John Kerry got "Swift Boated" in 2004. For Hillary Clinton in 2016, it was her "damn emails." Remembering those failed Democratic presidential campaigns, Joe Biden is determined not to get "Ukrained" in 2020.
Since a whistleblower report last week revealed that President Donald Trump asked Ukrainian officials to investigate Biden, the former vice president has struck an aggressive tone.
He has told supporters that he would beat Trump "like a drum" in a general election and that the Republican president is scared of that possibility. Biden has demanded that reporters "ask the right questions" and accused Trump of trying to "hijack" the campaign with unfounded assertions that Biden and his son Hunter had corrupt dealings in Ukrainian business and politics.
Biden has built his campaign around the idea that he can return Washington to a more stable pre-Trump era. But Biden's ability to win will turn on his ability to navigate the turbulent, no-holds-barred vortex that Trump has imposed on American politics with his Twitter megaphone, deep well of campaign cash and phalanx of surrogates.
And while many Democratic strategists and Biden supporters give him plaudits for pushback, there remain some worries about how the storyline might affect Biden's tenuous front-runner status.
"It's really a no-win situation," said Karen Finney, an adviser to Clinton in 2016, when the former secretary of state was besieged with media scrutiny and Trump criticism over her use of a private email server when she ran the State Department.
Finney credited the Biden campaign for "working the refs" by sending detailed memos to the media explaining the timeline of Hunter Biden's service on a Ukrainian energy company board and Joe Biden's involvement in Ukraine as vice president to establish that there were no conflicts. The campaign followed that by pressuring television executives not to give a platform to Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney.
Giuliani has alleged that Biden, while vice president, tried to quash a Ukrainian investigation of the company that paid Hunter Biden as a board member. The top Ukrainian prosecutor said earlier this year that his team found no wrongdoing, and there's no evidence that U.S. law enforcement has gotten involved.
"Why should Joe Biden be forced to defend himself against something that's not true?" Finney argued.
Trump raised his theory in a July telephone conversation with the new Ukrainian president, asking Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate the Bidens anew. That move, now the center of a formal whistleblower complaint and the House impeachment inquiry, could be found to violate U.S. law making it a crime to solicit or accept foreign contributions in an American election.