Biden's triumph of circumstances

It now all appears but certain that Joe Biden will be elected the next president of the United States. The former vice should be congratulated for triumphing in the most bizarre political campaign of modern times, one in which for months at a time he all but refused to participate, trusting instead that big city turnout operations and hysterical opposition to his opponent in the suburbs would deliver him a blowout victory.

This did not happen. Biden appears to have secured exceedingly narrow margins in a handful of crucial states, just as Donald Trump did in 2016. But a win is a win.

Does Biden's victory have the air of inevitability about it? Yes and no, I think. Despite what pollsters insisted to the contrary, this was always likely to be a close election.

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Many of us had our doubts that he was going to run in the first place. As late as the spring of 2019, I thought he would refuse. There were good reasons for this. At the height of #MeToo, I thought it unlikely that his handsy, aww-shucks image would play well with the party's base of Teen Vogue writers and that this would be enough to persuade those around from encouraging his candidacy. But I also thought that if he did choose to enter the race all the things that made him a political fossil would be appealing to the older Democrats who are the party's most reliable (as opposed to its most vocal) voting bloc. Here was a tacit but undeniable break not only with the increasingly shrill woke posturing but with the progressive economic policy that appeared to be ascendant after the unlikely success of Bernie Sanders's primary campaign in 2016.

In the early debates Biden looked poised for defeat. He was all but dismissed as a racist by a number of his Democratic opponents, including his eventual running mate. Then came the beginning of the primary season. A fourth-place finish in Iowa followed by a fifth-place showing in New Hampshire. A comeback in South Carolina brought him back to life, and by Super Tuesday he appeared all but invincible.

I maintain that his victory in the general election was, for all his unacknowledged strengths, a triumph of circumstances. Over and over again before lockdowns were imposed, Biden made it clear that he was incapable of interacting with ordinary Americans without becoming angry or losing his temper. His speeches were a mess, his rallies sparsely attended. The state-imposed bunker mentality gave his campaign an excuse to do as it would have liked under any circumstances: retire and wait for November. The media, the party turnout apparatus, and election rules changes that would almost certainly favor Democrats would do the rest. As it turns out, they did.

One illusion that we should dispel immediately is the notion that President Trump's defeat is some kind of triumph for "civility" or "decency" or any of those other fetish objects revered by partisans with predictable selectivity. Biden is a political hack who is one angry question from a voter or right-wing journalist away from throwing a temper tantrum.

What will his administration look like? When Rahm Emmanuel is already going on television to explain that retail workers need to suck it up and learn to code, and Lindsey Graham is talking about the need for bipartisanship when it comes to the federal deficit and other towering problems of our age, I think it is easy to guess. Republican control of the Senate and the thinness of the Democratic majority in the House will give a Biden White House cover for the center-right priorities it would have pursued regardless.

Still, it would be absurd not to say that congratulations are in order. Biden's success, first in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, then in the general election, comes 32 years after his first run for the presidency. This remarkable feat of doggedness is perhaps the most fitting symbol of his long career.