Remember when Hillary Clinton was going to be president? At one time—only a few months ago—the former Secretary of State’s ascendancy to the Democratic nomination was taken as a given. Elizabeth Warren wasn’t running, left-wing firebrand andVermont Senator Bernie Sanders was a sideshow, and Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee were less entertaining sideshows.
Now Sanders has become a more serious threat, raising nearly as much money as Clinton and polling extremely well in early primary states Iowa and New Hampshire. Clinton is still the frontrunner nationwide, but her approval ratings among the general public have been dropping into the negative, possibly because of the steady drip ofdamaging stories coming out of the emails she stored on a private server.
If the contest for the Democratic nomination is beginning to look like a real campaign and not just a Clinton coronation, it’s fair to ask, Why not Joe Biden? The sitting vice president is a big name, he’s popular—more popular than any other candidate, by some measures—and he’s got the experience that would make him a contender in a way that O’Malley and Chafee are not.
The only thing that’s standing in the way of a Biden candidacy is Biden himself, who reportedly has not made up his mind about running. A Biden advisor told CNN that the Vice President is «rounding third base» when it comes to making a decision, and CBS reported on Saturday that such a decision could come in the next «seven to ten days.» (Biden insiders told CBS that even if he did run, it’s likely he’d sit out the October 13 Democratic presidential debate.)
What would his campaign look like? Would he make a good president if he beat out Clinton, Sanders, and the rest of the GOP field? For the answers to all these questions and more, I turned to Professor Michael Munger of Duke University. Munger is the former chair of Duke’s political science program and current head of the joint UNC/DukePhilosophy, Politics, and Economics program. He has been an economist at the Federal Trade Commission, an NAACP Image Award recipient, and ran for governor of North Carolina one time, so he knows a thing or two about politics and campaigning. He and I spoke over the phone last week about Joe Biden’s long, winding road toward the presidency.
VICE: What do you think the chances are that Joe Biden is actually going to run for president?
Michael Munger: He’s considered it a bunch of times; he’s done it before. I think there’s an excellent chance that he will, and I see him working himself up to that.
He’s sort of already acting like he’s running for president, but if you ask him he’ll be like, «I’m still thinking about it.»
Sure, but that’s one of the tests of being a hipster.
What do you mean?
You have to deny it. «Of course I’m not a hipster!» So it’s clearly a sign.
Watch our interview with New York Senator Chuck Schumer:
How would Biden pitch himself to both the Democratic establishment as well as the voters?
Biden looks in the mirror and says, «Don’t you ever die. It’s my turn! It’s my damn turn! I’ve been a good guy. I was willing to sit back, but Clinton botched it, she shouldn’t have deleted those emails, and… OK, I’ll do it.» No one is actually asking him to do it; he’s sort of assigning himself to do it.
Biden is actually pretty conservative by the standards of what Democratic activists are looking for. He was instrumental in escalating the war on drugs and the civil asset forfeiture that so many people now associate with over-policing. If I’m in charge of opponent research I’m thinking, «There is a bunch of stuff I can say about Biden.»
Still, his argument would be his electability. That would not appeal to the activists on the left, but he has a chance of beating the Republicans. Hillary Clinton’s negative rating is over 50 percent. The rule is, you can’t win if it’s over 40. So Biden’s biggest positives are Clinton’s negatives.
One of the reasons that Obama had an easy time [winning the 2008 presidential election] was that he didn’t have any kind of record. Obviously the problem Clinton has is that she has a record. At this point his two selling points are, «I have a lot of experience, and I’m not Hillary Clinton.»
Photo via The White House on Flickr
It seems like the perception of Biden is that of this guy who’s always around, is genuine, and is smiling.
Which is not a terrible description of the sort of person people would want as president after the previous two. So having a president who seems like an experienced adult, who’s not corrupt, who is able to understand and work with the complexities of the legislative process, that might seem attractive. Biden’s claim wouldn’t be that he is a Washington outsider, but that he has been in the atmosphere a long time and wasn’t corrupted by it. So yes he is your uncle and he cares about you, so that would make a good president. And when Biden gives a speech, people like it. That’s what Hillary Clinton doesn’t have.
I think you can say the same about a bunch of the Republican candidates. Jeb Bush isn’t exactly Mr. Personality…
It’s hilarious that his campaign slogan is «Jeb!» with an exclamation mark.
That’s probably the one exclamation mark he’s used in his life.
Many of us try to compensate, yes.
Will Biden be able to maintain his air of likability if he ran?
He has a problem: He can’t shut up. He always says one or two more sentences than he should. Famously, he said the thing about Obama being «articulate and clean» in 2007. That was bad. Those are basically code words that racists use. You can say he didn’t really mean it, but he just shouldn’t have said it.
Would he try to argue that he’s been a behind-the-scenes player in the Obama administration?
That’s the story that he’s going to tell. «I did a bunch of stuff you don’t know about.» The administration didn’t do anything so he can’t have done that much, there’s nothing for him to claim secret credit for. The Obama administration has been this brooding Hamlet.
What do you mean by that?
«Well, should we do this? Should we do that? I don’t know what we’re going to do in Syria. We don’t have a strategy…» Biden can’t say, «Well, behind the scenes I was meeting to form a strategy against ISIS,» because the president said there wasn’t one! I myself do admire that because Obama honestly admitted, «This is complicated and it would be worse if we do something stupid, and if you don’t believe that look at my predecessor.» But that view’s not widely held. I’m a weirdo. I have come to like President Obama much, much more in the last two years. What I like about him is he has tended to say, «Look, we could really screw this up; let’s be careful.» That isn’t really a strategy as much as it is saying, «I’m not trying to make a mistake. Because there are a bunch of things we could do to make things much worse.»
In your opinion, what is the fundamental, three-sentence job of the president?
It’s to represent the encompassing interest of the nation as a whole in the face of the institution of Congress, which is fiercely trying to represent all of the particular interests of large corporations and other organized interest groups. The job of the president is to be the grown-up and say «No» and to do it in a way that argues to the public, «Here’s why doing that would be a mistake.»
Do former VPs tend to make good presidents?
We haven’t had one in quite a while. Lyndon Johnson took office because Kennedy was killed. Johnson’s great strength was his experience as Senate Majority Leader—he actually knew how to get legislation through. That was not Obama’s experience. Then the more recent vice president who became president is George H. W. Bush. George H.W. Bush was head of the CIA and he had a bunch of jobs in government. He did a brilliant job of running the first Gulf War: He won the war in less than 100 hours and said, «Let’s go home.» Which is pretty cool. I don’t think we appreciated it it until we saw how much harm an idiot could do.
On VICE News: Emails Reveal How Far Clinton Was Willing to Go to Promote Ex-Ambassador’s Interests
It seems like you’re saying being a good president will get you no thanks but being a bad president will get you a lot of flack very quickly.
I blame voters. We choose people who are self-confident. Trump, that’s actually all he’s got. He’s almost a perfect natural experiment: This is a person with absolutely no relevant no experience of any kind. All he has is a total absence of self-doubt. People say, «Wow that’s really cool! That guy is so confident!» It’s remarkable that we choose people for this job without looking at the experience where they have progressively shown their abilities.
Who merges what the qualities one needs to be a president and to be an effective president and of one that is the elected president?
It’s a combination of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Obama gave remarkable speeches but was shockingly incapable of delivering any of it. Clinton had an ability to see where the middle was and co-opt in a way that just drove Republicans mad. It would work, and that’s the way politics should work. You should work to the middle, not to the extremes.
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