When will the Democratic Party wise up? It’s time to say bye-bye to Joe Biden | Opinion

In early 2016, when I wrote an op-ed saying that Hillary Clinton should withdraw from the presidential race, it was met with an incredible amount of derision. At the time, she was the prohibitive favorite to win the nomination, but was already beginning to show the flaws that ultimately doomed her campaign.

The same could be said of former Vice President Joe Biden’s current campaign. His continued candidacy deprives the Democratic Party of a vibrant choice between its traditional liberal wing and its post-Obama progressive wing.

The dominant premise of the Biden candidacy is that he is the one Democrat virtually certain to beat President Trump. The fact that well-meaning Democratic donors and opinion makers who are driving the Biden campaign can say this with such conviction is mind boggling. If 2016 showed us anything, it is that the political class (of which I include myself as a member) has no idea who the best candidate to beat the president is.

What makes the premise of Biden’s electability so ridiculously questionable? Oh, where to begin? To start, history is always a good predictor of the future. Democrats have generally won with fresh faces — think Kennedy, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

Then there is fact that Biden has not exactly run state-of-the-art presidential campaigns in the past. Biden’s 1988 campaign imploded over charges of plagiarism, and in 2008, his candidacy never gained any traction, mired in single digits until he dropped out.

There are two primary reasons for his dismal track record. First, Biden’s policy positions are sometimes misaligned with the Democratic base. Be it his early opposition to busing, his mishandling of the Anita Hill hearing, his support for the Clinton crime bill and for the Iraq War, Biden has too often been out of step . Second, while the former vice president has always been mistake-prone, he now is a perpetual gaffe machine.

Whether he his talking about his friendship with Southern segregationists, placing the Kennedy and King assassinations in the 1970s rather than the 1960s or inaccurately conflating events he participated in, he is sadly starting to look ridiculous. Nobody doubts that Biden has been a wonderful public servant and a credit to the Democratic Party, but his age seems to have affected his mental acuity.

Do Democrats want to go into the 2020 election supporting a candidate who might be lovable, but cannot robustly challenge Trump? It has gotten so bad that Biden’s Democratic opponents now think they can criticize him without impunity. That will leave the vice president in a weakened position should he even get to the general election.

A candidate whose campaign is primarily based on a political calculus of electability is one that fails to inspire or generate enthusiasm. No one is leaving a Joe Biden event declaring “Let us march!” As we learned in Florida in 2018, if Democrats don’t have a fully motivated electorate, we lose. Biden represents the Democratic Party of the past, and President Trump has already demonstrated he can beat that.

The most recent poll of the well-respected Des Moines Register shows that Elizabeth Warren has already eclipsed Biden in Iowa and, it is hoped, marginalizes Bernie Sanders. Not a good sign for Biden. Voters are tired of candidates surrounded by drama.

The Democrats’ best opportunity lies in having a healthy debate within the party by candidates that effectively articulate issues on both sides of its divide. The Biden candidacy is suffocating more youthful, relevant and attractive candidates such as Sens. Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and Pete Buttigieg, who can more effectively offer primary voters an ideological alternative to the Warren/Sanders wing. This is not to say that Warren has not run a brilliant campaign that deserves serious consideration. Whoever emerges in this contest of ideas will be a far stronger candidate than a vulnerable Biden.

The stakes in 2020 are too high for Democrats not to enter the general election marching into the future rather than saddled with a fumbling candidate tied to the past.

Mike Abrams is former chairman of the Dade Democratic Party, a former state legislator and currently a policy adviser to Ballard Partners.