Even Joe Biden's Campaign Can't Think of a Good Reason to Vote for Joe Biden

Critics are responding harshly to comments made by Dr. Jill Biden Monday in which she claimed that even if Democratic primary voters prefer the policies of other 2020 candidates over those of her husband, former Vice President Joe Biden, they should vote for Biden anyway because he’s more electable.

Dr. Biden made comments to that effect on Monday in a campaign appearance in Manchester, N.H., reported first by NBC News.

“Your candidate might be better on, I don’t know, healthcare than Joe is,” Dr. Biden said, “but you’ve got to look at who’s going to win this election, and maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, ‘Okay, I personally like so and so better,’ but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.”

Splinter writer Rebecca Fishbein found those comments insulting, she wrote Monday evening.

Since the start of Biden’s campaign, his people have been pushing the line that he’s the only one who can beat
Trump, even though some polls have shown most of the frontrunners would take the President in a head-to-head. That line allows Biden to lean on a milquetoast platform that offers little-to-no progress, beyond getting a bonafide enemy out of the White House, even though much of Biden’s poll dominance reflects more on his name recognition than it does on his real-life performance. If you like him, I won’t stop you from voting for him, but if you’d prefer a candidate who “might be better on healthcare than Joe is,”—and there are several of those to choose from, in varying degrees—now is absolutely not the time to swallow that at all.