Joe Biden is taking one more shot at the presidency.
On Thursday morning, after an excruciatingly long period of unofficial campaigning, Biden announced in a video that he would run for president in 2020, joining an already-crowded field of 20 Democratic candidates.
For months, Biden has lurked in the background of the early campaign cycle, sitting close to the top of nearly every national poll even without a formal announcement that he was running, jockeying for the frontrunner title with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Biden’s presence in the race, however, gives the Democratic primary a clear option that it did not have before: making no progress whatsoever.
Concrete rumors of Biden’s announcement leaked on April 19 in a report in the Atlantic, in which anonymous staffers dished that the former Vice President thought that a firmly centrist campaign would be a shoe-in for the nomination. Biden’s campaign represents a clear chance for the Democratic Party to remain firmly rooted in the past. The problem is, didn’t we just try that?
Biden will undoubtedly run on a platform emphasizing his long, long career in national politics. It’s true: Biden has served in multiple executive and legislative offices, and is certainly qualified to serve as president by almost any traditional metric. The problem, of course, is that much of that long career was spent advancing firmly centrist or even conservative policies like ending desegregation busing, aggressive crime bills and voting for the Iraq War.
To top it all off, other
campaign insiders report that the entire venture is a complete clusterfuck.
Per Time magazine:
Biden is—like every Democratic candidate—preferable to Trump. But if the Democratic Party is at all interested in moving itself and the country forward, we won’t even get close to having to choose between the two.
https://splinternews.com/here-we-joe-again-1832881793
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