Will There Ever Be Another Presidential Election That Isn't A Race To Determine Who Is The Lesser Evil?

The latest YouGov polling for The Economist was released yesterday. There are over 350 pages: be my guest. I'll just highlight a few findings about characteristics that motivate vote choices among registered voters-- comparisons between Bernie and Status Quo Joe.

• Cares about people like you-- Biden- 49%, Bernie- 55%
• Honesty and trustworthy-- Biden- 39%, Bernie- 48%
• Age would severely limit job capacity-- Biden- 38%, Bernie- 34%

The same poll shows that both Biden and Bernie would beat Trump in November, Biden by 4 points and Bernie by 1 point. But perceived fear of a second Trump victory is driving Democratic primary voters to pick the less honest and trustworthy, more senile and less caring candidate. And we wish good luck with that, to all the strategic 2016 Democratic primary voters who were so sure Hillary would win that the least competent, least honest, least fit candidate in history is now sitting in the White House destroying our country. Great job; by all means make the same mistake again.

Author and L.A. Times columnist Erin Aubrey Kaplan was the first black weekly op-ed columnist in that paper’s history. Her much discussed column on why black voters are supporting former Vice President Joe Biden over Sen. Bernie Sanders stands out as an important piece of 2020 election coverage. In a letter to the editor, Richard Robinson wrote that there piece was "exactly on target. Comparing Sanders’ ideas to those of Martin Luther King Jr. was right on. Kaplan wrote, 'In the decades since King’s death, many black people have lost touch with the necessity of idealism and imagination.' She also pointed out that the 'overwhelming fear of a Trumpian future' is 'making pragmatists of us all.' Not only black voters have traded their idealism for fear. I’m sure many other groups have forsaken idealism for fear-based pragmatism, and they may end up with the very Trumpian future they so deeply fear anyway."

The country stands at the brink of absolutely bottomless catastrophe-- financially, politically and, obviously, healthwise. And all the two corrupted, dysfunctional political parties have come up with are an incompetent, narcissistic criminal carnival barker and a pointless conservative corpse who wants nothing more-- or less-- than the honor of dying as president. Yesterday, CounterPunch published a piece by author and American ex-pat-- residing in Switzerland-- Matthew Stevenson, that dealt with the question of the Democrats' suicidal charge into battle behind the corpse.

"Will the Democrats cut their losses with Joe Biden and try to nominate someone else at the national convention," he asked as a set-up. "Let’s get real about Biden. He’s a dead candidate running, whose only role in this campaign was to deny the Democratic nomination to the bomb-throwing Bernie Sanders. Did anyone vote for Biden for his intellectual prowess, leadership qualities or record in crisis management?" He wrote that he doesn't think so and that "the only reason anyone voted for Biden in the primaries was because his name wasn’t Sanders and because he was seen as someone who would endorse bailout checks to corporate America-- whatever the crisis. The rest hardly mattered. Now, a month into what is called his 'presumptive' candidacy, Democrats are waking up to the fact that their nominee cannot string together three comprehensible sentences and is just as clueless as Trump and Mike Pence in dealing with a national health crisis... I trust you have seen a few of the videos circulating online of Biden broadcasting from his undisclosed location. He sounds like an old man on a golf club membership committee, complaining how it’s impossible to find a parking place near the men’s grill on Saturdays."

He added, woefully, that "Now in 2020, the Dems seem to have gone out of their way to confront a seventysomething incumbent with wandering hands and crooked kids with their own nominee who seems cloned from the same source code." Stevenson thinks the Dems will dump Biden before or during the national convention. "Just as Republicans are good at rigging elections, Democrats are skilled at marking the cards in their primaries and caucuses. The reason Bernie hasn’t thrown in the towel and endorsed 'my friend Joe' is because he knows how the Democratic game is played, and the party will do to Biden as it did to him-- namely screw him out of the nomination. It’s about all the party does well. Getting rid of Biden will be a lot easier than getting tested for the virus. If the remaining primaries are postponed or cancelled ('a national emergency…this grave crisis…'), Biden would arrive at the virtual convention with 1,217 delegates (where the count stands today) while 1,991 are needed for the nomination.

If no Democratic candidate at the convention gets a majority on the first ballot, the 771 superdelegates become eligible to vote on the second and all subsequent ballots.

That bloc should be sufficient to throw the nomination in whatever direction it chooses, especially given that superdelegates come from the ranks of senior Democratic office holders and members of the national committee.

My guess is that, as a group, the superdelegates are tired of YouTube watching Weekend at Biden’s (“A lively comedy about a guy who isn’t…”) and despair that their man could lose to the criminally negligent, emoluments-rich, woman-abusing, narcissistically incompetent Trump.

At this point, the Democrats would happily nominate some tough-talking, Covid-fighting governor on the 38th ballot so long as it was not Sanders or, now, Biden.

Standing in the way of rational behavior, of course, is the Democratic Party itself, which has been in self-destruct mode since it loaded the dice in favor of Hillary Clinton in 2016, if not long before. Remember Mike Dukakis and John Kerry?

Note the ages of the party leadership: Biden is 77 and Nancy Pelosi is 80. (Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is 69, which makes him, relatively speaking, “the kid.”) And the runner-up in this race, Bernie Sanders, is 78. Even China has done away with its gerontocracy.

Is it any wonder that the Democratic party has so run out of ideas that all it can think to do, during a time of national crisis, is to nominate Clueless Joe?

...The great irony of the 2020 Democratic primaries and the general election is that the two candidates who ran largely on medical reform-- Sanders and Elizabeth Warren-- stand discredited, while the last two (tired old white) men still in the race-- Trump and Biden-- have nothing coherent to say about medicine (or anything else).

And you wonder why the crisis is out of control.

Stay safe or, as they ended letters during the Depression, write when you find work.

In the background, polling is finding support for Bernie's signature issue, Medicare for All-- explicitly opposed by Status Quo Joe and Trump-- is soaring. Morning Consult's Yusra Murad wrote that "In the midst of a pandemic that has spurred an economic crisis and put Americans’ health care costs in stark contrast with the rest of the industrialized world, support for Medicare for All has risen to its highest point in about nine months. The sweeping health reform package championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would provide all Americans with health insurance through the government now has support from 55 percent of registered voters, per a March 27-29 survey of 1,997 respondents, taken as the United States became the global epicenter of the coronavirus. Thirty-five percent of voters continue to oppose the proposal, putting net support-- the share who support minus those who oppose-- at 20 points, a 9-point jump from mid-February... For the first time since June 2019, a majority of independents are in favor of Medicare for All (52 percent), sparking an 8-point increase in net support among this demographic since February. As the domestic COVID-19 caseload spirals and economists predict a historic surge in unemployment, millions of Americans are bracing for potentially untenable health care costs and lapses in coverage, reviving questions about the viability of a health system that relies on binding insurance to employment." The Blue America ActBlue thermometer above, shows you candidates who are actively campaigning for Medicare-for-All. Please consider contributing to their efforts.