Sally Kohn

Opinion contributor

I really, really like Joe Biden. I mean what’s not to like? He’s a lifelong public servant with a reputation for fighting for causes he believes in while not suffering fools. It goes without saying that Biden has more executive branch experience, and especially foreign policy experience, than most anyone else running for president and certainly than the current occupant of the White House. Plus Biden’s hilarious. The things he says, and the way he says them, are frank and funny. And his gaffes are even better. Also, as a native of Allentown, Pennsylvania, I’m contractually obligated to love my Scranton brethren.

But I don’t want Joe Biden to run for president. He’s the wrong candidate for the political moment.

Biden is a conventional, corporate centrist Democrat. He is from the Great Banking State of Delaware, after all. A 2008 Pro Publica report detailed just how cozy Biden’s relationship has been with the credit card industry — including the fact that the financial services company MBNA was Biden’s single largest contributor for 20 years, and Biden supported credit card industry-friendly bills that include a 2005 legislation to make it harder for consumers to get bankruptcy protection. He also voted against legislation to require credit card companies to warn consumers about the consequences of paying only the minimum amount due on their credit cards each month.

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And it’s not just banking and financial services. Biden has a troubling string of other pro-big business policy stances, often at odds even with the center-left of his own party. For instance, according to reporting in Jacobin, in 1979, after receiving donations from Coca-Cola, Biden co-sponsored legislation to help the soft drink industry circumvent antitrust laws. As Jacobin also reported, “The same year, he voted against a measure before the Judiciary Committee to expand consumers’ rights to sue over price-fixing — one of only two Democrats to do so.”

I believe the 2016 election marked the beginning of a broader shift away from traditional left-versus-right ideological politics and toward a politics of populism-versus-elitism. Yes, Donald Trump ran on a lot of traditional hard-right issues — especially around immigration — but he also abandoned Republican orthodoxy and fashioned himself a sort of rogue economic populist, especially on issues of trade.

That an (alleged) billionaire would brand himself a populist is ironic to say the least, but Trump correctly read the pulse of the nation — whereas Hillary Clinton could not have been a more convenient avatar of conventional, corporate-cozy elite Washington. It’s no surprise, in this context, that more than 10 percent of Bernie Sanders supporters ended up voting for Trump. The last presidential election was the beginning of a new populist moment in our nation.

2020 election: nativist or inclusive populism?

The next presidential election will be a referendum on what kind of populism we will embrace — an exclusionary, nativist, hate-tinged populism of the sort advanced by Trump, or a broad, inclusive, equity and justice-driven populism for all. Both existentially and practically, that’s the terrain on which I believe the 2020 will be fought.

Most of the Democratic candidates seem to understand that. Some, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, are lifelong champions of bottom-up, inclusive populism in both in spirit and in policy. Others, such as Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, have been more recently tacking in that direction — recognizing that policies such as higher corporate taxes and Medicare for All are widely supported by the vast majority of Americans but only not embraced by mainstream Washington because of allegiances to corporate interests.

Yet while Joe Biden is arguably the most populist-seeming persona of the conventional Democratic lot, that doesn’t make him an actual populist. Far from it, in fact. In 2001, Biden reportedly derided populism in an interview with the National Journal:

The idea now, and it’s credible, is that class warfare and populism is the way we should conduct the next election. We do that (and) George Bush will be a second-term president, regardless of how bad a job he may do.

And even in this political moment, as CNN reports, Biden has stuck to the more middle-of-the-road incrementalist policy proposals such as infrastructure investments and low-income tax credits. “I get into a lot of trouble with my party when I say that wealthy Americans are just as patriotic as poor folks,” Biden said last May.

Biden is marred by Anita Hill failings

On top of all of this, there’s Biden’s abysmal handling of Anita Hill’s accusations in 1991 of sexual harassment against Justice Clarence Thomas, whose Supreme Court confirmation hearings Biden presided over as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Biden has long faced criticism for not doing more to support Hill and blunt the attacks and smears against her, including failing to call numerous supportive witnesses — criticism that has taken on new light in the wake of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and the #MeToo movement.

Thankfully, most of the Democratic candidates running in 2020 are more informed and savvy on issues of racial justice and gender rights. We should be highlighting this forward-looking vision, in contrast to Trump’s backwards-looking hate — but Biden is not only a candidate of the past but also with a past that will need to be relitigated.

Biden defenders, including Biden himself, suggest that he has the best chance of beating Trump. That’s unfounded.

It’s important to note that at this point in 2007, Sen. Barack Obama was less than a month into his candidacy and, in a poll that Feb. 21, 40 percent of voters polled said they didn’t know enough about Obama to form an opinion on him.

Also, the 2020 election will be more of a referendum on Trump than a judgment call about his Democratic contender. “With remarkable consistency,” writes David Graham in The Atlantic, “a president overseeing a growing economy wins at the polls, even if — as is usually the case — he had little to do with creating it.” If the economy is bad enough in November 2020, any of the current or potential Democratic contenders could best Trump at the ballot box. And if special counsel Robert Mueller’s report is sufficiently damning, my Aunt Heather could beat him.

I really like my Aunt Heather and I really like Joe Biden. But neither one of them should run for president.

Sally Kohn is author of "The Opposite Of Hate: A Field Guide To Repairing Our Humanity." You can find her online at sallykohn.com and on Twitter: @SallyKohn