Yesterday's Man. Branko Marcetic
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Lest his vote for tax cuts suggest Biden wasn’t serious about cutting the deficit, he also put his support behind the Gramm-Rudman bill, a budget-balancing measure that split the Democrats. Mandating a balanced federal budget by 1991, the legislation required the president to make spending cuts across the board (with some exceptions) if Congress failed to do so, leading to years of austerity for the nation’s cities. Timid, uncertain, and on the back foot with another election looming, Democrats landed all over the place on Gramm-Rudman, with stalwart liberal Ted Kennedy backing it to prove he was serious about wrangling the deficit and neoliberal Gary Hart, trying to prove he wasn’t a compassionless automaton, opposing it. Staying true to his new beliefs, Biden voted “aye.”28
Biden may have told himself his evolution was necessary to update Roosevelt’s legacy for an era of rising anti-government sentiment and a future where Democrats believed “that the New Deal is old but that the commitments of the New Deal are real,” as he put it. This is certainly how Democrats would come to justify the “triangulation” of the Clinton era, as the party took up Biden’s victory-through-right-wing-camouflage approach as their ethos.29
But maybe there was another way. While Biden reacted to conservatism’s ascent by doing his best to shed the label of “liberal,” five hundred miles to the north, a middle-aged activist and documentarian named Bernie Sanders became mayor of the largest city of the then-conservative state of Vermont while calling himself a “socialist.” Like Biden, he too adapted his politics to the mood of the era. But instead of railing against government, fearmongering about the deficit, and relying on the largesse of a corporate class whose worldview he would come to adopt, Sanders launched an anti-tax crusade from the left, seeking to shift Burlington’s tax burden from put-upon property owners to businesses and the rich while coordinating with a grassroots movement of activists to fight for the interests of working families and the poor. As Mayor Sanders tussled with the painful cuts imposed on his city by Reagan, Biden, and the rest of Congress, he fought a pitched war with the local conservative establishment, rallying a coalition of voters—and, crucially, nonvoters—to his side and ultimately transforming his city into a bastion of progressivism controlled by a coalition of like-minded aldermen.
Sanders’s success in Burlington during the 1980s serves as a glance back down a road ultimately not traveled. As Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party doubled down on their rightward drift in the years ahead, Sanders’s achievements suggested a way other than the Third Way might have been possible. Instead Biden helped drag a dazed Democratic Party over to his side of the political spectrum.
Moving the Party
In September 1987, as the Senate Judiciary Committee took a break from grilling Reagan’s latest Supreme Court nominee, the ultraconservative Robert Bork who was ultimately defeated in a close Senate vote, Joe Biden, his wife, his sister, and her husband filed into its hearing room, suddenly packed with dozens of cameras, microphones, and reporters. Three and a half months after officially announcing his candidacy for president of the United States, he was now officially ending it.30
Biden had run a campaign vastly better financed than almost all of his rivals and had charmed both the Democratic donor class and media establishment with his Kennedyesque aura and centrist bona fides. While he hadn’t lit up the polls, it was still early, and with none of the other candidates catching fire, it wasn’t hard to imagine the young, exciting candidate carving out at least some chunk of votes in the first primary contests in early 1988.
Instead, his campaign had disintegrated over the course of eleven days as a series of personal scandals turned Biden’s name into a hack columnist’s punch line for years to come, closing the door on another presidential run for decades more. He could at least take solace in one victory, however: though Biden failed to win the presidency, he’d helped make sure the next Democrat who did would be one made in his image.
If the Democrats had been demoralized by their last two election losses, then nothing could have prepared them for 1984. Despite a recession that plagued his first year in office and rounds of unpopular budget cuts, Reagan cruised to victory in one of American history’s biggest landslides, winning forty-nine states and 525 electoral votes. His opponent, Walter Mondale, a moderate liberal who ran an uninspiring campaign calling for a tax hike to pay down deficits, managed only thirteen electoral votes.
“For 13 years, I’ve been trying to move the Democratic Party off the course it’s been on,” he told the Wilmington Morning News a year after Reagan’s reelection. “I said what nobody else was saying: That interest groups had a stranglehold on us, and, number two, there’s a whole generation of Americans ready to move…. Now everybody says those things.”31
Other Democrats were toting the same line. “We’ve got to propose innovative solutions to problems and get away from government intervention,” said Dave Nagle, chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, in the wake of the loss. “We have to recast the old values, sort of begin to find a national vision,” Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt told CBS Morning News as he sat shoulder to shoulder with Biden, explaining that that “vision” included “fiscal responsibility” and “the budget.” “I think Democrats lost the middle class,” Biden added, “as a consequence of forgetting the middle class doesn’t belong to any particular interest group.” 32
Biden had been complaining about these “interest groups” and “special interests,” typically contrasted with his beloved “middle class,” for about as long as he’d been complaining about the party’s direction.
But who exactly were these shadowy entities? Franklin Roosevelt, too, had attacked “special groups” and “special interests” in the 1930s. But while Roosevelt meant the “unscrupulous money changers” and the anti–New Deal “minority in business and finance” whose minions “swarm through the lobbies of the Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington,” Biden meant something very different.33
“Minorities and other vested interests are sick and tired of hollow promises,” he had said in 1971 after his very first win. Seven years later, he would bellow at these “interest groups” who refused to do away with government programs that benefited them; he now blamed these groups for the runaway spending he sought to control. Now, as he toured the country preaching his vision, Biden urged Democrats to proclaim that special interest groups came second to the national interest. In Alabama, his denunciation of such interests (“warmly received,” wrote the Wilmington Morning News) was followed by his insistence that the state had confronted and largely worked out its racist demons.
Elsewhere, as in Delaware, he softened these attacks. “All the talk about us having to shed ourselves of control of special interests misses the point,” he told seven hundred of the state’s Democrats. “In fact, we don’t have a problem with labor. We need labor…. I’m proud to be in a party that has garnered the support of the majority of black Americans.”34
In other words, whether defending or attacking them—and by this point, it was almost always the latter—“special interests” were the diverse constituencies that had flocked to the Democrats: union members, African Americans, feminist women, gays, environmentalists, and any others whose image didn’t square with the “middle-class guy” Biden and others increasingly viewed as the typical voter. With two simple words, their participation in the political process and struggle for the rights and welfare of themselves and others like them had been cast as suspect, even corrupting.
Where once the tyranny