Kind of light on policy....

Biden goes light on policy, heavy on emotion

The former veep shows signs of rust in Iowa, but his supporters don’t mind.

By MARC CAPUTO

Joe Biden has a healthcare plan, but doesn’t “have the time to completely lay out all the details.”

He also has a proposal for college debt, but no specifics on that either because “I don’t have time; I don’t want to keep you standing any longer.”

The former vice president’s ideas on climate change and foreign policy? Also works in progress.

Yet there’s time for relatively lengthy anecdotes about how his dad long ago was unable to secure a loan to help send him to a school he wanted to attend. And time to describe a New Yorker cartoon that hung in his office, to praise President Obama, to remember the untimely death of his beloved son Beau and — a crowd favorite — to bash President Trump.

In his first campaign tour of Iowa since announcing his bid for president, Biden has been light on policy detail and heavy on emotion. There are clear signs of rust: he mangles phrases and flubs names. He needed a teleprompter at his Pittsburgh debut and relies on notecards for names and important subjects.

But judging by the polls and the adoring crowds who saw him during the first four stops of his just-announced candidacy, that’s just fine. He’s under no immediate pressure to offer more specifics or smooth out the rough spots.

In Dubuque on Tuesday, the second of his first two Iowa stops, Biden nailed the end of his speech, which he built to a crescendo by throwing shade at Trump and appealing to American optimism.

“We choose hope over fear! We choose unity over division! We choose truth over lies! And we choose science over fiction!” Biden said to loud applause. “Remember who we are!” Biden said. “This is the United States of America!”

Biden is also polishing his technique as he goes. Though his off-the-cuff humor usually produces laughs from the crowd, Biden occasionally misses the mark — as he did when he tried several times to tell a joke rooted in a New Yorker cartoon mocking “job creators” as bank robbers. By the time he described what the cartoon looked like and got to the punchline, few knew what he was talking about judging by the nervous and confused chuckles from the crowd.

By his third Iowa stop, at an Iowa City brewery and taproom, Biden got the message that the joke didn’t work and stopped using it.

After the speeches, Biden is in his element as Uncle Joe, expertly shooting selfie after selfie with voters’ smartphones, high-fiving small children and giving words of encouragement to well-wishers thrilled just to be standing next to a former vice president.

Each of the venues — a veterans memorial hall in Cedar Rapids, the Dubuque convention center, an Iowa City taproom, an old Des Moines nightclub — hosted a few hundred people. The crowds weren’t as large — or as electric — as at Trump’s events at this stage of the 2016 election cycle, but the attendees say it’s simply a reflection of familiar but low-key style.

“Biden doesn’t go to the base insanity like Trump. We need sanity again,” said John Roethig, a 66-year-old Dubuque Democrat.

For Roethig and other Biden Democrats, the lack of policy specifics doesn’t matter. There’s an understanding among them that Congress will only pass so much of a president’s agenda, and all the major Democrats are generally in line on the big picture ideas that matter anyway — more affordable healthcare, college affordability, a need for more renewable fuels.

There is one issue that differentiates Biden from his Democratic rivals, according to his supporters: electability. Biden Democrats say he’s the biggest threat to Trump, if not the biggest irritant, after Trump spent the days since Biden’s announcement rage-tweeting the former vice president. They say Biden, with the early backing of the International Association of Firefighters and his blue-collar paeans to the “dignity of work” is uniquely suited to win back the white working class voters Trump was able to peel off in the Rust Belt to secure his win.

“This is about beating Trump,” Roethig said.

Biden isn’t completely devoid of policy proposals in the early stage of his campaign. He wants to eliminate the Trump tax cuts and tax loopholes that, he says, favors investors over wage-workers. Biden endorsed a $15 federal minimum wage. And he tried to split the difference among progressives who want Medicare for All vs. a government-run public option that was left out of the Affordable Care Act.

“Whether or not your healthcare is covered through your employer, whether it’s covered on your own or not at all,” Biden said, “everyone should have a choice to buy into a public-option healthcare plan like Medicare.”

Biden also uses healthcare as a means to talk about “my buddy,” President Obama, whose popularity among Democrats has buoyed the former vice president. While he has always been proud to have served as Obama’s vice president, Biden says the passage of the Affordable Care Act was one of the administration’s high points.

“I told President Obama it was a big deal or something to that effect,” Biden, referring to his infamous hot-mic moment when he was caught whispering that it was a “big [expletive] deal,” says to laughs. “Thank God, my mom wasn’t around.”

The biggest applause lines often come at Trump’s expense, though.

Democrats loved Biden’s call to fight the “Trump-DeVos education agenda.” And they nodded in agreement when he described the president as an historic aberration.

After launching his campaign last week with a direct shot at Trump by recalling the president’s response to the violent 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Biden at his subsequent speeches accused Trump of dog-whistling white supremacists in such a way that it recalled Alabama’s segregationist Gov. “George Wallace in the 1960s.”

“The anti-Semitic chants about Jews in America could be heard around the world — around the world. Hatred is on the march. And he knew it,” Biden said of Trump’s response to the protests.

Biden says Trump’s response to Charlottesville was crucial in inspiring him to run. He tells crowds that the American system was only able to absorb the shock of the Trump presidency for four years.

“This is not who we are. This is not who the vast majority of the American people are,” Biden says. “That’s why above all else, we have to put an end, electorally, to this administration.”

Beyond that, the specifics were still to come.

“I have an ambitious plan to rebuild this country — from cleaner renewable energy, cleaner safer transportation, a whole range of things — that I’m going to be laying out,” Biden said. “But you’re going to be laying out on the floor if I keep going, if I laid it all out.”