In typical Biden style, the former vice president is eager to stake out the middle of the road, between ultra-predatory capitalism and solidarity with working-class people. At an October 2017 gathering in Alabama, he said: "Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn't like me saying that, but they are." Later, Biden elaborated on the theme when he told an audience at the Brookings Institution, "I don't think five hundred billionaires are the reason we're in trouble. The folks at the top aren't bad guys."
As Branko Marcetic pointed out in Jacobin last summer, "at a time when left-wing populism is increasingly accepted as the antidote to Trump and the GOP's nativist and corporate-friendly pitch, Biden stands as a remnant of precisely the sort of left-averse, triangulating Democratic politics that Hillary Clinton was relentlessly criticized for personifying."
Biden makes clear his distaste for the current progressive populist wave. "I know some want to single out big corporations for all the blame," he wrote in a blog post. "It is true that the balance has shifted too much in favor of corporations and against workers. But consumers, workers, and leaders have the power to hold every corporation to a higher standard, not simply cast business as the enemy or let industry off the hook."
One of the many industries that Biden has a long record of letting "off the hook" is the war business. In that mode, Biden did more than any other Democratic senator to greenlight the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
It wasn't just that Biden voted for the Iraq war on the Senate floor five months before it began. During the lead-up to that vote, in August 2002, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he presided over sham hearings refusing to allow experts who opposed an invasion to get any words in edgewise while a cavalcade of war hawks testified in the national spotlight.
"It is difficult to over-estimate the critical role Biden played in making the tragedy of the Iraq war possible," Middle East studies professor Stephen Zunes wrote. "More than two months prior to the 2002 war resolution even being introduced, in what was widely interpreted as the first sign that Congress would endorse a U.S. invasion of Iraq, Biden declared on August 4 that the United States was probably going to war. In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he orchestrated a propaganda show designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the America public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing."
Joe Biden's friendly T.V. persona appeals to many. He smiles well and has a gift of gab. Most political journalists in the mass media like him. He's an apt frontrunner for the military-industry complex and the corporate power structure that it serves. Whether Biden can win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination will largely depend on how many voters don't know much about his actual record.
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