Joe Biden’s brand has always been a media creation
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Voters apparently are learning that Joe Biden‘s behavior, despite the media’s projections, is less than Christlike.
“President Joe Biden’s brand as a family-oriented public servant has been a signature political asset that for more than 50 years has helped him win the argument that, when judged against ‘the alternative’ rather than ‘the Almighty,’ he stacks up pretty well,” NBC News reported. “But the burnish on Biden’s brand is being tested like never before, ahead of a close 2024 election. Some of the president’s Democratic allies are worried about potential fallout from a confluence of family drama that’s spilled into public view and from Republican attacks that cut at the bedrock of Biden’s longtime political appeal.”
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But the Biden “brand” has never been much more than a media-manufactured facade, from his sugar-coated career as a swamp monster senator to the elder statesman routine that helped elect a very senior citizen to the presidency.
For starters, son Hunter Biden is the tip of the iceberg, the most shameless sellout in a family of sellouts. But he was only fulfilling the family legacy:
In the 1970s, as Joe was entering the Senate and taking a seat on the Banking Committee, James obtained unusually generous loans from lenders who later faced federal regulatory issues. Joe Biden was in touch with two of those banks about his brother’s loans, once to scold a bank executive about invoking his name in attempts to collect on overdue payments. In the 1990s, a group of Mississippi trial lawyers enlisted James to further its interests in Washington as it sought congressional support for a tobacco megasettlement. A decade later, those Mississippi contacts supported Joe’s presidential bid — hosting a fundraiser for him and accepting an invitation to accompany Joe to a high-profile Washington dinner — while they simultaneously prepared to launch a lobbying firm with James and his wife, Sara. Plans for the firm fizzled when the Mississippians were arrested, then jailed, for an unrelated bribery scheme.
The entire Biden family has been banking off of the myth of middle-class Joe since he became a senator. And it’s not as though concerns about Hunter Biden began only when Donald Trump (correctly) began digging into the first son’s corrupt business dealings in Ukraine. Here is the Washington Examiner’s own Byron York reporting a full quarter century ago on Joe Biden’s cozy relationship with the MBNA, the Delaware bank that just so happened to employ his son:
A few weeks after Biden was reelected in November 1996, there came yet another tie between the senator and MBNA when the company hired Biden’s son Hunter (the younger Biden is a Yale Law School graduate who was admitted to the bar this year). MBNA officials seem delighted with their new executive. “Hunter Biden is an outstanding young man,” a bank spokesman says. “We’re very fortunate to have him here at MBNA.” Beyond that, the company is not eager to talk. First, a spokesman declined to discuss Biden’s salary. Then, when asked what young Biden is doing for the bank, the spokesman paused and said, “That’s not something we get into details on.” When pressed, the spokesman said, “He’s a talented young guy that we are grooming for a management position.” The spokesman said Hunter Biden has been “moving around the bank” as part of his introduction into the business. Hunter Biden himself declined to discuss his salary or his job.
The scope of the Biden business racket may be greater today, but how it silences scandal remains the same. And with Joe Biden enabling this behavior for half a century, it’s not hard to see how protecting a brand as lucrative as Biden would logically extend toward fighting in court to ensure an illegitimate daughter born to a former stripper from Arkansas does not gain access to the family moniker.
Lest you believe Biden has allowed all of this because he is simply too nice, let me remind you that Biden’s random outbursts at reporters over the last few years are not just senior moments. Recall this little diatribe aimed at a voter from his previous presidential campaign:
I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank.
Most of these claims, by the way, were wildly untrue. For example, he finished 76th in his class of 85, far from the “top half.” The diatribe came from his 1987 presidential campaign, the same one from which he had to withdraw after it was revealed he lied about his academic achievements and plagiarized from a British lawmaker.
From telling the wheelchair-bound Chuck Graham to “stand up” and his observation that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent,” Joe Biden was always treated as a sideshow to the Democratic platform of power. We know that Barack Obama put the weight of his machine behind Hillary Clinton and used Biden’s personal tragedy — the death of his son Beau — as a way to discourage him from the race. But ironically enough, it was that tragedy and Obama’s decision that probably put the second (or third) wind in Biden’s political career.
Had Democrats run anyone less comically corrupt than Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden would have never been seen as the “electable” alternative to Bernie Sanders in 2020. Had Republicans run anyone other than Trump, Biden’s age and excruciatingly long record would have been seen as disqualifying.
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But through a series of happy accidents, Biden was the old guy with the sense to stay off Twitter during the Democratic primaries and the slightly less corrupt guy in comparison to his predecessor for the Democratic presidential nomination. Looking ahead to 2024, even Obama is apparently warning Biden that he could lose not just to any other Republican, but specifically to Trump.
The Biden brand of the above water, middle-class patriarch was always a facade, but only now is it in the media’s interest to notice it.