Obama Sounded Like He Endorsed Bernie And AOC, Not Status Quo Joe

The video above is most of Obama's predictably eloquent endorsement of Status Quo Joe yesterday, starting with the part where he tries to wash the blood off his hands for having coordinated the successful neoliberal effort to derail the #NotMeUs campaign.

And there's some stuff there that anyone can like. "If I were running today," he said in his endorsement of a virtual corpse who talks about nothing but the good old days between 2008 and 20016, "I wouldn't run the same race or have the same platform as I did in 2008. The world is different. There's too much unfinished business for us to just look backwards." That basically, sounds like a critique of the entire Status Quo Joe campaign.

Is he begging Biden to change course and move beyond the Back to Normalcy campaign? "We have to look to the future. Bernie understands that." Did he have any choice here but to insert that absurd assertion that "Joe understands that?" He then claimed that Biden has the most progressive platform of any major party nominee in history. Biden isn't the nominee yet but... OK. And, as he said, the world has changed and Biden's foot dragging platform is not all that progressive for 2020-- maybe compared to 1960, but no, not now, not in a significantly changed world, which includes a significantly changed electorate.

He want on to talk about the need for "real structural change" and how we have to confront the "vast inequalities created by the new economy" (which Biden is still utterly clueless about) and economic policies that give young people leaving school "faith in the future-- and relief from crushing student loan debt. so we need to do more than just tinker around the edges"-- which is exactly what Biden's so-called "progressive" overtures of the last week do... tinker around the edges... lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 60, which is about 1% of the way to the Medicare for All goal and a disjointed, grudging and very partial debt forgiveness package.

This sounds like the speech Obama would have made if he was endorsing Bernie: "We have to go further, to give everybody a great education, a lasting career and a stable retirement." That's what Bernie's platform is all about, not Status Quo Joe's codified defensive posturing, which no one ever even bothers looking at.

Obama-- far more than Biden-- says we need to go beyond the Affordable Care Act to make healthcare "a reality for everybody." Again, it sounds like he could be endorsing Bernie far more than endorsing Status Quo Joe.

"We have to return the U.S. to the Paris Agreement and lead the world in reducing the pollution that causes climate change. But science tells us we have to go much further. And it's time for us to accelerate progress on bold new green initiatives that make our economy a clean energy innovator, save us money and secure our children's future." OK, not just Bernie here, but AOC and the Green New Deal as well, right?

That's why I want to reiterate something I wrote yesterday, buried in a long post about Andrew Cuomo that many people may have missed:

Maggie Moran, Cuomo's top political operative-- the one not currently serving a prison term-- is surreptitiously fund-raising against AOC and soliciting campaign operatives to work against her reelection.

I haven't heard a peep from the DCCC about this, have you? Doesn't it violate Cheri Bustos' and Nancy Pelosi's rule about Democratic operatives not working against incumbents? Have they banned Moran? Of course not; she's part of their pathetic establishment. Any by the way, I'm sure you noticed that Bernie moved rapidly to endorse Status Quo Joe. Blue Dog loser Dan Lipinski-- and right in Obama's neighborhood-- still hasn't endorsed the progressive who vanquished him, Marie Newman.

Before I turned the video off, Obama was babbling about how the Republicans are not interested progress, just power. And that doesn't also describe the New Dems and Blue Dogs, who make up the Republican wing of the Democratic Party and have absolute veto power over all progressive initiatives-- which they use without hesitation?

Yesterday, in a letter to their members, Roots Action asked why the Chamber of Commerce would go after AOC and they proffered a few ideas in response.

Here's something AOC said in a recent video published by The Hill that no candidate backed by the Chamber of Commerce would ever say:

"We have to start demanding and organizing from the bottom up, from grassroots movements, from nurses to warehouse workers to grocery store employees to the halls of Congress, demanding that we strip profit motive out of our decisions and reprioritize the public good and the health of everyday people."

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is openly criticizing the class bias of the Governor of New York in finally halting mortgage payments but not rent payments during the COVID-19 crisis. (RootsAction had been pressing for both steps.)

AOC is demanding that the U.S. government extend the census-taking period because of the coronavirus pandemic.

She's expressing appropriate but rare outrage at the xenophobic approach that Trump has taken to talking about coronavirus, and explaining the impacts this has on efforts to halt the spread of the virus.

She's denouncing Amazon's attempted smear campaign against a worker who organized a walk-out.

She's pressing for better responses out of Congress to the current crisis, and she's educating the public about Congress's actions.

AOC has become such a major presence in opposition to Trump's outrages that he actually urged Dr. Anthony Fauci to move to New York and run against her. (There's no indication that Fauci is taking Trump's joking remark seriously.)

So... I'll take Obama's endorsement of Status Quo Joe seriously when I see one from him for Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her reelection battle to hold onto a seat that the Chamber of Commerce-- basically an arm of the Republican Party and the Steny Hoyer wing of the House Dems-- has spent nearly a million dollars to deny her, in favor of corporate shill Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. There are only 12 members of the House on the Blue America "Worthy Incumbents" list (which you can see by tapping the thermometer on the right). There was no hesitation to put AOC on that list and now we think she may well need the support. Republicans and conservative fake Democrats are pouring massive amounts of money into Caruso-Cabrera's planned smear campaign against AOC-- and in New York City, having the Cuomo machine behind you means a great deal. So, take a moment to think about how much worse an already putrid Congress would be without a compelling young leader like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So far... not a peep out of the DCCC about how Democratic operatives are prohibited from working against Democratic incumbents. Someone should ask Cheri Bustos and Nancy Pelosi about that... instead of this.

And this is Chris Martenson's daily pandemic podcast from yesterday... an episode that may be too wonky for most of us this time.