Douglas Rooks: ‘Fighting Joe’ the answer to Biden woes

William Butler Yeats, the greatest English-speaking poet of the 20th century, foretold our own political crisis in “The Second Coming,” his penetrating depiction of Ireland a century ago: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

The “best” now are the Democratic Party elite, who even before the June 27 debate was over, were plotting to railroad Joe Biden out of the race.

The big donors and the party professionals never really accepted Biden, “Scranton Joe,” so different than safer Democrats who preceded him. Since Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, no Democratic nominee had really challenged the plutocratic ethos of our time, where the rich get richer and public services are relentlessly downgraded.

Biden is unabashedly pro-labor, devoted to the interests of working families. He broke the power of Big Pharma by capping drug prices and achieved – with slender congressional majorities – the first major public infrastructure investments in 40 years.

The elites failed in their impossible, undemocratic coup attempt, but still sulk that Biden can’t possibly win; in fact, he’s the only Democrat who can.

He has an enviable record – hardly unblemished, no president’s is – both at home and abroad, and in that respect is in a stronger position than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, whom no one suggested shouldn’t run for reelection.

And the one Democrat who was defeated – Carter – was out of touch with his own party. Despite Democratic majorities in House and Senate, he didn’t produce a single piece of meaningful pro-worker legislation.

Yes, we have the “age issue,” unfairly applied to Biden but not Trump. Biden campaigns much as he has since the 1988 presidential race.

He commits gaffes, mixes up words and is sometimes plagued by his life-long stutter, a plausible explanation for his fumbles in the first of two scheduled debates.

Even so, Biden’s record and abilities are so far superior to his incompetent predecessor that he should be able to “beat him badly,” as Bernie Sanders put it. 

The elites aren’t going to stop sulking, but Biden has a path to political recovery, paved by none other than Harry Truman in 1948.

Truman, like Biden, was dismissed by the elites of his day. His biggest problem was that he wasn’t Franklin Roosevelt, the only president who could ever be elected four times, thanks to the later Republican-inspired 22nd Amendment creating a lifetime two-term limit.

Roosevelt was a wealthy, patrician “traitor to his class” beloved by ordinary people. Truman ran a failed clothing business, and was so little consulted by FDR as vice president that he knew nothing about the atomic bomb program when inaugurated in April 1945.

Although the fictional “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline ordered up by Chicago Tribune Publisher Robert McCormick – the Rupert Murdoch of his day –  remains iconic, few remember how desperate Truman’s situation was after the party conventions.

Republicans united behind Thomas E. Dewey, their nominee from 1944, while the Democrats split three ways, just as they had before the Civil War in 1860.

Henry Wallace, another Roosevelt vice president dumped in favor of Truman, ran against him from the left. Strom Thurmond ran as a segregationist “Dixiecrat” after the Democratic convention approved a strong civil rights platform.

Somehow, Truman won enough working class votes throughout the country to beat Dewey, “the man on the wedding cake,” despite losing four states in the then-Democratic “Solid South.”

That is Biden’s pathway as well. We got a glimpse of it Friday, just before the campaign briefly shut down after the attempt on Trump’s life the following day.

At a vibrant rally in Detroit, traditional launching point for Democratic campaigns, Biden was fully engaged, taking the battle to Trump instead of shying away, as he has before.

More importantly, he energized the crowd with his pledge, for the first time, to slap a 25% minimum tax on billionaires, who he said now pay 8.2% – less than blue collar workers with decent-paying jobs.

Corporate moguls are – or were – happy enough to launch company DEI programs, but they absolutely don’t want to pay more in taxes, let alone recognize unions. All that could change if Biden is reelected with congressional majorities.

This can’t be an on- and off-again thing. Biden will have to keep hitting these notes at every campaign stop and interview.

But he doesn’t face the odds Truman did. There’s only an odd-ball third party candidate who will, come Election Day, get very few votes.

And if he can’t have the DNC behind him, he can make an issue of that, too. Going to the people is a time-tested, and a winning electoral strategy.

Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter since 1984. He is the author of four books, most recently a biography of U.S. Chief Justice Melville Fuller, and welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Douglas Rooks: ‘Fighting Joe’ the answer to Biden woes