In primary campaigns, the media abhors a vacuum. It’s no fun to report on a race in which a prohibitive frontrunner coasts to victory.  As of now, the Democratic primary competition isn’t providing much competition to Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders is bringing a much-needed dose of economic leftism to the table but has also shown the coalition-building skills one would expect of 73-year-old white guy who’s spent his political career running for office in a state that’s 95% white and has a smaller population than metropolitan Albany. And yet his ideological energy puts him far ahead the rest of the field, which includes a guy whose strategy for winning the Democratic nomination involves getting to the right of South Carolina’s Republican governor on the Confederate flag, a character from The Wire, and a foppish Rhode Island Republican.  It’s pretty hard to sell editors on multiple columns arguing that Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee are serious candidates for the Democratic nomination. Which brings us to the inevitable next step: Joe Biden speculation. This weekend, the New York Times kicked it into high gear with a weakly sourced story by Amy Chozick about Biden completing a run as well as a Maureen Dowd column taking the usual cheap shots at Clinton while pushing Biden.  These stories, however, tell us more about the media’s relationship with Clinton than about the race. Biden probably isn’t running, almost certainly wouldn’t win if he did and doesn’t bring any new perspectives to the party debate in the way Sanders’s campaign does. But he does have one characteristic that makes him seem more “presidential” to too many journalists: a penis.  To be clear, I do think the Democratic Party would benefit from an alternative to Clinton more viable than Sanders. And I like Biden, a happy warrior who’s overcome horrible personal tragedies – he is reportedly considering running because the son he just lost to brain cancer said while dying that he should. He has been effective in his role as vice president. But while the wishes of his late son may be a reason for him to run, they’re not a reason for Democratic primary voters to select an inferior candidate. A credible alternative to Clinton needs a rationale – an argument that you’re better on Clinton on policy, more electable than Clinton, or both. A Biden candidacy is a non-starter on both counts.  In policy terms, Biden and Clinton are virtually identical. On domestic policy, they’re both moderate liberals who are too close to the financial service sectors in their home states. On foreign policy, they’re both moderate liberal hawks who voted for the Iraq War. It would be harder to name two major politicians with more similar policy profiles. If Biden is going to enter the race, it’s not because he disapproves of the direction in which Clinton is going to lead the country.  And it’s hard to see any evidence that Biden is more electable. Clinton has consistently been a more popular political figure than Biden. He’s prone to major gaffes. Hillary Clinton lost by a nose to a major political talent in the Democratic primaries in 2008, while Biden failed to reach 1% in Iowa. In 1988, Biden’s bid for the nomination was a disaster sunk by plagiarism allegations.  At this point, the sexism of the contingent eager for Biden to run becomes hard to deny. We need to find a generic white male with Hillary Clinton’s policy positions to head the ticket, even though his two previous primary campaigns were flaming wrecks on the highway? This is tantamount to putting a “No Girls Allowed” sign on the door of the White House.  In addition to the misogyny, there’s something else going on here: the Clinton rules, the media’s tendency to give much more attention to spurious allegations than to proof showing that the allegations are untrue. In late July, a New York Times story initially alleged that a criminal probe had been opened into Clinton’s emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. The only problem is that the story was botched 11 ways from Sunday. First, the story was changed to reflect the fact that there wasn’t a criminal probe and then changed again to reflect the fact that the non-criminal probe wasn’t about Clinton. The story was bungled so badly that Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of the Times, has harshly criticized it twice.  As the Sullivan acknowledges in the newer column, this is not a one-off mistake. Times reporters and columnists have been smearing Hillary Clinton and her husband since the Whitewater faux-scandal. For reasons I can’t explain, many mainstream outlets subject the Clintons to much harsher treatment than other political figures, Democratic or Republican.  The idea that we should take a Joe Biden challenge to Hillary Clinton seriously, even though there’s very little reason to believe that he will run and even less reason to think he could win, is a combination of these two factors. White men are taken more seriously as presidential candidates even when they’re objectively much weaker, and a lot of reporters really don’t like Hillary Clinton. Admittedly, the Clinton campaign hasn’t always dealt well with the press, but in light of how she and her husband have been treated, some measure of defensiveness is understandable. Regardless, Hillary Clinton will clinch the nomination, but the media’s double standard is one reason why women are underrepresented at all levels of political office in the United States.
A credible alternative to Hillary Clinton needs to be better than she is on policy, or more electable. The vice president is neither of those things