It says a lot about my morale w.r.t. elections these days that I’m mostly just glad the crushing disappointment was phased in over a couple of weeks, rather than happening overnight.
My prediction is a decisive Biden nomination soon, followed by a campaign in which people find him old and boring and Turmp is all they talk about (and a constant wall of Hunter Biden white noise which won’t change anyone’s mind but will erode everyone’s will to live). Turmp will win via systemic bias again.
But if I were going to force optimism, I think Bernie would do better as the candidate. People would be interested to hear what he has to say, and I don’t think Turmp’s playground insults would land. Media bias would reach almost British levels, but that could backfire on them if they overplayed it.
I can’t see Warren as VP, and – other than the general kudos – why would that even be a good thing? She’d never be president then.
Cable news in particular is in the business of selling advertising. Serious policy discussion is dull compared to scandal, artificial outrage, and fearmongering, and so that’s the 24/7 coverage you get even if it means inflating a nonissue into a the next Watergate. It brings in eyeballs which in turn brings in advertisement gold.
If anything dulled us to the crimes of Trump administration, it’s the cable news outage machine which makes serious problems seem like background noise.
Biden has a real and substantial weakness on this (and a few others) that takes away some pretty damning attacks that could otherwise be made against Trump. We all know that Hunter Biden is a molehill and not illegal, but…we also all know that it’s not exactly great what he was doing. But now, any time the issue of Trump’s family at the feeding trough of the American government comes up, it’s just going to be an opportunity to bring up Hunter.
Any politician who has had a long career carries political baggage. That was partly the strength of Obama, he wasn’t around long enough to have made any genuinely questionable decisions, so the GOP had to make one up (birth certificate) and grossly mischaracterize others (his connections to Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright). Hillary had an exceptional amount, since she’d been the object of heated attack for many many years. Biden has loads of baggage as well, though much less than Hillary. Even AOC will be well-laden with baggage in 40 years should she last that long in politics.
This is maybe the main reason to be upset at all the younger candidates dropping out. Like with Obama, it would have been harder to find genuine problems with their records than with the ones left(1). But, you know, Mayor Pete took corporate money and spoke in platitudes so was the Devil, Harris and Klobuchar were prosecutors who had been zealous in their jobs and so were the Devil, Eric Swalwell – probably the most leftwing candidate in the House outside of the Squad – looked like a frat bro so was the Devil, Corey Booker and Julian Castro…no, sorry, I’m stuck there.
Our old World Book encyclopedia (from 1980), IIRC, essentially said this is why socialism hadn’t really gained traction in the US. (Not in these exact words, but I think it did mention the vast frontier.) Its article on communism had a big, gloomy, B&W picture of the Kremlin. The socialism article had no picture which, in comparison, was a more neutral presentation on the part of the editors.
They did when I was still on Facebook. (Well, not everybody – it’s like how we each have millions of square millimeters of skin, although we mostly think about the square millimeter with a sliver in it)
I don’t think it really changes anyone’s mind about a particular candidate, but think it affects people’s choices about whether to vote at all.
He should be holding an olive branch out to the non-centrist Democrats, who he’d need to turn out, rather than the vague hope that Republicans who’ve been fine with Trump until now suddenly change.
But look at what happened Tuesday night. Moderate democrats came out in DROVES to vote for Biden, and the young people who love Sanders stayed home. Lots of folks who absolutely abhor Trump but are fiscally conservative, and don’t like Bernie because they don’t think he can pay for anything he’s proposing. People don’t want a Utopian fantasy; they just want to go back to how things were under Obama. Bernie’s more popular in the most liberal pockets of the country but we know that the general election is ultimately determined by voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida.
I don’t love Biden - he was probably my fifth or sixth choice - but he’s got a MUCH better chance of winning those states and winning the general election. Vote for Biden, vote blue up and down the rest of the ballot, and then push your congressfolks for your progressive agenda. Much better than putting a Sanders/Warren ticket out there to win California and Massachusetts and get decimated everywhere else.
Biden is essentially identical to Clinton on policy, and is a worse candidate than she was in almost every other possible way. I don’t get how anyone can think that he’s likely to succeed where Clinton failed.
… because we’ve all seen Trump for the past three and a half years and know what the alternative is?
Look at what happened in the mid-terms. There’s a lot of people (who aren’t necessarily yelling and screaming on the internet) who are sick of what’s happening with the Republican party. But that doesn’t mean they’re going all the way over to the Sanders/Warren camp.
The people who want to go back to a “better time” of Obama are the ones being utopian. The Green New Deal is the bare minimum we need just to get more time to manage climate chaos. Sorry, nature refuses to compromise on this.
You have a choice: you can scream at the Earth for being unreasonable, or you can get both Sanders and Biden to agree to do a lot more for the environment that previous Presidents.
