The Great Generic White Guy Hope

The hot media discussion of the day seems to be whether the Democrats need Joe Biden to challenge Hillary Clinton. The answer to this question is “no, and isn’t this discussion rather egregiously sexist?”:

In policy terms, Biden and Clinton are virtually identical. On domestic policy, they’re both moderate liberals who are too close to the financial service sectors in their home states. On foreign policy, they’re both moderate liberal hawks who voted for the Iraq War. It would be harder to name two major politicians with more similar policy profiles. If Biden is going to enter the race, it’s not because of he disapproves of the direction in which Clinton is going to lead the country.

And it’s hard to see any evidence that Biden is more electable. Clinton has consistently been a more popular political figure than Biden. He’s prone to major gaffes. Hillary Clinton lost by a nose to a major political talent in the Democratic primaries in 2012, while Biden failed to reach 1% in Iowa. In 1988, Biden’s bid for the nomination was a disaster sunk by plagiarism allegations.

At this point, the sexism of the contingent eager for Biden to run becomes hard to deny. We need to find a generic white male with Hillary Clinton’s policy positions to head the ticket, even though his two previous primary campaigns were flaming wrecks on the highway? This is tantamount to putting a “No Girls Allowed” sign on the door of the White House.

You also have to love the fact that MoDo’s “Biden should run because of Hillary Clinton’s egregious corruption” story starts off with a Tom Brady analogy. Which is actually quite apt, although not in the way Dowd intends. (The one difference with the most recent New York Times botch is that the campaign’s immediate pushback helped to stop a “criminal probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails” narrative from cementing. The NFL’s leak of erroneous information, conversely, was immensely successful at establishing a fake narrative — as you can see in our comments section, many people still take the guilt of Brady and the Patriots as a given, sometimes in a dozen or so pompous comments about how Goodell’s scandalous behavior is not worthy of their precious thought, despite the egregious flimsiness of the evidence.)

I like Biden. And he has two major progressive feathers in his cap — playing a key role in stopping Robert Bork (and, inter alia, saving Roe v. Wade) and forcing Obama’s hand on same-sex marriage. He also has one major demerit — being cowed by the “Borking” propaganda campaign into conducting a hearing that was “fair and civil” to Clarence Thomas but notably unfair and uncivil to the woman he sexually harassed. But on the proposition that the Democrats need a generic white guy with Hillary Clinton’s policy positions to replace Hillary Clinton, I’m going to continue to vote “no.”