Will “Electability” Ever Stop Being Code for Old and White?

Anytime a politician has to say “I get it,” you can bet that he—or, much more rarely, she—hasn’t gotten it at all. In 1992, George H.W. Bush’s campaign variation was his notorious declaration, “Message: I care.” Instead of reassuring anyone, that gave an uneasy America a big hint that our fabled patrician class might be deteriorating into a bunch of clueless goofballs.

The comedy classic was Donald Trump gripping a notecard reminding him to say “I hear you” during his White House meeting with the Parkland survivors. He never did get around to saying it, but heck, it’s the thought that counts.

Joe Biden said “I get it” twice in the two-minute video he released last week. He knew he’d better try some damage control after multiple women went public about their discomfort with his handsy-ness and unwelcome physical intimacy when they’d shared a platform with him. But thinking he’d better repeat himself to make sure that we got how he got it was only one of the giveaways that Biden is about as woke as Rip Van Winkle.

As a lot of people were quick to point out, he didn’t apologize for his past behavior or even express regret. He just acknowledged that the rules about “personal space” have changed, and he’d try to keep that in mind from now on.

On the other hand, he also made it obvious that he thinks the new rules are pretty darn weird. Needing to cramp his style puzzles him, because he’s not some creep who’s into groping for groping’s sake. He’s just our affectionate, demonstrative Uncle Joe, who’s always used up-close-and-personal body language to convey support or comfort or simply connect with people.

“Electability is a nebulous concept when nobody knows what voters will be looking for 18 months from now. “

“I’ve never thought of politics as cold or antiseptic,” he explained, as if that was the only alternative to his Mr. Magic Fingers act around new acquaintances. And right, because we all know nothing reassures a woman and buoys her self-confidence like a total freaking stranger massaging her neck, breathing into her hair before planting a smooch on the back of her head, or offering to rub noses—rub noses, really?—to certify their instant bond.

At one level, this was unquestionably a tempest in a teapot. Nobody believed that Biden’s antics at public events added up to sexual harassment, let alone sexual assault. (That includes the women who voiced their misgivings about it.) Practically nobody thought his behavior was disqualifying, at least in and of itself. The real problem was how the whole thing played right into a caricature that Biden definitely doesn’t want to dominate voters’ perceptions of him.

Along with the handsy-ness, his fumbling non-apology—is there a woman alive who hasn’t heard a man say, “I don’t know what I did wrong, but I promise I’ll change”?—was a reminder that Barack Obama’s former Veep is 76 years old. On top of being yet another unrepentant straight white dude who never got the memo about checking his privilege, he’s also an elderly one who’s never going to learn to speak Millennial. From floating a proposal to only serve one term (then why bother giving him even one?) to suggesting Stacey Abrams as his Vice President (she’s gingerly about it), Biden’s attempts to deal with the generational thing and the multiculti thing alike have been inept even for him.

The problem isn’t only that he’s Joe Biden. Among the left’s most vocal and energized upstarts, even repentant straight white dudes are damaged goods these days. The prospect of voting for even one more of them for president feels like wishing the Spanish-American War had gone on longer. But the old coots who were in public life before Generation X hit puberty are the worst.

“One reason Bernie did so well in 2016 was that his lack of any national profile made him, of all things, a fresh face at age 72. “

For the record, we know plenty of old white dudes who feel the same way. They can’t wait for their own breed to fall off the big toboggan and make room for women, people of color, or pretty much anyone young and mentally uncluttered enough to represent something besides the patriarchy. They definitely aren’t the majority of white men, or even close. They’re just the perversely optimistic ones who’d rather welcome the future and see an America transformed by their own diminished role in running it.

It’s true that, at least so far, being a 77-year-old white guy doesn’t seem to have done Bernie Sanders much harm. His fiercest supporters are people something like half a century younger than he is. All the same, the loudest voices among them are predominantly white and male themselves—the Bernie Bros are the most consistent irritants on social media—and almost as unattractive as MAGA supporters in their intolerant and bellicose partisanship.

The difference is that Trump has zero interest in expanding his appeal beyond his hardcore base. Sanders, on the other hand, will need to do just that if he wants to make headway with, among others, African Americans (the decisive voters in the South’s Democratic primaries) and women (the decisive voters pretty much everywhere else). He’s shown himself to be fairly tin-eared when it comes to courting either of those constituencies, although he has been trying harder lately to woo them.

His odd advantage over Biden—or one of them, anyway—is that they cater to different stereotypes about old people. Sanders is the kind of irascible senior citizen whose insistence on speaking his mind about everything under the sun ends up making him everybody’s favorite character on a hit sitcom. Biden is more like the kind of senior citizen whose relatives dread having to visit him in assisted living and whose nieces learned to dodge him at weddings and family reunions before they were out of high school.

With ten months to go before the New Hampshire primary, it’s not impossible that America’s big sitcom audience will just be rolling its eyes at Sanders long before then. One reason he did so well in 2016 was that his lack of any national profile made him, of all things, a fresh face at age 72. That made the relatively youthful (she was only 68!) Hillary Clinton seem drearily over-familiar, just as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg, among others, now make Biden seem drearily over-familiar. But we’ve had plenty of time since then to get used to Sanders’s act, which has changed even less than the relatively youthful (he’s only 69!) Billy Joel’s set list.

He still can’t pivot to save his life from his cherry-picked favorite issues to talk convincingly about a more all-embracing vision of a Sanders presidency. For that matter, even his cherry-picked favorite issues have become standard talking points for at least half of his rivals. He deserves full credit for bringing his unconventional critique of capitalism’s sins into the mainstream of Democratic politics, but that just means we may not need Bernie himself to advocate for those positions anymore.

He also can’t posture convincingly as the insurgent candidate he was in 2016. The Democratic National Committee, which was his nemesis last time around, seems to be treating him with kid gloves these days, and the rest of the party and media establishment is, at the very least, resigned to him. After spending decades as an unreconstructed Capitol Hill outsider, he’s abruptly gotten comfortable with behaving like a full-fledged member of the U.S. Senate club.

For one thing, when Sen. Sanders introduces a bill like his latest iteration of Medicare for All, it’s guaranteed to get national attention and attract eager co-sponsors among his colleagues. That definitely wasn’t the case in his outlier years. Thanks to the brouhaha over his unreleased tax returns, he’s even had to admit that he’s now a—cough, cough—millionaire, which will make it kind of awkward to go on castigating other millionaires. Interestingly, Biden, who isn’t one, rarely if ever castigates them at all.

With only a couple of exceptions, the younger white dudes in the race are such an unknown crew of provincial politicians that most of us can’t be bothered to tell them apart. Wait, which one is John Hickenlooper again? Bueller. . . anybody? The exceptions—Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, chiefly—have stood out partly because at least they aren’t O-L-D, although Buttigieg also has the gay card to keep his candidacy looking like a bold break with tradition. As a result, Mayor Pete seems to be getting younger (in a good way) every day, while O’Rourke’s candidacy is aging as badly as a quiche somebody forgot to stick in the fridge after last week’s baby shower. He must sit around watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with tears in his eyes.

The dispiriting case that Biden’s supporters make for him depends on his alleged electability, even though that’s a nebulous concept when nobody knows what voters will be looking for 18 months from now. Then there’s his vast experience and the reliable (or is it?) wisdom of his years, which will supposedly settle the country back to normal after four years of Trumpian chaos and pillage. But we’re pretty sure we can kiss the concept of “normal” goodbye from now on, whatever it was or people thought it was.

Maybe, understandably, turning the car keys over to the kiddies fills the party’s elders with trepidation. All the same, it’s worth remembering that every Democrat who’s won the White House since John F. Kennedy in 1960 has succeeded by dramatizing a new generation’s rise. Lyndon Johnson doesn’t count, since he became president as a result of JFK’s assassination—and ended up being hounded from office five years later by a, ding ding, youth rebellion. Even Jimmy Carter was the first president in a generation too young to have seen active service in World War II, and he did fun things like quoting Bob Dylan and hanging out with the Allman Brothers when Gerald Ford probably couldn’t have picked any of them out of a lineup.

For months now, the polls have been telling us that most Democrats care more about defeating Trump than finding a nominee who shares their ideological values. (Hence: Biden, “electability,” and so on.) But if and when the happy day comes that Trump gets booted from the Oval Office, we think a President Harris, a President Booker, or even a President Buttigieg are likelier bets to take the oath to replace him than either the handsy uncle from Delaware or the *alte kocker *from Vermont. That’s not because we’re kamikaze crazies into multiculti novelty for its own sake, either. It’s because we’ve read enough history to know that going with the new and unexpected instead of the safe choice is how the Democrats always win.