Can the Democratic Party free itself from the Biden brand?

Former President Joe Biden “has told some Democratic leaders he’ll raise funds, campaign and do anything else necessary for Democrats to recover lost ground,” NBC News reported last week. Some prominent party supporters reacted with skepticism while insisting on anonymity, but Jane Kleeb, a new vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, voiced open enthusiasm.

“If you were to call any state party chair and ask them if they wanted Joe Biden to be a keynote speaker for their annual dinner, the answer would be yes,” Kleeb said. “He is beloved by the party and beloved by the voters.”

Kleeb is a rising star on the national stage, after many years as the innovative head of the Nebraska Democratic Party. In February, state party chairs elected her to a four-year term as president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, replacing Ken Martin when he became the new DNC chair. The two are close allies.

Does Kleeb truly believe that all state Democratic chairs would want Biden to keynote their annual dinner? The claim seems dubious. Her description of Biden as “beloved by the voters” is quite a stretch; Gallup polls show that Biden’s approval remained in the vicinity of 40 percent during the last three years of his presidency.

As the Democratic Party struggles to regroup after its disastrous 2024 election, what is needed from leadership is candor, not more politician-speak that touts Biden as some kind of guiding light for the future. Kleeb’s depiction of him is disconnected from the outlooks of grassroots Democrats.

Today, few Democrats agree that Biden is a fitting exemplar for their party. This month, when a CNN poll asked Democratic voters “which one person best reflects the core values of the Democratic Party,” only 1 percent chose Biden.

Pretending otherwise is politically foolish. Biden might appeal to the more hidebound party leaders, but it’s a whole different story for the voters that the party needs to mobilize. The reflex to do implausible public relations has been chronic among Democratic leaders, often undermining their credibility and damaging the party’s electoral prospects.

The anger that so many blue voters are venting at congressional Democrats this month is largely a response to party leaders’ continuation of Biden-style politics, akin to following Marquess of Queensberry rules while being attacked with hammers and knives. Meanwhile, people who comprise the Democratic base are crying out for a far more combative strategy against the MAGA Republicans as they take a wrecking ball to basic democratic structures of the U.S. government.

Telling voters that they find Biden “beloved” is the kind of infantilizing nonsense more befitting of a PR agency than a political party in need of credibility. This is the sort of fawning approach that enabled Biden to run for reelection until it was too late, as Democrats in Congress and state party chairs publicly lauded the Biden 2024 campaign even while often privately bemoaning its slim chances.

Biden, with his zeal for compromising with Republican politicians and his routinely feeble opposition to them, could hardly be less of a model for what the Democratic Party — and the country — now desperately need.

In 2019, Biden declared, “The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.” Of course, no such epiphany occurred.

After winning the 2020 election, Biden made a point of lamenting “the refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another.” Despite the GOP’s obvious extremism, he contended that the American people “want us to cooperate” and pledged “that’s the choice I’ll make.” While president, Biden often extended an olive branch to congressional Republicans, who only to have Republicans toss it aside and block the Democratic agenda.

All this matters now because party leadership must stop pretending about the past in order to chart a viable path toward regaining power. But leadership has shown few signs of recognizing why Democrats lost so much support from voters during Biden’s term.

Despite the massive falloff of working-class votes that sank the Democratic ticket last year, the response of the party establishment has been to deny the truth in what Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in the wake of the election: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

Days after the November wipeout, the DNC’s then-chair Jaime Harrison blasted Sanders’s critique as “straight up BS.” A month later, Sanders’s astute postmortem was still rankling party loyalists. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) went out of his way to label it “an absolute crock.”

Now, Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are inspiring huge crowds and voter excitement with economic populist messages, in sharp contrast to mainline congressional Democrats who are incapable of doing any such thing.

The faster that the Democratic Party can shed the Biden brand, the better its prospects will be for the midterms and the 2028 presidential campaign. Trying to pretty up the party’s recent past can only divert attention from the need to discard old playbooks and really fight for a much better future.

Norman Solomon is cofounder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His book “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” was published in 2023.