Joe Biden is Finished -and Cory Booker is the Main Beneficiary
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Joe Biden is finished. The allegations of Lucy Flores and her undisputed credibility have destroyed the chances of Biden for the Democratic Presidential nomination even before his announcement.
It isn’t just the revulsion Democratic voters will feel regarding the acts Flores alleges. Her statement is just the latest in a long history of alleged stories about unsolicited, unwanted, and inappropriate touching of women by Biden, even in public places.
All this will not just make Joe Biden an object of disgust for voters in the “Me, too” era. It gives rise to ridicule of Biden as well. He is no longer America’s Uncle Joe. He is America’s Dirty Old Man, a laughingstock for Saturday Night Live.
The political damage of the Flores allegations has been magnified by the appalling insensitivity of Biden’s denials. In effect, he is saying that he did not understand that women would find his touching to be unwelcome and offensive.
Didn’t Joe Biden realize that Donald Trump is the only male political figure who can get a pass from the public on offensive touching of women?
Forget it. When you become an object of ridicule in politics, you’re finished. To paraphrase James Carville, Joe Biden is toast.
And the main beneficiary of the political demise of Joe Biden will be New Jersey’s Senator Cory Booker.
Biden has been the overwhelming choice of center-left Democrats throughout the nation. When he withdraws from the race, these voters will need a new home. They will not be comfortable in the Progressive Democratic ultra-left campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Nor will they feel at home in the increasingly culturally leftist campaign of Kamala Harris, who has embraced the “joys of marijuana” and derided the Knights of Columbus, a highly respected mainstream Catholic organization.
There are two possible center-left options other than Booker.
The first is Beto O’Rourke. He has, however been a Democratic rock star without substance. Indeed, his emphasis of style over substance makes him highly vulnerable to the type of disparagement Walter Mondale utilized against Gary Hart in 1984: “Where’s the beef?”
The second is Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. She indeed has all the qualities to make an excellent president. Klobuchar, however, lacks Booker’s fundraising capacity and his personal network outside his home state. She would, however, make a superb running mate for Cory Booker. A Booker -Klobuchar ticket is a winner.
Booker has been laying the groundwork for success in his presidential campaign in two ways.
First, he has expertly fashioned his issue positions in a center-left manner. By making his “Baby Bond” proposal, which is a race neutral way of subsidizing the education of poverty affected children, he has avoided any political pressure to embrace racial reparations, which is a potentially destructive issue for the Democrats in the general election campaign. And although at one time he supported “Medicare for All,” which could lead to multi-trillion dollar deficits, he moderated his position on this as well in his campaign announcement, supporting a continuing role for private health insurance companies.
Second, he has smartly tactically focused on the February 29 South Carolina primary, which precedes the Super Tuesday primary on March 3. A Booker South Carolina victory will go a long way towards his gaining frontrunner status in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes. In the Palmetto State, Booker has already recruited excellent campaign staff and garnered a remarkable list of impressive endorsements. The South Carolina Democratic electorate is highly center-left and most receptive to a compelling center-left message like that of Booker. And he had a highly auspicious start to his South Carolina campaign with his CNN South Carolina town hall appearance last Thursday.
Booker’s early efforts have not yet manifested themselves by a higher standing in the Democratic national presidential nomination polls. He trails Biden, Sanders, and Warren on the basis of name recognition and Harris and O’Rourke due to their representing California and Texas, respectively, much more populous states than Booker’s home state of New Jersey. And as center-left Democrats withdraw their support from the disintegrating possible Biden candidacy and shift their support to Booker, Cory’s standing in the polls should rise.
There are two more points to be made regarding Booker, one related to his personal past behavior and the other being a foreign policy issue for the forthcoming 2020 presidential general election campaign.
The first was an incident on New Year’s Eve, 1984 involving the 15 year old high school student Booker in which he groped a female friend’s breast two times after the two of them had kissed. The woman pushed his hand away and Booker made no further sexual advances towards her. Instead, he maintained a friendship with her afterwards and revealed the incident not under political compulsion but instead in a self-rebuking article he wrote as a student at Stanford in 1992. His voluntary revelation of the event, the facts and circumstances surrounding it, and the absence of any further such incidents involving Booker will result in no political damage to him from this episode.
As a general election candidate, Booker will have to respond to his unwise support and vote for former President Obama’s executive agreement with Iran, which reduced economic sanctions against this totalitarian regime and did not foreclose the opportunity of this terrorist regime from obtaining in the future a nuclear weapon. Donald Trump unilaterally abrogated this agreement, and his action has been one of the very few successes of his foreign policy. The positive results of this particular Trump policy was documented by New York Times Never-Trump columnist Bret Stephens in his column of March 29, 2019, “The Foreign Policy Fiasco That Wasn’t”(https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/opinion/iran-us-foreign-policy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share). Booker can mitigate the political damage from his unwise vote by pledging during the campaign that he will not rescind Trump’s action in this regard.
My all-time favorite sports executive, Branch Rickey, the former chief executive officer of the Brooklyn Dodgers, once said “Luck is the residue of design.” Cory Booker did not cause the self-destructive downfall of Joe Biden, but he certainly adeptly set the stage to benefit from it. And that time is fast approaching. Booker-Klobuchar is a winning 2020 ticket.
Alan J. Steinberg served as Regional Administrator of Region 2 EPA during the administration of former President George W. Bush and as Executive Director of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission under former New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman.
It’s total BS and a cockamamie story that corporatist media pundits like you are making up about people in this country not wanting what Bernie and Warren are all about: to save our human race from destruction of the planet, to have truly affordable single payer health care, to get out from under crushing student loan debt, to stop the coddling of the super wealthy and the billionaire bankers and corporate scammers who are impoverishing most everyone else.
The reality is that the majority of US voters want all these things, that there is nothing extreme whatsoever about what Bernie and Warren want to bring us, and the so-called centrist (i.e., corporate toady) candidates are for business as usual in our slide from survival.
You are quite literally insane.
Would you care to articulate what I wrote in particular prompted you to write that?
free healthcare doesnt work, free tuition doesnt work. The notion that big companies are impoverishing the lower class is a false narrative. Check your facts before you make such statements
You just made blanket statements from an ideological point of view.
The problem when people like you write well reasoned nuanced analysis is that it completely sails over the heads of the lazy minds who are pre-programmed to think we cannot do certain things like universal health care. Europe has been doing it for decades. Affordable post high school education, California was the envy of the world in its public education system all the way through it’s University system which was free until the 60’s when Ronald Reagan assumed office of Governor of California and changed the course of the state’s higher education system. In his eight years, he cut state funding for college and universities and laid the foundation for a tuition-based system. Since then California California has spent more on prisons and prison construction than it has spent on all education, K-12 and all the university systems in the state. You think there might be some cause and effect in how we gutted the public school and higher learning in this state at the same time used the cost savings to put more people in jail. Yeah an absurd argument as educating your population may not exactly prevent them from future criminalality but at the same time gutting public education didn’t exactly save the average tax payer a nickle as that money went elsewhere. Now when leaders say we can offer affordable education the lazy minds say we can’t afford it. Meanwhile we spend billions putting people in jail and holding them on the tax payers dime.
Imagine picking the “joys of marijuana” thing as your go-to critique of Kamala Harris while being as high as the author of this slop clearly was
gee the New Jersey newspaper thinks the New Jersey candidate has the best shot? who would have guessed
Wrong again, Alan. Trump is the beneficiary. The moderate Dems will be just like the former Reagan Republicans. Booker goes nowhere. His hypocrisy and phoniness will be exposed. Plus, he’s from Jersey. We never had a good political national brand and Christie made it much worse. Time to retire Alan.
The buffoon Joe Biden’s backlog of bad behavior belatedly bit him badly on his butt!
Not a chance-anti cannabis Democrat candidate biden can get nominated….maybe last time but those days are over ..again u cant get within 50 miles of wh without cannabis legalization as a Democrat…and possible a Republican.