I don’t deny that it played a massive part. Not to relitigate it, but I do continue to insist that running (or wanting an endorsement from) quite possibly the most hated woman in the country who’s had a sustained 25 year long propaganda campaign against her to give her that status is what those in the biz call “not a good idea”.
ETA: wrt the endorsement part I mean that in the sense that nobody’s going “Well I might vote for Biden, but I really want to see if Hillary endorses Bernie first.” Know what I mean?
I don’t believe her endorsement will matter in the least. The only people it directly triggers are those who were already Trump-supporting, who are very specifically on the anti-Hillary wagon.
Misogyny, the general and not-at-all-latent kind that is everywhere in this country, excludes caring about the opinion of women, and Joe Biden himself is firmly (uncomfortably) male. That she endorses him won’t matter to those people in the least, because her voice doesn’t mean anything to them. They’re voting for “this dude” and so long as other “dudes” are visibly supporting him, that’s all they’ll care about.
2016 was a trainwreck for many reasons–Trump tapping into the racist vote being a significant and appalling one. But if Hillary Clinton had not been a woman candidate, we probably would not have Trump right now. And it hurts to know that about my country.
Edit: I should clarify that first sentence. It will matter, to some, in a positive way. But I don’t think it hurts his chances.
So, if you were playing “Re-Elect Trump: The Home Game”:
If Hillary does endorse Joe, you can condemn him for being endorsed by Hillary.
If Hillary does not endorse Joe, you can condemn him for not even being endorsed by Hillary.
Also: the political opinions of BoingBoingers are staggeringly unrepresentative of what the typical American voter, or even the typical Democratic voter, wants.
That’s true. If a user survey was ever done on this site, you’d probably find that your average Happy Mutant is more educated, more well-travelled, more politically aware, and more committed to social and environmental justice than your average Dem voter*. As a result, we’re more likely to understand that Uncle Joe’s (and Clinton’s) promise to get us back to “normal” through 1990s-vintage Third-Way economic policy is a pipe dream.
That isn’t to say most of us won’t vote for Biden, just that we haven’t deluded ourselves into thinking that he’s truly a part of the solution to America’s crises of unsustainability. He’s the mediocre and out-of-touch candidate that the somewhat sane and ethical duopoly party is running against the deranged candidate of the nutzoid and totally corrupt duopoly party, so most of us will hold our noses.
[* I’d also bet that we’re whiter and more affluent and slightly older on average, too, which is interesting in light of the readership’s political leanings]
Hide, Joe, hide!
Biden is not the best in front of cameras. The less he appears, the less news there is about him, and the more people think “We gotta get rid of this incompetent f’ing kumquat.*”
