Insurgent 70-somethings Trump, Sanders have upset Biden’s conventional apple cart
A strength of America’s enduring political parties, among the oldest surviving such groupings in the world, is their malleability.
Like chameleons and some sea creatures, they can change colors depending on their environment. Teddy Roosevelt, the hard-charging Rough Rider from the early 1900s, would not recognize the current Republican Party.
And even the tele-promptered eloquence of a cautious Barack Obama, the liberal messiah from 2008, couldn’t win the presidential nomination of today’s fractured Democratic coalition way out on the left. Have you heard Obama ardently campaign against the party’s current direction? Or in support of his vice presidential partner for eight years, as Bill Clinton did for Al Gore? Well, no, actually, you haven’t.
The modern American political reality is that the Republican and Democratic parties today are basically just brand names. They’ve become hollow, fundraising fuselages of once vibrant organizations that get captured every four or eight years by someone new with a contemporary personality packaged for the times.
That personality slaps on a new poll-tested label that appeals to enough varied voters in just the right places to cobble together an Electoral College majority.
Donald Trump definitely leads the Republican Party for now and, polls tell us, owns the favorable allegiance of nine-out-of-10 people who call themselves Republicans and hope to win again under his banner.
But there is little historic Republican ideology espoused by the tariff-slapping, deal-making man who’s switched political affiliations more often than fellow New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg, now a Democrat.
Like ocean freighters registered in Liberia that never go there, in 2016 the GOP was a political flag of convenience for Trump, who’s pondered a presidential run for some time. With sharp instincts, he tapped into and loudly proclaimed the profound frustrations of Americans so long ignored by the party’s elderly Eastern establishment represented by his 16 GOP competitors.
Given his stubbornly loyal party base, bullying tactics and congressional Republicans’ abiding instincts for survival, Trump has herded them into obedience, despite their 2018 midterm losses. You may have noticed the struggles during Trump’s first 37 months have not been ideological battles over policies. They’ve been over him and his unorthodox, even crude behavior.
The man whose recent poll surge has thrust him into the front ranks of the early Democratic primary struggle isn’t even a Democrat.
Independent Bernie Sanders with his energetic young acolytes could successfully hijack that party’s presidential nomination come July in Milwaukee. He could harness progressives’ vast spending ambitions and the visceral Trump-loathing of enough voters in traditional Democratic strongholds and beyond to become at 79 the oldest man ever to be president. And the first Jew.
Like Trump, Sanders piggybacks on the party’s brand as a strategically convenient label, though his democratic socialist views and early support of gun rights bear no political resemblance whatsoever, for instance, to Democrat Bill Clinton’s successfully centrist two-term presidency.
Then, there’s Joe Biden, another septuagenarian, who’s been marketing himself to Democrats as the safe, if distinctly drab, choice to defeat the you-know-who usurper who stole the Oval Office from its rightful heir in 2016.
It’s a revealing marker of how dramatically the Biden brand has changed over time, all as a Democrat, that his political prequel was as a staunch opponent of busing, a staunch supporter of the 1990s crime bill and the Iraq war, and a prominent tormenter of Anita Hill. None of which Biden has chosen to talk about much on the recent campaign trails in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Perhaps worse, Biden once confessed to Republican tendencies. Before taking on a Democrat’s label for a Delaware county council seat and a long Senate career, Biden worked in a Delaware GOP law firm. He once admitted he “thought of myself as a Republican,” in part over opposition to the racial politics of Democratic officeholders of the time.
This time, Biden has said he’d consider having a Republican as his running mate. That’s most likely just a passing ploy to burnish his credentials as ‘’moderate.” If Biden’s the nominee, he’ll probably have to choose a younger woman for balance.
Like most things about the former senator and vice president, the idea of creating a bipartisan presidential ticket is not new. That was actually a national unity reelection strategy used successfully in 1864 by the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln.
He was assassinated a few weeks after retaking office. That turned a Republican administration over to his Democratic vice president, Andrew Johnson, another former senator and the first president to be impeached.
This story was originally published February 4, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Insurgent 70-somethings Trump, Sanders have upset Biden’s conventional apple cart."