The fact that democracy has its faults was brought home to me again reading newspaper coverage of the US presidential election. It looks like that election will be a run off between 77 year old Joe Biden and 78 year old Bernie Sanders, both of whom would have ticked off another year by the time they assumed the presidency were they to be elected, followed by a run off against a youngster:73 year year old Donald Trump. "Two old white guys fighting to take on another old white guy - so much for diversity" as Irwin Stelzer said in his Sunday Times column this weekend.
There isn't much need for me to rehearse why Trump and the Corbyn doppelganger Sanders are unsuitable candidates for the next POTUS. But isn't Biden at least inoffensive and moderate? Mainstream US news sources note that Biden has moved a long way to the left since he was Obama's veep. I'm not talking Fox News here or right wing leaning media. The Boston Globe, long considered a socially progressive organ and a strong supporter of the Democratic party, claimed* Biden would be "the most liberal Democrat ever nominated for the presidency", if that happens. "By any understanding of 'moderate', as that term was used when Obama or Bill Clinton was president, Biden is no moderate" they said.
Admittedly the Globe branding Biden "liberal" and saying that he is running on "a far more progressive, i.e. far less moderate" platform than any Democratic presidential nominee in history" is using these terms in an American context. Several of their examples of Biden's lurch to the left don't sound very left to a Brit, even one who voted Tory last time round. Examples they gave to back up their case included moving left on abortion, the death penalty, free trade and a national minimum wage of $15 an hour. None of this sounded particularly left to me. They also cited his support for the Green New Deal, championed by Democrat lefties such as the firebrand (I nearly said nutjob) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While not claiming to be an expert on the Green New Deal I note that there isn't a single coherent set of actual policies underpinning that headline, so it's not particularly a problem for Biden to support something that isn't defined at this stage.
Other examples did seem leftish: Biden supports government-funded health care even for unauthoritzed immigrants, something Obama never came close to proposing and he supports a sharp increase in US refugee admissions and a path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants. By contrast when Obama ran for the White House in 2008 it was as an enforcement-first hard-liner. He cracked down so hard on those who crossed the border illegally, he was known for much of his presidency as the "deporter-in-chief".
But the simple fact is that, like Labour, the Democratic Party has been hijacked by the likes of Sanders and AOC and has moved significantly to the left. That has pulled candidates like Biden across but his values and principles probably remain unaltered. We could expect that, if elected president, he would revert to his natural liberal but centrist inclinations. Given a choice between Biden and Trump I would normally say Biden, even though I have traditionally favoured republican candidates for the post. (This got me into some interesting discussions with colleagues when I travelled frequently on business to Boston, where the only professed republican supporter in my company's operation there was the subsidiary company president, who was viewed as some kind of redneck by his liberal minded team.)
However, it was Niall Ferguson's Sunday Times column this weekend that had me wondering how a robust democratic system such as that of the United States could end up offering such a poor choice of candidates for such an important post at what feels such an important time for the world. Ferguson knows Biden well enough to have a "good chat" when they run into each other, but has been wondering if Biden has been severely diminished by age or even an unpublicised stroke. He had already noted numerous examples of Biden losing his train of thought and stumbling over his words when he heard what Biden had to say last week at a campaign event in Texas, two days after his win in South Carolina, which triggered his super Tuesday wins last week. These wins reignited Biden's campaign and made him more of a comeback kid than the comeback kid himself, Bill Clinton. This is what Biden said to his supporters:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are....created by the go....you know, the thing." Eh?
Biden might have been trying to rephrase Thomas Jefferson's preamble to the declaration of independence, which goes:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of human happiness." Which of course doesn't mention women. So if Biden was trying to repitch Jefferson's statement for the modern, identity-conscious, ear he might have got confused between what he intended to say and Jefferson's words which are pretty much drummed into most American schoolchildren. But I doubt "you know" was in Jefferson's lexicon and "the thing", whatever that is, certainly wasn't.
It's hard to avoid ageism here, but as I'm old I'll go ahead. Reagan was considered old to stand for president but he became probably one of the most effective two US presidents in my adult years (the other being sleazeball Clinton). Reagan and Trump were much the same age at the start of their presidencies. Biden and Sanders are already older than Reagan was when he left office after two full terms.
The system the US uses to select presidential candidates gives much more power to everyday punters in deciding which candidate represents a party, compared with our system of choosing party leaders where party members get to choose between candidates who have already gone through some sifting. Indeed the American parties can be stuck with candidates they really didn't want. I've always felt our system makes more sense because it has to be chosen from MPs who have already had to command public support in an election who then have to gather sufficient support from people who know them and what they are like. In the US you can join a party and then announce you're running for president. It doesn't matter if, like Trump, you've never run for or held any other public office.
Our system could have given us prime minister Corbyn and the Americans will end up with a choice between Trump and (probably) Biden or Sanders. The American system has more checks and balances on the powers of the president than our prime minister sees. It seems to me to they have a greater degree of delegation to cabinet members who are not necessarily experienced politicians (they are nominated by the president) but they have to be confirmed by the upper house (the Senate) and sometimes aren't. As a result the American system has a much greater separation between the legislature and the executive, which is somewhat blurred at times in our unwritten constitution.
I guess both systems generally work quite well in their own way. But neither of them can cope with a dearth of suitable quality candidates. The British system seems better at enabling a candidate to build up experience and profile. Unless they get into the cabinet, national American politicians (senators and representatives) and local politicians (governors and mayors) seem to have no career progression path to help them build a challenge. When the presidential race starts the party that doesn't hold the White House always seems to have a plethora of candidates, most of whom hardly anyone has heard of. I checked the list this time** and there were over 250 democrats who declared they were a candidate for the presidency and filed with the Federal Election Commission, of which 29 ran some kind of campaign. Admittedly some did that to draw attention to specific issues, including 89 year old Mike Gravel who stood after 3 students started a "draft Gravel" movement and decided to run to draw attention to nuclear non-proliferation and non-interventionist foreign policy, even though he probably would never have qualified for the primaries. Not quite the American equivalent of Screaming Lord Sutch: they have those too amongst the 250 but they generally don't get anywhere near the ballots. Of the 29, 11 didn't put their name forward for the ballots and a further 7 did but withdrew before the ballots started. That still left 11 campaigning actively when the race kicked off in Iowa, of which there are three still going. (The third is a Hawaiian member of the US house of Representatives, Tulsi Gabbard. It's not clear why she is still running as she has 2 delegates to Sanders's 710 and Biden's 864. Elizabeth Warren had 70 when she pulled out. Maybe Gabbard can't count, though the finish line is 1991 delegates, so Biden isn't actually half way there yet).
What I found remarkable was the limited number of those candidates who were aged between 40 and 60 who got through to fight on the ballots: only 3 of the 11 were in that age bracket. Which left Americans choosing between the relatively elderly and the young and inexperienced, like 38 year old Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana which has a population of barely 100,000. I'd only just found out how to say his name properly by the time he pulled out.
Is there a problem when, even with these large fields of candidates, voters are left mentally ticking the box "none of the above?" Churchill is credited with saying "democracy is the worst form of government besides all those others that have been tried from time to time"***. It currently seems to be giving us poorer and poorer leadership candidates. In the context of this year's US election, Irwin Stelzer predicted that "Voters will pay careful attention to the quality of vice-presidential selections as two vulnerable septuagenarians violate every anti-virus protocol by plunging into crowds, hugging, shaking hands".
Hmm, will voters do that? But I do hope Biden has a competent veep if he were to become president......
* https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/11/opinion/moderate-joe-biden-has-moved-way-to-left/
** The Atlantic. The 2020 US Presidential Race: a cheat sheet; https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/2020-candidates-president-guide/582598/
A good crib sheet with snippets on all the candidates and some up to date news
*** Indeed he did say it, but prefaced it with "it has been said" so he wasn't claiming the statement as his own
US politics is odd as what we look upon as being as being liberal they may think is communist! But then look at the Austrian Liberal Party - a gang of right wingers who give a bad name to the radical social liberalism that I signed up to here in the UK. Warren was probably the best/most credible of the Democratic potential candidates in my view. And yes the age thing is very odd. I would have thought that a President would ideally be late 40's to early 60's.
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