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Joe Biden and Restoring the Old (Pre-Trump) Order cfif.org/v/index.php/co… via @CFIFonline
Obviously, Democratic voters want to replace a Republican president with a Democratic president. But they are especially dismayed by Trump — and some, driven by increasingly strident news coverage, seem to have gone nearly 'round the bend about him.
But for some center-left Democrats, the solution to the fact that Trump is president — might not be the Green New Deal or Medicare for All. It is to restore the pre-2017 order in American politics. And Barack Obama's vice president , is the physical embodiment of that old order.
Biden's unexpected choice of the 2017 events in Charlottesville, Virginia, as the theme of his announcement was a way of saying that something has gone terribly wrong in the United States and that he wants to return to the pre-Trump past.
Addressing a real or imagined moral crisis is one way for an opposition candidate to run against an incumbent president whose term has brought solid economic growth, low unemployment and higher wages.
Biden will be 78 years old on Inauguration Day 2021. That is the same age Trump would be upon leaving office, should he serve eight years. But Biden would be just beginning his presidency nearing the age of 80. That is totally uncharted territory in United States history.
Even if Democrats want to restore the old order, they might decide a younger candidate should do the job. They might also want a candidate without Biden's record of fizzling out in presidential campaigns. In his first run in 1988, Biden withdrew amid a plagiarism scandal
In his second run, in 2008, he quit after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses. So he has run twice and never even made it to the New Hampshire primary.
