Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

On Monday, former Vice President Joe Biden wrote a blog post that proves two things: Blogging isn’t dead and neither is Biden’s political career. In fact, in Biden’s essay, and in other little-noticed public pronouncements, you can see him sculpting a role for the 2020 presidential campaign that perhaps only he could get away with playing: the voice of anti-populism.

Though Biden’s essay was largely ignored amid the constant hum of Trump-related stories, it made a bit of news in wonk circles because Biden used it to announce his opposition to a “universal basic income,” that newly vogue policy proposal in which every American would receive a periodic check from the government regardless of their work status.


But there’s more in the post to decipher. Biden criticized the “Silicon Valley executives” who have championed universal basic income for “selling American workers short” and undermining the “dignity” of work. He recoiled at rhetoric, often wielded by Senator Bernie Sanders and his acolytes, that demonizes corporations (“Some want to single out big corporations for all the blame. … But consumers, workers, and leaders have the power to hold every corporation to a higher standard, not simply cast business as the enemy.”) And he cut against the prevailing sentiment among Trump-friendly working-class whites that not everyone should go to college: “Cognitive capacity—as opposed to brawn—continues to become a surer path to climb that ladder into the middle class.”

A few days earlier, the former vice president published a New York Times op-ed deriding President Donald Trump’s nationalistic foreign policy. “[T]his White House casts global affairs as a zero-sum competition,” he wrote, calling this line of thinking “disturbing.” Moreover, America’s global standing had eroded due to Trump’s “shameful defense of the white nationalists and neo-Nazis.” “Not since the Jim Crow era has an American president so misunderstood and misrepresented our values,” wrote Biden.

By criticizing the views of both Berniecrats and Bannonites—and by making a full-throated, clear-eyed declaration of what the alternative should be—Biden is positioning himself as the antidote to populism in all its forms and flavors.

Is he even running for president? We can’t know for sure. But consider the following. He has opened two policy institutes, one at Penn focused on foreign policy, and the other at the University of Delaware with a domestic focus. He has a book coming out in November, and will accompany it with 19-city “American Promise” book tour. He has an “American Possibilities” political action committee. And to borrow the teasing headline from a July profile in the Washington Post, “Joe Biden Still Wants to be President.” If you want the presidency—and if you could enter the field as a front-runner for your party’s presidential nomination—you usually run for it.

If you’re looking for someone who can simultaneously persuade the angry mobs to put away the pitchforks and still bring white working-class voters back into the Democratic fold, perhaps you’ve found your answer in the Pride of Scranton.



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The challenge for those unnerved by the rising tide of populism is to find a standard-bearer who can’t be easily caricatured as the epitome of elitism, as Hillary Clinton was.

In the emerging 2020 field, most leading Democratic lights are scrambling to establish populist cred. Others with records that cut against populist grain will have major biographical obstacles to overcome. For example, before becoming governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe unapologetically mixed political fundraising and personal business. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a politician’s son with a Machiavellian reputation. When Rep. John Delaney—the only declared Democratic presidential candidate—said in his announcement video, “attacking banks won’t win the day,” it reminded the few watching that he is a former bank CEO.

But Biden? Amtrak Joe? The President of Vice? The man has oozed working-class charm since he hustled his way into the Senate at age 30.

When he speaks to crowds in the Rust Belt, he says “we,” as in “we’re made of the same stuff.” You could hear a pin drop at the 2008 Democratic convention as Biden imagined the kitchen table conversations inside the homes alongside the Delaware train tracks: “How in God's name are we going to send the kids to college? How are we going to retire, Joe?”

The classic tome of the 1988 presidential campaign, “What It Takes,” captures how Biden was in his element inside a union hall: “He wouldn’t leave the podium until he knew he had the connect. And he got it. They loved how Joey made them feel.” He’s kept those bonds to organized labor throughout his five-decade career. He’s never forgotten the early United Auto Workers endorsement in that 1972 Senate campaign. In 2015, steelworkers at a Labor Day parade were chanting, “Run, Joe, Run!”

And yet, he’s hardly captive to labor’s policy agenda. While he was a “strong supporter of labor rights here in the U.S., from union organizing rights to protecting prevailing wage laws,” in the Senate, according to one labor activist, he did not reliably side with unions on trade. He voted for the deals most hated by unions and embraced by multinational corporations: the North American Free Trade Agreement and permanent normal trade relations status for China. Then as vice president, he was an enthusiastic booster of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal despised by Sanders and eventually iced by President Donald Trump.

In his memoir “Promises to Keep,” Biden tells a story about how before he got a $5,000 check from the machinist union endorsement in 1972, the union president asked him to his face how he might vote on a hypothetical bailout of a defense contractor to save union jobs. The then 29-year old Biden blew up: “If you’re asking me how I’m gonna vote on a particular issue, you can take that check and stick it.”

But hard-core progressives who roll their eyes at Biden’s shtick don’t see him as immune to the influence of campaign cash. They charge him with carrying water for Delaware-based credit card companies—especially MBNA, one of Biden’s biggest contributors at the time—when shaping the 2005 law that made it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy.

You might think Biden’s dualities—a guy from the working class who’s spent nearly his entire adult life among the global elite; a champion of liberal values who can be found on the side of corporations—make him an easy mark for the populists. They could cut him down to size as yet another neoliberal corporatist shill who talks pretty while he rigs the rules for the rich.

A cynic might look at Biden’s long career and see a consummate B.S. artist. Then you have to remind yourself: A lot of B.S. artists make it to the White House.



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As The Atlantic’s Mark Bowden once observed, Biden is the quintessential “salesman,” and “For most of his adult life, Biden has been selling himself.” But when you are selling yourself in a presidential campaign, you need an idea or two to go with it. Even Trump needed his wall.

The fact that Biden has a domestic policy institute to go along with his foreign policy institute suggests he is in search of that big idea for one last campaign. When you’re an elder statesman, like Jimmy Carter, you can establish an institute that focuses on deeds abroad, like monitoring elections or eradicating disease. But when you are active politician aspiring to higher office, a domestic-looking institute can help craft policy platforms on which to base a candidacy.

That’s what former Senator John Edwards ostensibly set out to do when he followed up his unsuccessful 2004 vice presidential bid by founding the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina and pledging to develop groundbreaking solutions for the “eradication of poverty.” By the time he launched a second campaign for president, the center had failed to come up with any compelling ideas. Having little in the way of fresh substance to offer, he was overshadowed in the 2008 primary by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Biden will have to do better than Edwards. His Biden Institute blog post rejects a big idea (universal basic income), embraces an off-the-shelf idea (free community college), but leaves unsaid what he would do to realize his vision of “a future that puts work first.” He acknowledges the challenge of automation, the importance of higher education and the need to retain “workplace benefits and protections … in an economy where the nature of work has changed.” But he doesn’t have any game-changing answers, yet.

In rejecting universal basic income, he is signaling that he is not on the democratic socialist bandwagon, though he is far from the only prominent Democrat not on board.

Hillary Clinton details in her new book What Happened that she came close to making universal basic income her signature 2016 issue, but “we couldn’t make the numbers work. To provide a meaningful dividend each year to every citizen, you’d have to raise enormous sums of money, and that would either mean a lot of new taxes or cannibalizing other important programs.” When Sanders has been asked about it, he consistently avoids giving a direct answer. (Some on the left worry it would supplant, not supplement, America’s current network of social programs and worker protections.)

But Biden’s reasoning is significant. His concern is not technocratic like Clinton’s, nor in defense of the welfare state, like some of Sanders’ fellow travelers. Biden is ultimately worried about demeaning people’s “dignity” by degrading the value of work in society. That’s a principle that echoes the counsel of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank viewed with derision by Berniecrats.

Earlier this month, Third Way’s Lanae Erickson Hatalsky and Ryan Pougiales produced a strategy memo based on focus groups conducted with “Obama-Trump and Rising American Electorate voters,” which found that “voters intuitively view Democrats as anti-business,” and that “while many voters support Democrats on social causes, they want the Party to focus on jobs first.”

By “jobs,” these voters did not mean “handouts,” which some focus group participants criticized with “overtly racist, xenophobic, and homophobic” overtones. The analysts concluded, “participants’ anger was rooted in the belief that the government was taking from them and giving to others they deemed undeserving—for them, it’s an attack on the value of hard work. So rallying around proposals like free college or universal basic income just exacerbate this resentment.”

Biden has taken part—but only part—of Third Way’s reasoning. He snubs free checks as eroding the dignity of work. Yet he does embrace free college, or at least community college, as a path toward enhanced “cognitive capacity” and well-paying work. Furthermore, Biden is not shying away from “social causes,” nor is he pandering to bigotry and misogyny. In addition to ripping Trump on his response to Charlottesville, two weeks ago Biden had a Facebook post criticizing Trump’s secretary of education for planning a rewrite of the Obama administration’s Title IX guidance on campus sexual assault.

But if Biden is not going to wink at bigoted, anti-intellectual sentiments, neither is he going to call anybody a “deplorable.” Soon after Trump’s victory, Biden said, “We lost because an awful lot of hard-working Americans who live in areas where we did not pay much attention to. Barack Obama won these people. They are not racist.” Never mind the data indicating a significant number of Trump voters, even those who once backed Obama, do hold bigoted views. There is no way, no how that Biden is going to chastise working-class people. After all, “we’re made of the same stuff.”

With all this in mind, there’s one major question left that Biden has to consider before he runs: Does he have a shot? He’s an old white man at a time when many Democratic voters are hungry for fresh faces. However, he’s also a commanding presence who would likely enter a field overcrowded with rookies stepping on one another’s populist toes. And he’s just as comfortable talking about the old days at the local auto show as he is embracing multiculturalism. He can seamlessly shift from celebrating the American worker to confronting the scourge of domestic violence (as he touts one of his big Senate legacies, the Violence Against Women Act) to the importance of LGBT rights (and reminding how he publicly nudged President Obama on gay marriage.)

If nothing else, Biden has a path. It’s a path that diverges from left-wing and right-wing populism; a path that seeks partnership between workers and corporations, unity across racial and gender lines, and reverence for higher education and the idea that you can work your way to a better life if given the right tools.

But walking that path will require a few more signature policy ideas, and a whole lot of Scranton charm. If anyone can make everyone believe he’s on their side—and in turn, erase many of the divides wracking the American electorate—it may well be the fast-talkin’, back-slappin’, gaffe-makin’ God-love-him Uncle Joe.