Stock markets plummeted on Thursday at the news that former vice president Joe Biden had, for the first time ever, overtaken President Donald J. Trump as the betting-odds favorite to win the 2020 election.
Biden, 77, is the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination. He's also among the most vulnerable members of the population—very old and male—when it comes to the risk of dying from the Wuhan bat plague. Few pundits thought he stood a chance in the Democratic primary, given his bumbling campaign, incoherent message, and frequently malfunctioning brain.
Democratic voters had other ideas, mostly due to their diehard commitment to male superiority. Members of the mainstream media and other liberal pundits have no choice now but to praise Biden as the savior of the republic. For many, this will involve a complete about-face after spending 2019 routinely savaging Biden as an incompetent, feckless racist.
Sally Kohn, USA Today contributor
"I don't want Joe Biden to run for president. He's the wrong candidate for the political moment." (March 2019)
Zach Carter, Huffington Post senior reporter
"In 2019, it is no longer a surprise that Biden is running yet another bad presidential campaign. What’s stunning is the insistence from the Democratic Party's leadership that Biden is their best bet for defeating Donald Trump." (June 2019)
Charles Blow, New York Times columnist
"Biden's positioning on racial issues has been problematic." (September 2019)
"[Biden has] an antiquated view on racial matters and racial sensitivities." (September 2019)
Roger Cohen, New York Times columnist
"[Biden] has demonstrated tone-deafness on race in a way that is disturbing." (September 2019)
Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist
"[T]he Biden [health care] plan would preserve the crazy-quilt, Rube Goldberg aspects of our current system, which impose a lot of unnecessary costs and make it too easy for people to fall through the cracks." (July 2019)
"Until recently I wondered whether Joe Biden's seeming naivety about the GOP, his insistence that he could work with Rs, was a pose. But it's now clear that he really was clueless about the ruthlessness of his opponents. Not a good sign." (October 2019)
Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone senior writer
"Biden has a troubling past of positions on abortion, race, and other issues key to mobilizing the Democratic electorate." (April 2019)
"I'm no doctor, and I had a family member whose dementia contributed to his death. I will be the last one here speculating wildly about Biden's cognitive abilities relative to his age. But his campaign is irresponsible to let this go unexplained — or undiagnosed, if the case may be." (August 2019)
"Biden is not only deficient as an antiracist, if he ever was one, but he is saying things — at a Democratic debate on an HBCU campus, no less — that make it absolutely impossible to trust him to be the party’s best candidate to address systemic racism and to ameliorate the nation the current administration leaves behind....
"If defeating Trump in 2020 is as important to Biden as he so often claims, he should end his campaign and remove himself from contention for president." (September 2019)
Jamelle Bouie, New York Times columnist
"Biden made a straightforward defense of white racial advantage aimed at those communities that viewed integration with suspicion and hostility. He articulated their anger. And while Biden tried to distance himself from outright demagogues like George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate, his rhetoric was on the same wavelength....
"Consider the message this would send. For decades Biden gave liberal cover to white backlash. He wasn’t an incidental opponent of busing; he was a leader who helped derail integration. He didn’t just vote for punitive legislation on crime and drugs; he wrote it. His political persona is still informed by that past, even if he were to repudiate those positions now. Biden could lead Democrats to victory over Trump, but his political style might affirm the assumptions behind Trumpism. The outward signs of our political dysfunction would be gone, but the disease would still remain." (March 2019)