I haven’t endorsed yet (and probably won’t) but there are candidates I oppose and one is Uncle Joe. He represents everything that is bad about Versailles, its ‘Villagers’, and the Institutional Democratic Party.
Joe Biden is the candidate of Other People. Is that enough?
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
Dec. 26, 2019
Biden’s own wife told voters that “maybe you have to swallow a little bit” and vote for him even if you like another candidate better, because he’ll win over independents and Republicans.
That might be true. But it’s a proposition that should be treated with skepticism. Particularly since right now almost everyone saying that Republicans will vote for Biden is a Democrat.
That Times article does quote a Republican, former senator Chuck Hagel, saying that members of his party have “said to me, ‘If Biden is the nominee, I will vote for Biden, I will not vote for any of the other Democrats.’” But it’s revealing to hear this from Hagel, a voice from another age. A moderate of the kind virtually extinct in today’s GOP, Hagel was appointed to President Barack Obama’s Cabinet as part of Obama’s futile attempt to show the opposition that he was bipartisan and therefore they should approach him with an open mind.
To be sure, there are some number of Republicans who are dissatisfied enough with President Trump to be open to voting for a Democrat. But there were also a good number of Republicans in 2016 who said the same thing, and in the end it didn’t happen. They were pulled back to vote for Trump by the power of partisan loyalty: Even though it was not some kind of mystery who Trump was, 92 percent of Republicans voted for him. That was virtually unchanged from 2012, when 93 percent of Republicans voted for Mitt Romney.
While Biden’s potential appeal to your Republican uncle is often described as a product of Biden’s ideological moderation, there is no reason to assume that voters will make their decision based on some finely tuned understanding of ideology. There’s a temptation among those who pay a lot of attention to politics to believe that the average voter thinks the same way they do, but that has never been true, particularly in presidential elections.
It’s also important to remember that whoever the Democratic nominee is, those Republican voters will be absolutely bombarded with messages meant to enforce party loyalty, coming not just from Trump but also from every Republican they respect and admire. Joe Biden is a villain, a liar, a crook, they’ll be told, and he’d turn America into a socialist hellscape. A vote for him would be a betrayal of your party, your country, and everything you hold dear.
I’ll pause here and remark they would say the same of any Democratic candidate. It doesn’t make Joe particularly virtuous because it’s a lie. To continue.
It’s hard to know how Biden will stand up to that assault, because he has never been tested in that way. The attacks to which he has been subjected so far in this campaign, not to mention in his career to this point, are but a fraction of what he would face if he became the party’s nominee. And we know that his Republican friends in the Senate will not vouch for his goodwill. Quite the contrary; they have shown that they will do everything in their power to destroy him on Trump’s behalf.
Any Democratic nominee will face a similar version of the right’s campaign of vilification, not to mention a news media that is likely to rerun the “But Her Emails” debacle of 2016, elevating some small weakness or misstep in the Democrat’s history into a Watergate-level scandal. The most skilled candidates, like Obama and Bill Clinton, were able to overcome what was thrown at them, and it’s perfectly reasonable to ask which candidate is best able to withstand the assault.
Biden might be that candidate, but looking over his career I see reason for skepticism. Many Democrats are supporting him at the moment because of how they think Republicans will react to him at the end of what will be an utterly brutal general-election campaign. At that point, there will be no hypothetical or imagined open-minded Republicans, only real ones. Counting on them to vote for a Democrat isn’t a safe choice. It’s a gamble — one that might pay off, but not one with any guarantees.
The Neo Liberal system Institutional Democrats support is in its death throes, not only from Global Warming but its inherent fallacies. We had an opportunity in 2008 and Barack Hussein Obama, War Criminal and Accessory After The Fact to War Crimes (it’s true and saying Republicans are worse doesn’t make it any less so), blew it. A Vote for Joe is a vote for failure, a vote for endless War, a vote for more Corporatist Thievery.
I’d like to defend the guy because Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio and the totally fake Ukraine thing, but his record is lengthy, stark, unblemished sellouts to Mammon when it’s not based on his own inherent racism and misogyny. I give you the Joe Bros which has at least the virtue of rhyming instead of relying on assonance. If he is the nominee there will be not just a second term, but a destruction of the Party System in the United States of America and I don’t know about you but I think it would be bad for my health and intend to get as far away from the fallout as I can.
(We write about politics all the time here. What makes you think otherwise?)
Recent Comments