2020 elections

The former vice president slogs through a rough stretch as he considers a third bid for the White House.

Joe Biden is enduring the roughest stretch of any candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, and he’s not even a candidate yet.

In a two-week period where his attempts to smooth a path into the 2020 race only seemed to underscore the obstacles confronting his prospective candidacy, the former vice president got a concentrated dose of what’s in store for him if he chooses to embark on a third run for the White House.

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The hardest hit came Friday, when Lucy Flores, Nevada’s Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 2014, stepped forward to say she was made uncomfortable by Biden’s attentions that year when he was too physical with her at a campaign event.

“He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head,” Flores wrote in a publication called The Cut. “My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused.”

From that encounter to his ongoing apology tour for the way he handled sexual harassment allegations against Justice Clarence Thomas to an awkward float about a possible running mate to mounting questions about his son’s business dealings in Ukraine, Biden has been reminded in short order of the lingering questions he’ll need to address. Namely, whether there is a place for a 76-year-old white male career politician in a historically broad and diverse field of candidates, and whether his long career in public service has left him with a record that is out of sync with a party that’s rapidly moving leftward.

“Biden’s record is at odds with where the Democratic party is in 2020,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive consultant who advised Cynthia Nixon’s primary campaign against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “Primaries are tough, and Joe Biden, when you’re this old and running for president, you have a pretty long record for people to go through.”

Biden’s spokesman, Bill Russo, indicated that Friday’s allegation was a surprise.

“Neither then, nor in the years since, did he or the staff with him at the time have an inkling that Ms. Flores had been at any time uncomfortable,” Russo said in a written statement, “nor do they recall what she describes.”

But a picture from the event also shows Biden also burying his nose in the hair of actress and activist Eva Longoria. Katz, a former staffer in the U.S. Senate — where Biden had served for 36 years before becoming President Obama’s vice president in 2009 — said it was easy to believe Flores’ accusations.

“The thing that’s so challenging for team Biden is that everything that Lucy Flores said seems very, very true,” Katz said. “There’s literally highlight reels of Biden, whether it’s with world leaders or granddaughters of incoming members of Congress, doing things that seem a little off — on camera.”

Cristobal Alex, a Biden adviser referenced anonymously in Flores’ account, said in a statement that he felt “sucker-punched and surprised” when he read the essay. He contended that Flores misrepresented a private conversation with him and that her recollection of the event did not match his.

Still, the rise of the #MeToo movement, and a trove of videos and photos have placed Biden under fresh scrutiny. While Biden’s Democratic critics make sure to add that there’s no comparison with the record of President Trump — who has been accused by multiple women of sexual harassment and once said in a hot-mic moment that he could grab and kiss women because “when you’re a star, they let you do it” — they also concede the focus on Biden’s overly familiar style will make it more difficult to draw a sharp contrast with Trump.

Yet that isn’t all Biden is contending with. Three days before Flores went public, Biden was busy expressing regret for his treatment of another woman of color involving a different sexual harassment issue: The 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings he chaired in 1991, in which Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of improper behavior.

“She paid a terrible price. She was abused through the hearing,” Biden said of Hill during the Biden Courage Awards ceremony in New York. “To this day, I regret I couldn’t get her the kind of hearing she deserved.”

The attempts to tackle the Anita Hill issue, however, have so far failed to put the issue behind him — despite what amount to public apologies, Biden continues to draw criticism for not taking personal responsibility for his handling of the hearings, and for not apologizing directly to Hill.

Democratic pollster Joel Benenson, who was the chief strategist for Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns, noted that “the public is going to be the ultimate arbiter of whether the regret and whether what he says on this issue is sufficient.”

Sandwiched between those two flaps was a third concerning 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams, who appeared on two television shows to shoot down rumors she would join Biden’s ticket as a running mate before he cinched the nomination.

The trial balloon, which appeared to come from Biden’s inner circle, didn’t have the intended effect. Far from generating excitement about the prospect of introducing an element of youth and diversity to his prospective bid, the float smacked of desperation.

A Biden spokesman denied that there were “discussions on a pre-cooked ticket,” calling them ”false, plain and simple.”

Benenson sounded surprised by the rumors that Biden advisors wanted to pick Abrams as a running mate before he even announced.

“Voters ultimately do not like gimmicks. They also, I believe, don’t like the presumption of announcing your vice presidential choice before you’re the nominee,” Benenson said. “Iowa and New Hampshire are retail politics on steroids. And for you to suggest that you are looking past them and deciding who your vice president should be? I think it plays wrong.”

Republicans were gleeful at the prospect of Biden either making the move or being so flat-footed that he didn’t suppress the rumors fast enough because it made him look weak.

“This is consultant malpractice,” said Florida GOP Congressman Matt Gaetz, a top Trump defender and surrogate. “Either they actually considered this as a trial balloon and didn’t realize how bad it made Biden look or they didn’t get in front of it to shoot it down because they wanted it to be true … We hope he gets in the race and we hope he’s the Democrats’ nominee.”

Republicans and Democrats alike are already laying the groundwork to face Biden by examining the business deals of his son, Hunter Biden, when Biden was vice president. It’s an issue of such grave concern to Joe Biden, who lost his other son Beau Biden to cancer, that he has told close associates it’s a major factor in deciding whether to run.

To start off the week, the conservative website One America News Network featured a report Monday about Hunter Biden’s ties to a Ukrainian oligarch and a natural-gas company in 2014, an arrangement that was also criticized a year later in a New York Times editorial.

As with the allegations lodged by Flores against Biden, the former vice president must not only determine how to respond, but also how to answer critics who will say Hunter Biden’s business interests make it harder for Biden as a nominee to contrast his record with Trump on the question of ties to Russia.

Trump’s defenders, who have blamed Ukrainian intelligence for some of the Trump-Russia stories, say they look forward to making Democrats pay for it if and when Biden enters the race.

“I’m pretty confident Joe Biden will be called out by his presidential primary competitors for his son getting rich off a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch’s gas company,” said Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign consultant and top Trump defender.

He pointed to a connection with Trump’s former campaign manager that should make Democrats uneasy.

“Wait till they find out Hunter Biden’s oligarch is from the same political party Paul Manafort consulted in Ukraine,” he said. “Old ‘Lunch Bucket Joe’ would be smart to not even get in the race.”

Alex Thompson contributed to this report.

Politics are ablaze today with both savage indignation and misty sentimentality. With “the future of the republic” and “justice itself” on the line in every Twitter battle, it seems unlikely that anyone would propose that a dose of irony could help lighten the mood. But … a dose of irony could lighten the mood.

Great news for us apathetic types born around Woodstock and Watergate: No need to dig up Thomas Pynchon or an Alanis Morissette CD. Look no further than Beto O’Rourke’s recently revealed teen involvement in the Cult of the Dead Cow, America’s original cell of computer hacktivists. The rad cDc, founded in 1984 in a slaughterhouse in Lubbock, Texas, was an ironic project par excellence—by turns infantile, enraged and bleeding-heart.

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O’Rourke’s membership, which was exposed by Reuters and gamely confirmed by the candidate himself, surely reflects his libertarian–skater proclivities, which he flaunts to this day. But, while O’Rourke did use the Cult’s resources to cop some free long distance, it turns out at the cDc he was less pirate than poet. As the group’s old posts reveal, he mostly saw the cDc’s online board as a zine, where, under the pen name Psychedelic Warlord, he could pop off on alternative music or write indie experiments. O’Rourke doesn’t have a campaign memoir yet, but the presidential candidate now better known for winding Medium posts also has some online juvenilia that’s worth a look.

What do Beto’s musings reveal about him as a politician? “Self-invention” was a watchword of the 1980s and ’90s, with all it implied about the fictions of identity, and Beto was no stranger to persona-shuffling—then as now. In his adolescent oeuvre, he tried his hand as a critic, punk and journalist. As time went on, he experimented as a musician, outlaw, idealist, family man, skater, fundraiser, politician and, maybe, leader of the free world.

But is Beto the writer any good? Sure, he was in high school, and his stuff is mostly record reviews and snark. But never mind the bollocks. O’Rourke genuinely understands genre and tone; he’s economical and makes good words work hard; he’s playful and takes chances; he can deftly conjure odd worlds, especially interior ones; he’s recessive—or maybe afraid to commit—as a narrator; he steers clear of the projection and judgment that muck up the work of many young essayists.

Reader, he had me at the opening paren. Yes, O’Rourke used ASCII, a retro affectation that brings the top-shelf nostalgia in O’Rourke’s poem “The Song of the Cow,” which features this mini-moo-sterpiece:

((___))

[ x x ]

/

(` ‘)

(U)

That use of clashing symbols for nostrils, suggesting that one is more flared that the other! And, of course, the x-ed out eyes that conjure the slaughterhouse! O’Rourke’s teen stylings suggest the hand of a bona fide artist. Or at least a little nerd fleetingly willing to rethink Texas iconography. Then, off he goes into a pastoral poem that tackles the topic of butts or bollocks. “Wax my ass,” reads the verse, which turns liturgical in rhythm. “Scrub my balls. / The Cow has risen. / Provide Milk.” Cow has died. Cow is risen. As we approach Easter, we might consider the paschal cow to be O’Rourke’s radical critique of the paschal lamb. Cow will come again. Alleluia. Devastating commentary on the resurrection.

While it has fewer balls, another stanza caught my attention for its evocations of Nathanael West’s 1931 The Dream Life of Balso Snell, in which the hero searches for meaning strolling around inside the entrails of a Trojan Horse. O’Rourke writes:

Oh, Milky wonder, sing for us once more,

Live your life, everlusting joy.Thrust your hooves up my analytic passage,Enjoy my fruits

Thrust your hooves up my analytic passage—come on, that’s not bad. It works well as an ultranerdy answer to Bruce Springsteen’s manly, earnest innuendo from the then-loathed 1970s: “Strap your hands ’cross my engines.” “Everlusting” is a nice neologism in a countryside poem that doesn’t shy from evoking eternity and bestiality at once. It’s hard to remember how important irony—not just snideness and polyester coveralls, but what Richard Rorty called “liberal irony”—was to Gen-X slackers. O’Rourke was never going to let himself be seen lolling around like a farm boy writing hymns to country life and milkmaids. But, like all young poets from William Wordsworth to Bob Dylan, he also wanted to try his hand at a traditional lyric. Irony, and the elastic space of the brand-new internet, let O’Rourke come to romance at a punk angle.

Then there’s a more vicious short story by O’Rourke as Psychedelic Warlord, “Visions from the Last Crusade.” O’Rourke’s metal title fails, but the story begins, elegantly, in the “catacombs” of the narrator’s head, wherein a hallucination unfolds. In short order, the narrator realizes: “My one and only goal in life became the termination of everything that was free and loving.” Hoo boy. This is where things become a little bit manifesto-like, but what the hell. O’Rourke’s narrator goes on a killing spree, and—OK, yeah—he starts mowing down children. He keeps this up, lays to waste 38 people, evades the police—and is pleased with himself.

“Visions from the Last Crusade” is more reverie than story. It comes across as an Edgar Allen Poe tribute, with maybe an Anthony Burgess tribute rising. As a dramatic monologue, it also borrows some logic that recalls—don’t @ me—the seductive and fiendish voices in Robert Browning. O’Rourke’s killer-narrator’s delusions are not banal: When he spots his first soon-to-be victims looking carefree, he decides, “this happiness and sense of freedom were much too overwhelming for them.” Their happiness, he goes on, “was mine by right. I had earned it in my dreams.” Maybe not a campaign slogan—“your happiness is mine by right”?—but not bad, if you like online satirical murder fantasies of 1988.

What other genres did O’Rourke test out at the cDc? In 1990, he contributed to the collective a recounting of a gruesome dentist appointment that’s surprisingly dull in spite of plenty of gums and gore. (He must have liked this conceit, though, as he reprised it in January, filming his dental hygienist, Diana, as she spoke about her experiences at the U.S.-Mexico border—and cleaned O’Rourke’s teeth.) A 1989 piece called “Ultra-Trendies” is endearing for its very ’90s calibration of who is authentically punk and who isn’t; those who know all the lines in Sid and Nancy—and listen to nothing but the Sex Pistols—are, says Beto, phonies. (I sense our hero protests too much here—he’s off to Columbia in a year.) In another cDc piece, a Q&A from 1988, O’Rourke and his pal Arlo Klahr, with whom O’Rourke would start a punk band called Foss, interrogate a self-described Nazi and KKK member. Mostly, they just let him ramble, denying the Holocaust, praising the leadership of Hitler and defending neo-Nazis as loving Christians. O’Rourke and Klahr are nonconfrontational in the extreme. At the bottom of the page, they give an El Paso address for anyone who wants to mail away for the tape of the interview. A Google search suggests that the house at that address once belonged to Pat Francis O’Rourke, Beto’s father.

“A Feature on Money,” from 1987, is my favorite O’Rourke from the Cult of the Dead Cow years. Yes, another negligible title. Still, the piece, a short essay, is much more sincere than the others. O’Rourke, for all he gives goth an occasional go, is just not a very dark person. And while his essay is supposed to be “radical”—arguing for a world without money—it’s really just a comfort. Turns out Beto, like anyone but a demented oligarch or the American president, is skeptical of the claim that greed is a virtue. He proposes, with all the ingenuousness of a teenager, that we “slowly take the United States off the world market, and then slowly phase out our own money markets.”

O’Rourke now insists he’s a “capitalist,” but his cDc writing suggests he can still throw down with the best of the Occupy-trained lefty foes of Wall Street. And in his essay, the sweet, slow process of obliterating the American economy has some damn good effects: “This would slowly bring the upper and middle classes of people in America together.” Who doesn’t want to all be together, without the stress of … money? I’m in.

At the bottom of “A Feature on Money,” I found the Cult’s usual libertarian contempt for copyright (“All rights worth shit—and duefully [sic] so”), but also a number to call. The idealistic Beto—the man who by force of sheer charisma can rally Americans to donate millions of dollars in 24 hours—really did want to start a movement back then! “Remember, we are the next generation, and will soon rule the world,” he wrote. I dialed up the 915 number. I figured if O’Rourke the aged hacktivist still knows how to monkey with telephony, maybe he routed that old number to his campaign headquarters. No dice. It was a law firm in El Paso, Texas. I was too not-punk to prank them. But then I reverse-searched the number online and found that, at least at some point, it belonged to none other than Pat Francis O’Rourke.

Early Beto hits the spot if you’re feeling nostalgic for the days of debates among punks or the interface of early web boards, but if you want to find one real radical cell in O’Rourke, you’re out of luck. It seems O’Rourke—minor indie showoff turned normcore candidate for president—once thought his fellow Americans might consider money the root of all evil. And he hoped we could actively converse about it, if we just called his dad.