Joe Biden has been a staple of the Democratic Party since 1972, when he was elected as a United States Senator for Delaware. With a nice-guy persona and Obama’s friendship, Biden is overall well-respected by many Democrats. Nevertheless, the career politician not only has a few skeletons in his closet, but might even be incapable of winning 2020 for the Democrats if he receives the nomination. 

Biden’s problems are long-standing. As early as 1987, Joe Biden acknowledged that he plagiarized a paper while at Syracuse University College of Law. His response to this detail? The plagiarism was not “malevolent”. Still, even though he was young, it reveals a serious honesty problem that he “used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution”. 

In Delaware, Biden put a serious block on desegregation efforts, permanently hindering Delaware’s hope for racial equality in schools.

Joe Biden is responsible for the overwhelming nature of student loans, as he was one of the most major supporters of a “federal law in 2005 [that] effectively bars most Americans from accessing bankruptcy protections for their private student loans”. Student loans are the scourge of the middle class, millennials and Generation Z. How will Biden improve the future of the middle class and younger generations when he has made life harder for them? 

Recently, six women have come forward to accuse Biden of inappropriate physical contact, most notably Lucy Flores, who alleged that Biden “proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of [her] head”. 

Vague and average, Biden’s policy goal to “strengthen college as the reliable pathway to the middle class, not an investment that provides limited returns and leaves graduates with mountains of debt they can’t afford” is neither promising for a potential presidential candidate and evidently not well-thought out.

Moreover, his entire plan for college centers on primarily increasing the affordability of community college. This is a start, but it will certainly not fix the broader problems associated with dramatically increasing costs of state and private schools. To truly alter the course of higher education in this country, these topics must be tackled as well. 

Joe Biden, however, doesn’t seem to care about specifying his lofty ideals of a strengthened middle class nor does he seem to necessarily care about attracting the average voter to any of his specific policy plans. Biden plans to run on a platform he has used for some time: to simply be likable, friendly Joe, a callback to the days of Obama-presidency normalcy. 

Yet, he is a candidate that wouldn’t be popular with moderate and Republican voters who are looking for an alternative to Trump. Rather, to actually have a chance at winning in 2020, the Democratic Party must choose someone other than an establishment politician with scandals and no concrete visions of how to put America back on track. America is in need of a different Democratic Party and Joe Biden as a Democratic nominee would not enable Democratic victory to occur.

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