The Democrats Will Never Voluntarily Stop Force-Feeding Us Lesser Of Two Evils Elections

If U.S. politics were as binary as the average Joe thinks it is-- and everyone was either a Democrat or a Republican-- then any Democrat not voting for Status Quo Joe would be a traitor, just the way so many average Joes on Twitter seem to think #NeverTrump/#NeverBiden Americans are. Don't hate them for their simpleminds. Even the Simple Minds had a hit song. People who know nothing about Biden except that he was Obama's vice president-- if not why-- and is running for president, feel they can assail people who know a lot about why Biden is unfit for leadership because of their well-placed hatred for Trump. Some people, however, are committed to voting for a candidate, not against another candidate.

Likely many millions of Americans will be finding out exactly who Joe Biden is between now and November and the corporate entity known as The Democrats better hope that their anybody-but-Bernie jihad and their forever lesser-of-two-evils strategy, which has driven millions of Americans away from the party in disgust, works for them. They're so driven by both of these conditions that they're willing to risk inflicting Trump on the rest of us for another four years.

The Other #MeToo Movement

Last week Zak Cheney-Rice, in a New York Magazine essay noted that Tara Reade is making it harder to hide Joe Biden. He wrote that "Biden's most effective campaign strategy has been to lie low and let people vote for whatever imagined version of Joe Biden congealed inside their heads. On Friday, he went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss the Tara Reade allegations. It was not a good argument for changing this strategy.

For the most part, the interview with Mika Brzezinski held few surprises: Biden denied the allegations that he assaulted Reade in 1993, when she was on his Senate staff, while maintaining that women who make such allegations should be heard and have their claims investigated seriously. He declined to speculate as to Reade’s motives and called on the secretary of the Senate to search for her complaint in the National Archives-- the “only … place a complaint of this kind could be,” Biden said. Less surefooted than these broad strokes were their substance and delivery. Soon after Biden called for the search, a National Archives spokesperson told Business Insider that they do not hold the records to which he referred, which, if true, means the vice-president directed the inquiry toward an easily verifiable dead end. More predictably, Biden proved to be an uninspiring spokesperson for himself, fumbling his words at times and cutting himself off mid-sentence, unprompted.

It vividly distilled his party’s bigger plight. With the general election looming, Democrats have organized, rationalized, and voted themselves into the unenviable but richly earned position of having a presumptive nominee who’s at his best when he’s neither speaking nor appearing in public. While other campaigns busied themselves with big plans, stirring rhetoric, and disruptive ideological positions, Biden’s candidacy has been judged by one criterion to the exclusion of all others: whether it’s up to the task of beating President Trump. Poll after poll has shown that Democrats privileged this metric in an outsize manner when winnowing the primary field, which included contenders who diverged negligibly from Biden in both demographic and ideological terms. But what the other candidates lacked has proved to be determinative: a career long, resilient, and ideologically contortive enough to have produced allies and admirers at every level of American politics, and the imprimatur of serving under the party’s most mythologized figure, President Obama. The persuasive heft this combination gave Biden’s pitch as a proven winner and America’s best bet for a return to normalcy-- meaning the pre-Trump status quo that gave us Trump-- was such that being the prohibitive front-runner where some candidates had campaigned for months merely required him to show up.

He proceeded to test voter goodwill at every turn. He reminisced fondly about working with segregationists, even as his record as a busing opponent, “tough on crime” zealot, and architect of punitive criminal-justice policy came under fire. He joked glibly about asking permission to touch his supporters, shortly after more than half a dozen women came forward with accounts of him touching them inappropriately. Perhaps most damning to the prospect of his running a presidential administration come January, to say nothing of four to eight years from now, the 77-year-old proved to be senescent, leaving thoughts unfinished in his public remarks, going off on tangents from which there was little hope of returning, and stumbling through debate appearances while his opponents ran roughshod over his stream of gaffes. It didn’t matter. His lead in the polls collapsed only briefly when Bernie Sanders’s momentum heading into the Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada primaries-- contests that Biden had largely dismissed as lost causes anyway-- suggested a general-election viability to rival his own. But a livelier-than-usual debate performance and endorsement from Representative Jim Clyburn cemented the vice-president’s South Carolina firewall and restored his winner’s sheen. He won that election in a landslide, prompting several challengers to drop out and endorse him. His victories on Super Tuesday and beyond left Sanders with little choice but to do the same.

This all happened despite Biden getting out-organized, out-debated, and out-spent by one or more of his opponents, sometimes several at a time, most glaringly in states like Alabama, Maine, and Minnesota, where the vice-president had no field offices but won anyway. That voters in these states could crib together their champion from fragments of a comparatively nonexistent effort to win them over suggests it hasn’t mattered much what Biden says, does, said, or did, as long as he can win — an endeavor aided immeasurably by the fact that everything else he does seems immaterial. The result is a national campaign to elect someone who exists largely in the minds of Biden’s supporters. Luckily for the real Biden, nobody to whom he’s inclined to listen is asking him to be anything more.

Nor, it seems, has his MSNBC appearance given them a good reason to. Quite the contrary: In the face of mounting evidence that Reade’s allegations are more than the baseless smear his campaign has dismissed them to be, Biden has mostly faded into the background while his surrogates, supporters, and some pundits went to bat for him, deploying timeworn canards about sexual assault victims and what circumstances justify disbelieving them, or dismissing Reade outright before a fuller picture sees daylight. When pressed on the latest developments-- that Reade told a neighbor and a former co-worker about her assault shortly after it’s alleged to have happened, according to Business Insider-- columnists from the New York Times to The Nation stepped up to discredit her, and politicos from Stacey Abrams to Nancy Pelosi reaffirmed their support of the vice-president. Even Kirsten Gillibrand, who drew ire from within the Democratic Party when she pushed for Al Franken to resign after evidence of his misconduct surfaced in 2017, doubled down on her support. (That it’s fallen mostly on women to speak for Biden when he’s hesitant to speak for himself-- and will likely continue to be-- indicts both his strategy and the sexist standards from which it profits.)

We’re now at the point where corroborating testimony supporting Reade’s allegations meets or exceeds the threshold established by those made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and President Trump. Many of their defenses are now being deployed to protect a man whose efforts to nullify the former’s power and depose the latter are being framed by his supporters, and even some of his skeptics, as America’s best alternative to catastrophe, moral and otherwise. Opportunism guides political behavior as much as cynicism and hypocrisy shape it. That’s about as involved an explanation as this reversal merits, I think. More striking is that Biden hasn’t had to do much of the defending himself. Mounting evidence supporting Reade’s claim makes things harder, but he’s largely staying true to the strategy that’s guided his campaign since early on, which holds that the winningest Biden is one to be imagined, not seen, heard, or even thought about too hard. His staff recognizes that the less its candidate speaks, the less opportunity his supporters have to neglect evidence that undermines their faith-- in his competence, his election odds, and, increasingly, his innocence. If there’s one thing for which the Democrats have yet to punish Biden this cycle, it’s his silence in the face of lingering doubt. To change that now would be to change the very foundation of his campaign’s success.

I made up my mind about Biden when I was living abroad and reading about a young racist asshole running for the Senate in Delaware. Since then, he's never given me a moment to reconsider. In fact, he consistently got worse in the Senate and after that, Obama called all the shots for him. I believe Obama is doing that again today and whether Biden is ultimately the nominee or replaced with a younger, more palatable version will be Obama's call as well.

Bonnie Kristian attempted to figure out what many people want to know. Is it possible to get rid of Biden... if not elegantly at least not by some method that smacks of a coup? "Before the convention, which is currently rescheduled for August," she wrote, "the answer is probably no. Suspended primary elections have already raised concerns about abrogation of transparent, democratic processes... While Democratic delegates will understand the need to modify normal convention procedure to avoid spreading COVID-19, their understanding won't be unlimited. Sweeping changes to the nominating process would be suspect, and if the process continues as anticipated, Biden will very likely be selected as the nominee on the first ballot.

So far, Biden has 1,406 of 1,991 delegates needed to win that initial vote, and those are delegates pledged (by strong custom, though not law) to Biden by primary and caucus results. Between now and August, there will be 22 more primaries whose outcomes will pledge another 1,368 delegates. Biden has no remaining challengers campaigning against him and needs fewer than half those delegates to win the first ballot. Unless the Democratic Party, wildly improbably, tosses its entire rule book out the window, Biden will take the nomination at the convention in a single vote.

Ah, but what then? In the waning days of the Sanders campaign, I argued endorsements from superdelegates-- prominent Democratic leaders and elected officials-- showed party bosses had decided Biden was their guy. I don't expect to see those endorsements disappear, not publicly. But is the party leadership's commitment to Biden as solid as it once was?

Suppose, plausibly, it is not. Suppose they don't want to run a historically elderly candidate amid a pandemic that is deadliest for the elderly? Suppose Tara Reade's assault accusation and Biden's tendency to misspeak even from the low-pressure, high-preparation environment of his own basement further fuel the "two senile sex offenders" narrative of this election? Suppose enthusiasm continues to grow for running New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), whom one poll found 56 percent of Democrats would prefer to Biden as their nominee? (Cuomo says he won't do it, but that could be an obligatory performance of deference to a party elder.)

"The presidential debates are in effect already occurring daily between" Cuomo and Trump, Craig Snyder, a former Republican Senate chief of staff, argued in the Philadelphia Inquirer. We don't have to suppose Democratic Party leaders have noticed; they undoubtedly have.

So if they wanted to replace Biden (whether with Cuomo, the veep nominee, or some arrangement of both) Democratic leadership could wait until after the nomination to do so. Then, as they did with Democratic vice presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton in 1972, they could ask Biden to step aside, citing his health.

Biden's agreement is a long shot. Eagleton continued his Senate career after leaving the 1972 ticket over pressure about his mental health, but he was a much younger man. At Biden's age, stepping aside would end his political career for good. Relinquishing the nomination would therefore suggest he expects an embarrassing loss and ruined legacy if he stays.

With Biden out, the Democratic National Committee, a group of around 350 which is "composed of the chairs and vice-chairs of each state Democratic Party Committee and over 200 members elected by Democrats in all 57 states and the territories," would vote to select a new nominee.

Such a switch could be made any time between the convention nomination and Election Day. Because we technically vote for Electoral College members rather than presidential candidates, it may be, as Vox proposes, that Electors could simply transfer their vote from the old Democratic nominee to the new one regardless of what was printed on the ballot. But the legal situation is uncertain and varies from state to state. "For instance," notes FiveThirtyEight, "Michigan's law requires an Elector to vote for the ticket named on the ballot whereas Florida's rules say that an Elector is to 'vote for the candidates of the party that he or she was nominated to represent.'" That means a sooner swap, allowing more states to print the new name on the ballot, would be better. Yet court battles would be inevitable with the ever-litigious Trump involved.

The likeliest outcome remains the most straightforward: That Biden will be the Democratic nominee and will face Trump in November. But if Democratic leaders did want to change horses midstream, late August or September could well be when they make their move.

Obama will decide.

When Will Biden Put Aside His Ego And Withdraw For The Sake Of The Country?

One of the Manchester, New Hampshire state legislative districts has 3 seats in the state House. All the candidates, regardless of party, run on one ballot. It's a blue area and the three top vote-getters were all Democrats. In 2018, Democrats Chris Herbert and Ben Baroody came in first and second with over 5,000 votes each. Richard Komi, after polling last in the Democratic primary, came in third with 4,517 votes, beating out top GOP vote-getter Ross Terrio's 3,868 votes. The conservative Komi, a Nigerian refugee, had supported Biden all through the primaries. Bernie came in first in New Hampshire with 76,324 votes. Biden came in a distant 5th with just 24,921 votes, too few votes to qualify for any delegates. And in Hillsborough County, which Komi represents, Bernie also came in first with 25.7% with Biden again, a distant 4th and just 8.8%. Komi didn't mind that his constituents are more progressive than he is. And they probably don't care anymore either since he resigned Friday. Why? Look at this tweet for his boy Status Quo Joe, now deleted:

House Speaker Steve Shurtleff was mortified and told Komi to resign: "I am appalled by Representative Komi’s comments. They were dismissive and hurtful to survivors of sexual assault across the Granite State and across the country. The comments are not fitting for the New Hampshire House of Representatives and immediately upon learning of them I called him and asked Representative Komi to resign his seat."

The Tara Reade scandal has been building slowly. Biden and his handlers had hoped it would go away if they just ignored it-- and, indeed, pre-primary no one from the corporate media would touch it. Now the corporate media is all over it and Biden has finally been forced to respond. His allies are smearing Reade viciously and are basically one tiny baby step away from asserting she paid men to let her blow them. One of them has already said Putin paid her to accuse poor ole Joe, who everyone knows never puts his hands in any women, just all over them. Non-corporate media has been covering this already, of course.

Saturday, Caroline Kitchener asked and tried to answer a question for Washington Post readers-- could Biden really step aside because he has been exposed? "No presidential candidate," wrote Kitchener, "wants to be on the wrong end of an 'October surprise': Major news breaks at the last minute-- maybe the media unearths an old videotape, or the FBI resuscitates a closed investigation into a particular collection of emails. The campaign has to do damage control with limited time before Election Day. October is still a long way away. It was March 25 when Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, publicly accused former vice president Joe Biden-- the presumptive Democratic nominee for president-- of digitally penetrating her with his fingers while she worked in his office in 1993. On Monday, Reade’s former neighbor corroborated Reade’s account in an interview with Business Insider, saying Reade told her about the assault in the mid-90s, soon after Reade says it occurred. Biden spoke about the allegation for the first time Friday morning, saying unequivocally: 'This never happened.'" Biden, like Trump, is an inveterate compulsive liar. There's no reason on earth to believe him now, not anymore than there would be to believe Trump.

Some Democrats are asking for Bernie and some of the minor candidates to unsuspend their campaigns and take Biden on. So far no one is biting, some using the shitty excuse that it could cause chaos in the shitty party that demanded such a shitty candidate as their nominee. All the corporate Dems are setting their hair on fire claiming any show of disunity would be playing into Trump's hands. Umm... wouldn't keeping a fatally flawed candidate like Biden on the ticket be playing into Trump's hands? Trump's campaign has many millions of dollars to make sure every voter hears all about this filthy little secret that Biden has endeavored to not address. Kitchener seems eager to present the establishment perspective-- or maybe she's just a gullible fool.

This kind of division within the Democratic Party is exactly what Trump wants, said Democratic strategist Adrienne Elrod, a former spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. The calls for Biden to step down are coming from people who didn’t want him to be the nominee in the first place, she said.

“It’s silly talk. I think maybe it gives the far left or people who were not supportive of Joe Biden something to hang their hat on. But it’s not realistic.”

Reade’s allegations might dissuade some voters from turning out for Biden, but a new nominee would likely be far more harmful to the Democrats’ chances of defeating Trump, said Jennifer Lawless, a professor of women and politics at the University of Virginia.

“It would make the Democratic Party look utterly incompetent,” she said.

Groper

More evidence in support of Reade’s claims could potentially change the Democratic Party’s calculus. But that evidence would likely need to be extremely conclusive and damaging, said Lawless — not just more corroborating accounts, like the statements from Reade’s former neighbor-- but a “smoking gun” more in line with Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape, where Trump admitted to sexually assaulting women.

While that kind of evidence did not derail Trump’s presidential campaign, Lawless says, the Democrats have “held themselves to a higher bar” by harshly condemning Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh for the allegations wagered against them. When former Congressman Al Franken (D-MN) was accused of sexual assault, several high profile Democrats publicly called for his resignation, which led him to eventually step down.

The situation could also shift with public opinion, said Lawless.

“If public opinion polls start to change in the next few weeks, and Biden looks like he is faring less well in some of these battleground states, all bets are off.”

Unless new information emerges, Lawless doesn’t expect the Reade allegations to have a major impact on Democratic voter behavior. That might be different if Biden was not going up against Trump, she says. But evaluated against Trump’s long history of sexual assault allegations-- and the hard evidence of the “Access Hollywood” tape-- Democratic voters concerned with these issues will likely still side with Biden, said Lawless.

“As awful as this is, the worst case for Biden is that he’s now on a level playing field with Trump on this dimension [of sexual assault allegations].”

If “smoking gun” evidence did surface, and pressures mounted for Biden to step aside, he would probably have to do so voluntarily, said Jewitt. Biden has already won too many delegates to lose the nomination in any other way. If that happened, a host of other Democratic candidates would rush to reinstate their campaigns. After the first round of votes at the convention, there would likely be no clear winner, said Jewitt, at which point any other person would be free to jump into the race. (Jewitt has fielded many questions in the past month from people eager to know if New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo could run for president. In this scenario, the answer is yes.)

Based on his age-- 77-- Biden’s vice presidential pick was always going to be particularly important, said Lawless. It’s even more important now. Going forward, the vice presidential nominee-- who Biden has promised will be a woman-- will be called on to defend Biden with regards to these allegations, probably more frequently than Biden is called on to defend himself.

It’s a “tough spot” to be in, Lawless says. But that surely won’t deter prospective nominees. If Biden wins, the vice president will be better positioned for the presidency than any woman in history. Years from now, she could be the one deciding how her party responds to a woman who comes forward to share her story of sexual assault.

The anybody-but-Bernie crowd that owns the corrupt corporate Democratic Party apparatus wants just one thing, for Biden to hang on until they can replace him in a proverbial smoke-filled room with another one of any number of neoliberals, someone putrid who would never win the 2020 primary, a Hillary, Cuomo, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Newsom... someone who would put voters into the position of having to eat the DNC's shit or be stuck with 4 more years of Trump. The Democratic Party is now a greatly diminished, sad to behold, one-trick pony: heads you lose, tails you lose even worse.

Is the Tara Reade Story Approaching Critical Mass?

Big Media silence is breaking in the Tara Reade story

by Thomas Neuburger

Is the Tara Reade story reaching critical mass, approaching a tipping point? It seems so.

The initial response to this story was silence from anyone with political or media power. The media in particular completely ignored it. Comparisons of CNN coverage of the Reade story with their coverage of the Blasey Ford story show a marked discrepancy. Reade told her full story first in a March 25 interview with Katie Halper. Yet CNN published no Tara Reade stories until April 25, and then, it seems, they published only in embarrassed response to The Intercept's revelation that Reade's mother had called in to CNN's own show, Larry King Live, on August 11, 1993 to discuss in unspecific terms her daughter's problem.

CNN finally broke silence on the Reade story less than a day after Ryan Grim and the Intercept published the Larry King show transcript and the Media Research Center located and tweeted a clip of it. Blasey Ford's story, in contrast, went viral on all national media. including on CNN, as soon as it was available. Deservedly so, in her case. Not so much, in Reade's.

To conclude that the media buried the story to help Biden remain the presumptive nominee is inescapable. The plan, apparently, was to starve the public of Reade news and wait out the indie-press storm until newer news drew their attention.

Once the wall of silence was breached, the indie press started asking why Democratic Party leaders and opinion makers, especially prominent #MeToo women, were either absent from the discussion or suddenly coming out in support of Biden. Kirstin Gillibrand and Hillary Clinton are the latest to announce support as of this writing, but the silence of many — Elizabeth Warren prominently among them — is still deafening. Note that "I support Joe Biden" and "I believe Joe Biden" are different statements.

Only Nancy Pelosi, speaking with Ari Melber on MSNBC, has been asked directly about Reade's accusation and replied, "I'm satisfied with his answer." (It's very much to the point of this piece that the only sources I could find to link to for this quote are right-wing sources like Breitbart. Yet Melber's show is on MSNBC.)

Now the story itself, or the story about the story, is coming to mainstream pages and screens, thanks partly to the shaming of the indie press and partly to the recent report by Rich McHugh in Business Insider.

Michelle Goldberg tweeted this on April 27, three days prior to this writing:

This is the most persuasive corroborating evidence that has come out so far. What a nightmare. https://t.co/u4yPbEElaf

— Michelle Goldberg (@michelleinbklyn) April 27, 2020

The New York Times now publicly acknowledges Biden's silence:

Democratic Frustration Mounts as Biden Remains Silent on Sexual Assault Allegation

Activists and women’s rights advocates have urged Mr. Biden to address a former aide’s allegation that he sexually assaulted her in 1993. His lack of response has angered them.

In an April 27 New Yorker story entitled "The Biden Trap: As the candidate faces credible assault allegations, his progressive female colleagues are being offered a poisoned chalice," Rebecca Traister observes:

Biden’s shaky past behavior around women and their bodies isn’t staying in his past.

BuzzFeed weighs in with "Democrats Will Have To Answer Questions About Tara Reade. The Biden Campaign Is Advising Them To Say Her Story “Did Not Happen.”"

In which article we see this:

Democrats are in an increasingly precarious position as reporters assess Reade’s allegation. By any measure of the #MeToo movement that has seen the Democratic Party embrace “believe women” as a mantra, Reade, 56, has provided a serious account, disputed by Biden’s campaign and former senior staffers who worked in his office in 1993 but corroborated in part by people she told about the incident in the 1990s.

Chris Cillizza add his bit with "Joe Biden's campaign is twisting a New York Times story to defend against the Tara Reade allegation".

And the Daily Beast pursues responses from 10 prominent women's groups and notes their near universal silence (emphasis added):

Why Have Women’s Groups Gone Dead Silent on Biden Sex-Assault Accusation?

Women’s groups and prominent feminist figures have remained almost universally silent over a former staffer’s accusation of sexual misconduct against former Vice President Joe Biden—including those individuals and groups who came to express regret for how the Democratic Party handled similar accusations made against President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

The collective non-response from mostly Democrat-aligned groups comes as potential female running mates struggle themselves in responding to the Biden allegation, which has the potential to upend his campaign against President Donald Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women in alleged incidents spanning decades. And it echoes the division among progressives when the #MeToo movement revived scrutiny of Clinton’s own alleged sexual misconduct.

The Daily Beast contacted 10 top national pro-women organizations for this story, including Emily’s List, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the National Organization for Women. Most organizations did not respond to a detailed request for comment about the allegation by Tara Reade, a former staff assistant in Biden’s Senate office who has accused the former vice president of forcibly penetrating her with his fingers in the early 1990s. Others replied and did not provide a statement.

In addition, according to the article, "neither [attorney Patricia] Ireland [who presided over NOW during the whole of the Clinton administration] nor feminist icon [Gloria] Steinem responded to a request for comment about Reade’s accusations against Biden."

Finally, the Washington Post's editorial board writes on April 29: "Biden himself should address the Tara Reade allegations and release relevant records".

What's notable in all these reports isn't the story itself. It's that the story is being told in mainstream media outlets where people with mainstream lives can finally see them.

What's Next?

The day may be almost here when Gloria Steinem, Elizabeth Warren, and worse for Biden, all of the female VP candidates and hopefuls mentioned by Traister in her "poisoned chalice" New Yorker article will be asked on the record, not if they support Joe Biden, but if they believe him.

That's a question few women with strong #MeToo credentials will want to answer, since it ties them, perhaps forever, to Biden's "historical shortcomings" (in Traister's delicate phrasing). They have to be concerned that, if another credible accuser comes forward, it could sink them all.

Will this explosion of coverage lead to a collapse of the Biden campaign and a DNC search for a new 2020 standard-bearer? We can't be sure it will. Every indication that's come to my ears suggests that DNC Democrats, those with real power, are certain the storm will be weathered, the story will pass into the background, spring will fade to summer, then to fall, and by November Party-leaning minds will think only of Trump and the wreckage he represents.

But critical mass brings tipping points. We also can't be sure that Reade's story won't lead to Biden's collapse, now that the difficult questions are starting to be asked in places that give permission to ask them.
 

Will Deeply Committed Progressives Vote For Status Quo Joe In November-- The Lesser Of Two Evils Play?

Bernie apparently got some policy concessions out of Biden-- enough for him to endorse him. Maybe there are more to come, but what Biden announced so far isn't enough for me to vote for him. (Note: I vote for candidates, not against someone who is worse. Over the decades, the Democrats have taken interpreted progressives willingness to vote for their putrid centrist candidates as an endorsement of putrid, centrist policies. If that's ok for you, go for it.) Anyway, I stuck up a quickie Twitter poll and a tiny majority of respondents said they had decided to vote for Biden, either on their own or because of Bernie. Almost as many people said they would not vote for him or had not yet decided.

On Tuesday, The Guardian published a column by Nathan Robinson asserting that Biden needs to win progressive voters over by doing a lot more and that "his 'concessions' so far have only demonstrated that he isn’t serious about listening to leftwing voters." Trump may lose-- how could he not?-- but there's no way Biden can win in anyway but by default. The enthusiasm gap for Biden is monstrous. At best, he's simply better than Trump, a lot better for some people, magically better for others. But he has nothing to offer anyone, except neoliberals eager to see the end of Social Security and Medicare and a balanced budget.

AOC is likely to endorse Biden as well but she said he has to be made to feel uncomfortable before there can be any real of party unity. Robinson wrote that "Many younger people share Ocasio-Cortez’s perspective; they are waiting to see what Biden can offer rather than reflexively supporting him because he is the Democrat" or even because Bernie endorsed him. "Why," asked Robinson, "is Biden struggling with young progressives?"

Well, one reason is that he has spent a lifetime opposing key progressive goals, and used to be proud of his reputation as one of the Senate’s “most conservative” Democrats. He was anti-abortion, pro-Iraq war and in the pocket of big banks. Even today, Biden says he has “no empathy” for young people who complain about indebtedness and precarity. He has told millennials who raise concerns about his environmental policies that they should “go vote for someone else.” Plenty have been willing to do just that. So while some commentators, such as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, have suggested that activists and left media are responsible for Biden’s “unity problem,” the more blameworthy culprit is Biden himself.

In fact, it doesn’t seem as if Biden has much interest in solving his “unity problem.” In an ostensible effort to reach out to the left, Biden recently debuted new policies on healthcare and education. Did he adopt the policies recommended in the activists’ letter, namely Medicare for All and canceling all outstanding student debt? No, he did not. Instead, he merely proposed lowering the existing Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 60 and canceling tuition-related debt for students who attended public colleges who earn under a certain income.

The first of these policies almost seems like a deliberate insult. Biden’s response to those young people demanding a better health policy is to offer a policy that won’t help any of them for decades. And to understand just how pitifully stingy this “concession” is, remember that dozens of Democratic senators, including plenty of “moderates”, have already endorsed lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 55. You can find an op-ed in Forbes (not exactly the Democratic Socialists of America newsletter) suggesting 50 would be a better age. Bill Clinton proposed 55 in 1998, and Hillary Clinton advocated 55 in 2016. So Biden’s big concession to the left is actually more conservative than a centrist Democratic proposal! It’s not nothing, but it’s about as close to nothing as a policy can get without literally being nothing, and it shows that Biden isn’t serious about courting the left.

Remember, too, that we’re only talking about the platform. This is where negotiations start. By the time a proposal has gone through the political process, it inevitably gets watered down. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll get the Medicare age dropped from 65 to 63 by the year 2030 or something. And even that prospect assumes that Biden is serious about fighting for his platform. At election time, politicians have an unfortunate habit of promising voters whatever they think voters want to hear. Needless to say, they don’t always follow through, and you’re often better off looking at their record than their rhetoric. From Biden’s record, it’s more plausible that he’ll follow through on his reported plan to put Michael Bloomberg and JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, in his cabinet than that he’ll overhaul the healthcare system.

The student debt plan is a disappointment, too. Why only public colleges, when so much unsustainable debt comes from private universities? Why only tuition-related expenses? Why is it means-tested? If Biden wants to impress the left, he will need a big, sweeping plan, not a plan with dozens of qualifiers and caveats that recalls Kamala Harris’s infamous proposal to forgive debt only for “Pell grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities.

I actually really hope Biden embraces one of the big left policy proposals such as Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, because he can’t afford to write off progressive votes, and the stakes of this election are high. If Donald Trump is re-elected, it will be a disaster: he will be emboldened and more powerful, and will end his second term with almost complete control of the courts. Democracy as we know it may disappear altogether; U.S. militarism will escalate; carbon emissions will spiral out of control; and brutal new immigration policies will be introduced. Trump needs to lose, but Biden is already a weak candidate, and he will be even weaker if he can’t turn out the progressive base.

Many progressives are going to have a difficult time voting for Biden. He has shown contempt for them and betrayed many of the causes they care about. To make matters worse, Tara Reade’s credible sexual assault allegation against Biden will make it difficult for those who consider themselves allies of women and supporters of #MeToo to vote for him in good conscience. Biden has a long way to go to convince the left he’s worth supporting.

So far, though, it seems as if Biden is mostly concerned with reassuring rich Democratic donors and party bigwigs that he will keep his promise that “nothing would fundamentally change.” That could almost be Biden’s campaign slogan at this point. But it doesn’t seem like a winner. He will need to do better if he’s going to stand a chance of beating Trump.

Appreciating Bernie In Our Era Of Hobson’s Choices

-by Skip Kaltenheuser

One thing we know for certain about what weighed on Bernie’s decision to suspend his campaign is that there are things we do not know for certain. Before and after the October 1st medical adventure his heart embarked on, I wrote he’d be ticking like a Timex and coming from behind like Seabiscuit, both prediction and prayer. I acknowledge my disappointment but refrain from judgment on what I believe to be a clean call. Bernie's not infallible, but I believe he makes clean calls. That belief is why so many support him.

The Covid19 virus was a game-changer that undermined Bernie’s campaign strengths and his chances of overcoming the battery of establishment cannons arrayed against him, the pressure of which would buckle most people half his age. And unlike Perez and Biden, whatever the latest tune they whistle, Bernie wouldn’t have people risking lives in primaries in a game of Covid19 Russian roulette. Biden has a minefield of banana peels before him, but waiting for him to slip from the grasp of his army of handlers and do a face-plant is not a political strategy that inspires. It’s understandable that someone with Bernie’s integrity would focus instead on his ideals and proposals, which to anyone not in a coma or a special interest pocket make more sense with each passing day.

Biden Blunders by Nancy Ohanian

As Naomi Klein has observed, “...during times of crisis, people also are risk-averse. I think the timing of this was such, with the inability to continue campaigning in person, with people just reaching for something that looked and felt safe, I don’t think it was possible to translate that shift in openness to these kinds of policies with a huge electoral swing from Biden towards Bernie, although I was certainly hoping for it up until Bernie’s announcement last night. But while hoping for it, I was keenly aware that the polls were not reflecting it, that it wasn’t happening and that people are not up for that kind of political seesaw in this moment of tumult."

There’ve been logical, solid analyses, as by the anchors of the online political show Rising, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, that the Democratic establishment will eventually blow off anyone not brandishing a ball bat with nails in it, that whatever promises Bernie might elicit from making nice, they’ll be written in sand washed away by the high tide of big donors. And no matter what Bernie says or does, he will be blamed again if Trump wins, as CNN is already about the business of. As in 2016, how dare Bernie practice democracy and provide the country with a choice and an awareness of issues best left concealed from view.

Some might despair that with Bernie stepping back, the progressive movement has lost its lynchpin. Bernie countered that nicely with accomplishments noted in his statement that he was suspending his campaign, (not cremating it, as many in the media have implied), while staying on the ballot to hold and earn delegates to influence the party. Progressive candidates inspired by Bernie certainly aren’t fading away. Charles Booker, running against Mitch McConnell, stated “…make no mistake: our fight for Medicare for All, racial justice, a Green New Deal, and an economy that works for all of us is nowhere close to over.” Mark Gamba, the mayor Milwaukee, Oregon, running against incumbent Blue Dog, Kuirt Schrader, reaffirmed his goals of changing the healthcare system, boldly addressing climate change and holding corporate interests accountable for damage they cause. The grassroots movements supporting such candidates aren’t fading away either.

Here’s Biden’s statement on Bernie stepping out of the race, pre-canned by strategists for sure, but I’d have to say it’s not a bad statement from the point of view of conning people to fill in the blanks with whatever they hope Joe is saying about health care, etc.... Trump was masterful at letting people hear what they wanted. If he’s not too addled, he may be again. But maybe Joe can limp along for awhile on a lack of specificity and a media tossing him softballs, until Biden figures out the peril of not making solid, substantive commitments and standing by them.

Maybe Biden can ride to victory atop a platform of low expectations other than not being Trump. But if Biden wins with wishy-washy, with simply not being Trump, he’ll have nothing resembling a mandate, only a load of disappointed people when he turns out to be Mr. Cellophane, moved about with puppet strings by big donors to whom Bernie, with his small donor cornucopia, must have looked like one of Eliot Ness’s Untouchables. Spurning the money of big donors and owing them nothing made Bernie a dangerous man.

Howie has repeatedly contrasted Biden’s weaknesses and Bernie’s strengths, so I’ll just offer a couple glimpses that glare out.

Recently the Biden camp conferred with Eric Holder about Biden's campaign and his vice-presidential pick. Holder who ushered, covertly from colleagues who’d have been aghast, the pardon of finance criminal fugitive Marc Rich for Bill Clinton’s signature on Clinton's last day in office, after which Rich’s ex-wife donated huge sums to the Clinton library. Does anyone doubt that had that happened a year earlier Clinton would have been impeached, and properly so? Holder, who prosecuted whistleblowers like John Kiriakou, a top counterintelligence agent who exposed CIA torture, just to ruin him and to send a message to others, putting this hero in prison, initially with an effort to throw away the key. Holder, who let bankers off the legal hook laying the groundwork for his law firm, and therefore Holder, to reap fortunes servicing those banks. Read what Holder did to bank whistleblower Brad Birkenfeld on behalf of foreign banks hiding Americans’ money. That’s the short list.

Holder was Wall Street’s early Manchurian candidate for President. He fizzled like a wet fuse, but he's been waiting in the wings if opportunity knocks, raising his profile with an anti-gerrymandering organization that’s run like a campaign. If Biden hadn’t already committed to a female vice-president, I’d bet Holder would pull a Cheney and recommend himself. He’ll certainly be influential in a Biden administration, again looking out for protecting his client bankers from facing serious consequences for misdeeds and greedy maneuvers that are again setting Americans-- and the world-- up for another fall.

American Dream Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

My point is that no one had to worry about Bernie consulting with Eric Holder. Instead Bernie would be throwing a wrench in the revolving door to keep Holder’s ilk out of his administration. Bernie would never have floated the idea of Jamie Dimon as a swell potential member of an administration, perhaps Secretary of the Treasury, as Biden’s camp did. Want some intriguing reading? Read a bit on Dimon here, and on JPMorganChase here, courtesy of Wall Street on Parade. I’m confident that after the election, when the revolving door starts spinning, Bernie will be shouting the dangers loud and clear, channeling public anger that Biden would be a fool not to pay attention to.

By the way, Wall Street called the shots on many of President Obama’s picks, including Holder for Attorney General and Hillary for Secretary of State. That insight came courtesy of WikiLeaks, so one can sense the establishment fervor to destroy Assange. And Wall Street on Parade reports that in the 2020 presidential primaries one Wall Street firm was an instrumental supporter of five different Democratic candidates. Should that leave us wondering at the impressive orchestration of the Super Tuesday endorsements, that maybe some candidates, beyond shooting for Veep or major posts, were being jockeyed to derail progressives and elevate Biden?

Establishment vs Bernie by Nancy Ohanian

Both of Bernie’s presidential campaigns laid bare the hapless state of much of mainstream, corporate media. Take the Washington Post. Does anyone think Jeff Bezos bought that paper because, like Citizen Kane, he thought it might be fun to run a newspaper? The man has a Washington agenda. The Bezos Brigaiders on the editorial pages and covering the campaign are well aware of how many newspapers have hit the skids, with major staff layoffs that leave many journalists scrambling to find public relations work. They don’t have to be geniuses to figure out what the world’s richest man doesn’t like. Bezos doesn’t like antitrust enforcement and close scrutiny and regulation of monopolies. He doesn’t care much for paying taxes. He doesn’t like to be embarrassed and pushed by potential legislation that would penalize him if he doesn’t raise wages and improve working conditions for expendable workers toiling in warehouses and grocery stores and delivering his goods. He doesn’t like unions. So none of the Bezos Brigaiders needs to be told he doesn’t like Bernie Sanders, whose major supporters include Amazon workers and who throws a spotlight on that company's excesses. And so these members of the press decided squashing Bernie is worth shredding their journalistic credibility, continuing a pattern Thomas Frank wonderfully described in 2016 in a Harper’s magazine article, Swat Team.

The New York Times opinion page and campaign coverage has been as relentless whacking Bernie. One can only marvel at how the Gray Lady has become so in the tank for the Wall Street establishment it still won’t acknowledge the folly of Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin eliminating the Glass-Steagall Act, that had separated commercial and investment banking since FDR, becoming a major cause of the 2008 economic debacle. Both Clinton and Rubin were richly rewarded for that, from speaking fees and foundation contributions for Clinton to a job for Rubin with stunning compensation. In Washington, quid pro quo often takes its time, but it gets there.

Did it ever look to you like a contest between those two papers to find the most deranged and angry looking images they could of Bernie? Propaganda 101.

We’ve been treated to the comic spectacle of Comcast media players like Chuck Todd, putting their Orwellian knives into Bernie and his health care proposals between commercials for health care insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And a number of NPR reporters and analysts behaved as if they’re auditioning for Comcast, putting words in interviewee’s mouths and cutting them short if what they said wasn’t supporting the narrative. They all ought get plaques engraved with “But How Will You Pay For It?” Particularly if the big banks start tumbling economic dominoes that most media has routinely ignored.

So we can thank Bernie for making the media fix so apparent that many of us now seek out alternative media voices, voices that represent a much better use of one’s time.

Freedom of the Press by Nancy Ohanian

Consider corporate media's willingness to avert its gaze from a foreign power meddling American elections. I’m not speaking of Russia, the influence of which on the 2016 election I think greatly over-played, to the detriment of focus on critical issues and on what the Trump grifter class is up to. Whatever Russia did I doubt it had much impact next to the tabloids in the grocery store checkout line, let alone our home-grown dark money networks of the Kochs, Mercers and others from the oligarch rogues gallery. More attention should have been paid to the influence of foreign companies' American subsidiaries, including banks. No, I’m speaking of Israel, whose confederates and advocates in the US spent fortunes running ads attacking Bernie in the primaries, supporting the narrative of Bernie being unelectable. Just imagine if it had been Russia, how quickly those covertly undermining our democracy on a behalf of a foreign power would earn the accusation of betraying our country. Just because Bernie called for decency and morality in the treatment of Palestinians systematically oppressed in every way imaginable. That oppression was often done with American indifference or complicity, which Bernie was perceived as a threat to.

Predictably, media was then complicit with ludicrous and flimsy intelligence claims-- intelligence loosely defined-- that Bernie topped Russia’s wish list.

Ironically, Bernie went along a bit with the Russia narrative, something for which he’s been criticized. I’ve no idea how much he really bought into that party orthodoxy. Some purists won’t like what I’m about to say. Things are relative, and running a presidential campaign isn’t the same as seeking sainthood. Look how fast media stood Bernie before a firing squad for giving a harmless nod to educational and medical accomplishments in Cuba, painting him as a fellow traveler to discredit him, particularly in Florida.

On balance, Bernie has given it to us straight more than any other candidate. His consistent drumbeat has changed the conversation. On healthcare, 55% of voters now support single payer health care, only 35% oppose it. Major programs to counter climate change and develop related jobs are now a top priority of many, particularly younger voters. Bernie provided an articulation of the growing wealth gap that helped people better understand what they already sensed going on around them, and the campaign finance fix behind much of it. He provided hope that there was a way to do something about it. Where would the conversation be were it not for Bernie?

While I like and respect some of those who’ve been critical of Bernie over dis and dat, no offense to them but I think Noam Chomsky is better than most in assessing the immediacy of the big picture. Here’s some of his comments on Bernie ending his presidential run.

Chomsky on Democracy Now:

"If Trump is reelected, it’s a indescribable disaster. It means that the policies of the past four years, which have been extremely destructive to the American population, to the world, will be continued and probably accelerated. What this is going to mean for health is bad enough...It will get worse. What this means for the environment or the threat of nuclear war, which no one is talking about but is extremely serious, is indescribable.

Suppose Biden is elected. I would anticipate it would be essentially a continuation of Obama-- nothing very great, but at least not totally destructive, and opportunities for an organized public to change what is being done, to impose pressures.”

“It’s common to say now that the Sanders campaign failed. I think that’s a mistake. I think it was an extraordinary success, completely shifted the arena of debate and discussion. Issues that were unthinkable a couple years ago are now right in the middle of attention.

The worst crime he committed, in the eyes of the establishment, is not the policy he’s proposing; it’s the fact that he was able to inspire popular movements, which had already been developing-- Occupy, Black Lives Matter, many others-- and turn them into an activist movement, which doesn’t just show up every couple years to push a leader and then go home, but applies constant pressure, constant activism and so on. That could affect a Biden administration.”

In the end, we should appreciate Bernie for the enemies he’s chosen, domestic and foreign. And we should appreciate him for the voice he’ll provide as interesting times compound.

It's Still Obama's Party. What Happens Next, He Owns It.

Photo: Getty Images. From an article titled: "Barack Obama Reportedly Plans To Tell The Nation To Pause If Bernie Sanders Gets Close To Securing The Democratic Nomination — The former president privately told his advisers that he would speak up against Sanders."

by Thomas Neuburger

This is still Barack Obama's Democratic Party:

     • He personally made sure Tom Perez beat Ellison to run the DNC.

     • He organized the Super Tuesday drop outs to maximize the hit on Sanders after South Carolina.

     • He talked "multiple times" with Sanders before Sanders dropped out.

Barack Obama, hero to millions, owns the Biden disaster. He's the invisible hand on the wheel at every significant turn.

About the latter point, Sanders' concession, CNN offers this:

(CNN) Former President Barack Obama played an active, albeit private, role in the Democratic presidential primary that effectively ended on Wednesday when Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race.

Obama and Sanders spoke multiple times in the last few weeks as the Vermont senator determined the future of his campaign, a source familiar with the conversation tells CNN. Sanders' decision to get out on Wednesday paves the way for Joe Biden, who served as Obama's vice president for eight years, to become the Democratic nominee.

The article doesn't quite say the words "Obama played an active, albeit private, role" in "Sanders' decision to get out on Wednesday." But it sure lets you think that, given they got their information about these multiple talks from "a source familiar with the conversation" — meaning, familiar with the content of the conversations.

Whatever happens, from now through November and beyond, you can thank Barack Obama. Always the hidden hand, he gets what he wants without having to appear to want it.
 
Thanks, Barack. This one's on you.
  

How Wrong Is Andrew Cuomo? Let's Count the Ways

More on Cuomo's corruption problem — or one of them — here.

 by Thomas Neuburger

Andrew Cuomo takes money from rich people, sneers at principled rivals, says taxes on rich people aren’t politically possible, and then implements left policies only if he can get rich people to approve them first.
—Lyta Gold's partial summing-up of Andrew Cuomo (see below for more)

Andrew is vindictive. He wants to punish people. And he gets joy out of that.
—A Democratic strategist, quoted in New York Magazine

…a hands-on manager who prefers vise-grip control…
—Anna Gronewold, Politico
 
Last week I scratched the surface of what's wrong with nominating New York's Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo as a substitute for Joe Biden in the November race for president (see, "Political Retaliation: Cuomo Proposes Kicking Third Parties Off the NY Ballot").

But there's so much more that's wrong with Cuomo. Yes, he's a mean-spirited man who loves to retaliate against his enemies, but he also stands for nothing more than the interests of the rich and his own aggrandizement. And as his stint as governor shows, he's so hates progressive policies that he empowered New York's Republican Party in order to neuter Democrats who were to his left. And he's corrupt.

That's a terrible combination. Imagine what Andrew Cuomo would be like as president — stabbing progressives in the back while smiling on MSNBC and CNN, gratefully accepting their loving praise and the generosity of the wealthy he serves. Worse, he'd be much more effective at causing damage than even the barely competent Trump, because whatever else Cuomo is, he's also competent.

The best go-to piece on all that Cuomo has going against him was written by Lyta Gold and published in Current Affairs under the title "Stop Trying to Make Andrew Cuomo Happen."  It's well worth the fifteen minutes or so it will take to read it. The writing is sparkly and the research is solid and complete.

Here's a taste. Under the subhead "Andrew Cuomo is a garbage person," Gold offers this list (I've shortened it in the interest of your time and added some bolded emphasis):

Andrew Cuomo is a liar and effectively a Republican. When Cuomo was first inaugurated in 2011, he was supposedly stymied by a difficult, intractable Republican state Senate. Technically, the New York Senate was majority Democratic, but a group of conservative Democrats known as the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) broke away to caucus with the Republicans, essentially becoming Republicans in all but name. (So basically, they acted like conservative Democrats everywhere, only this time they were super obvious about it.) You may be familiar with one of the IDC’s chief strategists: Lis Smith, top advisor for the failed Buttigieg campaign. For his part, Cuomo claims he had nothing to do with the IDC. This is a lie. According to sources cited in a Politico report, “[Cuomo] and his staff were active in ‘nudging’ [the IDC] along behind the scenes.” The sources also claimed that Cuomo wanted to “ensur[e] that Republicans had control over the agenda in the Senate, so that he wouldn’t be handing over power to New York City Democrats.” ... When asked about the IDC, Cuomo still pretends he had nothing to do with them. He defines himself as a progressive, and specifically as “an effective progressive. A competent progressive, an accomplished progressive. Progressive not just in words, progressive in actions.” Now, “progressive” is a slippery term with many meanings, but I don’t think “letting Republicans do whatever they want while pretending you WOULD pass legislation that would save people’s lives, if only you COULD” is any kind of progress.

Andrew Cuomo doesn’t give a shit about gay people. In one of his often-touted accomplishments, Andrew Cuomo legalized gay marriage in New York State in 2011. As per the Atlantic profile, the bill had long been sponsored by openly gay congressman Danny O’Donnell, but Cuomo wanted it to be sponsored by “his team” instead. According to O’Donnell, Cuomo’s chief of staff threatened him over O’Donnell’s unwillingness to give up the bill. “You’ll never work again,” the chief of staff is reported to have said. “I’ll make it my mission in life to destroy you.” In the end, O’Donnell surrendered the marriage equality bill he’d been fighting to pass for over a decade, while Cuomo signed it and was acclaimed an LGBTQ rights champion. O’Donnell told Dovere: “It’s only about getting [Cuomo] credit. He only cares about credit.” The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), among other LGBTQ organizations, endorsed Cuomo’s gubernatorial re-election campaigns, and the HRC made him a speaker at their 2019 New York gala. (The organization has a talent for supporting powerful people over the interests of actual LGBTQ people: see here and here.) Pramila Jayapal, a left-leaning congresswoman from Washington and the sponsor of the Medicare for All bill in the House, says that “most of Cuomo’s progressive accomplishments, such as gay marriage, are what [New York’s] big donors want anyway.” It’s pretty obvious that you’re not “progressive” if you’re bullying gay politicians into letting you take credit for their work, and only doing the work in the first place because the local rich people said you could.

Andrew Cuomo doesn’t give a shit about women or reproductive justice. With the help of the IDC, the Republican-controlled state Senate shot down critical reproductive health initiatives for years. ... This, by the way, didn’t stop the IDC from stealing reproductive justice valor in 2017, when they issued mailers claiming that Planned Parenthood endorsed several IDC candidates. This was a lie, and Planned Parenthood had to tell them to stop. Shortly after the IDC’s defeat in the 2018 midterms, Cuomo signed both reproductive health bills into law and—you guessed it—proudly took credit, while simultaneously reassuring conservatives that the RHA “does little more than codify Roe v. Wade into state law.” At the signing ceremony for the RHA, Cuomo wore a pink tie and gave an award to Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued the Roe case before the Supreme Court. Politico quotes her as saying, with irony, “The governor’s tie indicates the depth of his sincerity.”

Andrew Cuomo really, really does not give a fuck about women. Cuomo was supported in his gubernatorial re-election campaigns—the first against attorney and activist Zephyr Teachout in 2014, the second against actress and activist Cynthia Nixon in 2018—by the Women’s Equality Party. “Wow!” you might think. “The Women’s Equality Party supported Andrew Cuomo against two women candidates? He must be great on women’s issues.” You would be wrong. The Women’s Equality Party (W.E.P.) supports Cuomo because he founded them in 2014 when he was running against Zephyr Teachout. As Ginia Bellafante reports in a blistering New York Times article, the Women’s Equality Party is something like “a political shell company,” that has a history of endorsing more conservative male candidates over left-leaning female candidates. ...

Andrew Cuomo doesn’t care about the people of Queens. When Amazon flirted with headquartering itself in Queens, Cuomo bowed and scraped in order to get their business. He even jokingly offered to change his name to “Amazon Cuomo” in exchange for the new headquarters. While Amazon promised the creation of 25,000 new jobs, they would pretty much all have been white-collar jobs, offered mainly to educated out-of-staters and not the immigrant, working-class residents of most of Queens. The mega-corporation would also have been granted an obscene $3 billion in tax breaks just for deigning to destroy the borough. Thankfully, local activists in alliance with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other New York Democrats tanked the Amazon deal and saved Queens. In typical Cuomo fashion, he loudly blamed the “small group [of] politicians [who] put their own narrow political interests above their community,” and then got sneaky, contacting Jeff Bezos directly to beg Amazon to reconsider. When it comes to kinks, to each their own, but personally I can’t imagine anything less sexually appealing than a public official who once begged the richest man on earth for table scraps. A few months ago, Amazon decided it would move into Manhattan’s ritzy Hudson Yards neighborhood anyway without needing to be bribed by tax breaks first, just as AOC predicted would happen. Queens is safe, and the most annoying neighborhood in Manhattan is getting another corporate headquarters, all despite Andrew Cuomo’s best efforts.

Andrew Cuomo doesn’t take leftist ideas seriously, and he doesn’t like to do things that might be hard. If you’re looking for Cuomo’s other accomplishments, they might seem somewhat impressive…on the surface. He worked with Bernie Sanders to help bring a $15 minimum wage and paid family leave to New York, along with (means-tested) free public college. ... The problem is that Cuomo’s progressive commitments are minimal at best. He favors policies that he believes are doable, but not the ones he’s already decided can’t be done. ... Cuomo received a “hero’s welcome” for the $15 minimum wage bill, but he isn’t willing to stick his neck out on anything difficult or really meaningful, especially not if it scares off rich people. He blames his blinkered imagination and lack of political courage on voters themselves. ...[Yet] Polls show that a majority of voters actually favor bold policy proposals such as Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, and public opinion may shift even further given the twin realities of the pandemic and subsequent economic collapse. But in praising Joe Biden, who opposes both Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, Cuomo mocks leftist ideas: “[Biden] knows what he’s talking about, he’s experienced, he is relatable, he knows how to get things done, he wants to get things done, he’s not blowing smoke, he’s not a blue-sky puffer…He’s not, ‘Health care for all, Social Security for all! Everything for all!’” Ah yes, that impossible pie-in-the-sky ambition of everyone having Social Security.

Andrew Cuomo is a constant thief of progressive valor. In fact, Cuomo is only willing to undertake bold policy as long as someone else does the difficult work of popularizing it first. Jayapal describes Cuomo as “a politician’s politician. He is not a movement politician; he’s not the person who comes up with the bold ideas first and does the work to push it forward…You can be a politician’s politician and tough to move on an issue until you see a public out there that’s clamoring. You still deserve credit for getting it done, but where were you when an issue was not popular?” We can see the proof of this in Cuomo’s reaction to Cynthia Nixon, his 2018 leftist primary challenger. During the primary, Cuomo moved left to fend off Nixon’s candidacy. Once he won, many of her policies made their way into his new “Justice Agenda,” including legalizing marijuana, the above mentioned Reproductive Health Act, a Green New Deal for New York State, a middle-class tax cut, and banning corporate campaign contributions. When Cuomo released the proposals in December 2018, he “compared himself to FDR, and said ‘Now is the time to lead.’” Nixon has noted with amusement that she successfully pushed Cuomo left, but he’s failed to acknowledge her influence on his agenda. In fact, in a recent press conference, he took an unnecessary shot at her, laughing at the very idea of her—a former actress who starred in a show about S-E-X!!!—as governor of New York during the coronavirus crisis. Andrew Cuomo is a cynic who stole a woman candidate’s work and took the credit for it.

Andrew Cuomo believes in nothing except his own legacy and making sure rich people keep their money. If you ask Cuomo, however, he’ll insist on his progressive credentials. When his record is criticized, he blames “the professional left” whom he describes as members of “‘the greatest scam in history. What does it mean, ‘professional left’? Basically, a sham set of groups that are fronts for labor unions…They were all with Cynthia Nixon, the professional left.’” ... [P]ollster and Albany insider Steve Greenberg described Cuomo’s appeal to Politico as “a progressive who gets things done.” But what does it really mean to “get things done?” Are progressive policies, as Cuomo has claimed on multiple occasions, really at risk of driving a significant number of rich people out of the state? There is some evidence that rich people are leaving New York, but even Forbes admits that the problem is as much “costly living expenses [and] crumbling infrastructure” as the tax rate. The real obstacle to progressive policies in New York, according to Bill Lipton, executive director of the Working Families Party, is Andrew Cuomo. “I tried to work with the guy for eight years, because we’re the WFP—we’re not the Green Party. We’re trying to actually get stuff done…The truth is Cuomo has no policy or values base at all. What he cares about is keeping taxes low on his donors.” ...

Andrew Cuomo is beholden to rich people. The source of Cuomo’s petty feud with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is not, as most people think, the New York City subway. The badly-needed subway upgrades were definitely a source of tension: “Cuomo argued that the city owned the subway and that Mayor Bill de Blasio needed to pay for half of the repairs. De Blasio pinned the blame on the Metropolitan Transit Authority, a state agency controlled, for all practical purposes, by Cuomo.” But the battle may also have been over de Blasio’s universal pre-kindergarten plan, which is paid for by a “millionaire’s tax” on the richest residents in the state. Cuomo, according to a former adviser quoted in New York Magazine, was furious about the tax. “He told the mayor, ‘We’re going to give you pre-K. It may take a while. We may have to bang you around a little bit. But you’re getting pre-K. Now, understand my politics, Bill. I just fought off this millionaire’s tax. I need the business community right now because I’ve got to get an on-time budget.’” De Blasio partly agrees with that interpretation of events, saying, “I was struck by [Cuomo’s] unwillingness to tax the wealthy, and I felt he was not willing to challenge some powerful interests in this state.” However, de Blasio added that the deeper issue was Cuomo’s support for the IDC and the Republicans, saying Cuomo broke “the promise he made to help us win a Democratic State Senate and over the years, he aided and abetted the IDC and the Republicans, and that to me was a real breaking point.” ...

In fact Andrew Cuomo isn’t just beholden to rich people; he’s outright been bought. The matter of LLCs came up a lot during the primary against Nixon—in New York State, LLCs are a method that corporate entities use to launder their campaign contributions, somewhat like Super PACs. New York Magazine states that “Cuomo rakes in money from corporate, hedge fund, and real estate interests,” and quotes a “Cuomo insider,” who said, “‘… The governor is acutely aware that it’s not just about the dollars to spend. It’s the perception. ‘You want to run against me? You better be prepared.’ And it says to the world, ‘I have access to really deep pockets.’’” During the primary, Cynthia Nixon refused to raise money from LLCs, and lost the election to her better-funded opponent. Andrew Cuomo takes money from rich people, sneers at principled rivals, says taxes on rich people aren’t politically possible, and then implements left policies only if he can get rich people to approve them first. What a progressive hero. ...

The list ends with this cheery set of quotes:

Andrew Cuomo is an asshole. Here is a list of things people have said about Andrew Cuomo in profile pieces ranging from the sympathetic to the fawning to the respectfully critical at worst:

• “What comes up most in talking about Cuomo is how people hate him.” The Atlantic
• “The differences between the Cuomos are huge: Mario would blow up in a rage, while Andrew tends to bide his time for revenge…” The Atlantic
• “Even when there is good news, Cuomo’s scheming breeds suspicion from reporters, activists, and other politicians.” The Atlantic
• “‘Is he a son of a bitch at times? Yeah.’” New York Magazine (2014 profile)
• “And when he’s criticized, his first reaction—often deployed through surrogates or staffers—is to belittle or intimidate.” New York Magazine
• “‘Andrew is vindictive,’ a Democratic strategist says. ‘He wants to punish people. And he gets joy out of that.’” New York Magazine
• “…a hands-on manager who prefers vise-grip control…” Politico
• “One Northeast-based political consultant, a longtime fixture at the National Governors Association event, says he remembers meetings in previous years when Cuomo entered and exited sessions without a word to anyone. When Cuomo does publicly interact with other governors, the events are often carefully timed and monitored on his own home turf.” Politico
• “…a governor who finds it distasteful to interact with the unpredictable masses and his fellow politicians…” Politico
• “It’s sometimes said of certain politicians that they love humanity but hate people; Andrew Cuomo does not appear especially fond of either. He is the uncommon elected official with a streak of misanthropy. Cuomo rarely sees ordinary people, and they rarely see him, except in television commercials. ‘Andrew doesn’t like meeting with voters,’ someone who is familiar with his campaigns told me. ‘He’ll do parades, but that’s about it.’” The New Yorker

And he's also corrupt. (See here and here as well.)

Andrew Cuomo — Collecting the Worst of What Democratic Leaders Could Offer into One Media-Made Candidate

There you have it, or some part of it — there's actually a whole lot more.

If you're looking for a Biden replacement who isn't Sanders, hasn't received a single vote in the primary, is as vindictive as Trump and twice as controlling (and effective), Andrew Cuomo is happy to have your support.

And if the DNC, God forbid, actually does swap out Biden for Cuomo, God help us all, whether he wins or loses.