Joe Biden, Joe Biden's toughest opponent in 2020

As he prepares to enter the race for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden takes away nearly half a century in the big leagues of American politics . When Pete Buttigieg was born, Biden was an American senator for almost nine years. He voted on the conflicts in Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the confirmation of 14 Supreme Court judges and the dismissal of a president. He served when opinions about crime, abortion, race and sexuality changed completely. Perhaps Biden's greatest challenge – outside his own age – will be to persuade Democratic voters not to see his past through the prism of the present.

It would probably be easier for Biden if he was Republican. One of the defining features of the 2016 campaign was the ability of GOP voters to dismiss Donald Trump's past, words and actions. Trump, who was once heavily "pro-choice", adopted a substantial wealth tax, openly celebrated a sybarite lifestyle and became a heroic figure among supply economists and evangelical Christian leaders.

History continues below

But Trump was far from being the first Republican to be forgiven his past offenses. Republicans chose John McCain in 2008, despite his apostasy on taxes and campaign finance reform in the early 2000s. In 2012, they forgave Mitt Romney for creating a health care plan in Massachusetts, which had helped develop a master plan for Obamacare.

It is not at all clear that the Democrats, especially this year, see the past with such tolerance. A party much more diverse than it was when Biden entered the Senate in the 1970s has tough questions to ask about his opposition to urging schoolchildren to promote racial integration, his support Draconian crime legislation and its performance as chairman of the Judicial Committee Thomas' candidacy for the Supreme Court has been faced with charges of sexual harassment by Anita Hill. The way Biden answers these questions can determine whether his current status as "first in the polls" is dissipating like those of Ed Muskie, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton (2008), or it's as unstoppable as the nominations ahead of George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton (2016).

In general, a presidential candidate can use three approaches to deal with a problematic past. One is to hope that difficult questions simply do not arise. It sometimes works. In 2000, Al Gore was never seriously encouraged to voice his views on abortion and guns as a Tennessee MP. At a time when a speech of several decades ago is available on social media of a simple finger gesture, this does not seem like an option for Biden.

A second approach is contrition. About Thomas's confirmation, Biden has already said, "I would have liked to be able to do something. I opposed the candidacy of Clarence Thomas and voted against it. But I also realized that there was a real and perceived problem that the committee was facing: there was a bunch of white guys. And he apologized for the crime bills he supported that punished crack cracked more than powder, a disparity that weighed heavily on African Americans. This year, he said at a breakfast hosted by Martin Luther King Day: "White America must admit that racism is always systematic. And that goes almost unnoticed for many of us.

The third approach is both the most direct and the most difficult: trying to show voters what was going on for years, if not decades, is what explains your actions. Getting schoolchildren to achieve racial equilibrium, for example, was far more complicated than struggling to overcome the racist whites' hostility towards integration – even if it surely meant part of the story. (This long essay describes the complexity of this task, as well as some of the negative consequences of the policy.)

Crime, like desegregation, looked very different decades ago. The rate began to rise in the 1960s and Richard Nixon's "law and order" message in 1968 made it a major national issue for the first time since the 1920s. Two decades later, George HW Bush made Michael Dukakis the iconic "soft-crime" candidate by making the criminal folly of a Massachusetts prisoner convicted of one of the most controversial crimes in his campaign. It was in response to this framework that Bill Clinton, four years after the defeat of Dukakis, adopted a program for the death penalty and the suppression of crime – a program he also promulgated as president.

But beyond politics, crime was a real concern. and nowhere more than in the dark neighborhoods of downtown. When I was working at New York City Hall in the late 1960s, one of the most persistent claims of black municipal leaders was to ask more police to stem the tide of violence by forcing mothers to bed their little children in bathtubs. to protect them from random shots.

None of this means that the political responses to crime were the right ones. None of this can erase the blatant racial dimensions of the call by politicians for more "law and order" during the same years that African Americans demanded equality. and integration. But it reminds us all that the main victims of crime do not live in closed communities or in apartments guarded by gatekeepers. The fact that homicides in New York, which once numbered 2,000 a year, now amount to less than 300 a year, literally saving thousands of lives, most of them among the poor.

Can Biden make such an argument as a partial defense of what he called, just ten years ago, "the 1994 Biden Crime Bill"? I am skeptical. It simply asks the voters too much to place themselves in a past that is completely foreign to them. So maybe his best chance of winning the nomination is that enough older Democrats participate in the primaries, democrats for whom Biden's story is also theirs.