic-nominee-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/politics\/politics-features\/joe-biden-ballot-2020-democratic-nominee-president-829313\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s Soul Is Not on the Ballot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t\t\t

The United States will require much correction in the wake of Donald Trump, should he be defeated and should he actually leave the presidency peacefully. I assume neither, given his behavior and the current slate of candidates opposing him, numerous as they are. <\/span><\/p>\n

There are 20 of them now<\/a>, with Joe Biden adding himself formally to the mix last Thursday<\/a> with a video that oddly invoked the 2017 white-supremacist chaos<\/a> in Charlottesville, Virginia solely to take a shot at his presumed general election opponent. With any number of policy horrors to choose from in this administration, it was perplexing to see Biden define Trump\u2019s racism reach back to two summers ago to remind voters of a quote that likely no one has forgotten: Trump\u2019s \u201cvery fine people on both sides\u201d remark in the wake of \u201cJews will not replace us,\u201d the beating of DeAndre Harris, or a neo-Nazi murdering Heather Heyer with his car.<\/span><\/p>\n

Never mind that Biden hadn\u2019t been to Charlottesville since this all happened, never asked Heyer\u2019s mom whether it was cool to do this nor worried about what his political ad might trigger in the survivors of those two days of terrorism. The former Vice President had written an op-ed back then about all this, one that I guess his campaign people figured would be a perfect message. <\/span>Writing for <\/span>The Atlantic<\/span><\/i><\/a> two weeks after the Unite the Right rally, Biden declared that \u201cif it wasn\u2019t clear before, it\u2019s clear now: We are living through a battle for the soul of this nation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Contrary to <\/span>conventional wisdom<\/span><\/a>, while Biden may have done his campaign a service steering Trump and the news cycle briefly away from Robert Mueller and towards Robert E. Lee, he failed the public. The line that Biden is now repeating, in that Thursday campaign ad and at a kickoff rally outside of <\/span>Pittsburgh<\/span><\/a> and in <\/span>Dubuque, Iowa<\/span><\/a>, may sound Presidential, in the way rhetoric often does. <\/span><\/p>\n

But \u201ca battle for the soul of this nation\u201d is actually word salad. It is an abyss of a sentence, what a politician speaks and sends voters falling endlessly into like Alice\u2019s rabbit hole. It means nothing because it isn\u2019t intended to mean anything. It is verbal Vaseline.<\/span><\/p>\n

Biden even echoed President Trump\u2019s slogan in his effort to sound like the William Barber of politics. During <\/span>a <\/span>Good Morning America <\/span><\/i>interview<\/span><\/a> alongside his wife Jill on Tuesday, Biden said that his new campaign slogan would be \u201cMake America Moral Again.\u201d Yes, really. He plans to \u201cmake America return to the essence of who we are, the dignity of the country, the dignity of people and treating our people with dignity.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

How, exactly? And is that even a president\u2019s job? And is this \u201csoul of a nation\u201d what we find only in America\u2019s most shining, commercial-worthy moments, when the country and its government loves to tell the most heroic story of itself? Or is the soul of this nation found in the places where we don\u2019t like to discuss? Is it in our rotting homeless encampments under the freeway bridges here in Los Angeles as we gentrifiers speed by without a glance? Can I find the soul of this nation in underfunded public housing, or along the southern border where asylum seekers are being harassed and hunted by our border patrol for trying to escape persecution? Is that soul in our overcrowded prisons, or in the overcrowded classrooms? Can we find it in the swelling rivers of the Midwest, or in the swelling eye socket of the young black boy punched by the police officer for existing? Is that soul outside our abortion clinics, threatening patients as they seek their healthcare? I surely think we can find it in the increasingly frequent incidences of domestic terrorism targeting black, Jewish and Muslim houses of worship, including one that killed <\/span>Lori Gilbert Kaye<\/span><\/a> at a synagogue in Poway, California,<\/a> on the last of the eight days of Passover. <\/span><\/p>\n

Trumpism isn\u2019t extinguishable with an election, and 2020 isn\u2019t a \u201cbattle for the soul of this nation.\u201d It\u2019s a job search. Joe Biden wants us to hire him. That may seem simplistic, but it isn\u2019t false. And the more we demystify this process and understand the true powers and limitations of the presidency, the better for the voters.<\/span><\/p>\n

As much as they may frequently position themselves as emancipators, revolutionaries or movement leaders, contenders for President of the United States are job candidates. The fact that they are applying for a position and have to convince voters how they will perform once they get the gig often gets lost in the swirling rhetoric. Declaring merely that you want to defeat the incumbent, which is more or less all Biden has done, is the equivalent of putting your name at the top of the application form.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, it\u2019s early, and Biden should have a chance to establish his platform, but it isn\u2019t no one\u2019s fault but his own that he entered the race well after competitors like Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders have had months to lay out nuanced policy proposals by the dozen. He has less than two months before the first debates, after all \u2014 even if judging by his ad and his rhetoric, it seems that he isn\u2019t intent upon running against the other 19 people in the Democratic field.<\/span><\/p>\n

Part of the fault is ours. Leaving aside his rank cruelty and borderline treasonous behavior for a moment, Trump\u2019s utter inadequacy in the office should have competence and planning as primary concerns in this race. Instead, we\u2019re talking about <\/span>which bands Pete Buttigieg wants at his inauguration<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>who Cory Booker is dating<\/span><\/a>, as if it\u2019s a normal election. We have loud policy debates about things that matter but are unlikely to happen, while solutions to family leave and universal child care go undiscussed in the public sphere. I don\u2019t have much patience for candidates who fill our heads with platitudes when their names, not anyone\u2019s soul, is on the ballot. But we are letting it happen.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is Biden\u2019s strike zone, adhering to political clich\u00e9s and conventional politics. It\u2019s working, in the short term. Thanks to his unparalleled name recognition and the undeniable advantage of being a white man running for president, Biden entered the Democratic fray as the front-runner and soon increased his lead substantially. Carried largely by <\/span>older voters<\/span><\/a>, Biden experienced<\/span> a fairly massive post-announcement polling bump<\/span><\/a> and now leads his nearest competitor, Vermont independent Bernie Sanders, by 14 points. <\/span>A <\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/i> report<\/span><\/a> published before his Monday rally found strong anecdotal support amongst the black interview subjects, including one 53-year-old man who repeated a cautious refrain that I suspect is being echoed in many a living room, church, and barbershop: \u201cI\u2019m going to be completely honest: I think with the country going the way it is, I think we\u2019re kind of safer on the Democratic side going with a white male right now.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Four years after Barack Obama\u2019s presidency, the White House hopes of his running mate will likely rest heavily upon whether or not the electorate is scared to take a chance on someone who isn\u2019t a white man. That, perhaps more than anything, may reflect the \u201csoul of America.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

There are many echoes of Trump in the former Vice President, <\/span>more than he would likely care to admit<\/span><\/a>. There is the phony machismo, such as when Biden wished in 2016, after more allegations of Trump\u2019s sexual abuse surfaced, that he <\/span>\u201ccould take him behind the gym.\u201d<\/span><\/a> There are the past policy positions, in which Biden himself <\/span>sounded much like a segregationist in the 1970s<\/span><\/a> when speaking about school busing or contributed to mass incarceration\u2019s explosion by helping write and pass the <\/span>1994 crime bill<\/span><\/a> as the Senate Judiciary chairman. As much as there are Trump problems to fix, there are still Biden problems to fix. <\/span><\/p>\n

Worse than the empty rhetoric about the \u201csoul\u201d of America is the prospect that Biden is proposing himself as the panacea. It indicates that he either doesn\u2019t understand what Trumpism is doing to this country, or doesn\u2019t have a strategy devised to handle it. Conveniently for him, though, this \u201csoul of America\u201d business positions Biden as a single-handed savior for a nation whose ills are due solely to Trump and not, say to the crime bill. Everything will be addressed by his defeat. That Biden even seems to suggest as much is dangerous, evoking an even more chilling and Trumpian quote from his 2016 Republican National Convention address: <\/span>\u201cI alone can fix it.\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

There is a real chance that Biden will becomes the nominee, which makes this all even more of a problem. The stakes of this election are as dire as he makes them sound. That is why he needs to grasp that \u201chope and change\u201d was for a past era, talk about goals instead of \u201csouls,\u201d and tell us what precisely he\u2019ll do to address both the mess that Trump would be leaving behind and the one that he himself helped to create.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\n\t\t\t

<\/div>\n\t\t