Biden's in. Deal with it.

AMERICA IS an idea,” Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. told us in the campaign video from the Biden web site, the web site that indicated like nothing else could that, as of April 25, the former vice president was officially joining the 2020 presidential conversation, making his bid to reclaim the American idea from its captors, foreign and domestic.

In the video, Biden speaks over footage of the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, describing those involved as having “crazed faces, illuminated by torches.” “And that’s when we heard the words of the president of the United States. He said there were quote ‘some very fine people on both sides.’” Biden slowly repeats the words “very fine people.”

He then said that, with those words, “the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d seen in my lifetime.”

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Biden continues. “I believe history will look back on this back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an abhorrent moment in time. If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation. Who we are. And I cannot stand by and watch that happen. ...

“That’s why today I am announcing my candidacy for President of the United States.”

Biden seeks the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in a field of contenders too crowded by half, all of them facing a ruthless but damaged president whose disregard for the rule of law beggars the imagination. Biden also confronts a Democratic field eager to put distance between now and the past, even at the risk of alienating the voters whose loyalty has lifted the Democratic party before, more than once.

Ironically, Trump and the Democrats are using the same tactic in the runup to the primaries. Both are trying to frame the coming election as an inescapable existential choice. Trump hopes to cast Democrats as socialists and pit them against the nation; some in the Democratic party are working to pit Democrats against themselves. Both are doomed to fail, and Joe Biden may well be the reason why.

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WHAT I observed about Biden in October 2015 is true today: He’s “an Amtrak-corridor politician unafraid to meet people on their turf; a voluble man of outsize emotions; an empath of American politics — making the gaffes and outbursts of passion that mark him as human and, as such, eminently electable as one of us.”

Joe Biden is, among other things, someone who believes in the function of the American government, and the singular genius of that government’s operators’ manual — the United States Constitution. But Biden’s also a process guy, heartily embracing the muscular, intimate, in-your-face tropes of presidential campaign politics. He never met a baby he wouldn’t kiss. Among other people. Which has been a problem.

One of Biden’s main campaign challenges will be to fully grasp how the rules of tactile, retail politics have changed in the #MeToo era. Just weeks before Biden announced, two credible accusers came forward to call Biden on instances of unwanted touching and physical familiarity. It’s a problem Biden has addressed in the short term, even though it’s certain to come up again in the primary season.

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With these too-recent allegations of touching overstep, it’s clear that Biden needs to learn the new tolerances, the new rules of touch and permission in 21st-century public space, the way culture, society and the rules of attraction themselves have changed in #MeToo time.

We also have to consider the totality of Biden’s public life, rather than snapshot a relative handful of problematic events. But wait — what a handful of events: Biden’s historically embittering performance interrogating Anita Hill at the Clarence Thomas Senate hearings in 1991; the problematic optics of his work to advance the controversial Crime Bill in 1994; an unfortunate stand against school busing (a “bankrupt concept,” he said) to achieve integration in his state of Delaware, in 1974.

Americans like to think leaders are capable of evolving, and Biden is no exception. There shouldn’t be any doubt that Biden has been doing that evolution, making the necessary changes in the last 30 or 40 years — learning, however clumsily, how to be more emotionally and morally inclusive — how to enhance the, uh, articulate speech of his own heart.  Barack Obama wouldn’t have picked him for a running mate in 2008 and 2012 if Biden hadn’t shown documentary evidence of that evolution, and, importantly now, the potential for more of it.

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YOUNGER, progressive-leaning Democrats and their supporters have been ready to make the 2020 election a zero-sum-game referendum, a hard, stark, which-side-are-you-on choice between the quicksilver open-mindedness of youth and the sclerotic mindsets of the elders — even, yes, the Democratic elders.

But there are millions of Democratic voters who take pride in showing up on Election Day, happily taking the place of younger and more indifferent Americans, who, with weight of historical evidence as proof, don’t vote as consistently or reliably as their older counterparts on either side of the partisan divide.

Those loyal older voters? They’re Joe Biden’s people, and they have been for years. Age is no more valid a reason to pass on a Biden candidacy — and the voters that candidacy will require — than gender or race would be a reason to dismiss anyone else in the 2020 campaign.

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And if the Democrats are serious about inclusion and demographic breadth, Biden shouldn’t expect side-eye from rank-and-file Dems. Biden exhibits a baseline retail empathy that transcends orchestrated appearances on the campaign stage. It is foundational to who and what he is.

Yes he’s messy, he can be a tad sloppy, he blows through social boundaries when he shouldn’t, he’s almost too effusive in a deeply standoffish era. At first (or even second) blush, at all the cosmetic levels, Biden looks like a man out of step with his country ... until you reckon with where we are today, all of us, in a country out of step with itself.

The Democrats previously fixated on the problems they’d have if Biden got in the 2020 race. They should focus more on the problems they’d have had if he didn’t get in. Problems of a field of contenders with comparatively little or no name recognition. Of little or no affinity with millions of blue-collar Democrats in the vital Rust Belt states. ...

And the problem of having no experience in the White House. Few things will be harder to ignore than a track record of success. Trump can dismiss Biden, and the Democratic field of candidates, as weak nanny-state socialist apologists; those same candidates might be tempted to try defining Biden as an overrated anachronism. What they have in common: both have to take him seriously. Biden’s got the gravitas of experience, and they know it, each for different reasons.

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TEAM TRUMP, for example, reluctantly recognizes that, by way of his time in the public sector, at a variety of levels, Biden thoroughly dismantles the emerging Republican binary identifier of the collective Democratic campaign. Trump-versus-the-socialists branding might work against Biden’s younger fellow candidates, whose styles and policy prescriptions are thought to bear the whiff of the radical.

It definitely won’t hurt him. Biden’s deep affinities for the union — that deeply American institution — and for the blue-collar workers who characterize its identity will frustrate the idea of painting him as a Molotov-throwing outsider. Biden’s spent far too long working within the machinery of the federal government, being a part of its operation at levels Trump can only dream of. He's spent enough time among his fellow Amtrak-riding capitalists for them to know who he is. Joe Biden’s the institutionalist William Barr wishes he was.

The public knows it. They’re already identifying with Biden on the basis of electability. A Morning Consult poll released on April 24, the day before he announced, 42 percent of Americans found Biden more electable than Trump, who came in at 34 percent. Other polls say the same thing: In the Quinnipiac poll released April 30, Biden led all candidates, with 38 percent favorability, over Elizabeth Warren (12 percent), Bernie Sanders (11 percent) and Pete Buttigieg (10 percent). In a CNN poll, Biden led all contenders with 39 percent, followed by Sanders (15 percent) and Warren (8 percent).

By inference, these polls suggest that the various gaffes Biden’s been prone to don’t necessarily hurt him. And maybe the more innocent goofs of recent years shouldn’t hurt him. Hell, Trump’s been a gaffe machine since before the 2016 campaign, but people either ignored his numerous unforced errors altogether, or they factored them into their overall view, over time. Biden’s likely to be the beneficiary of the same thing, for exactly the same reasons. Familiarity needn't always breed contempt.

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Biden is electable on the basis of reach. Name recognition and 40 years of work in the public sector mean the Biden campaign can count on buy-in from older, working-class voters, many of whom were Obama voters a decade ago, the same people who decided to kick Trump’s tires in 2016. He’ll get to the blue-collar Democrats that have been party bedrock for generations. The citizens without which the Democratic Party can’t win next year.

Those voters? They’re Joe Biden’s people too.

And the generational divide that the Trump campaign is counting on may not be the deep chasm they think it is. Much has been made of the past-era Joe Biden and his penchant for bluster and overreach (witness the disaster for the Hill hearings, the misstep on school busing).

More recently, though, there were the eight measured, productive years as vice president in the administration of Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American president and still one of its most popular.

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AND CONSIDER what Biden offered as a political valedictory, a cri du Coeur that the current crop of Democratic candidates will be hard pressed to improve on as a progressive mission statement. “I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart,” Biden said in October 2015. “And I think we can. It’s mean spirited, it’s petty, and it’s gone on for much too long. ...”

“I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies,” he said. “They are our opposition. They’re not our enemies. And for the sake of the country, we have to work together. There are too many people in America — there are too many parents who don’t believe they can look their kid in the eye and say with certitude, ‘Honey, it’s gonna be okay.’”

“That’s what we need to change. It’s not complicated. That will be the true measure of our success, and we’ll not have met it until every parent out there can look at their kid in tough times and say, ‘Honey, it’s gonna be okay,’ and mean it.”

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At least in the early going, one of the things that most elevates a Biden 2020 campaign isn’t about what he is. It’s about what Donald Trump thinks he is. It’s the level of preoccupation that Trump has with the former vice president.

Look at the number of Biden-related tweets and retweets Trump’s released in the last week — 60 of them in one day alone. The winnowing of the Democratic field hasn’t happened in real campaign time and space yet. As the numbers come in between now and the end of the year, and maybe sooner, some candidates will vacate the field because of a perceived lack of interest. Others will bail because of a more practical consideration: an actual lack of money.

But that winnowing process has already started for President* Trump. In Trump’s witheringly tactical, compartmentalized, reptilian brain, Biden is the first among equals right now, the one Trump believes is closest to being an existential threat to his own prospects for re-election. He is the object of Donald Trump’s obsession. Joe Biden has thus taken up residence in a luxury penthouse apartment in the Trump Tower of the president’s mind. And unlike with occupants of other Trump properties in the past, eviction is unlikely any time soon.

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Image credits: Biden top and lower: From Biden 2020 web site. Biden and President Obama: Spencer Platt/Getty Images. Biden in Pittsburgh: Reuters. Biden 1974: Charles Harrity/AP Photo via Politico.