Part I -- The Where Is Biden Question
Do you remember that classic puzzle book, Where's Waldo? It was first marketed in 1987 and placed Waldo, a tiny, oddly dressed, twenty-something figure amidst hundreds of other ordinary folks. The challenge was to find him in the crowd. Today the Waldo puzzle is still out there but, because in the latest version he is wearing a mask and practicing social distancing, he is not so hard to find.
The Where's Waldo? puzzle has recently lent its iconic title to a different question: "Where's Joe Biden?" Because Biden is the prospective Democratic presidential nominee, this question denotes more than a puzzle game. Some argue that, despite the present contagious environment, Joe Biden should be a lot more visible than at present. Why so?
Well, it might be true that our present Republican president, the all too easy to find Donald Trump, is in the process of self-destructing. But given the often fickle state of mind of the American voter, the Democrats would be ill advised to just rely on the Republicans to defeat themselves.
Part II -- So Just Where is Joe Biden?
Thanks to an in-depth article in the New York Times (NYT), we do in fact know where Joe is. He is presently hunkered down at his home in Wilmington, Delaware -- involuntarily cloistered in the basement due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, according to the NYT, Biden is not just twiddling his thumbs.
Joe Biden is in an information-gathering mode. He has daily briefings via conference calls with chief aids and other advisers. The daily topics are invariably the state of the national economy; the state of the national health; and electoral strategy "seeking to map out the fall campaign and a potential administration." Occupying only an occasional subject of discussion is the category of foreign policy.
In the process, Biden seems to be presenting the picture of a sober elder statesman to be contrasted with the present erratic occupant of the White House. Whether the cloistered elder statesman image will cut it in an agitated age of pandemic, economic collapse, and global warming is something that is worrying a lot of Democrats.
There can, of course, be no campaigning (although Biden has experimented with virtual town halls and round tables). Unlike Trump, Biden hasn't got a bully pulpit. Nor has he figured out how to replicate what can be called the Governor Cuomo phenomenon of drawing almost daily media attention to himself by the sheer public mastery of his circumstances. So, the Democratic leadership, never the most imaginative of pacesetters, seems to be content with casting a low-key virtual image.
There is another factor that keeps Biden secluded. The last thing the party leaders want is for the 77-year-old Biden to get sick ("rare outside visitors don masks and gloves as a safety measure"). A Corvid-crippled Joe would probably bring a Bernie Sanders candidacy back to center stage.
Part III -- A Man for Our Time?
It appears that behind the scenes, Joe Biden is not optimistic about the nation's near future, even if he wins the November election. "Before Mr. Biden entered his state of near-quarantine, he was telling associates that he feared the onset of a national catastrophe" in the form of "another Great Depression." This contrasts sharply with Donald Trump's prediction that the economy will soon "come roaring back." If the precipitous movement towards reopening the economy under Trump's leadership backfires and triggers a national reinfection, Biden's concern will prove much closer to the truth. Under such circumstances, he may very well win the presidency even if he never leaves his basement.
And then what? Can Joe Biden be a man for our time? Can he be the leader who saves us all in this crises-ridden hour? Considering Biden's political record, one has a hard time imagining this.
There is a recently published (January 2020) book entitled Joe Biden, Yesterday's Man. Written by Branko Marcetic, an investigative reporter and staff writer for Jacobin magazine, the book lays out Biden's political biography. It argues that Biden's political sensibility is that of a 1970s suburbanite. He sees his base as being a white middle class that has, in truth, shrunk and turned to the right. That process has, on occasion, led him to turn to the right (he has a record of sharp reversals on positions when subjected to heavy pressure). He has no problem taking corporate money (he told donors that with a Biden presidency "nothing fundamental will change for them"), and is the friend of many powerful lobbies. Biden is a politician whose lifelong self-image is that of a great conciliator -- someone who believes he can work with all groups. In the 1970s, he cut political deals with segregationists in Congress so as to "get things done." As Marcetic shows, what Biden got done at that time was putting a stop to busing as a method of desegregation. Biden seems to think he can now work with the Trump Republicans as well. Finally, as we will see below, he embraces most of the nation's immoral foreign policy.
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