President Biden
NOTE: This is the third endorsement I’ve made for a presidential candidate. The first was Hillary Clinton for the 2016 presidential election and the second was Andrew Yang for the 2020 Democratic presidential race.
I’m voting for Joe Biden. His presidency would be a step in the right direction of reversing the damage that Trump has done to this country. The continued advancement of liberalism in American democracy depends a great deal on his victory. I’m afraid that I lack the time to do a more thorough analysis of Biden’s record, but I intend to highlight, with a fair hand, his strengths and weaknesses. I will argue that his strengths present a sincere liberal, and his weaknesses, a complicated one. Biden was not my first choice, but at this hour, he is our only choice, and one which I make proudly, without hesitation or regret.
Biden’s liberal record
Two qualities that define the soul of liberalism are a sensitivity to the suffering of women and a solidarity with the oppressed around the world. In his record as Senator, Biden has shown both through his support of the Violence Against Women Act and his support for military intervention during the atrocities of Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic. Through these actions, Biden has positively contributed to America’s moral character both at home and abroad.
Biden first introduced the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1990. President Bill Clinton passed it in 1994 with bi-partisan support from not only Democrats, but also Republicans, like Utah Senator Orrin Hatch. It was primarily designed to help women who were victims of domestic abuse, as the New York Times wrote:
“The act has established the National Domestic Violence Hotline, the Office on Violence Against Women within the Department of Justice, and myriad programs to train victim advocates, police officers, prosecutors and judges on gender-based violence. Since it was created, more than $7 billion in federal grants has been given to programs that prevent domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence and stalking. It has also funded shelters, community programs and studies tracking violence against women.”
It’s worth recalling that at that time, domestic violence against women wasn’t always taken seriously by the police, as TIME wrote of the law in 1994:
“At present, 25 states require arrest when a reported domestic dispute turns violent. But police often walk away if the victim refuses to press charges. Though they act quickly to separate strangers, law-enforcement officials remain wary of interfering in domestic altercations, convinced that such battles are more private and less serious. Yet, of the 5,745 women murdered in 1991, 6 out of 10 were killed by someone they knew. Half were murdered by a spouse or someone with whom they had been intimate.”
Biden championed the law out of great anger over this injustice, believing that “the basic decency of the American people would demand change once they saw the scale of violence and the depth of the ignorance and stereotypes used to justify it.” Time has proven him right. The Bureau for Justice Statistics found that intimate partner violence decreased by 64% between 1994 and 2010. VAWA was also renewed by President Barack Obama in 2012 to include the LGBT, Native Americans, and immigrants. Through VAWA, Biden played a major role in actualizing equality for women of many backgrounds, and we can expect to see more of it in the Oval Office.
Biden also wisely supported intervention during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s to halt the genocidal terror of Slobodan Milosevic. The Slavic peoples of the Balkans have a long and tortuous history that dates back to the 6th century. They comprise of many ethnic groups, such as the Serbs, the Croats, and the Bosnians. Their history is also marked with ethnic violence, such as the genocide of between 320,000 and 340,000 Serbs by Croat fascists during World War II. That war also saw the rise of communist fighter Josip Broz Tito as a national figure in Yugoslavia, as he led the anti-Nazi forces to victory. In 1948, Tito broke away from the influence of Joseph Stalin, when the Soviet despot failed to meet his repeated demands for a federation of Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria. As dictator, Tito sought a united Yugoslavia that overcame ethnic divisions, and to that end, he repressed any nationalist dissent, going so far as to ban old flags and anthems. After his death in 1980, however, the old hatreds began to bubble up to the surface. To quote the New York Times in 1986: “conflicts and jealousies that had lain buried beneath the Titoist myth have escaped like the ills of mankind from Pandora’s box.”
In the 1980s, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic took advantage of the renewed tensions to stoke Serb nationalism. In 1987, he was sent by communist authorities to calm tensions between Serbs and Albanian police in the Kosovo suburb of Pristina, where he instead exacerbated them, telling the Serb protesters: “No one will dare beat you again.” As president of Serbia, he made the Yugoslav People’s Army ninety percent Serbian, and then used them to suppress the independence movements. He started with the Croatian War of Independence in 1991, during which Serbs committed war crimes against the Croats. When Bosnia declared independence in 1992, Serbia began a military campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnia’s Muslims, which resulted in 100,000 dead, 90% of whom were Bosniaks. The war, of course, was marked with atrocities. In Sarajevo, General Ratko Mladic led the longest siege in history, in which civilians were deliberately targeted and water and electricity were cut off. 11,000 died in the siege with 2,000 of them being children. Between 20,000 and 50,000 women were also raped during the war, the majority of them Bosnian Muslims at the hands of the Serbs. The most infamous atrocity occurred in 1995, when Mladic took over the town of Srebenica and committed a genocide of roughly 8,000 Muslim men and boys, the only genocide on European soil since the Holocaust.
Biden became interested in the conflict after being told of Serbian abuses in Croatia by a Catholic monk in 1991. He was among the first to advocate lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia and aiding them with NATO’s air force, a policy known as “lift and strike.” Presidents Bush Sr and Clinton, however, were hesitant to support the policy because they feared getting caught up in a civil war. In 1993, Biden had a tense meeting with Milosevic where he allegedly called the man a war criminal to his face. Then, in 1995, he supported a bipartisan bill sponsored by Republican Senator Bob Dole and Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, that would at last lift the arms embargo on Bosnia. Later that year, NATO began an air bombing campaign against the Serbs to end the siege at Sarajevo. The intervention pressured all sides to sign the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995, which re-established Bosnia as a unified state, but also recognized the Serbian Republika Srpska as having self-governing rights. It also created a system of power sharing that respected the minority rights of the three ethnic groups.
Kosovo, however, was frustrated by the deal’s failure to grant them any solutions. Serbian rule in Kosovo had been marked by denying its Albanian citizens “livelihoods, education, medical attention, news organs and political rights.” This led to the rise of the militant Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which often attacked Serbian police stations in the pursuit of a “Greater Albania” and began an insurrection against Serbian rule in 1998. Serbian forces responded with a systemic campaign of violence, rape, and ethnic cleansing that killed between 1,500 and 2,000 civilians and combatants, as well as the displacement of 850,000 ethnic Albanians. Biden joined with Sen. John McCain to support a resolution which called for all available force to be used against Milosevic. In 1999, NATO began a 10 week bombing campaign in Yugoslavia that led to a withdrawal of the Serbian military from Kosovo. Now, not everything NATO and the KLA did in that war was just. Human Rights Watch estimates that NATO killed at least 488 Serb civilians, used indiscriminate weapons such as cluster bombs, and the deliberate bombing of a state TV station. Meanwhile, many former KLA members, including Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, have been indicted for war crimes. This crimes, while grave, do not make NATO the equal of Milosevic, nor do they disqualify the moral necessity of the intervention. Biden, an ardent supporter of the intervention, offered his condolences to Serbian families who died as a result of the NATO bombing.
Biden’s liberal problems
A measured endorsement of Biden must also address the major criticisms made against him. Biden has a long record, so there are too many to count, but of them all, I can name three: his support for the 1994 crime bill, his support for the Iraq War, and his questionable relations with women. It isn’t my intention to absolve Biden of any wrongdoing, but to make the case that his sins should not disqualify him from the presidency.
Biden has not always been a leader when it came to racial justice. This failure in leadership was most apparent in his support for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. The bill has been criticized for its role exacerbating America’s mass incarceration problem, as we have the world’s largest prison population, with African-Americans making up 60% of the imprisoned. The most disdained part of the bill is the so-called “three strike” provision, which, according to FactCheck.Org, “mandated life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes.”
The effects of the crime bill on mass incarceration, though, are somewhat overstated, as the rise in the prison rate began in the 1970s with the War on Drugs. There was also the 2019 study from the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, which found that “the 1994 crime bill did not aggravate the preexisting racial disparity in imprisonment.” This doesn’t absolve the bill, either, though, as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has argued, incarceration rates grew for another 14 years after the bill’s passage, and the bill also encouraged states to pass their own draconian “tough-on-crime” laws. While the 1990s did see a drop in the crime rate, there’s no strong evidence that the crime bill was the primary driver, though its funding for more police presence might have been a contributing factor.
It’s also worth noting that the bill came in response to a 41% increase in the crime rate between 1983 and 1992, and was supported by 58% of African-Americans, who knew that their communities suffered from violence the most. It also found support from many black leaders, such as South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, Baltimore’s first black mayor Kurt Schmoke, and Kweisi Mfume, the then chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. This is not to say that the bill came without any black resistance, as the NAACP then called it “a crime against the American people,” but that it clearly was a complex issue for many black people at the time. Though the evils of the crime bill may seem obvious to us now, it might well have seemed to many a reasonable proposal. The bill also included provisions that many liberals now praise, such as the aforementioned VAWA and the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Biden has since called the crime bill a big mistake and he now supports the decriminalization of marijuana and the expunging of past marijuana convictions, which signals to me that he has evolved on criminal justice since 1994.
When it comes to the Iraq Wars, Biden opposed the right intervention and supported the wrong one. In 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, seeking to control Kuwaiti oil fields, invaded the small Gulf nation with 100,000 soldiers and 700 tanks. While occupying Kuwait, the Iraqi military killed and tortured hundreds and set fire to more than 700 oil wells. The United Nations passed 12 resolutions ordering Iraq to leave Kuwait by January 1991. When Iraq refused to comply with this resolution, President George H.W. Bush sought authorization from Congress to liberate Kuwait. The Allied forces boasted a coalition of 34 nations, including Australia, the United Kingdom, Niger, South Korea, France, Canada, and Argentina. Though it later came to light that the United States was passive towards Iraq’s intentions before the invasion, this made the inevitable intervention no less necessary. Nothing short of military force could compel Iraq to abide by the UN Security Resolutions. Biden, however, opposed the war, questioning the national interest.
Biden’s mistake regarding Kuwait may have influenced his decisions to support the suffering peoples of Bosnia and Kosovo, and eventually of Iraq. The 2003 invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush was an unnecessary and criminal disaster, whose consequences we are still dealing with to this day. Americans were led into the war many false pretenses. The two most prominent being that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Hussein had relations with Al-Qaeda. Neither were true. In 2005, the Iraq Survey Group found that Saddam’s WMD program was destroyed after the Persian Gulf War. A 2005 CIA report found that Hussein had no relations with Al-Qaeda leaders, and in fact, tried to catch one of their leaders, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. While there was some intelligence supporting the buildup of Iraqi WMDs, fact-checker Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post noted, “Bush administration officials often hyped the intelligence that supported their policy goals — while ignoring or playing down dissents or caveats from within the intelligence community.”
Biden supported the war as a means to force Iraq to destroy its alleged WMD program, and trusted Bush’s judgement, saying, “At each pivotal moment, he has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation and I believe he will continue to do so. At least that is my fervent hope.” Biden also brought in 18 witnesses to testify to Senate on behalf of the war effort, with some of them saying that a nuclear armed Iraq was possible in the decade and that al-Qaeda moved freely in the nation. The ensuing war effort looked promising in its first two years. Baghdad was quickly overtaken and Hussein was captured. In 2005, Bush gave his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech, where he declared that major combat operations were over in Iraq.
It was around this time, however, that the initial optimism began to sour. Just one year earlier, we learned that coalition forces used Hussein’s infamous Abu Gharib prison to sexually torture and humiliate detainees. The post-invasion Iraq was also terribly managed. Stuart J. Bowen, the Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction, found that $8.8 billion supposed to be spent on reconstruction was left unaccounted for and that an official for the Coalition Provisional Authority stole millions of reconstruction money. Against the judgment of our British allies, the Iraqi army was hastily dissolved, which created a vacuum that fueled the insurgency and eventually gave ISIS many recruits. The occupation plans were overly optimistic, as CIA Intelligence analyst Kenneth M. Pollack, now of the Brookings Institution, once wrote:
“As it was assumed that the Iraqis would be delighted to be liberated–with no allowance either for those who opposed the invasion, those glad but wary of U.S. intentions, or those simply looking to take advantage of the dictator’s fall to grab as much loot as they could–little thought was given to security requirements after Saddam’s fall. This was carried over into a larger dearth of planning for the provision of security and basic services in the mistaken belief that Iraqi political institutions would remain largely intact and therefore able to handle those responsibilities–especially after America’s Iraqi friends (particularly Chalabi) were installed in Baghdad in Saddam’s place.”
Biden’s disillusionment with the war also grew. In 2003, though he still supported the war, he began to question the Bush Administration’s strategy, admitting that the pre-war intelligence was exaggerated. By 2005, he told NBC’s Meet The Press that his support for the war was a mistake. He also opposed the surge of troops to Iraq in 2007, for which he called General David Petraeus “dead, flat wrong.” The conventional wisdom, however, is that the troop surge succeeded in reducing violence, something which even Barack Obama has conceded. The surge, though, was not a permanent solution to Iraq’s sectarian violence. On that front, Biden suggested that the nation be federalized into three autonomous regions, one for Kurds, one for Sunnis, and one for Shias. In 2007, the Senate passed a non-binding resolution endorsing this plan, which was met with a mixed to hostile reception by many Iraqis. The plan, however, was praised by the Iraqi Kurds, whose recent attempts to declare independence were cruelly suppressed by central government. While Obama’s vice president, Biden may have also contributed to rise of ISIS in Iraq, with his continued support of Iraq’s sectarian Shiite leader, Nouri Al-Maliki.
Biden’s Iraq policy remains his most troubling, with poor decision-making that ranges from naive to delusional. By no means should Iraq be the only measure by which we judge his foreign policy insights, but it remains an important failing nonetheless. It’s hard to say if Biden has learned much from Iraq, but I wouldn’t regard his miscalculations as absent of any critical thought. After all, Biden’s own son, Beau, served in Iraq and might have acquired his fatal cancer from working near burn pits.
For many of the left, the Iraq War is the ultimate litmus test for good and evil in modern politics. I don’t see things as that simple, however. It isn’t hard to imagine that many might have supported the Iraq War, because they genuinely wanted an end to the reign of one of the most barbarous tyrants in the Middle East. This includes many Iraqi dissidents, like intellectual Kanan Makiya. Nor do I regard everyone who opposed the war as righteous. Consider British MP and Stop the War leader George Galloway, who in 1994 saluted the Hussein’s “courage” and “strength,” while also fostering friendship with his murderous son. The lesson that many leftists took from Iraq is that American military power is irreversibly bad, and that all conflicts abroad must judged as future “Iraqs” instead of on their own contexts.
This is where I believe Biden’s judgment is more measured than some of his left-wing critics. When put within the context of his wider foreign policy record, Biden seems more willing to judge foreign policy crises on their own merits and consider multiple perspectives. His 2002 Iraq hearings, for instance, heard from just as many people who were critical of an invasion as were supportive of it. As John Nichols of The Nation wrote in his summary of the hearings at the time, “If there was any agreement, it was on the point that removing Saddam would saddle the United States with the more difficult tasks of uniting opposition forces, protecting the Kurds and maintaining stability.” Biden himself even considered the possibility of failure during the hearings, warning that, “It would be a tragedy if we removed a tyrant in Iraq, only to leave chaos in its wake.”
Lastly, Biden’s interactions with women have come under fire from feminists and others. As numerous photos and videos have long attested, Biden has a bad habit of massaging women’s shoulders, holding them close, and sniffing their hair. While such acts are wrong and should stop, I’m not convinced that they were meant to be sexual or predatory. Biden probably just belongs to older generation where such public displays were common.
Eight women have accused Biden of touching them inappropriately and making them feel uncomfortable, they are Lucy Flores, Ally Coll, Sofie Karasek, Amy Stokes Lappos, Caitlyn Caruso, DJ Hill, Vail Kohnert-Yount, and Tara Reade. Their stories hint at some aloofness of the part of Biden, for which he has yet to take complete responsibility. Biden has resolved to change his behavior going forward, but has stopped woefully short of apologizing for his actions.
Out of all eight of these women, only Reade has accused him of sexual misconduct. In her original account to The Union in 2019, Reade alleged that when she first began to work for then Senator Biden, he said that she had nice legs and that she should serve cocktails at a fundraising event. She then alleged that Biden would often touch her on her shoulder or run his index finger up her neck. Reade, however, was explicit that at the time that “this is not a story of sexual misconduct; it is a story about abuse of power.” By 2020, however, Reade added another allegation of sexual assault which occurred after the harassment. In an interview with political commentator Katie Halper, she alleged that Biden pushed her up against the wall in the side area of the Capitol Building and kissed her while penetrating her with his fingers. She also alleged that was retaliated against for reporting the harassment and rejecting Biden’s advances.
There are at least eight people who have corroborated aspects of Reade’s account. The New York Times found two anonymous friends of Reade who support her. The first recalled that Reade told her about the assault at the time in 1993. The second said that Reade told her about Biden touching her inappropriately and that she had had a traumatic experience in his office. Two former interns also told the Times that they noticed Reade had abruptly stopped supervising them. Rich McHugh of Business Insider interviewed co-worker Lorraine Sanchez and ex-neighbor Lynda LaCasse, who both recall being told about the incident in the 90s. Sanchez was told of the harassment while LaCasse was told of the assault. Reade’s friend from law school, Joseph Backholm, has also testified that she told him about being assaulted in Washington D.C. in the 2000s. A 1993 video has also resurfaced of Reade’s now deceased mother, Jeanette Altimus, calling in to Larry King Live to complain about her daughter’s problems working for a prominent senator. Reade’s ex-husband, Theodore Dronen, wrote in a court deposition amidst their divorce that she told him of being sexually harassed at Joe Biden’s office. Reade’s brother, Collin Moulton, initially told ABC that she had told him about being harassed by Biden this spring. However, he later added that she told him about the assault in 1993. It later turned out that Current Affairs columnist Nathan Robinson coached him into being more consistent.
From this corroboration, it is clear that, at the very least, Tara Reade was made uncomfortable at Biden’s office in the 1990s, it distressed her greatly, and Biden was probably responsible. What I am less certain of, however, is her assault allegation, and for this doubt there are two reasons: 1) her characterization of Biden is at odds with what other staffers have said 2) Reade herself lacks credibility on an accusation this grave.
With regards to the first point, PBS Newshour spoke with 74 former Biden staffers, 62 of them women, to figure out if there was a wider pattern of harassment as detailed by Reade. None of the staffers spoken to experienced any sexual misconduct by Biden, nor did they recall hearing rumors of such behavior. Newshour also noted that there was no semi-private area like an alcove along the path that Reade describes, so an assault would’ve almost certainly had witnesses. None of the staffers ever recalled Biden holding fundraiser events, and two male staffers added that it was men, not women, who served the drinks. Nor do any of his female staffers recall being unfairly treated. In fact, many female staffers on Capitol Hill in the 90s had a list of senators to avoid. Biden was not on that list. Most sexual predators leave behind a pattern of behavior. The fact that there aren’t other allegations with Reade’s level of severity throws doubt on its likelihood.
With regards to the second point, there’s good reason to believe that Reade is a serial liar. Cathy Young of Arc Digital noted problems with Reade’s story that were either contradictory or odd. One being that when the assault allegedly occurred, Reade was apparently shocked that such an advocate for women’s right could behave so grossly. This is despite Reade having earlier claimed that she was harassed and objectified by Biden. Young also notes that Reade had, up until 2017, boosted tweets that were positive of Biden, even with regards to his handling of sexual assault. Young also observed in Quillette that Reade had similarly told two differing accounts of domestic abuse at the hands of Dronen, with the 2009 version being more extreme than the 1997 one. From this, Young suggests that Reade has “a propensity to weave a thread of genuine bad experiences into a tissue of made-for-TV melodrama.”
This pattern of deceit has also been observed by those who knew Reade personally. Natasha Korecki of Politico spoke with over a dozen people, many of whom were in the animal rescue community, that felt deceived by Reade, as Korecki summarized: “Reade ingratiated herself, explained she was down on her luck and needed help, and eventually took advantage of their goodwill to extract money, skip rent payments or walk out on other bills.” NBC News also found that Reade, who was an expert witness in a domestic violence case, misrepresented herself as being a graduate and visiting professor of Antioch University. Laura McGann at Vox has also disputed Reade’s characterization of the media as uninterested in her account of sexual assault, when Reade was forceful to many reporters from the start that her story wasn’t about that. While Reade has clearly suffered and deserves our empathy, her sexual assault allegations shouldn’t be taken with any seriousness.
Biden’s liberal platform
A Biden victory would be a repudiation of Trump and all the ugliness that he represents. Trumpism is a type of political demagoguery that elevates bigotry, carries a blatant disregard for sexual misconduct, indulges in lies instead of objective truth, and clings to authoritarianism instead of liberty. Biden is far from perfect, as I have examined at length, but he has a decent respect for the Constitution and our founding ideals.
Nor is Biden simply “anti-Trump,” but he will also advance the ideals of liberalism if elected to office. Acknowledging the pain caused by Obama’s deportations, Biden will end the sadism of Trump’s child separation policy and reverse the unnecessary Muslim ban. He will also give 11 million illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, increase the number of refugees admitted into the country, and invest $4 million into Central America to stem the turmoil that causes refugees to flee. Biden also supports a desperately needed public option for healthcare, which would give citizens the freedom to select a Medicare plan instead of having to rely on their employer or greedy insurance companies. Of the 25 wealthiest nations, America is the only the one that doesn’t provide some form of universal health coverage. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that we spend more on our health care than any other developed nation, and we’re often ranked lower than other nations in healthcare coverage. Most civilized nations understand that your access to healthcare shouldn’t be dependent on your income. It’s time we joined them. Climate change will be humankind’s greatest challenge this century and the next. While Trump wants to expand drilling, Biden has adopted an extensive climate plan that will help shift our infrastructure from a carbon-based one to a carbon-free one. To this end, Biden has shown a willingness to adopt nuclear energy, carbon capture, and possibly even a carbon tax.
While Trump casts doubt on the integrity of our elections, such as his baseless assertion that mail-in voting is subject to widespread fraud, Biden tries to stay the course of appealing to all Americans, to quote his 2020 Gettysburg speech:
“Instead of treating each other’s party as the opposition, we treat them as the enemy. This must end. We need to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in this country. A spirit of being able to work with one another. When I say that, and I’ve been saying it for two years now, I’m accused of being naive. I’m told, ‘Maybe that’s the way things used to work, Joe, but they can’t work that way anymore.’ Well, I’m here to tell you they can, and they must if we’re going to get anything done.”
This difference presents Americans with a clear choice: We can either embrace the further polarization and paranoia of Trump or we can embrace the empathy and careful judgement of Biden. The choice is yours, America. We voted against our common humanity once before and I dread to think of the suffering untold if we do so again.
