Viewpoint: Presidential flame still burns brightly for Biden

Sam Waltz
Founding Publisher

The most frequent question I was asked over this holiday season – not about family, or travel plans, or snow – was whether I thought Joe Biden would be the Democratic candidate for president in 2020.

It prompted me to think about my First Look column in the first issue of 2018, which sits turned to this pageon the credenza in my home office.

Scrawled in big red marker script is this note: “Sam – you have always been good to me! Keep the faith, Joe.”

The headline on that column, which Joe had returned to me with that note, read: “Bet on 2018 being the year Biden rises again.”

And, yes, to friends and others, I still believe that we enter the 2019 Democrat sweepstakes with Delaware’s “homeboy” as the front runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. For what it’s worth, remember that Hillary Clinton effectively had locked up the nomination by the end 2015, more than six months before her anointment as the party’s candidate.

The inevitable questions regularly mixed up verbs, rotating “would Joe” and “should Joe” run, and frequently inserting the also-inevitable questions and comments about his age, citing the fact that Joe, born in 1942, had just turned 76 a month before this Christmas, and that he would be 78 years old when he took office in 2021, if elected in 2020.

I always taught my kids that “we cheer for the hometown team,” but I’ve also always made the point that as journalists, we aspire to objectivity as an important value.

Let me admit in this case, though, to being what we called a “home-towner” more than 50 years ago when I started in this business as a sportswriter, to confess that I find myself rooting for Joe because I’ve known him since 1976, I like him, I liked his late son Beau, and I had the occasion some years back to mentor his daughter Ashley.

And, too, if the stars are in alignment for a Democrat to beat President Trump in 2020, as a Democrat, I’d much rather see it be a President Biden than some of the other jokers who are kicking the tires.

Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, the leftist senators from the East and West coasts, have more ambition than talent, accomplishment or gravitas. And Sen. Harris is burdened by the appearance of having looked the other way in the “#MeToo” era while she employed a sexual harasser on her staff whose victims were awarded robust settlements.

Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, 46, the handsome mid-career Ivy League-educated congressman, is Kennedyesque enough to have Democrat hearts fluttering, but, after serving just four years in the House of Representatives, half of that spent absent while running for Senate, he seems remarkably light, too, on experience and accomplishment.

That leaves Sen. Elizabeth Warren to round out “the other top five not named Biden,” but much of the party seems to regard the American electorate as not quite ready for her brand of leftist orthodoxy, although that quality seems to be the directional surge in the party, particularly with the arrival of the millennials as a voting force replacing my boomer generation.

However, I still feel she has enough gravitas that she will emerge as Biden’s running mate for VP, if he chooses to run.

So, that brings us back to Delaware’s favorite son, Joe Biden, “Uncle Joe” to millions of voters, who has to decide soon – in just the next few weeks – whether the presidential flame still burns as fiercely in him as it has for decades.

Yes, I still think he will run.