The Democratic Party Should Not Be Nominating Republicans-- Not For Anything

Like Hillary, Biden started off as a Republican. He found himself in a Democratic environment at work-- and he didn't like Nixon-- so he re-registered as a Democrat. But, issue-wise, like Hillary, he's always been a moderate Republican at heart. He wants to run for president as one too-- and if he does, like Hillary, he will probably lose. Status Quo Joe's only real chance would be if voters decide he's the lesser of the two evils. In a post for In These Times last week, Reagan Lives On In Biden, Branko Marcetic reenforced something Georgia progressive Nabilah Islam wrote earlier today: "Growing up in the South, Democrats are indoctrinated early on to believe a specific type is what is electable. That type is usually white and even more often moderate or centrist. The strategy is to play to the middle and hope to get Republicans to vote for you. That’s not a winning strategy. When Republicans go to the voting booth, they vote for the real Republican, not the fake one." Biden, by the way, is on the record saying Delaware was part of the South and would have joined the Confederacy except Maryland was in the way." He spent a considerable part of his time palling around with Southern racists from both parties; he just gravitated to them. They're his people.

Marcetic cautioned Democrats trying to decide who to vote for in 2020 that "Amid warnings of a coming global recession, it’s worth asking what the 2020 presidential aspirants would do during an economic downturn. When it comes to Joe Biden, we may already know. Biden’s formative political years were spent in the shadow of economic crisis. After more than a decade of economic expansion and blissful, carefree consumerism, recession hit in 1973, the same year Biden entered the Senate. Two years later, 2.3 million jobs had disappeared. Americans also had to contend with runaway inflation that reached double digits by 1974. The United States had barely exited that recession when it plunged into another one in the early 1980s, with unemployment climbing past 10% by 1982. During this economically turbulent decade, Biden fended off Republican challenges to his seat by embracing right-wing doctrine--specifically, that restraining federal spending is more important during economic downturns than priming the pump."

This fiscal austerity would become a core conviction of Biden’s and help animate a lifelong belief that compromise and reaching across the aisle are the perennial solution to what ails America.

Biden had always been a somewhat ambivalent New Deal liberal-- fretting about government spending as early as 1975, even as he garnered positive scores from liberal groups for his voting record-- but the recession and his time in the halls of power nudged him in a more conservative direction.

“I must acknowledge that when I first came to the U.S. Senate at age 29, not too long out of college, many economists had been telling me why deficit spending was not all that bad,” he told the Senate in 1981.

“So I was not very convinced of the arguments made by my friends here, who I must acknowledge, were mostly on the Republican side of the aisle.” But, he went on, “as I listened over the years in this body, I became more and more a believer in balanced budgets.”

By the close of the 1970s, Biden began calling himself a fiscal conservative and introduced what he called his “spending control legislation”: a bill requiring all federal programs to be reauthorized every four years or automatically expire. He also voted for a large but unsuccessful tax cut introduced by Sen. William Roth, his Republican counterpart.

Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, pioneering the economic program of generosity to the rich and stinginess to the poor that became known as Reaganomics. Biden was right there with him.

Biden, Reagan and other conservatives pushed the flawed idea that the government is like a household and must take drastic measures to pay off debt to stay solvent. Six months into Reagan’s first term, Biden called the reduction of deficit spending “the single most important” path toward “an economically sound future.”

To curtail government spending, Reagan severely scaled back or eliminated federal programs-- even as he slashed tax rates for the rich. Biden voted for both (including an updated version of Roth’s failed tax cut). When the president proposed a budget freeze in 1983-- to cut the enormous deficits that, ironically, his tax cut helped produce-- Biden one-upped him, working with two Republican senators to propose an even more aggressive budget freeze doing away with scheduled cost-of-living increases for Medicare and Social Security.

This idea is contrary to what economists and experience tell us is the proper course of action in times of economic downturn. Economist Joseph Stiglitz credits Obama’s 2009 big-spending stimulus for ameliorating the recession (criticizing it only for being too small) and criticized austerity politics for undermining it. Meanwhile, countries like the United Kingdom and Greece stand as living monuments to the economic ravages of budget cutting during a recession, something even the International Monetary Fund belatedly acknowledged.

The economy under Reagan did recover-- even as he slashed programs for the poor and vulnerable, he ramped up defense spending, in effect creating an economic stimulus much larger than what would come in the wake of the Great Recession.

Meanwhile, Biden voted three years in a row for a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. When the 2008 financial crisis plunged the world into recession, Republicans again called for cuts to entitlement programs. As ever, Biden stretched out a bipartisan hand. As Obama’s lead negotiator during the “grand bargain” negotiations, Biden-- to his Democratic colleagues’ horror-- capitulated to every one of Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s demands, including cuts to Medicare, Social Security and food stamps, and warned in 2013 that, left untouched, deficits “may become a national security issue.”

While that effort collapsed due to Tea Party obstinacy, a President Biden could get one last shot. Following the Reagan playbook, the Trump tax cuts have sent the national debt soaring, and Republicans and conservative groups are now pushing for stringent budget cuts. Biden stands alone among the leading Democratic presidential candidates in his insistence that Democrats can work with McConnell’s GOP. Add a recession into the mix and the temptation to resume what he and Reagan began may be too great. Who says the era of bipartisanship is dead?

Peter Wade, writing yesterday for Rolling Stone, gave another example of Biden's utter unfitness to be the Democratic candidate. During his "No Malarkey" tour of Iowa, the decrepit Status Quo Joe from another era told reporters he's rather share power with Republicans than wild power the way FDR did. I suppose when you have nothing important to do-- and the ego-driven Biden has nothing at all he wants to accomplish other than self-gratification-- you can embrace the kind of dysfunction that plagued the Obama administration. Has he already forgotten how McConnell blocked whatever Obama tried to do-- like the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination? Or, as I suspect, was that just find with Biden? Wade reported that "Biden expressed concerns about Republicans possibly getting 'clobbered' in the upcoming election mainly because" of Trump's toxicity. I can't remember ever seeing someone as politically out of touch with the moment as Joe Biden is today.

The candidate said he’s held back on his “ass-kicker” side because he knows the American people want someone who can get things done and work with the other side.

“I mean look, everybody, anybody who knows me in politics including Trump knows they’re not going to be able to screw around with me. Not a joke,” Biden continued. “But that’s not what this is about. I think what the American people want to know is how am I going to make their life better.”

Biden went on to say that he thinks it’s important to have a political balance and the possible lack thereof concerns him. “I’m really worried that no party should have too much power,” Biden said. “You need a countervailing force. You can’t have such a dominant influence that then you start to abuse power. Every party abuses power if they have too much power.”

This warm-and-fuzzy attitude toward divided government is surprising coming from the former President Barack Obama’s VP. During Obama’s first two years, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and, briefly, had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Despite that, they relentlessly chased Republican moderates, begging to get just one to sign onto a health care plan that included no public option and was modeled after a system implemented by [checks notes] Mitt Romney. All those concessions to the middle gave them exactly zero GOP support.

Instead, they got Republican GOP leadership that decided on Day 1 to block everything Obama did and a tea party movement that claimed Obama was born in Kenya. Democrats lost the House in 2010, and for the final three-quarters of Obama’s presidency, he got damn near nothing of any importance through Congress. And when it was Obama’s turn to pick a Supreme Court justice, Mitch McConnell stole it because he could.

Republicans, meanwhile, used Trump’s first two years in office to ram through absolutely everything they could, including trillions in tax giveaways to corporations and the rich, despite having only the slimmest of Senate majorities.

For Republicans, “sharing power” is only important when Democrats have control-- and Biden should know that better than anyone.

Bernie and Elizabeth have powerful and compelling agendas of things they want to accomplish. Status Quo Joe, much like Trump, just wants to be president. There's virtually nothing he'd do if he were, except some vague, dysfunctional notion of a status quo ante which is at the heart of the rise of Trumpism. I'm sad so many of my countrymen voted for Trump. I'm just as sad that so many of my countrymen are preparing-- a few even eager-- to vote for an utterly worthless sack of crap like Joe Biden.