Let’s reboot this thing. Have at thee.
Political Discussion In The 20s
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Two old white men and a white woman with questionable Native American ancestry.
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Amy Klobuchar ends presidential campaign
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Good morning. Welcome to the Monday Massacre.
Mayor Pete out. Look to 2028, Petey, and learn about some chicken and waffles. *Note: That does not mean The Waffle House. It mean Roscoe’s.)
Amy Kloberum – Settling for the Vice Presidency? A playa.
Tom Steyer – Some good ideas and a good heart, but at this juncture an outsider does not have a chance.
Biden – Building from within, playing internal politics while not really delivering anything new or solid to the actual voters. He may have become the Lowest Common Denominator, and, if so, the only way the country will survive is by a solid choice of Veep.
Tomorrow should be interesting. Especially Colorado’s vote, as it’s the first time we’ve had a voting primary in 20 years (as long as I’ve been here).
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Ratboy and the Klob endorsing Joe Biden…interesting development.
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I think it’s pretty standard fare to be honest Arjan in leadership races. Once they feel they can’t win they stand aside and endorse the candidate closest to them politically. Otherwise all you do is split the vote in your area – in this case the ‘centrist’ section.
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That seems like a good thing. With wages a lot depends on the living cost, I can imagine in some areas of the US 70,000 is a lot of money and in others it isn’t that much. When I worked for the power company here, we got a “profit sharing” a couple of times at the end of the year. aybe there could be a way to get more companies to do something like that.
It is a good example of the backwards thinking political ideology has. Often, in economic cases, right wing and left wing extremists advocate positions that are counter to the interests of the people, whether workers or owners, whose interests they think they speak for.
Low wages and high cost of living reduce productivity because it stresses out the workforce. You can’t expect the best work from someone who’s worried they can’t pay their electricity bill and still buy groceries or who won’t go to the doctor when they’re sick because they just don’t have the money or can’t take any time off.
I think Sanders doesn’t have the best ideas in this regard, actually, but he’s likely to be the only one of all the candidates who would implement the best ideas or listen to the arguments for the benefits of a low cost of living economy and how it actually increases competitiveness, personal savings and wealth and productivity.
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You can manipulate it to a degree though. The only way to do that is social housing, if you have a shortage you offer subsidised accommodation for the lowest earners. Since this takes a long time to put into place it doesn’t flood the market and tends to just flatten house prices rather than drive them sharply down, allowing it to readjust over time. So where prices have surged while wages remained relative stagnant you’d get the opposite effect, the priced remain stagnant as the wages catch up gradually.
It’s been done before, I know it was used extensively in the UK in the 1960s without creating any negative equity or crisis in values of private properties.
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It would be difficult to drive down real estate cost, since it would take a lot of value out of the economy. A lot of home owners would suffer if the price of real estate went down. So it’s a difficult issue to solve.
It can be done – house values are irrelevant to a large chunk of owners. We often hear here that the median house price/value in Sydney is over a million dollars – homeowners might think that makes them millionaires, but if they sell, once they settle their mortgage and buy a new home, unless they move to a completely different part of town, the country, or the world, they’d likely be in exactly the same situation.
Housing stock is a wildly popular investment choice but it’s a terrible one from a macro-economics perspective as it’s a non-productive asset. Staunch capitalists and free-marketeers should be outraged at the sheer volume of money tied up in housing, as for growth that money would be better invested in businesses or shares.
It’s a tough balance too for a government – they have homeowners and investors on one side wanting house prices to keep going up so that their assets increase in value, and aspiring homeowners on the other desperately in need of affordable living. With the demographics how they are our governments tend to favour the former.
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money well spent there
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Biden is a terrible candidate to run against Trump. He has all of Hillary’s baggage plus more racism, he famously wants to cut Social Security, and he’s in sharp cognitive decline. His strategy for the last month or two has been to stay out of the public eye as much as possible because he keeps speaking gibberish and making bizarre gaffes like nibbling his wife’s finger on camera. Great candidate there, guys.
It’s pretty clear the Dems would rather lose to Trump than win with Sanders. And if Biden does somehow manage to win, he’d be almost as terrible as Trump for the country and the world. For starters, he won’t implement the Green New Deal, and doing anything less at this point will have lethal consequences.
Very depressing but I think Sanders still has a shot. An Elizabeth Warren endorsement would be nice right about now. If she endorses Joe Biden, that’s it for her, all her progressive cred goes out the window.
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An Elizabeth Warren endorsement would be nice right about now. If she endorses Joe Biden, that’s it for her, all her progressive cred goes out the window.
I kinda think the dems might be giving her some goodies to keep her running and keep votes away from Sanders.
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An Elizabeth Warren endorsement would be nice right about now. If she endorses Joe Biden, that’s it for her, all her progressive cred goes out the window.
I kinda think the dems might be giving her some goodies to keep her running and keep votes away from Sanders.
Yeah, that wouldn’t surprise me. If Warren doesn’t drop out and endorse Sanders, I’ll lose all the respect I once had for her and I’ll vote for anyone who primaries her here in MA as long as they’re to her left. I know Sanders took it to the convention in 2016 but it was a two-person race and he was winning states, Warren’s done no better than third place anywhere. The centrists coalesced around Biden, it’s time for our side to do the same.
Here’s an article that goes over Biden’s racist past: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/joe-biden-record-on-busing-incarceration-racial-justice-democratic-primary-2020-explained.html
The whole thing’s worth reading, but the bullet points are:
– he fought integrating schools in the 70s
– fought for mandatory minimums for drug offenders
– advocated crack vs powder cocaine sentencing disparities
– expanded death penalty
– 1994 crime bill which he proudly calls the Biden crime bill
– eliminated education funding for prisoners even though it’s proven to reduce recidivism
– argued GHWB’s plan to ramp up war on drugs wasn’t harsh enough
– used “super predator” myth, said black teen criminals couldn’t be rehabilitated
– fondly remembers his work with segregationists Jesse Helms, James Eastland, and Strom Thurmond, who he eulogized
– called Obama the first clean and articulate African-American to run for President
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While I really do think Biden would be a terrible choice, I don’t think he’s packing the same baggage as Hillary did. For one thing, a lot of people – on all sides of the US political spectrum, it seems – simply like him. Nobody liked Hillary.
It’s strange to see it coming down to Biden vs. Sanders. That Sanders actually might win this just goes to show just how fed up people are with how things have been going for the last decades – Sanders stands for a radical change towards a gentler, kinder society in which people try to take care of each other. Seeing him go against Trump and his “Fuck the weak” credo would be quite a spectacle, and maybe it would show the true essence of the US more than any other duel.
We live in interesting times.
It’s pretty clear the Dems would rather lose to Trump than win with Sanders. And if Biden does somehow manage to win, he’d be almost as terrible as Trump for the country and the world. For starters, he won’t implement the Green New Deal, and doing anything less at this point will have lethal consequences.
Yup. I agree.
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Another Presidential election becomes battle of the old white dudes.
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Bernie is not out yet, a lot of the polls for the remaining states seem to give him a good chance. We’ll see what happens.
I don’t have a clue why someone would vote Biden though. Jim liked him but he’s not here so he can’t explain it.
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It’s telling about the state of affairs that centrist has become a slur. I think we need more centrism.
(But universal healthcare and decent social security should be a centrist policy.)
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Yeah this really feels to me like Democrats are gearing up to shoot themselves in the foot no matter who goes into the GE. I can see a large portion of Bernie fans whinging about establishment politics and staying home in november and likewise for upper middle-class Dems on Bernie.
Arjan, Tulsi is still in it, maybe she can sweep in as the unity candidate.
I don’t think Biden is the fucking devil like some do here. Both candidates are problematic. Neither is perfect. Just please don’t blow a hole through the next four years because you didn’t get your way
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Candidates’ pasts are fair game, especially if it informs their present thinking. Biden’s a mass deporter who prides himself on his conservatism and still thinks fondly about working alongside virulent racists, how do we think he’s gonna govern?
It says a lot about Sanders that he’s been under the microscope since 2016 and the best his opponents can come up with is that he praised Castro’s literacy programs and wrote a cringey essay on gender roles in the 70s.*
*That essay’s really been overblown, btw. Margaret Atwood wrote a short story called “Rape Fantasies” in the 70s about the same subject. Rigid gender roles warping women’s sexuality was a common theme in second-wave feminism, so Bernie’s essay, badly written as it is, just shows he was up to date with feminist discourse.
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I’m just gonna say that I think it’s far from a sure bet that Bernie beats Trump, but I think he’s a much stronger candidate to run against Trump than Biden (who I strongly dislike but don’t think of as the devil, btw). Trump would eviscerate Biden in the general.
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I dont disagree entirely but im not convinced either. It remains to be seen. Both have potentially insurmountable challenges on the road to an election.
At the end of the day its about the ECs and the democrats really need to galvanise over whoever becomes the candidate because this season has been brutal with infighting.
Also, Im fucking hating the huge thanks text. It really makes your allegiances too well known on this board. I dont think im really saying anything unreasonable here but I feel like youre demonstrably voting me down Lorcan because im not orgasming over Bernie!
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It’s telling about the state of affairs that centrist has become a slur. I think we need more centrism.
(But universal healthcare and decent social security should be a centrist policy.)
The problem with this statement is that you’ve basically declared that the centre is good, and the policies you agree with should be centrist.
The centre should be the result of good faith negotiation between left and right wing elements in government, rather than a specific set of beliefs a person holds. What’s the centrist position between pro-choice and anti-choice? Between LGBT rights and criminalising homosexuality?
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Arjan, Tulsi is still in it, maybe she can sweep in as the unity candidate.
It’s not entirely impossible that both Bernie and Biden die from old age before the end of the primary…Tulsi is the savior America needs but doesn’t deserve!
Tulsi fucked up when she backed Trump on firing Vindman:
Tulsi Gabbard Defends Donald Trump Firing Alexander Vindman: ‘Whether People Like It or Not, There Are Consequences to Elections’That was a really stupid thing to do.
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Which is why it’s pretty silly to call Biden a centrist if that’s your standard. He’s on the left of those questions.
What’s the left of those positions?
I should point out though that I picked those two because they’re fairly simple binary choices on the surface, and when you actually drill down into how laws regarding them have been applied, it’s frequently been a compromise position, and often a shitty one at that. Or situations where an allegedly left-leaning party has given up ground to the right in the name of claiming a mythical centre ground.
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Those are two examples and Biden’s not even stringently in favor of abortion!
Biden’s backed by corporate donors, voted for the Iraq war, wants to cut social security, is gonna do dick about climate change, floated picking a GOP running mate, deported and drone-bombed thousands along with Obama–these are either center-left or center-right positions.
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I’m glad of that. I suppose when it becomes about viscerally tearing down one candidate to prop yours up it sometimes looks like you might not want to vote for the other guy altogether, even if they’re on the same team.
It’s worth noting that the narrative around that is far overblown, especially when it comes to Sanders – a larger percentage of his supporters voted for Clinton in the 2016 presidential election than Clinton’s did for Obama in 2008
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- Pro-life vs pro-choice is not as binary as it seems to be. Is someone who thinks that abortion for a woman who didn’t want to be pregnant but had consensual unprotected sex is wrong, but if there is even a doubt that the mother’s mental or physical health is endangered if she brings it to full term, to deny her an abortion is worse than a forced abortion, and given that allowing abortion in the case of doubt that the mother’s mental or physical health is endangered (but if she takes the risk, that’s her choice) if she brings it to full term is an ethical inperitive, and a lot of people might not see a legitimate danger in some cases, so even unethical abortion should be legal, to protect those that are ethical,pro-life or pro-choice?
I don’t know but you do win this week’s prize for the longest and most unreadable sentence.
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How is “pro-life” the opposite of “pro-choice”? These are two different issues. How many “pro-life” anti-abortion activists are also anti-death penalty activists?
It’s a rhetorical trick. Anti-abortion activists started calling themselves “pro-life” to imply that the other side were “anti-life”, but also because people are naturally more likely to gravitate to your cause if you frame it as positive. Pro-choice was then self-selected by the side campaigning for reproductive rights in response because it was seen as being more accurate (we don’t want everyone to have abortions, just the people who want or need them).
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Besides, “Anti-Life” reeks of Darkseid.
Not to be confused with Anty Life, which was Hank Pym.
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Yeah I mean the presenters there are being plain dumb but it’s a good point that people start to struggle to fully take in when numbers are huge. There’s been an effort recently to get people to fully understand the large gap between a million and a billion using dates, along these lines:
It was a massive problem with the argument against Brexit, their sole point of attack was on billions in investment on GDP percentages. That’s never going to resonate with the majority of voters.
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I read an article years ago (it may have been New Scientist, I don’t remember) that suggested we started talking about large sums of money in a new unit called the Peoplepound.
One peoplepound is one pound sterling divided by the population of the UK.
So for example, “WE SEND £350M TO THE EU” would be reported as, “We send 5.80 Peoplepounds to the EU, or slightly less than the cost of a latte and a biscuit.”
And you’re suddenly thinking, you know what, I spend that every morning on a latte and a biscuit, it’s not that much.
“UK’S GPD £130 BILLION LOWER DUE TO TO BREXIT” becomes, “”We’ve lost 2000 Peoplepounds from our bank account”
OMG £2000 wiped out, that’s horrendous!
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Tangentially relevant
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/504065/america-post-christianity/
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Yeah I mean the presenters there are being plain dumb but it’s a good point that people start to struggle to fully take in when numbers are huge. There’s been an effort recently to get people to fully understand the large gap between a million and a billion using dates, along these lines:
It was a massive problem with the argument against Brexit, their sole point of attack was on billions in investment on GDP percentages. That’s never going to resonate with the majority of voters.
I think in the US system these days, in Dutch 1 biljoen is actually the American 1 trillion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Long_scale_users
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I think in the US system these days, in Dutch 1 biljoen is actually the American 1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Long_scale_users%5B/quote%5D
We used to use the long billion in the UK too, but the official standard is now the short billion. I blame the EU for the change. Wait — if it’s the EU then why don’t the Dutch have to change??? IS BLAMING THE EU JUST A LIE?????
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Its an opportunity for both to spell out their appeal over the other.
The Battle of the Boomers
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On a similar note to Gar’s infographic, someone on TikTok demonstrated Jeff Bezos’ fortune in rice grains.
https://www.tiktok.com/@humphreytalks/video/6796564670481190150
https://www.tiktok.com/@humphreytalks/video/6798276393634467077
(not sure if TikTok videos will embed here or not).
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Looking at the current president, I’m pretty sure that this will make no difference to Biden’s electability.
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It’s a long article and most people probably aren’t gonna read it but it raises a lot more points against Biden than a few 40-year-old votes and his weakness on abortion (which, btw, includes supporting the Hyde ammendment as recently as last year!).
To your point, though, Bernie’s changed drastically on gun control whereas Biden has not changed many of his views, and the ones he has haven’t changed drastically, and there’s no real proof in his record that he will fight on the just side of issues like abortion, mass incarceration, climate change, war, etc.
Can you make the case he’ll fight for what’s right? Let’s just pick one issue, the most important: climate change. Biden got a D- from Greenpeace and an F from the Sunrise Movement on climate. He will not do what we need, and right now doing too little is the same as doing nothing. Seriously, moderates are now just as dangerous on climate as the right. Maybe worse, because they believe the science and yet think stuff like offering incentives to corporations will cut it.
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Looking at the current president, I’m pretty sure that this will make no difference to Biden’s electability.
What do you mean by “this”?
If it’s the abortion issue Tim brought up, it’s not a major factor in the electabiliy argument. The writer mentioned it in the first section, which comes before the electability section, to show how Biden’s a poor proponent of left values.
I’m just gonna post the electability section despite its length:
***************
Okay, you say: I admit that Joe Biden has a history of showing egregiously poor judgment on nearly every political issue I care about, fabricating his biography to make himself look good, defending the worst Republicans, and actively doing harm to progressive causes. I admit Bernie does not share Biden’s history of telling outrageous lies, undermining women and LGBT people, and sidling up to banks, insurance companies, and the fossil fuel industry. But I still think Biden is the best candidate to run against Trump. He’s simply more electable.
Now, to me this seems a little counterintuitive: I’d think it would be quite difficult to run someone as uninspiring and untrustworthy as Biden, because it would make it tough to convince Americans that that person would be a good president. When Joe Biden tries to point out that Donald Trump is a serial liar with bad judgment and a history of being creepy and corrupt, Trump will just say that the same things are true about Biden. It will be difficult to draw a clear contrast of character, and Biden has built his central case against Trump around their supposed contrasting characters! To me, you’d be better off running the person you think makes the best potential president, because it will be easier to make the case that they are the best potential president.
In fact, isn’t it a little strange that all of the above qualities don’t affect people’s thinking about Biden’s “electability”? Surely taking ignorant, unprincipled positions and lying about them is something that’s going to come up. I’ve separated discussion of the “electability” question from the question of whether Biden would be good as a chief executive, but I actually think those questions are one and the same: Voters are going to think about these things when they decide who to vote for. It’s harder to run someone who lied about doing sit-ins than someone who actually sat in, because those fictions will be exposed and they will turn people off. Every single thing I’ve mentioned—from Hunter Biden’s consulting gig with the credit card companies pushing Joe Biden to strip consumer bankruptcy protection to African Americans victimized by Biden’s punitive drug sentencing—is going to be put in ads run against Biden, and Trump has hundreds of millions of dollars to blast those ads far and wide. They will be effective, because they will be correct. And if you do not think Trump would run ads criticizing Biden on behalf of incarcerated African Americans, you do not know Trump: He’s already been doing exactly that.
To Democrats, it may be self-evident that Joe Biden is far better than Donald Trump, and so they assume that all the bad things he has done will not matter to anyone. Any Democrat in the White House is better than Trump, I hear a lot, and I agree with it. But if you are going to make a clear and powerful case against Trump, you need to be free of the kinds of dirt that are going to muddy your case. If we’re going to point out that the president has been accused by dozens of women of inappropriate touching, we don’t want that message to come from someone who themselves has been accused of inappropriate touching (and who said they are “not sorry” for it). If we’re going to accuse the president of being reckless and warlike, we don’t want the argument being made by a candidate who pushed the most reckless war in the last several decades. If we’re going to accuse Trump of being corrupt, we don’t want a candidate who has done the bidding of the credit card companies while his son took a cushy job with them. If we’re going to call Trump out for separating families, we don’t want a candidate who deported hundreds of thousands of people themselves, and if we’re going to call Trump a racist, we don’t want a candidate who was best friends with segregationists and helped build modern racist policing and imprisonment regime. As with Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden’s record is so bad that he’s unable to effectively attack Trump on the areas where Trump is most vulnerable. This is one reason Biden has to resort to simply attacking Trump’s “character” and his “malarkey”—but as I’ve pointed out, Biden himself is of poor character and half of what comes out his mouth is malarkey! He’s exactly the sort of corrupt, sleazy insider politician D.C. is full of, and who we need to get rid of if we’re going to advance the cause of justice.
In fact, the parallels with Clinton are striking. As this magazine pointed out in early 2016, Clinton was a uniquely weak candidate against Donald Trump, because she had the kind of record on issues like trade, war, and Wall Street that his “populist” campaign could hit an “establishment” politician hard on. She was the perfect foil for his message, because she embodied the D.C. insider culture he was trying to whip up hate against. Trump thrives on dirt and scandal, and Clinton was tainted by enough corruption and misconduct allegations that he had an easy time landing blows. Mehdi Hasan puts things very well when he says:
I just don’t get why Democrats… think that you can just rerun the 2016 playbook and not think that Donald Trump will rerun his. I mean, they tried to run a pro-Iraq War, pro-Wall Street, establishment Democrat with a history of dubious claims and dodgy dealings and dodgy comments about mass incarceration and superpredators. Where did that end up? What’s the old saying? Insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.
Indeed, Biden shares many of Clinton’s exact weaknesses. He voted for NAFTA, the “bad trade deal” Trump loves to attack for shipping Rust Belt jobs overseas. (Sure enough, Trump has already started bringing up NAFTA.) Biden is a creature of the “swamp” that Trump has vowed to drain, a pal of lobbyists and bankers. (The New York Times even called his staff “more than a bit swampy.”) And then, of course, there is the corruption. Ryan Grim of the Intercept reports that Biden’s “family has been cashing in on his career for decades,” something Democrats have not wanted to admit. Biden “has not even bothered to come up with a persuasive answer to his son Hunter’s involvement with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.” Even pro-Biden centrists like Jonathan Chait admit that “Biden’s responses to questioning on his son’s role, which range from challenging his interlocutor to a push-up contest to trailing off awkwardly, have hardly allayed the concern.” As Eric Levitz put it, “Hunter collecting $50,000 a month to sit on a board for which he had no qualifications was clearly corrupt influence peddling.” Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s stories are in conflict, too: Joe Biden says he never discussed it with his son, while Hunter says they did talk about it and all Joe said by way of objection was “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
If you’re a Democrat, you probably don’t want to hear about any of this. Let’s be honest: Many Democrats are simply lying to themselves and pretending that Biden is someone other than who he is. (A Detroit Free Press editorial says Biden has “occasional lapses of judgment but not of character” and is as “innocent of venality as any politician in Washington.” As if pretending to have been a civil rights hero is not a “lapse in character”! And as if we didn’t all know how disgustingly venal most Washington politicians are.) But brace yourself, because in a general election, you’re going to hear about all of this all the goddamn time for months on end. And you’re going to wince as Biden struggles to come up with an explanation of what Hunter’s role at the Ukrainian energy company was, or responds by challenging honest critics to a push-up contest. (Expect to hear the phrase “Quid Pro Joe” about 10 billion times. Also, if you haven’t heard of Jim Biden, get ready: you will.)
One worrying thing we’ve learned about Biden over the course of this election is that he needs to be kept away from voters. Not many show up at his events in the first place, but when they do, his interactions with them are often excruciating. He has told them to go vote for his opponent. (In Iowa, 85 percent followed his advice.) He even called one young woman a “lying dog faced pony soldier” after she asked him a tough question. She was horrified:
“It was kind of humiliating to be called a liar on national TV by the former vice president. Instead of answering that question straightforward, his immediate response was to attempt to invalidate me by exposing my inexperience.”
The Biden campaign’s response is that Biden was attempting to quote a movie, which explains nothing and makes no sense. Get ready for a hell of a lot more of this in a general election, and get ready for Donald Trump to mercilessly mock and repeat every single Biden misstep. (Often by turning Biden’s indefensible acts into amusing memes.) Trump’s specialty is brutal attacks on DC politicians, which he does with a knack for entertainment that those who come out of the Senate instead of television can hardly hope to match.
I’m actually something of an amateur Trump scholar, and one thing I have found many Democrats do not sufficiently understand about him is that Trump is a genuinely formidable political opponent who is good at crushing the weak. Trump packs stadiums and is bringing in campaign cash in the hundreds of millions. It should be of serious concern, then, that even though Biden has ultimately been able to consolidate centrist voters behind him, his fundraising has been anemic, his events poorly-attended, and his on-the-ground campaign apparatus bare bones. Until Democratic leaders rallied around to revive him, Biden “had less than a third as much cash on hand as Bernie Sanders” and was doing so poorly that he eventually had “to abandon his pledge to not accept support from corporate-backed outside super PAC groups.” One reason for this is that Biden doesn’t inspire confidence; even Barack Obama was reportedly nervous about running him in the primary. Democrats might be resigned to putting Joe Biden up against Donald Trump, feeling they have few other options, but you won’t meet many who are excited for his campaign, and he’s hardly likely to build a grassroots movement of volunteers and donors in the fall.
To make matters worse, Joe Biden does not seem to be in excellent form at the moment, to say the least. The more people see of him, the worse he looks. The gaffes, always a Biden trait, have become near-constant: forgetting the first words of the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident… you know, you know the thing”), forgetting which office he is running for, forgetting Barack Obama’s name, forgetting that the Parkland shootings did not happen while he was in office, mixing up his wife and his sister, and telling bizarre, rambling stories that make Grandpa Simpson look like a man who gets straight to the point. This may well be why his advisors had to keep him from doing too many public events, preferring quiet private fundraisers to rallies and town halls. Biden surrogate John Kerry was reportedly making desperate calls from Iowa, telling Democrats that Biden wasn’t up to it, and wondering if Kerry could step in to replace Biden on the ticket. Other Biden-sympathetic Democratic officials on the ground said Biden didn’t “seem to have his heart in it or the energy for the slog.” The disgraced Chris Matthews, no Bernie sympathizer, criticized the Biden campaign for hiding the candidate from the press, and the New York Times chased Biden for months to answer some basic questions. Even now, in the wake of Biden’s big Super Tuesday resurgence, Rachel Maddow has struggled to get him to appear on her show alongside the other candidates.
This should be a giant red flag. If Biden is not in peak fighting shape, he will lose and lose badly. Donald Trump is the King of the Bullies. When he senses weakness, he pounces. You need to have boundless energy and stamina and fire to counteract him. And they can’t hide Biden away forever. Sooner or later, if you’re running for president, you’re going to have to make some appearances. It is not a good sign if your allies are suggesting you scale back events so that voters don’t accidentally hear you speak off the cuff.
Democrats do not want to talk about the question of whether Biden is up for this. And none of us want to say the word “dementia” when we don’t actually know whether that’s true. Politico reports that journalists have shied away from answering the question of whether Biden is mentally capable of his task. But it’s a serious issue: If you choose a nominee who is going to embarrass themselves in front of the country, you’ve just thrown the entire election. It’s a colossal risk. We can’t not confront it, because Trump is coming. Trump has already begun to bring up Biden’s mental health, noting that Biden “said 150 million people were killed with guns and that he was running for the United States Senate.” (Biden did say both these things.) Trump will compile all of the flubs, go through them in excruciating detail at his rallies, and talk about how sad it is to see someone in such obvious decline. He will compare Joe Biden’s brain to the Democratic Party itself, and will ask why anyone would want someone in charge of the country who cannot be trusted to remember who the Prime Minister of Great Britain is. It will not be easy to answer this question.
Be ready for what is going to come at Biden in a general election. Just look at Trump’s tweets for a preview of what we’re going to see:
- I will protect your Social Security and Medicare, just as I have for the past 3 years. Sleepy Joe Biden will destroy both in very short order, and he won’t even know he’s doing it!
- Super Predator was the term associated with the 1994 Crime Bill that Sleepy Joe Biden was so heavily involved in passing. That was a dark period in American History, but has Sleepy Joe apologized? No!
Do you think “Sleepy Joe” is up to the challenge of proving Trump wrong? Probably not even on a good day, because Biden’s record on Social Security and criminal punishment is not defensible and gives Trump the upper hand. But lately, even Biden’s good days have been few and far between, and I shudder to think of his flailing responses (probably his go-to will be “challenge Trump to a push-up contest”). I hope the Democrats who have suddenly come together behind Biden have a good reason for having changed their minds and concluded he is ready for what would hit him. But I suspect they’ve just tried not to think about it.
So: The central argument for nominating Joe Biden is not that he would be a good president, because, for all the reasons I went into, he clearly wouldn’t. The only case for him is “electability”—even Joe Biden’s wife (not sister), Jill Biden, makes the argument this way: “You know you may like another candidate better, but you have to look at who’s going to win.” But the electability argument for Biden might be the worst argument of all. Biden is a corrupt, inept, dishonest, undisciplined, rambling con man. This makes him less electable, not more. It makes him exactly the person we don’t want to use to make those very same charges against Trump. Because Biden is a man with almost no message, a bunch of scandals including feeling women up against their will, a seemingly addled and confused brain, a long history of inventing nonsensical stories, and a record and agenda that will inspire no one, the electability case seems thin. Much is made of the difficult challenge Sanders faces in increasing youth turnout, but I’m not sure why anyone under 30 would show up for Joe Biden, a man who has contempt for them and has spent his life embodying everything about the Democratic Party that turns them off politics. If there is a Biden plan for mobilizing and exciting ex-Sanders voters, I struggle to think what it could possibly be.
In fact, the only way the “electability” case can even begin to be made is by saying that whatever Biden’s chances are, Sanders’ are worse. Yes, you may say, I admit Joe Biden is a disaster waiting to happen. But Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist. I’ve discussed at great length before why I think this concern is actually backwards, and that a populist outsider like Bernie Sanders will have a much easier time running against Trump than Democratic insider politicians. In fact, Trump himself was afraid Hillary Clinton would pick Bernie Sanders as her running mate, because he guessed that she would have won with Sanders on the ticket. (In the end, spite won out over pragmatism, and she picked a guy with a terrible record on abortion rights whose name and face you may not even remember.) Sanders is very good at talking to Trump’s own voters, in a way that respects their concerns but doesn’t validate their racism, and has far less contempt for so-called “deplorables” than many Democrats do. I won’t repeat my full case for Sanders’ electability, which I have done so at length elsewhere, but I would ask that instead of assuming that received wisdom is necessarily true, you take a moment to question it and wonder whether the many talking heads who insist Sanders cannot win might be just as wrong as they were about whether Hillary Clinton’s victory was inevitable.
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