Joe Biden is in trouble. It’s not his actual campaign that’s in truly dire straits. Although Elizabeth Warren has risen steadily, troubling donors already troubled by Biden’s age, he’s still first or second in most polls and shows few signs of tumbling too far from the top of the field. He could do without the attention President Trump and the impeachment situation have brought to Hunter Biden. But to the extent that his son’s business dealings may receive intense scrutiny, it’s far more likely to become a concern if Biden wins the nomination. Here in the nomination fight, his fellow Democratic candidates will be wary of echoing Trump’s attacks. No, Joe Biden the candidate is mostly fine. Joe Biden is in trouble because should he win the general election, then Joe Biden the president will be unable to govern. The Biden theory of change, the central argument of his campaign, is unraveling before our very eyes.

One of Biden’s early expositions of that argument came in January during a speech before the United States Conference of Mayors. Still undeclared, he made a nod to speculation about his intentions and the criticisms his campaign would be subjected to. “I read in The New York Times today that one of my problems if I were to run for president, I like Republicans,” he said. “OK, well, bless me father for I have sinned.” Here he crossed himself to laughter and applause. “From where I come from, I don’t know how you get anything done. I don’t know how you get anything done unless we start talking to one another again.”

As proof of his ability to get us talking to one another again, Biden has offered, both in private fundraisers and on the stump, anecdotes about his personal success in bridging ideological divides throughout his career, including stories about the relationships he built with segregationists like James Eastland and Herman Talmadge. Despite the controversies those remarks spurred, polls suggest the larger message he wanted them to convey has resonated with a large share of Democratic voters, who would like to believe, as Biden insists, that we’ll return to a more productive politics after Trump leaves office. “The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House,” Biden said at a May campaign stop in New Hampshire. “Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”



Biden’s Republican friends are abetting the president’s attacks on his son and smearing House Democrats’ efforts to hold this administration accountable.

In the meantime, Biden’s Republican friends are abetting the president’s attacks on his son and smearing House Democrats’ efforts to hold this administration accountable. The responses of House Republicans to the impeachment inquiry have been fairly predictable, although Representative Matt Gaetz did offer up a stunner of a line Tuesday morning. “What we see in this impeachment is a kangaroo court,” he said, “and Chairman [Adam] Schiff is acting like a malicious Captain Kangaroo.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy made a more serious gaffe on 60 Minutes last week when he falsely accused anchor Scott Pelley of altering the White House’s transcript of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to make Trump sound worse.

Senate Republicans have been quieter—so quiet, in fact, that as of Monday, none have appeared for interviews on CNN or MSNBC since September 25. Chuck Todd spent the majority of his interview with Senator Ron Johnson on Meet the Press this past Sunday trying to get straight answers on the propriety of Trump’s Ukraine call as Johnson dodged with conspiratorial statements about the Mueller investigation. Senator Mitt Romney has issued obligatory statements of indignation about Trump’s conduct, but even his fellow reasonable Republican Senator Ben Sasse has accused Schiff of running “a partisan clown show.”

