By RYAN COOPER
It's official: Joe Biden is running for president. He started in signature bumbling fashion, claiming that he asked Barack Obama not to endorse him, putting out a tone-deaf fundraising email talking about how "all men are created equal," and releasing a very awkward picture of himself with Obama.
But here we are: the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination are two elderly white men — Biden and Bernie Sanders (at least in terms of polls at this early date). Nevertheless, their political legacies are poles apart. Biden represents the old party orthodoxy, while Sanders represents a new ideological force trying to displace it. Their records make for a good illustration of the political stakes in this primary.
Let's examine three major policy areas.
Political Economy
Certainly the biggest difference between Sanders and Biden is in their economic views. Sanders has been a die-hard advocate of unions, taxing the rich, regulating corporate abuses (especially in finance), fair trade, and social insurance for his entire career. It's what he cares about most, and where his messaging is most consistent. (In an amusing interview on the Today Show from 1981, Sanders said: "In our society, theoretically a democratic society, you have a handful of people who control our economy. You have maybe 2 percent of the population who owns one third of the entire wealth of America, 80 percent of the stocks, 90 percent of the bonds.") As Mayor of Burlington, he worked to preserve public housing, enable worker and consumer cooperatives, and ensure public ownership and control of the city waterfront.
Biden, by contrast, has been a bag man for big corporations for his entire career. Delaware is like the Luxembourg of U.S. states — a tiny tax haven and flag of convenience for corporations who own the local political system outright, and Biden is no exception. His economic policy career has been one disgrace after the next — sponsoring or voting for multiple rounds of financial deregulation, trade deals that savaged the American manufacturing base, and bankruptcy "reform" that made it much harder to discharge consumer debt (and nearly impossible to get rid of student debt). It's no surprise at all that on the same day he launched his campaign, Biden held a fundraiser including several corporate lobbyists and Republican donors at the home of a Comcast executive.
Civil Rights
Though it's not his prime area of concern, Sanders has a real record of civil rights activism. As a student at the University of Chicago, he was a bit player in the 1960s civil rights movement, helping organize protests against segregation and racist abuses, and was even fined for resisting arrest at a sit-in. As a representative and senator, he has a very good voting record on civil rights legislation.
Biden, by contrast, openly courted white backlash to the civil rights movement to keep himself in office in the 1970s, working with southern segregationists like Strom Thurmond and James Eastland to stop school integration. "I think the Democratic Party could stand a liberal George Wallace," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1975. Biden was also key in helping Clarence Thomas get onto the Supreme Court, harshly questioning Anita Hill, who had accused Thomas of sexually harassing her, and did not call witnesses who could have supported Hill to testify, one of which also accused Thomas of harassment. Since that time he has supported many civil rights bills, but he was also one of the driving forces behind racist mass incarceration (see below).
Please continue this article here: https://theweek.com/articles/837515/biden-vs-bernie-what-two-long-records-say-about-2020
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