If Democrats Really Want To Beat Trump, Joe Biden Should be Their Nominee. It’s Not Clear They Do.

Former Vice President Joe Biden officially entered the race for 2020 Democratic presidential nominee on Thursday. While he is joining a cast of what feels like dozens of theoretical contenders, Biden has two important characteristics that no one else battling for this position currently possesses.

One, having already been a heartbeat away from the job for eight years, Biden has already passed through the all-important “presidential threshold” in the minds of the majority of American voters. Two, partially because of number one, he can be reliably counted on the defeat the presumed Republican opponent in the 2020 race, President Donald Trump.

These are incredibly valuable assets which, partly because no other Democrat has both of them, should make Biden the overwhelming favorite to win the nomination. This is particularly the case because of the unprecedentedly urgent nature, at least according to what Democrats are universally claiming, of making sure that Trump does not secure a second term with even less accountability than he has had so far in his first.

After all, if your only child is badly hurt in an accident, you immediately take the car least likely to break down, with the steadiest driver you have, and you do not take the scenic route on the way to the hospital. In this analogy, Joe Biden is more likely to get the country safely to that emergency room than any other option that also has a realistic chance of winning the Democratic nomination.

The reasons this assumption is sound are many, but here are just a few:

• Biden can unite the Democratic modern coalition without scaring the hell out of the many white voters who don’t really like Trump, but who don’t trust Democrats to not start giving away the store to everyone else but them.
• Biden plays very well in the four states which will very likely decide the 2020 election: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida (all of which voted for him twice to be vice-president).
• Since Trump was elected, Biden has never come close to losing a head-to-head poll against the president, with the closest margin being 5 points in a recent Rasmussen poll (which is notoriously extremely biased in Trump’s favor).
• Biden’s greatest weaknesses, being a gaffe machine and having somewhat of an alleged #MeToo problem, would be irrelevant against Trump because they would seem totally insignificant in comparison to Trump’s vulnerabilities in these same areas.

To be clear, prior to Trump taking office I would never have comprehended a scenario where I was personally comfortable with Joe Biden being the president of the United States. He is way too liberal for my tastes and, frankly, I think he would be the least intelligent president of my lifetime (while he is much more knowledgeable than Trump, my sense is that the president has far greater street smarts than Biden does).

However, as a conservative who loathes Trump and is open to supporting a Democrat for president for the first time in their life, desperate times call for desperate measures. Biden appears to be a good person who at least tries to tell the truth while respecting our institutions, those qualities, combined with the fact that he might only serve one term due to his advanced age, make him currently by far the best option for someone like me who just wants to see this nightmare end with as little long-term damage as possible.

While I am hardly alone in this assessment, people like me are very unlikely to have any say whatsoever in who the Democrats actually nominate for the job of taking on Trump. Unfortunately, those who will make that decision appear to be thinking far more emotionally than rationally, and are delusional in their optimism about how easy it will be to defeat Trump.

This is the perfect recipe for Trump to somehow get re-elected.

It is clear that all of the real energy in this campaign, at least until the votes start getting tallied, will be among the younger and very progressive elements of the Democratic Party. They will not be satisfied with settling for Biden. They want to fall in love. They want their own Barack Obama.

But there simply is no Obama is this race. Consequently, they should go home early with the safest option, which is clearly Biden. That is unlikely to happen, however, at least not without the process doing great harm to what made Biden a good choice in the first place.

Because Biden is very old, and has a very long history in government which predates the creation of the current rules for being a progressive, he will have to constantly, awkwardly defend himself against past actions which, in a general election, would do him absolutely no harm at all. He is facing a death by a thousand cuts, with too many powerful people, especially in the liberal sections of the news media, being perversely incentivized to help take him out.

The irony in this scenario is that, in the 2016 primaries, no one really attacked Trump until it was way too late because it was assumed he couldn’t win. Biden, who is presumed to have a great chance at victory, will therefore face constant, supposedly friendly fire throughout the process.

How a guy of his age and vulnerabilities in the realm of political correctness can emerge unscathed from the bloody battle of “wokeness” he just entered appears to be a complete mystery. I am not optimistic about how this will all turnout, but as this saga now begins for keeps, Democrats should understand that every time Joe Biden takes a figurative bullet, Donald Trump will smile.

At least they won’t be able to say no one warned them.

John Ziegler is a senior columnist for Mediaite. He hosts a weekly podcast focusing on news media issues and is documentary filmmaker. You can follow him on Twitter at @ZigManFreud  or email him at johnz@mediaite.com

[Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images]

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.