Joe Biden: Long Road to the White House (CNN, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night CNN did two-hour specials on both Donald Trump (focused on what he’s likely to do in a second term) and Joe Biden, and I watched the Biden one. Called Long Road to the White House, the CNN documentary on Biden told mostly the same story about him that the Democratic Convention had -- that he deserves to be President because he’s a decent human being who’s had enough pain in his own life (the death of his first wife and their daughter in a car crash in 1972 and the loss of his son Beau to cancer in 2015) to empathize with the sufferings of others. It’s hard not to make the comparison to Donald Trump Biden’s supporters want us to make -- Trump, who was taught by his father Fred Trump and his other great role model, corrupt attorney (and self-hating closeted Gay man) Roy Cohn, to regard empathy and compassion as weaknesses fit only for “suckers” and “losers” (two words we’ve been hearing a lot about in the Trump lexicon since Jeffrey Goldberg’s report in the Atlantic that he applies them to U.S. servicemembers, especially ones who get captured or killed).

The CNN Biden documentary focused on his long career in the U.S. Senate and dealt with some of the controversies surrounding it, including the confirmation battles over Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork (whom he was able to keep off the Court) and Clarence Thomas (whom he wasn’t) and the accusations of sexual harassment against Thomas by Anita Hill. I remember that when Hill came forward much of what she had to say just seemed weird -- until then I had assumed “sexual harassment” meant a boss leaning over to an employee and saying, “Meet me at the No Tell Motel tonight or don’t bother coming to work tomorrow morning,” and it was Hill’s graphic and almost surreal testimony that alerted a lot of us (especially those who had escaped it by being male) to the horribly demeaning and insulting treatment bosses put employees through over their sexuality short of a fuck-me-or-else ultimatum.

The show also dealt with the women who’ve come forward and said Biden made them feel “uncomfortable” by hugging them (which I believe is a direct result of Biden having come of age in the early 1970’s, at the height of the so-called “Human Potential Movement,” one of whose precepts was that people were overly protective of their personal space and needed to break that down and build bonds of trust by hugging each other more; the show featured a clip from Biden himself acknowledging that “the rules have changed” about that sort of personal contact). It did not mention Tara Reade, who in 2018 was one of the women who claimed Biden was “too huggy” but in 2020 expanded that allegation and claimed that Biden had out-and-out raped her with his finger in a Senate hallway.

The show detailed other controversies surrounding Biden, including his double flip-flop on the wars in Iraq (voting against Bush I’s request for an “Authorization to Use Military Force” in 1991, supporting Bush II’s similar and even more thinly justified request in 2002, and then saying that vote had been a “mistake”), and it gave a rather odd account of his decision not to run for President in 2016 -- when he would have been a stronger candidate than Hillary Clinton and might have been able to spare us the horrors of the Trump Presidency. The explanation Biden gave at the time was he was still in mourning for his son Beau -- though the media also reported that on his deathbed Beau had told his father to run -- but the story we got on this program was that Biden had decided not to run because Hillary Clinton had already lined up too many of the big donors and endorsers for him to have a shot.

And of course the show detailed Hunter Biden’s scapegrace antics in Ukraine (even when both were still alive Hunter quite obviously lived in Beau’s shadow, and once Beau died so tragically it was even more a case of “Dad always liked you best!”), though the CNN documentarians flatly rejected the obvious parallel between what Biden did in Ukraine in 2015 (threatening to withhold U.S. aid unless the Ukrainian President fired the state prosecutor who was investigating the Ukranian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat) and what Trump did in 2019 (threatening to withhold aid from a later Ukrainian President unless he reinstated the Hunter Biden investigation).

The CNN documentary on Biden portrayed him as a man with personal flaws and one who’s made political mistakes, but -- once again in stark, though unspoken, contrast to the current President -- one who will admit to them, apologize for them (even though the modern-day Anita Hill doesn’t think Biden’s apology to her went far enough -- still, she’s willing to vote for him, especially considering the alternative!) and change his mind on contentious issues like criminal justice reform (it was Biden who pushed through a lot of the nastiest “tough-on-crime” bills of the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s that led to the mass incarceration of Americans in general and African-Americans in particular) instead of clinging to the views of his youth as eternal verities, unchallengeable by anything as prosaic as facts or reason, like Donald Trump does!