The Wall Street Journal, Alan Dershowitz, And The "Delaware Way"

Although it's behind a paywall, the Wall Street Journal has editorialized that Biden shouldn't run in 2024, and the web has picked up the main points:

The Wall Street Journal editorial board argued President Joe Biden is too old to run for re-election Friday, amid reports he is likely to announce his 2024 bid next week.

"The public understands what Mr. Biden apparently won’t admit: that electing an octogenarian in obvious decline for another four years could be an historic mistake," the editors wrote.

The editors continued, "asking the country to elect a man who is 80 years old and whose second term would end when he is 86 is a risky act that borders on selfish."

This is not the WSJ of the supply-side 1970s, when it had new things to say. They don't like Biden, but they don't like Trump, either. Maybe they hope Romney will stage a comeback. Their interpretation of Biden is utterly conventional:

The editors alleged the White House "goes to great lengths" to hide what they speculate is Biden's declining health.

"But his decline is clear to anyone who isn’t willfully blind," they argued.

They pointed to his lack of press conferences, scripted appearances, and public stumbles as evidence for their position.

The hypothesis here is that Biden is in a decline from a different Biden of an earlier era, but my problem is that we don't really have evidence of that more capable, dynamic younger Biden. During the runup to the 2020 presidential campaign, TIME noted Biden's unremarkable performance as of 2019 and looked back to his disappointing perforrmance in 1987 and 1988:

By the time he did declare his candidacy for the presidency, on June 9, 1987, he had been in the Senate for more than a decade, though his age — now seen by some as a weakness — was still one of his strengths.

“What people don’t remember today about Biden in the 1980s is that he was considered by quite a few people as a bright new hope, different from other Democrats,” says [Laurence I.} Barrett, [a former TIME national political correspondent].

. . . “The Democrats had taken two shellackings at the hands of Reagan, and there was this thought, not really based on a lot of facts, that the Democrats were too soft, too feminine, too much into interest politics, and Biden was seen by his own people as an antidote to that — good looking and athletic — who would come across as stronger,” Barrett says.

Not that the candidate was without his drawbacks: “Biden’s mouth is both his greatest asset and his greatest liability,” Barrett wrote shortly after Biden announced his candidacy. That analysis would prove enduringly prescient.

The 2019 TIME piece brought up the 1987 charges that he plagiarized a speech by UK politician Neil Kinnock and the fumbling responses by his handlers, including

2) An Awkward Revelation. The Kinnock kleptomania was particularly damaging to Biden since it underscored the prior concerns that he was a shallow vessel for other people’s ideas.

3) A Maladroit Response. Top Aide Tom Donilon claimed that Biden failed to credit Kinnock because “he didn’t know what he was saying. He was on autopilot.”

In other words, the argument that the Biden of 2023 is in a decline from a youthful, adroit, dynamic Biden assumes facts that are not in evidence. He was Mr Magoo in his early 40s as he is now in his early 80s. If he was thought to be strong, good-looking, and athletic in the 1980s, this was proven to be a fantasy at the time.

But this leads to another question: If Biden has always been a shallow vessel on autopilot, how did he get to the Senate in the first place, and how did he manage to stay there? Interestingly, Alan Dershwoitz made remarks just this past week that may be helpful. In this YouTube video at about 2:25, he says in a completely different context,

Let's remember this is Delaware. I've argued cases, I think it's now 32 states, out of the 50, 32, maybe 34, something like that; I've never argued in a more corrupt state than Delaware. In Delaware the judges basically pick each other. They come from a small number of elite law firms, and then they go back to those law firms, and then they favor the lawyers from those law firms. The favorite word in Delaware, everybody knows it, is "home cooking" or home court advantage. If you're a Delaware lawyer, you get a home court advantage.

But this isn't necessarily limited to Delaware, either: the South Carolina "Murdaugh Murders" scandal shows how a tight insider clique can control things elsewhere in small backwater states. What Dershowitz saw -- and he's quite an insightful guy -- was a courthouse version of a larger phenomenon called the "Delaware Way", described in more depth by The Intercept:

The Delaware Way is the idea that there is a synergy between the success of the state’s benevolent corporate monarchies — the chemical companies, debt collectors, and pharmaceuticals that call the First State home — and the well-being of the state’s people, all of it eased by compromise and good will among leaders of both parties. The Wilmington News Journal explains that the locally famous ethos is possible because the state is “so small, the line goes, that we can get all the right people in one room and get things done.” Like runoff from its chemical plants, the Delaware Way is in the water.

The DuPonts are at the center:

Two du Ponts would go on to become U.S. senators, and a third would serve as Delaware governor. Delaware’s elite social and political circle has largely remained intact for more than 200 years now.

From what I read, the Bidens' Wilmington home is a former DuPont mansion that was apparently provided to young Joe at the start of his career at a considerable discount. Biden's rise hasn't been well covered, but it took place at an early age, and his accomplishments were unimpressive: from the TIME link above, he graduated 76th out of 85 in his Syracuse law school class, and he "failed a course because he wrote a paper that used five pages from a published law-review article without quotation marks or a proper footnote." The lad was clearly not white-shoe law firm material.

But he found favor with the DuPonts presumably because he looked good, had no center, and would do precisely what he was told. This was Biden in the beginning, is the Biden now, and is the Biden that ever shall be.