The New Yorker Radio Hour - The State of the Biden Campaign

Episode Date: July 10, 2020

Joe Biden all but locked up the Democratic Presidential nomination just as the coronavirius crisis began triggering national lockdowns. Now he faces an economic disaster and a public-health emergency that prevent traditional campaigning, which may help Biden if swing voters blame the incumbent for the state of the nation. But Biden faces his own heavy baggage: admissions of inappropriate touching of women, an accusation of assault, and a blemished record on racial justice. Amy Davidson Sorkin, Eric Lach, Katy Waldman, and Jelani Cobb reflect on the Biden campaign and on the candidate’s past leadership. Cobb, who discusses Biden’s history with police reform and the 1994 Crime Bill, says that one thing is almost certain: whatever gaffes that the gaffe-prone candidate may utter, the Trump Administration will create a bigger headline five minutes later. Plus, David Remnick interviews the South Carolina congressman James Clyburn, who is the most senior African-American in Congress. Clyburn helped Joe Biden win the critical South Carolina primary, and he defends Biden’s controversial record on issues of racial justice. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Four months out from the presidential election, Joe Biden is leading big in the polls, and his campaign just announced record fundraising halls. So it may be a little hard to remember that just a few months ago, Biden was considered all but dead in this race. The early primaries went really badly for him, fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire. fifth in New Hampshire, and second in Nevada.

You know, the press is ready to declare people dead quickly. But we're alive and we're coming back and we're going to win. Then Biden won South Carolina, the primary he desperately needed. And with a string of victories on Super Tuesday, he just about wrapped up the nomination just as the country was starting to shut down. The presidential campaign since then has been, what, unprecedented? And maybe that doesn't begin to describe the strangeness of a campaign conducted from backyards and rec rooms. To understand how the Biden campaign has handled all these events,

I'm going to call on a few of our experts. Hi. How are you doing? Very, very good. Where are you? First up, Amy Davidson Sorkin, who writes a great deal about politics. Amy, one of the distinguishing features that we never would have anticipated about this campaign is that it's taking place during a pandemic. And how is that effect? Biden's campaign in particular? Sometimes people say, well, will COVID-19 get in the way of Biden's larger agenda? I think it's going to be hard to see that larger agenda divorced from COVID-19 because it is so

integrated in a lot of, you know, democratic priorities like health care, like protections for workers, but also because it's going to be the first big test of his presidency if he is president. Do you think that there's evidence that the dual crises of the pandemic and what we can now call the Black Lives Matter moment? Do you think this is in any way radicalized Joe Biden? He obviously ran as a moderate. He ran in his deepest argument was with Bernie Sanders, but not only Bernie Sanders. And now he's saying that the level of his ambition for his presidency exceeds that of Franklin Roosevelt's. Yeah, I mean, I think he's coming to terms with the idea that Obama was not enough.

But I wonder a little bit about how politics happens at this moment. I mean, so much is going to depend on what happens in the Senate. You know, Biden's self-perception has always been of somebody who can work with any Senate. You know, he thinks of his contribution to Obamacare and to, you know, the Recovery Act after the earlier financial crisis as being the guy who was sent to Capitol Hill to talk people into signing up and bringing people on board. That's not going to be... What happens when those dreams of reconciliation smash into the reality of Mitch McConnell? I think they already have smashed. I think it was a revelation for Biden when his son became a target

in impeachment. He thought these were the guys he could always talk to. So I think it's much more dependent who controls the Senate, then an earlier version of Biden would have thought. An earlier version of Biden might have thought, even if it's not my Senate, it's still my Senate. But this is not going to be that if the Democrats don't control the Senate, so much of what he can even accomplish just in a logistical way, even the basic steps you would need to fight the pandemic or deal as consequences with some basic level of decency are going to depend on whether the Democrats win the Senate. And we're going to have to see how that goes. It's going to depend a lot on state's individual experience of the pandemic as well.

Amy Davidson-Sorkin, thank you so much. Thank you, David. All the best. Well, you know, this is the most unusual campaign, I think, in modern history. Staff writer Eric Latch followed the Biden campaign through the early primaries. So, Eric, I have to say we're at a point where the Democrats, wisely or not, are talking about a potential landslide. And all I can remember is, how did Joe Biden actually become the nominee? He was trailing and trailing

and suddenly came South Carolina and everything completely, as Donald Trump would say, magically changed. Biden, when he launched his campaign way back, way, way back in 2019, his pitch was that Trump was an aberration. that the country had to move on from Trump and get back to the business of what it was. And he was much more willing than most of the rest of the field that he was up against

to sort of say, okay, look, there's a place for policy discussion that we can talk about these big things. But the key first job that we have to do is beat Donald Trump. And primary voters seem to respond to that. And yet here we are in the middle of the summer and tens and tens of thousands of people are out on the street demonstrating for week after week about racial justice by extension about income inequality, about unequal outcomes in health care,

all kinds of things. We're in a moment that's marked by really transformational thinking, it would seem. And the standard bearer of this is someone who is about as moderate as moderate can be. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, the case for Biden

is that a lot of the unrest is obviously directed at the man in the White House on the one hand. And on the other hand, that he's already kind of navigated an extremely difficult stretch of campaigning through which he had to sort of justify himself in the face of calls for Medicare for all or a Green New Deal or forgiving student debt. The Democratic primary was dominated by these bold policy discussions in which Biden was acting much more as the kind of check on the rest of the field. And he got through it. You know, he survived that. And in some ways, that test was sort of harder, you know, in the context of rallying his party, rallying sort of segments of his party to him than maybe what will face in terms of a kind of policy

or issue discussion in the general election. Barack Obama told Joe Biden, apparently, keep your speeches short, keep him on the teleprompter, make sure your tweets are concise, In other words, play it really rhetorically safe. And obviously, you know, Biden's a guy whose mouth has gotten him in trouble many times over the course of a long career. And last year he had moments where he, you know, was wistful about his time working with segregationists in the Senate. You know, there's that line about poor kids are just as smart as white kids and sort of just awkward, weird, offensive language that sometimes rolls out of his mouth. but the voters seem to not really care about that. Did the terror read matter affect him badly?

That was happening the end of March, just as both the voters in Super Tuesday and other early primary states were kind of swinging the race to Biden, and then the pandemic hit, and it just was all sort of swept aside. I mean, there was a moment where it seemed like that was going to be a very difficult situation for Biden to address. And the reporting that was done around her story complicated it in ways that, you know, are still debated in certain circles. But in other ways, he just kind of Biden was able to just move on. And I've never thought of politics is cold and antiseptic. I've always thought about connecting with people. And I said shaking hands, hands on the shoulder,

a hug, encouragement. And boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset. And I get it. Katie Walden writes mostly about books and culture, but a while back she took a keen interest in how Joe Biden is portrayed in the media. Now, Katie, you've compared Biden's public persona to that of a messy Labrador. Could you expand on what you mean by that? Yeah, I just meant that he has this sort of affectionate and exuberant quality that is also a little bit clumsy. And so it's very hard to criticize him because his well intentions are so evident. You know, when you say, say that he's clumsy, are we crossing over into the area where his clumsiness and his body language and the way he is with women is part of the conversation? Because a lot of people took

a lot of offense at that. I mean, he wants to present as a very empathic man who feels other people's pain and can identify with them. And so being harmless is a big part of that persona. Unfortunately, if you're not actually picking up on the discontent, that women are feeling in your presence, you're not being very empathic. And I think in clinging to this identification, this self-identification, as a very kind and empathic man, he's actually not allowing other women's discomfort to be voiced or heard. So it was kind of the collision of the Uncle Joe stuff with the accusations of inappropriate touching that surfaced that really caused at best a disconnect.

Yes, I think so. So empathy has been a central pitch of the Biden campaign. What does that mean? Why is that? And how effective is that, do you think, as a political tool in this particular campaign against Donald Trump? I mean, he's always inspired a lot of sympathy in part because of his really tragic personal past. He lost his first wife and his infant daughter in a car accident back in the 70s. His son died of cancer recently.

I think that was 2015. And he is really, really good at sort of inhabiting the role of the national mourner as someone who mirrors and reflects and expresses the suffering and the sorrow of lots of different types of people. And so what you have in this campaign against Donald Trump is someone who used to be kind of the lovable buffoon now ascending into a much more solemn and dignified voice of, all that turmoil. And so it's really interesting to see how he is going to just switch gears from one to the other. Well, exactly. In the last three and a half years, the Me Too movement and now

Black Lives Matter have reshaped so much of our culture from standards of behavior to broader awareness of inequalities and racism, obviously. Is it your sense that Biden, at his age, temperamentally, fits into this cultural moment? in an effective political way? I mean, in the obvious ways, he's really behind the ball and the Me Too stuff demonstrated that clearly. But he did budge a little bit, and in the same way, he has a bit of a checkered past

with racial justice, I think, with his support for the crime bill. And yet, as Obama's trusty right-hand man, I think he transcended some of that, and he does seem to be sort of shifting leftward in ways that a lot of progressives probably find promising. Katie Waldman, thanks so much.

Thanks. The pain is raw. The pain is real. The President of the United States must be part of the solution, not the problem. But this president today is part of the problem. It accelerates it. Jolani Cobb is a staff writer and a professor of journalism at Columbia University. Jolani, how would you rate Biden's response to the nationwide protests against racism and police brutality?

You know, for one, I'd written, you know, previously that if you were kind of drawing up your ideal candidate, it would not be someone that has the history he has with the 1994 crime bill. And, you know, there are a lot of people, obviously, certainly during the primaries, you heard a lot of criticism of him about that. But, you know, Biden has other strengths that he has really, you know, showcased particularly of late. One is the statement that he made on the 4th of July and thereabouts and around 4th of July, where by my county used the term systemic racism three times in a very passionate and direct, you know, statement about what's been going on, the tenor of the country. And, you know, talk with a few people on the campaign about this. And, you know, they've been pointing out things about the 94 crime bill that have not been, you know, the center of that. conversation. They've been really emphasizing the assault weapons ban and really, really saying that the thing that they want the public to be more aware of was the police department reform aspects of it. So we've had these conversations about consent decrees and the DOJ providing oversight of police

departments that have gone rogue or at least have been systemically or chronically troubled. And that came out of the 1994 crime bill too. This is a long career that Joe Biden has had, and it has included a kind of state's rights view on busing years back. He was friendly with a noted segregationist in the Senate. Not that they shared political views. They didn't overlap. But Biden's view of those kind of relationships is not the view of Senate relationships we have now. Has that been really litigated thoroughly, and do you think it will be in the race to come?

Well, I tell you, there are a lot of people who were Bernie Sanders supporters who are making that case, and you still hear a lot of commentary about this. And, you know, there are some things that Joe Biden does that you kind of go, I don't think that is going to poll well. You know, the idea that he views Donald Trump as exceptional, as opposed to being a product of forces that have been very much present in American life. and we could walk back through the history of American demagogues in American politics. And so I think there's a lot of people who will hear things like that and go like, that's not where I am. But, you know, Roy Barnes, who was the last actually Democratic governor of Georgia, had a line that it was kind of interesting once in a race that he ran.

And someone raised the question of what he was going to do to organize. teachers to get the teachers vote out for him. And he said, oh, I'm just thankful that my opponent is doing that for me. The biggest asset that Joe Biden has is that any gaff he makes will shortly be overshadowed or any statement he makes that people disagree with, even among his supporters, will shortly be overshadowed by something really outrageous or borderline insane that comes from the White House five minutes after that. Yelani Cobb, thanks so much. Thank you.

The New Yorker's Jelani Cobb. We also heard from staff writers Katie Waldman, Eric Latch, and Amy Davidson Sorkin. And in a moment, I'll talk with a congressional power broker who helped get Joe Biden to the nomination, James Clyburn of South Carolina. That's just ahead. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're talking about the candidacy of Joe Biden, who formally secured the Democratic nomination just last week. Now, even as he faces an incumbent who defends Confederate history and Confederate monuments, Joe Biden will face questions about his own record on issues of race. There was his early resistance to busing as a way to integrate schools, his role in the Senate's treatment of Anita Hill, and his support of the 1994 crime bill, a law that's now seen as the start of a devastating increase in incarceration, especially of young black

men. And yet black voters helped make Biden the nominee. One of the turning points in his campaign was the endorsement by James Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest ranking African American in Congress. Clyburn is the House Majority Whip, and I spoke with him early last week. In his Fourth of July message, Joe Biden vowed to rip the roots of systemic racism out of this country. Now, where and how can a new president start doing that? I think that Joe Biden could start out by putting together something that resembles a reconciliation commission. They would take a look at all of these things and would come back.

I don't mean four years from now, but I'm talking about within a few months. Nobody's asking anybody to tear down statutes. I don't support that. I think we ought to put things in their proper perspective. And I think statutes, some of them belong in museums. You can create a park if you want to and put them in parks. But to have pitchfuck Ben Tillman on the statehouse grounds here in Columbia, South Carolina, is an affront. And we all know it's the front.

It was planned to be in a front. They know what they're doing. When they put the flag on top of the statehouse, they did it in 1962 in response to civil rights activities. I happened to have been marching over in Arnsbury. That's the year after I graduated from college. I went to jail two years before that, and that's what they were doing. They were responding to my marching to get off the back of the bus and sit down to the lunch counter.

So put everything in this proper perspective. Yes, it's our history. We are trying to change that, but we don't want to honor that. That, to me, is what this problem is all about. Congressman, you are a veteran of the civil rights movement and had a very clear view of that. How do you compare that movement in the 50s and the 60s until maybe, I guess, as long as the King assassination? And the Black Lives Matter movement now that has swept across the country in ways that are far larger than anyone would have imagined when the movement began a few years ago? There are many, many differences.

The first one being that when John Lewis and I met back in 1960, there were maybe two African-American members of Congress, all from big cities and none from the areas where all these things were taking place. All of a sudden now, this is taking place with 50-plus African-American members sitting in the United States Congress in position. to help fashion a legislative response. And if I might say when Byrne, baby Byrne became the headline back in 1960s, it hijacked the movement. That's why I and three others made it very clear we were not going to allow defund the police be a headline that destroys this movement.

That's why I spoke out forcefully against it because no. Nobody's talking about defunding the police. And everybody's telling me, well, that's not what I mean. This is what I really mean. Well, everybody knows that in this business, if you're taking time to explain what you mean, you have already lost the argument. So I think that the difference then and now is the fact that the institutions, judicial, legislative, though we don't have much help in the executive, but in the institutions, a lot of help was there to respond to the issue. Well, if Joe Biden is elected in November and the House is Democratic and maybe even the Senate is Democratic,

what is that legislative agenda going to be to back up the moment and the movement? I don't know if I can tell you exactly what it's going to be. I can tell you that it will be a agenda that will respond to Black Lives Matter, and everything that flows from it. Now, Black Lives Matter to me is a much bigger issue than law enforcement. When I say Black Lives Matter, the health of black people matter. So the health care delivery system affects black lives. Affordable housing affects black lives.

accessible education, excess, affects black lives. So black lives matter is much broader than just one facet of law enforcement. What kind of reforms do you want to see in policing in America? Setting aside the term defunding. I would like very much for us to reimagine what policing is all about. Real community policing. We know that policing, especially in the black communities, has devolved into armed occupations.

Why do we have police departments with these military tanks, police departments with military weapons that only get drawn when it comes to the black community? So that's what I want to see us do. Sit down and say we're going to have community policing, and we're going to have community oversight. this whole thing that independent boards of community people should have no say-so about how police do their jobs, that's a bunch of foolishness. And I don't care what police officer says it.

They need to take stock of themselves. And nobody who is doing the right thing would care about people looking at what they're doing. Now, Biden wants to give $300 million to police departments for community policing, but with all the problems you describe, why do these departments need even more money than they have? I don't know that they need more money. I think that what we really need is for police departments to do policing, not be counselors for people who may be mentally ill, not to be in charge of the homeless.

So I do believe that we have to reimagine policing. Now, your endorsement of Joe Biden for the South Carolina primary was absolutely pivotal in him turning around his primary race for sure. And you seem to put an enormous amount of faith in him, and Barack Obama did at a certain point in his career as well. But you also know his history when it comes to, to busing when it comes to the 1994 crime bill and other matters that are, you know, reflect less well

on his sensitivities to racial inequity. How do you assess his career when it comes to this incredibly vital issue? Joe Biden is not a perfect person. None of us are. He was not alone in opposing busing. if you go back and look at the surveys taken at the time, the majority of the black people in this country were against busing. A lot of black people favored the 1994 crime bill. There were the scourge of drugs throughout African American communities.

I tell people all the time, the roughest time I had in 1992 running for Congress was into a black group when I came out against mandatory minimums. I said I was against it. And the black folks almost ran me out of the room. Now, so for us to look back on that now and pretend that we don't know what the sentiment in this country were, I don't quite understand that. I voted for that crime bill. A lot of members of Congress or Black Congress voted for that crime bill.

Based on the experiences we had in 1992 when we were out there. Now, I haven't said that, there was an assault weapons ban in the 1994 crime bill. Bill. Nobody talks about that. The 1994 Crime Bill did not create mandatory minimums. That was back in 1986. The 94 Crime Bill got rid of a significant number of mandatory minimums. And we tried hard to reduce crack cocaine, the 101 crack cocaine stuff. We had community policing in that crime bill. The violence against women was in the 1994 crime bill. All these good things were there. And people forget that in the fall of the fall of the crime bill. The violence against women was in the 1990s. The of 94, we lost the election. And Newt Gendrits, he took over in 94 and gutted the crime bill of all the good stuff we had in it and enhanced the bad stuff, but it didn't change the name of it. That's almost like saying that because I support the 1965 Voting Rights Act, I'm responsible for the Supreme Court having gutted it. So I don't support what the Supreme Court did, but I do support the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Come on. Do you not think it was

also responsible in large measure for growing mass incarceration, is it not fair to point out that the bill gave billions of dollars for states to build more prisons and encourage the embrace of truth and sentencing laws, so-called, which required inmates to spend at least 85% of their sentence behind bars? So isn't the 1994 crime bill something that, at least in part, that both you and Joe Biden want to look back at and say, you know, this was a mistake? Part of it was a mistake. Parts of it, I would give you credit for that. But the fact of the matter is, in 1994 crime birds, you just brought something else to mine,

also had drug courts in it. They're there. That's now gone. So all I'm saying is it was out of balance after 94. So sure, there are things about it that ought to be. ought to be changed. You'd have to be a little bit nuts to think that I'm going to support mass incarceration. That flowed from it, but that's not what we were voting for.

I think you ought to give us a little credit for having some sense. One of the things that stuns people about the Trump era is not merely Trump, but the way the Republican Party leadership has behaved, how completely obedient it's proved to be, whether it's Mitch McConnell or other Republican leaders. But Joe Biden said that if he's elected, he has faith that he can work with, quote, some congressional Republicans and said, I think you're going to see the world change with Trump gone. Is Biden dreaming? No. I have faith that he can because I have seen it done.

I've done it. And I still do it. I've got bipartisan legislation with broadband right now. that I'm co-sponsored with Upton of Michigan. We work together on a lot of things. Sure, it can be done. With him gone, maybe they'll grow spine. And that's all it takes, just grow a little spine.

Congressman, thank you so much. Thank you. James Clyburn of South Carolina is the House Majority Whip. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for today. For more about the radio hour and everything that we're doing, at The New Yorker. Follow us on Twitter at New Yorker. And I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon-N-Corri-Ran and Corby, Cala, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Mengfei Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.