I am supporting Joe Biden for president, and I still don’t know who his running mate will be.
I am not worried that Joe Biden will be beholden to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. There is no reason to believe that he will be beholden to anybody. He is nearing the end of his political career, not the beginning. He’s not some young Senator from a small state hoping to make a name for himself. His name has been made. This is legacy time.
I’m not worried that joe Biden is not always the smartest person in the room. Truthfully he never really overly impressed me. In his earlier years he had a propensity for repeating the wisdom of his others as his own. Oftentimes he would provide proper attribution, but that one time he didn’t it was a doozy. It killed his presidential bid at that time. I’d thought that, at least on the national front, we’d seen the last of Joe. It would have sunk a lesser man. On the other hand, his borrowed words were well chosen. All by all appearances he was sincere in his meaning, even if it had sometimes been enunciated better by others. If that is his greatest sin he’ll be a great president.
Joe Biden had been a senator for a long time. He certainly took some positions in the past that I can’t support today. Of course, some of them, he no longer supports either. I think that it is safe to say that throughout his career that while he has seldom been on the leading edge of anything, more importantly in my opinion, is that he has seldom if ever failed to come around to the more decent, empathetic and human point of view. The bottom line is that in spite of his ups and downs and the occasional, maybe a bit more than occasional, malapropism he has always returned to what seems to be his core: basic decency.
There is little doubt that he will do all that he thinks he should to placate the more extreme members of his party, whether you believe them to be Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or Tulsi Gabbard. However, people cowering at the thought of socialist takeover need not worry. He will also try to sooth the concerns of Mitch McConnell, if for some reason he’s still around, as well as whomever remains from that side of room.
It has never been in Joe Biden’s nature, at least politically, to stick it to people. I don’t think he’s about to start now. Deservedly or not he sees himself as someone who can bring people together and that is the legacy he is most likely to pursue.
Given that the choice this election year will be between a return to sanity or a hastening of the slide into a banana-republic totalitarianism, I don’t see a third party vote and the resultant gamble with the American electoral system, as an affordable luxury for 2020.
