Scott Eisen/Getty Images 2020 Joe Biden’s Toughest 2020 Opponent Is Joe Biden How he runs against his past—on crime, on integration, on Anita Hill—will determine whether he is a strong front-runner or a weak one.

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

As he prepares to enter the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden is carrying with him nearly a half a century in the major leagues of American politics. When Pete Buttigieg was born, Biden had been a U.S. senator for almost nine years. He has cast votes on conflicts in Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the confirmation of 12 Supreme Court justices and the impeachment of a president. He’s served in office when opinions on crime, abortion, race and sexuality have changed root and branch. Perhaps Biden’s biggest challenge—apart from his age itself—will be to persuade Democratic voters not to view his past through the prism of the present.

It would likelier be a lot easier for Biden if he were a Republican. One of the signal features of the 2016 campaign was the capacity of GOP voters to sweep aside Donald Trump’s past, both his words and deeds. The once “strongly pro-choice” Trump, the Trump who embraced a substantial wealth tax, who openly celebrated a sybaritic lifestyle, became a heroic figure among supply-side economists and evangelical Christian leaders.


But Trump was far from the first Republican to be forgiven his past trespasses. Republicans chose John McCain in 2008 despite his apostasy on taxes and campaign finance reform in the early 2000s. In 2012, they forgave Mitt Romney for creating a health care plan in Massachusetts that helped provide a blueprint for Obamacare.

It’s not at all clear that Democrats, especially this year, view the past with such forbearance. A party far more diverse than it was when Biden entered the Senate in the 1970s has hard questions to ask about his opposition to the busing of schoolchildren to promote racial integration, his support for draconian crime legislation and his performance as Judiciary Committee chairman when Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination was confronted with accusations of sexual harassment from Anita Hill. How Biden answers these questions may determine whether his current “first in the polls” status dissipates like those of Ed Muskie, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton (2008), or whether he is as unstoppable as the front-running candidacies of George W. Bush and Clinton (2016).

As a general rule, there are three approaches a presidential candidate can use to handle a problematic past. One is to hope that tough questions simply do not arise. It sometimes even works. Al Gore in 2000 was never seriously pushed on his views, as a House member from Tennessee, on abortion and guns. In a time when a speech of decades ago is available on social media with the flick of a finger, that doesn’t seem like an option for Biden.

A second approach is contrition. About the Thomas confirmation, Biden has already said, “I wish I could have done something—I opposed Clarence Thomas’ nomination, and I voted against him … But I also realized that there was a real and perceived problem the committee faced: There were a bunch of white guys.” And he has apologized for crime bills he backed that punished crack cocaine more harshly than powder, a disparity that fell heavily on African-Americans. He told a Martin Luther King Day breakfast this year: “White America has to admit there’s still a systematic racism. And it goes almost unnoticed by so many of us.”

The third approach is both the most direct and the most difficult: to try to show voters what was happening years, even decades ago, that explains your actions. Busing school kids to achieve racial balance, for example, was a lot more complicated than a struggle to overcome the hostility of racist whites to integration—though that was surely part of the story. (This lengthy essay lays out some of those complexities, as well as some of the baleful consequences of the policy.)

Crime, like desegregation, looked very different decades ago. The rate began to rise in the 1960s, and Richard Nixon’s “law and order” message in 1968 made it a major national issue for the first time since the 1920s. Two decades later, George H.W. Bush turned Michael Dukakis into the emblematic “soft on crime” candidate by making the crime spree of a furloughed Massachusetts prisoner a top campaign issue. It was in response to this framework that Bill Clinton, four years after Dukakis lost, embraced a pro-death penalty, tough-on-crime agenda as a candidate—an agenda that he also enacted as president.

But beyond the politics, crime was a genuine concern; and nowhere more so than in inner-city black neighborhoods. When I worked in City Hall in New York City at the end of the 1960s, one of the more persistent demands of black civic leaders was for more cops to stem a tide of violence that had mothers putting their small children to bed in bathtubs, the better to protect them from random gunfire.

None of this means that the policy responses to crime were the right ones. None of this can erase the flagrantly racial dimensions of the call by politicians for more “law and order” during the very same years that African-Americans were demanding equality and integration. But it does remind all of us that the principal victims of crime do not live in gated communities and doorman-guarded apartments. The fact that homicides in New York City, which once hit 2,000 a year, are now below 300 annually has saved literally thousands of lives, most of them among the least well off.

Can Biden make such an argument as a partial defense of what, as recently as this decade, he called “the 1994 Biden crime bill”? I’m skeptical. It simply asks too much of voters to put themselves into a past that is utterly alien to them. So perhaps his best chance to win the nomination is that enough older Democrats turn out in the primaries—Democrats for whom Biden’s history is also theirs.