Who Am I Voting For In November?

Well, it won’t be Donald Trump.  I made that clear in February of 2016¹ (and I knew it before that).  So does that mean I am voting for Joe Biden?  I don’t know.

I have the advantage, unlike people who live in states that might go for either President Trump or former Vice President Biden, of living in a state, Illinois, that is definitely going to go for Vice President Biden.  So my vote is not going to make a difference for president this year (though as I mentioned here, in some cases one vote can make a difference).  The fact that Illinois is definitely going for Vice President Biden means I don’t have to vote for Vice President Biden just to stop President Trump.  I can wait and decide whether I want to vote for Vice President Biden based on how good I think Vice President Biden could be, not just how bad President Trump would be.  Which is the problem.

If I vote for Vice President Biden, who am I voting for?  The Joe Biden of the 1970s (who opposed school busing), the Joe Biden of the 1980s (who supported a constitutional amendment to prohibit burning the U.S. flag), the Joe Biden of the 1990s (who helped write Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill), the Joe Biden of the 2000s, the Joe Biden who was Barack Obama’s Vice President, or the Joe Biden of 2020?  That’s a lot of Joe Bidens.  Which one would I be voting for?  Or would it be another one entirely?

I don’t know, and it makes a difference to me.  I have talked about what I think is the biggest danger in a dangerous world.  And I’m not sure Vice President Biden is the right person for that job.  As I have noted before, in 2014, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates² said of Vice President Biden: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”  And he didn’t take it back when asked last year.

Last month, in a talk to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (which I previously mentioned here), when Secretary Gates was asked who he thought was addressing the concerns he had about American foreign policy, he said that neither candidate, and neither party, were talking about the issues he had raised or had a policy to address those issues.

In talking about Vice President Biden and foreign policy, The Economist said this last month:

“Mr Biden has got a lot of foreign policy wrong over the decades.  But it does have the advantage of sounding serious.  ‘Being wrong” about American’s interests is another thing Mr Trump has defined down.”

That is not much of an endorsement.  Which is my concern about Vice President Biden.  He’s not President Trump, which is good, but I don’t know what he is.  Is he the Joe Biden who was “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”?  Is he the Joe Biden who was Vice President under Barack Obama, whose foreign policy was defined by leading from behind and ignoring its own red line in Syria (and, per John Bolton, whose foreign policy was not all that different from President Trump’s “deal at any cost” approach³)?  Or is he a brand-new Joe Biden for 2020, one who thinks like the Democratic Party of today?  He’s not saying.  When Vice President Biden’s senior adviser for foreign policy was asked what Vice President Biden’s view was on President Trump’s reduction of the number of U.S. troops in Germany, he said a Biden administration “would review” it, like it would review everything President Trump has done.  That’s not good enough.  I don’t want somebody to “review” this decision.  I want somebody to reverse it.  I want somebody to tell what they are going to do. 

Ivo Daalder, President of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former Ambassador to NATO, said in the Chicago Tribune: “What holds alliances together is an understanding that the security of one is vital to the security of all.”  We need a president who believes this.  President Trump doesn’t.   I think Vice President Biden probably does, but I can’t be sure – for a couple of reasons.  First, he hasn’t been talking about it, so I don’t know what he believes now.  Second, and perhaps more importantly, I don’t know who would be running foreign policy in a Biden administration.  There are a lot of people in today’s Democratic Party I wouldn’t trust with foreign policy.⁴ 

Thus far, the foreign policy argument for Vice President Biden has been: He’s not President Trump plus he’s a nice guy.  I am sure Vice President Biden is a nice guy on a personal level.  But that’s not enough on a policy level or on the level of being able to implement policy.

We need a president who can convince the American people that “the security of one is vital to the security of all.”  We need a president who can convince the American people that, in the world as it is today, the United States needs to lead – for the sake of the world and for the sake of us.  So far, I don’t know if Vice President Biden would be that president.  But there’s three-plus months to go.  Let’s see where we are in November.
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¹ Here and here.
² And former lots of other things, too.
³ See Peter Spiegel, “The Reaganite revival,” Financial Times, July 18, 2020, and my thoughts here. 
⁴ As I say in this post (and as I said here, among other places), I think it is critically important for the United States to lead in the world.  But, for someone to think the United States needs to lead, they have to think the United States is good enough to lead.  I am afraid there are parts of the Democratic Party that do not think that today.  If our system is “rotten to the core,” how can we lead?