How Long Has Joe Biden Been In Politics

Joe Biden'south 2020 presidential campaign is, in a way, an amende for 2016: He believes he could have stopped Donald Trump from e'er becoming president and now he believes he is the best chance for Democrats to get Trump out of the White House.

Always since Biden declined to challenge Hillary Clinton, he has said he came to believe he would have won. "I idea I was the correct candidate," Biden said in May 2017. He has reportedly told friends that in 2020, it's also big of a take chances not to run.

This marks the third presidential run for the onetime Delaware senator, who has spent his entire professional life in public office. He started his run at the top of a very large pile of presidential contenders on the Autonomous side, placing showtime in nigh early polls. One-3rd of Democrats pick him equally their preferred candidate when asked. But this fourth dimension, Biden is in for a very different entrada compared to the two he's run earlier.

While America's 76-year-onetime "Uncle Joe" enjoys early frontrunner status, the challenge for Biden is he no longer fits the rapidly changing party that nominated a immature blackness senator over Clinton a decade ago.

The Democratic Party is evolving — not simply in ideology, though Biden has always been a little more populist in his rhetoric compared to his policies — but too in identity. The party is starting to look younger and more racially diverse. It's more driven by women voters than always before. And Biden is a white man who would striking 80 in his commencement term.

He's running in a moment when the public is changing its views on what is adequate male beliefs. Over the years, the press has jokingly covered Biden's public antics with women, from handsy photos to borderline comments to overly affectionate embraces. That's not the approach media would take with a candidate today. Biden as well chaired the Anita Colina hearings that sent Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Courtroom; he's had to repent for how he handled them.

Still, Biden should be taken seriously. He knows what information technology takes to campaign for president, even though his previous runs were miserable affairs, catastrophe in scandal and obscurity. He can credibly claim the legacy of Obama, who is even so universally popular with Autonomous voters. Biden is also overwhelmingly popular with voters who look dorsum fondly at the Obama years, and he's gained a foothold with the older and more moderate members of the Democratic base.

He's been quietly building a campaign for 2 years. He's arguing he's the guy who tin can take the White House abroad from Donald Trump. And Autonomous voters might believe him.

Joe Biden doesn't exactly look like the future of the Democratic Party. He's also failed earlier.

Biden knows he has bug. Interviews similar this i with Vogue, in which he says he should apologize to Anita Hill for his role as Senate Judiciary Committee chair during the Clarence Thomas scandal, make that clear. He knows he'll take to answer these questions; that's the curse of a long public record.

His story starts with tragedy, the expiry of his wife and daughter in a 1970s car crash. He became a well-liked senator from Delaware. He married Jill. Joe got the White House itch in 1988 and actually started to establish some momentum in the Democratic primary. Just and then information technology surfaced that he'd plagiarized spoken communication material. He pulled out of the race.

In 2008, his nominal entrada barely registered. Notwithstanding as an established and well-regarded senator, he was the perfect partner to a greener Obama, who picked him equally vice president. He had a substantive office in the White House, overseeing stimulus programs and serving every bit a respected adviser on foreign affairs. He was an active presence in the Obama presidency in a way some vice presidents take non been.

President Barack Obama looks on as Vice President Joe Biden speaks during town hall result to discuss fatherhood and mentoring in Washington, DC, on June 19, 2009.

But Biden's long record and his admittedly superior credentials for the chore he seeks are both an asset and liability. Times take changed and forced Biden to alter with them. He has some things in his past that disqualify him in the eyes in the young, active Democratic base.

First of all, we all know what Biden is like. He is an extraordinary extrovert. It'due south why he'southward so broadly popular. But he does put his hands on people. I interviewed the vice president in his last year in office, and he gave my human foot a clasp to emphasize his point. There are videos like this one, in which he puts his hands on women at official photo ops. The most generous reading is the veep is quondam-fashioned. But more recent stories, like that of Lucy Flores, reveal Biden as intrusive and disrespectful of women'south personal infinite in a way that goes beyond a generational disconnect.

Before announcing his run, Biden said he would try to do improve. There take still been blench-worthy moments already on the campaign trail, however, like when he chosen a ten-year-old daughter "expert looking." Information technology's hard to drop old habits.

Biden is running in a party that only nominated and elected a tape number of women to Congress. He faces an open up question virtually whether he is the candidate for those suburban women who drove so much of the Autonomous gains in the midterm elections.

It's not just his behavior that volition turn off some voters. His record equally senator has some stains when it comes to gender, race, and other issues important to the party'southward progressive base.

What are Joe Biden'due south policies?

Every bit Voice's Matthew Yglesias reviewed, Biden shares many of the aforementioned weaknesses Obama and Bernie Sanders drew attention to when they ran against Hillary Clinton in their Democratic primaries. He voted for the Iraq War every bit chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the "tough on criminal offense" era of the 1990s, he voted for mandatory minimum sentences for drug trafficking and for increased funding for federal prisons — both of these policies have contributed to mass incarceration.

His long tape underlines how much has changed since Biden first entered public life. Already, his comments from the 1970s regarding school busing to gainsay segregation accept come under scrutiny. "I do not purchase the concept, popular in the '60s, which said, 'We have suppressed the black human for 300 years and the white human is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers," Biden said in 1975, remarks the Washington Post resurfaced in March.

On abortion, also, Biden's history has been put under the microscope. He voted in 1981 for a bill that would have allowed states to overturn Roe v. Wade, as the New York Times recently reported, and in one case said he didn't believe a woman should take the "sole right to say what should happen to her body." In June, his campaign initially said he yet supports the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding for abortions, but so reversed his position afterwards blowback from a Autonomous base of operations that is prioritizing abortion rights.

Biden has changed his opinion on many problems, bringing himself more than in line with the Democratic Party of today. But some voters might still find it hard to dismiss the senator he once was.

While Biden seems to connect with blue-collar workers, he'south not a lefty populist in a field that has a few of them. He's pretty mainstream, friendlier to corporate interests and more in favor of gratis trade compared to candidates like Elizabeth Warren. He was known in the Senate every bit a friend of banks. From Yglesias:

He spent his whole career in the Senate representing Delaware, a major center of the consumer credit side of the cyberbanking industry. He was so shut to the local banking behemothic that he was jokingly referred to as "the senator from MBNA" (which has since been bought by Bank of America).

This made him, amongst other things, a champion of mostly GOP-supported legislation in 2005 whose aim was to brand it more difficult for hard-pressed families to belch their credit carte debt in bankruptcy.

The human being is not without admirable policy achievements. He spent his last months equally vice president securing more than than $one billion in new funding for a cancer enquiry initiative, personally invested in its success afterwards his son Beau'south diagnosis and decease from brain cancer. The project was so popular that the Trump assistants and the Republican Congress kept it going after they took over.

In the 2020 campaign so far, Biden has released only ii notable proposals of his own:

tripling federal funding for depression-income schools
a climate action plan that borrows thematically if not always substantively from the Green New Deal

The climate plan is more limited in targeting oil and gas exploration. It also endorses nuclear power and emphasizes carbon recapture and sequestration, priorities for blueish-neckband wedlock interests. Biden isn't running on Medicare-for-all either; instead he'due south embracing the Affordable Intendance Act and a more express public pick proposal.

It adds up to a candidate who seems well behind the leftward winds driving his party. He personifies a return to the past when the progressive grassroots might exist looking for a new direction for the hereafter.

Then again, for a broadly popular candidate openly courting older and more moderate Democratic voters, a more than reserved, less ideologically fervent platform is surely past design.

Biden is all the same a popular, universally known Democratic candidate

Joe Biden is a hard guy not to similar. Authenticity is a catchy thing in the show business of 21st-century politics, but information technology's difficult to really hate Joe Biden.

Eight in 10 Democratic voters like him. He's currently a lot more popular than Donald Trump, and he'south beating the president in hypothetical 2020 polls. His argument is principally an electability argument: He thinks he tin can vanquish Trump. He's not sure everyone else could, as the New York Times'due south Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns reported recently:

In one of his calls over the holidays, Mr. Biden repeated a variation of a line he has used publicly: "If yous can persuade me at that place is somebody better who tin win, I'thousand happy non to do it," he said, according to the Democrat he spoke to, who shared the chat on condition of anonymity to discuss a individual talk.

But and then Mr. Biden said something he has not stated so bluntly in public: "But I don't come across the candidate who tin clearly do what has to be done to win."

Biden may see himself as somebody who could rumble with Trump on the debate stage like no other nominee could. Then again, he may underestimate how other candidates would fare. His somewhat lite candidature schedule has also already attracted some sideways glances, simply it is after all the summer of 2019 and Biden doesn't have to introduce himself to voters in the way other less-known candidates practise.

Former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden arrives for a campaign kickoff rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May xviii, 2019.

He might also have benefited from being viewed as a nonpolitical figure. Now that Biden has entered the presidential campaign, he'll exist the subject field of attacks from the right and left. He has no real tape of success as a presidential candidate without Barack Obama on the ticket.

But for at present, he's still polling well ahead of Bernie Sanders and his other closest rivals; older voters are putting him in the lead. The upcoming debates volition be the offset opportunity for his Democratic challengers to face up him confront to confront in front of a national Tv set audience.

The former vice president views himself as the last unifying figure in the Democratic Political party, the torch-bearer for the most successful Democratic presidency of a generation. But a lot has changed in the past 2 years. Joe Biden will have to prove he can go on up.