If The Foolish Democratic Establishment Nominates Biden, A Dinosaur, They Will Be Handing Trump A Second Term

In 2018, here in Los Angeles, Status Quo Joe, admitted-- proudly, like your crazy old right-wing uncle might do over Thanksgiving dinner-- that he had no empathy for "the younger generation." No one had it as tough as he and his generation was what he was whining about and it's the kind of typical claptrap from someone you can expect to see sitting on a lawn chair in his front yard screaming at anyone who dares step on his grass. "The younger generation now tells me how tough things are-- give me a break! [Audience laughs and applauds]. No no, I have no empathy for it. Give me a break..." Biden is a piece of shit. Biden has always been a piece of shit. Biden is also dangerously delusional and as completely unfit for the presidency as he was in the '70s, the '80s, the '90s and so on. Yes, he's better than Trump, but that is way, way too low a bar to use as a metric in picking a Democratic candidate for president. Biden still lives in a world time has forgotten. Let him stay there, babbling his crap to whomever he pays to listen to him.

Democrats are telling pollsters they prefer Biden for several reasons, some that make sense and some that make none. For example, 92% of Democratic primary voters think Biden has a good chance to beat Trump, probably a very optimistic assumption made by the same minds that thought Hillary was a shoe-in. 77% say Biden is "willing to work with Republicans to get things done." Those are the people who will deserve the results of the unpopular hits to Social Security and Medicare that Biden and the Republicans will put through while congratulating themselves on how courageous they are. 66% say they think Biden "holds progressive ideas." He does hold them-- in contempt. This 66% cohort are either ignorant or willfully ignorant, or simply just don't know what "progressive ideas" are. 64% believe Biden "represents the future of the Democratic Party." Stop laughing. If Biden wins the nomination and then loses the general, he will be responsible for the future of the Democratic Party, as progressives, especially young progressives, just give up on it entirely. 62% believe Biden "has been consistent over the years." He's been consistently corrupt and in the pockets of Wall Street and corporate America but he is absolutely a flip-flop king and this 62% is as ignorant as the 66% who say he has progressive ideas. But the most moronic set of Democratic primary voters are the 39% (basically 4 in 10 Democrats) who say that Biden "can bring an outsider's perspective to Washington." They don't even seem to realize that Biden, who has been a DC insider since the early 1970s, is the polar opposite of an outsider. This morning, one of my friends, a top DC progressive staffer, asked me if I would consider moving overseas with him and some friends if either Trump or Biden are elected in 2020.

And who are Biden's biggest supporters (demographically)? People of color (46%), people over 50 (38%), voters without college degrees (46%) and Democrats who label themselves "moderates" or "conservatives" (44%).



Today, as young people-- and especially young activists who are warily looking at the Democratic Party as a possible, or even probable, political home-- tell pollsters that the most important issue for them is an existential one: the Climate Crisis, Biden rejects the Green New Deal and promises to come up with some middle course. That's Status Quo Joe! Yesterday, Valerie Volcovici, reporting for Reuters, wrote that Biden is trying to come up with something that will make everyone happy. His instinct is to just leave it at rejoining Obama's Paris Climate Agreement, which is way too weak to solve the problems addressed by the Green New Deal. But it's a prototypical way someone like Biden approaches a problem he doesn't understand and would rather avoid.

[A] former energy department official also advising Biden's campaign who asked not to be named, said the policy will likely also be supportive of nuclear energy and fossil fuel options like natural gas and carbon capture technology, which limit emissions from coal plants and other industrial facilities.

...The approach, which has not been previously reported, will set Biden apart from many of his Democratic rivals for the White House who have embraced much tougher climate agendas, like the Green New Deal calling for an end to U.S. fossil fuels use within ten years. That could make Biden a target of environmental groups and youth activists ahead of next year’s primary elections.

More than half of the crowded field of Democratic contenders, [particularly Bernie but also] including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke [more or less, mostly less], Cory Booker, Jay Inslee and Pete Buttigieg have backed the Green New Deal, and many have also called for a moratorium on drilling on federal land.

Biden has yet to comment publicly on the Green New Deal, and has said little about climate change in his campaign stops.

Referring to the outlines of Biden’s policy, Varshini Prakash, the director of the Sunrise Movement, which has been pushing candidates to endorse the Green New Deal, said: “We are ready and willing to call out the insufficiency of policies like that.”

Republicans, labor unions, and some Democrats have panned the Green New Deal as unfeasible in a country that has become the world’s top oil and gas producer, and remains a major fossil fuel consumer. The costs of ending the fossil fuel economy and transitioning to clean fuels could soar into the trillions of dollars, and would take decades, they say.

Zichal said Biden welcomes the heightened attention on climate change, but will ultimately take a more measured approach than the other Democratic candidates, one that picks up where Obama left off.

“Right now, we need a little bit more reality around this dialogue,” she said.

Blocking or reversing the Trump administration’s rollback of over 70 Obama-era climate rules and initiatives, such as the Clean Power Plan, auto efficiency standards, oil and gas methane emissions limits, and the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement could form the foundation of the strategy, she said.

She and the other advisor pointed out, however, that Biden’s climate policy was still being formed and the campaign’s approach could change.

Trump’s successful bid for the White House in 2016 hinged in part on his promise to create blue-collar jobs in oil, mining and manufacturing by rolling back regulations he argued were overly burdensome to business.

In contrast, then-Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton saw her support dip after she said her aggressive clean energy agenda would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” underscoring the impact environmental policy can have on an election.

Biden’s middle ground approach to environmental policy could put him in a better position than his rivals to take on Trump if it accommodates blue-collar voters. But he must first battle for his party’s nomination by seeking the votes of people who see global warming as a priority.

A recent CNN poll showed that climate change is the top issue for Democratic voters.

Zichal said she is gathering policy advice on Biden’s behalf from experts including former Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Frank Verrastro, head of the energy and national security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Moniz, who declined to comment, co-wrote an op-ed in March with a Bush administration official calling for a “Green Real Deal,” an alternative to the Green New Deal that calls for increased energy efficiency, nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage technology to drive down emissions alongside renewable energy. He has said achieving a zero-carbon target by 2030 is impossible.

Zichal said Biden hopes to be able to use his climate policy to bridge the gap between younger and more progressive Democrats who want bold action on global warming, and the working-class demographic that fear losing jobs as the economy shifts away from fossil fuels.

“He will build a new climate coalition,” she said. “Unions and environmentalists are searching for common ground. We can’t drive a common agenda unless we work together.”

Ball and Chain by Nancy Ohanian

Biden has no vision and no reason to be running for president other than a desire to achieve his own personal dream. I can't think of many people in politics-- other than Trump-- who would make a worse leader for this country than a nothing like Status Quo Joe. I doubt it will surprise you to know that another Jacobin writer, this time Malaika Jabali, has denounced Biden as a phony. "Biden," she wrote, "has nothing to offer workers of any race. He’s a corporate hack with a phony blue-collar veneer... the great white hope in the fight to moor a sinking white nationalist ship to some harbor of respectability unsullied by Trump’s controversies, bigoted policies, and boorish leadership."

[T]he media narrative about Biden tends to focus exclusively on working-class whites, downplaying the multiracial, working-class coalition needed to advance progressive policies and unjustifiably hinging Democrats’ success on a man whose record mostly illustrates that he is the least deserving of the coronation.

Assumptions about Biden’s candidacy-- that winning over working-class Trump voters is the primary key to victory; that the working class does not consist of nonwhites who would be averse to Biden’s history of racist rhetoric and corporate shilling; and that Biden could appeal to the working class enough to defeat Donald Trump-- fall apart with even marginal scrutiny.

Accepting these tropes uncritically could lead Democrats down another path of failure-- and they’d undoubtedly undermine the chance for progressive policy victories.

The first assumption depends on a misreading of the 2016 election: that working class, presumably white voters, catapulted Trump to victory in the Rust Belt, and Democrats thus need someone that can win them back into the fold. But in 2016, Trump won key battleground states not because of some large-scale shift among white voters from Obama to the Republican Party, but because more Democrats stayed out of the voting booths entirely.

In Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the three states that ultimately decided the election, Trump only got 400,000 more votes than Mitt Romney. This could be explained at least in part by population growth, as Trump won with virtually the same margin of white voters as Mitt Romney. However, Hillary got 680,000 fewer votes than Barack Obama in these battleground states, indicating that Obama voters went somewhere-- but not necessarily to Donald Trump.

In fact, black and white voter turnout fell in both Wisconsin and Michigan between 2012 and 2016. In Wisconsin, black voter turnout dropped to its lowest level in recorded history, from about 79 percent to 47 percent, amounting to about 87,000 fewer votes. Clinton lost the state by an estimated 23,000 votes.

The story of 2016 is really about nonvoters. And the story of 2020 should be about how to advance a politics that can energize and engage those nonvoters.

Yet the conclusion widely drawn from 2016-- where 57 percent of white voters chose a Republican candidate, in line with every other presidential election in the past nineteen years-- is that appealing to working-class, white Trump voters is necessary for the next Democratic challenger. Trump’s 2016 victory-- where he won over white voters with no college degree-- was less a bellwether than business as usual for white voters: since 1968, 55 percent of them on average have voted for a Republican president.

But rather than center their efforts on progressive nonvoters, establishment Democrats are eagerly citing offhand anecdotes about Biden’s hometown of Scranton, his support from some labor unions, and, it seems, simply pointing to his identity as white and male.

...Yet these are not the images that proliferate in mainstream news cycles. We don’t hear that the US working class is more diverse than ever or that people of color will make up a majority of the working class by 2032.

This oversight does not merely train Democrats to bypass what should be its natural constituency (workers of all races). It advances a racist conception of the working class that divides them internally. White workers, we are told, are deserving of our sympathy-- they are hard-working Americans. People of color, on the other hand, aren’t even workers-- so they couldn’t be part of the “economically anxious.”

Google Trends indicates that, for the search terms “white working class ” and “black working class” since 2016, the latter barely registers in the country’s consciousness.

This is devastating for progressive politics-- and a boon to people like Joe Biden, who have little to offer workers-- black, white, Hispanic, Asian, indigenous-- other than a blue-collar veneer. Peering through Biden’s record, as writer Branko Marcetic observes, it is clear the veteran Democrat has spent much of his political career advancing establishment interests instead of bucking them, from his votes “for NAFTA, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform.” When given the chance, Biden has often sided with corporations and big banks, not the working class.

For an egalitarian society to emerge from the crumbling communities failed by American individualism and white supremacy, we need to construct a coalition rooted in the working class of all races. And Joe Biden doesn’t belong in it.