Biden’s Branding Reboot: Here Comes Emo Joe - Vanity Fair

When Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke endorsed Joe Biden in Dallas on the eve of Super Tuesday, each of the former candidates played to type. Buttigieg spoke in calm and deliberate terms about the need for healing, saying Biden “will draw out what is best in each of us.” Klobuchar told a story of Franklin Roosevelt’s connection with working-class Americans, tethering it to Biden. “Joe knows you, and he will fight for you,” she said. O’Rourke bounded onto the stage in his signature blue button-down, shouting out Texas’s 254 counties, invoking Whataburger, and promising that Biden could bring the country out of its polarized corners. There was one word, though, that passed through all of the Democrats’ lips on Monday as they talked about the former vice president: empathy. Each Democrat made a point of weaving the word into their remarks. If the message wasn’t clear enough, you’re about to hear it a lot more in the coming months. Should the Democratic primary evolve into a showdown between Biden and Bernie Sanders, a core argument of Biden’s candidacy won’t be about policy. It will be about Biden’s humanity, a bid for the moderate suburbanites who played a decisive role in flipping the House to Democrats in 2018.

One campaign strategist I spoke with recently described Biden’s potential with “empathy moms,” suburban white women who might share soldier-homecoming videos on Facebook and perhaps voted for John McCain or Mitt Romney, but find Donald Trump revolting. They’re Romney–Clinton voters, and even some Obama–Trump voters, who aren’t ideologues. They moved in Biden’s direction in the South Carolina primary last weekend, when he established a coalition of black voters and post-Trump suburban dwellers over the age of 30 who are plainly uncomfortable with the prospect of a socialist on top of the Democratic ticket. With Buttigieg and Klobuchar no longer slicing up the vote among college-educated whites, they seem poised to consolidate around Biden as the anti-Sanders candidate.

What’s coming into view, as the primary race goes national, is that the Biden campaign is engineering a branding reboot, with the things Democrats loved about Biden during the Obama years coming the fore: the aviators, the merch, the tears, everything visceral and Irish that’s defined Biden’s public life for the last 40 years. O’Rourke invoked a moment from a CNN town hall in South Carolina last week, when Biden spoke tearfully about grief and his faith with Rev. Anthony Thompson, whose wife was murdered in the 2015 mass shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. That video, of Biden in his purest form, went viral, racking up over 2 million views on Twitter alone, and becoming a big topic on The View the next day. “A man like Joe Biden is the person that can change the tenor of this country, of what we are going through, because he has that empathy,” said Sunny Hostin, one of The View’s cohosts. “And I can’t believe we haven’t seen more of that Joe Biden.”

Longtime Biden watchers likely agreed. Richard Ben Cramer wrote in What It Takes about how Biden’s raw political talents during the 1988 campaign often gave way to too much emotion, too much “confession and apologia.” But at his best, then and now, Cramer said, Biden had “the connect.” He wrote about one Biden campaign speech in Sacramento, in which Biden fed off the energy of the crowd. “[H]e could make them feel it … he could make them feel him,” he wrote. But the 2020 Democratic primary, at least in its early stages, wasn’t about gut connection or feelings or any kind of beer test that Biden would easily pass despite not drinking alcohol. Even though plenty of voters make decisions with their gut—remember that Barack Obama won the crucial “cares about people like me” question in 2012 exit polls over Mitt Romney by a staggering 81-18 margin—the outset of the 2020 Democratic primary was about ideological dogma, identity, and generational change. Plenty of those fights played out among activists on Twitter, and they presented uncomfortable trapdoors for a white-haired candidate who talked a little too fondly about palling around with Strom Thurmond back in the ’80s.

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Biden’s Branding Reboot: Here Comes Emo Joe - Vanity Fair
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