It's Sunday-- What's Wrong With Status Quo Joe Today?

Biden's actual campaign kickoff was on Thursday, April 25-- a fat cat-only fundraiser in the Philadelphia mansion of Comcast executive and lobbyist David Cohen, co-hosted by every crooked Democrat he could find, from establishment scumbag Ed Rendell to union-busting attorney Steven Cozen. ($700,000 came in from these rich folks for Biden that night.) But 4 days later, Biden made his way to a Pittsburgh union hall for a Potemkin Village version of his campaign kickoff event, claiming that was the "real" start of his campaign, one that would saddle the Democratic Party with another establishment loser. He claimed to be "a union man" during his speech. Is their a union for corrupt politicians? What other union could Biden be talking about?

Writing yesterday for New York Magazine, Eric Levitz noted that although Status Quo Joe is "campaigning as an old-school liberal," Biden, a warrior for trade policies that ship American jobs overseas to cheap labor markets, has been no friend to working families.

Organized labor opposed NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and China’s admission into the World Trade Organization, all bills Biden told them to shut up about and follow his (and the plutocrats') lead. In 2016 it was Hillary's posture on those same policies that allowed Trump to "effectively used NAFTA as shorthand for the Democrats’ purported betrayal of its traditional working-class base. And those attacks, combined with his demagogic messaging on immigration, helped to reduce the salience of class resentment in the 2016 election, and send a critical mass of midwestern Obama voters into the GOP coalition."

Thus, it makes sense that Bernie Sanders is already focusing his fire on Biden’s “fair trade” bona fides. Casting the Democratic front-runner as a serial betrayer of industrial workers doesn’t just undermine Biden’s standing with a key interest group in the primary, but also challenges his claim to electability-- which, polls show, is the No. 1 quality that Democratic voters are seeking in their standard-bearer this cycle.

Shortly after Biden launched his campaign at a union hall in Western Pennsylvania this week, Sanders went on CNN and assailed his rival’s views on trade. “When people take a look at my record versus Vice-President Biden’s record, I helped lead the fight against NAFTA; he voted for NAFTA,” Sanders said. “I helped lead the fight against [permanent normal trade relations] with China; he voted for it. I strongly opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership; he supported it.” The Vermont senator proceeded to release a video spotlighting this point, and a news release calling on his fellow Democratic candidates to embrace his trade agenda. When Biden suggested Wednesday that China was not a serious competitor to the United States, economically or geopolitically, Sanders immediately fired back, tweeting, “Since the China trade deal I voted against, America has lost over 3 million manufacturing jobs. It’s wrong to pretend that China isn’t one of our major economic competitors. When we are in the White House we will win that competition by fixing our trade policies.”

Sanders is hardly alone in seeing trade as Biden’s Achilles’ heel. As Politico notes, a wide variety of progressive activists and organizations, including some aligned with Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, are mounting a similar line of attack.

“There are many reasons Joe Biden is the least electable Democrat our side could possibly nominate,” said Adam Green, the co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which supports Elizabeth Warren. “Being seen as cozy with big corporations and loving to cut backroom deals with political insiders are two of those reasons-- and they are exactly what trade deals like the TPP represent. That’s the opposite of the outsider zeitgeist Trump tapped into in 2016 and will try to repeat in 2020.”

This argument appears sound enough on the merits. In current polling, Biden does look like the strongest Democratic candidate against Trump, not least because of his relatively high support among whites without college degrees. But it is true that he boasts the very same trade record-- and cozy relations with financial-industry titans-- that Trump used to mitigate the Democrats’ advantage among economically liberal, working-class voters.

What’s more, if history is any guide, no one wants to run as a champion of the existing trade system in a Democratic presidential primary, especially those who support said system. In 2008, Obama assailed NAFTA as “devastating” and a “big mistake.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton disavowed Obama’s TPP, a trade deal she had previously hailed as “the gold standard in trade agreements.” Ostensibly, Clinton and Obama did not adopt these positions for kicks, but rather, for electoral advantage.

But this time might be different. As the Republican Party’s standard-bearer has claimed the mantle of protectionism, negative partisanship has led a significant number of Democrats to embrace the opposite view. In 2009, 34 percent of Democratic voters told Pew Research that free-trade agreements had “generally been a bad thing for this country”; last year, that figure fell to 19 percent.

Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs have spurred a backlash in several midwestern states, where agricultural interests have lost more from the president’s policies than industrial workers have gained. It’s possible that these trends will reduce the potency of anti-NAFTA arguments in the Democratic primary, while the same Obama nostalgia that’s propelling Biden’s candidacy will take the bite out of attacks on the TPP.

That said, it’s quite possible that Democratic voters will be responsive to a critique of Biden’s trade record on electability grounds, even if they aren’t on substantive ones. Surveys suggest a large majority of Democrats are looking for the candidate who’d be most likely to defeat Trump, not the one who best represents their own views. If Sanders can convince these voters that Biden’s support of NAFTA makes him a less-than-ideal general-election candidate, then they may start viewing Uncle Joe’s other betrayals of core Democratic constituencies-- from consumers to African-Americans to feminists to retirees-- in a less forgiving light.

Have you noticed how the prominent centrists in the race-- Biden, McKinsey Pete and Beto-- would rather talk about "values" (which you can think are anything you'd like) than about specific policies? Biden's repulsive 4 decades-long record shows what his values-- and his policies-- are, rather than his smarmy old-school campaign techniques. Democratic primary voters too scared to look at Biden's career of racism and corporatism are exactly the ones who are headed towards giving us another 4 years of Trump.

There I go again-- blaming the voters, not the candidates... as though all the problems in America are the fault of the people who voted for Trump, rather than Trump (and Putin and Comey and Hillary and Wasserman Schultz). But, come to think of it, isn't that exactly what the problem really is-- a poorly-educated electorate backing a fascist? Yesterday, The Times' Shane Goldmacher, embedded with Biden and reporting from Dubuque, noted that Biden blames it all on Trump's aberrancy and not on Republican voters he's hoping to woo over to his own brand of establishment status quo-ism.

Biden: "Limit it to four years. History will treat this administration’s time as an aberration. This is not the Republican Party... my Republican friends in the House and Senate."

Goldmacher is clear, of course, that there's no disagreement among Democrats about the urgency of defeating Trump, but he claims that "Biden’s singular focus on the president as the source of the nation’s ills, while extending an olive branch to Republicans, has exposed a significant fault line in the Democratic primary." Deeper thinkers, like Bernie and Elizabeth Warren see Trump "as a symptom of something deeper, both in a Republican Party overtaken by Trumpism and a nation cleaved by partisanship." For them, driving Trump out of the White House is the beginning, not the end. In Biden's case, there really is nothing more to his campaign than to get rid of the aberration that is Trump. So Goldmacher asks the obvious Biden/Bernie question: "Do Democrats want a bipartisan deal-maker promising a return to normalcy, or a partisan warrior offering more transformative change?"

“Make no mistake about it, this struggle is not just about defeating Donald Trump,” Mr. Sanders declared in his own kickoff speech in Brooklyn. “This struggle is about taking on the incredibly powerful institutions that control the economic and political life of this country.”

After more than 40 years in Washington, Mr. Biden has forged more and deeper relationships with Republicans than any other Democrat running. In the Obama White House, he was known as the “McConnell whisperer” for his skills in striking agreements with the often recalcitrant Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell. Mr. Biden spent decades cutting deals in the Senate.

Mr. Biden’s opening pitch as an electable pragmatist who can reach across the aisle has resonated with many Iowa Democrats who are desperate to end Mr. Trump’s presidency.

“I just want to see decency again,” sighed Jimmy Stumpff, who wore a “Make Lies Wrong Again” shirt to Mr. Biden’s event in Cedar Rapids this past week. “I feel Biden’s our best chance to beat Trump-- by far.”

John Anzalone [pollster to the Blue Dogs], a Democratic pollster who has previously advised Mr. Biden, said it should be no surprise that bipartisan appeals sell, even in a party primary. “Guess what,” he said. “Democratic primary voters agree with the fact that a Democratic president should work with Republicans to get things done.”

“There is this narrative about Democratic primary voters that they’re all about anger and the fight, or principles,” Mr. Anzalone added. “But real voters know one thing: If anything is going to get done to help them, it’ll have to be done across party lines.”

On the trail, Mr. Biden has made no secret that he plans to narrow the focus to a Trump-Biden matchup. From his campaign’s opening video montage, he has purposefully targeted Mr. Trump while ignoring the wider Republican Party and his own Democratic rivals, a strategy that allows him to project himself as the front-runner and direct attention to his perceived electability.

It seemed no accident that Mr. Biden quickly took his deal-making case from the swing state of Pennsylvania to Dubuque County, which flipped from the Democratic column to Mr. Trump in 2016, and sits in the middle of the densest stretch of counties in the nation that made the same shift to Mr. Trump.

Yet many on the left believe that Mr. Biden’s nostalgia for a bygone era of comity, compromise and civility-- while appealing-- is misplaced, or even naïve. They question whether historic pragmatism can even be considered pragmatic anymore in an era of norm-busting hyperpartisanship.

“Joe Biden knows better,” said Brian Fallon, a former top spokesman for Hillary Clinton and Senator Chuck Schumer, “because Joe Biden was the wingman for Barack Obama, who in his first year in his presidency had Mitch McConnell say his No. 1 objective was that Barack Obama wasn’t re-elected.”

Mr. Fallon acknowledged the political temptation to be “less partisan sounding,” by condemning only Mr. Trump in an attempt to appeal to disaffected Republicans. “I’m not saying a candidate needs to go around preaching doom and gloom,” he said. “But for the good of the country-- beyond the short-term political calculus-- we need someone who is cleareyed about the situation they will be inheriting if they win the White House.”

Some Democratic strategists point to Mayor Pete Buttigieg as a candidate who grasps the challenges to bipartisan deal-making. While he has offered rhetorical gestures to Republicans-- casting himself as a consensus-seeking executive in a red state, Indiana-- he has embraced more radical ideas that would help Democrats bypass the opposition party, such as eliminating the filibuster and stacking the Supreme Court with additional justices.

It took Ms. Warren only two days after the 2016 election to cast Mr. Trump as an outgrowth of an electorate demanding change. “The final results may have divided us-- but the entire electorate embraced deep, fundamental reform of our economic system and our political system,” she said then.

Joe and Jesse-- does it warm your heart to see them all buddy-buddy?

Mr. Biden’s graciousness toward Republicans has gotten him into trouble with Democrats who see him as overly solicitous to an intransigent party. Last year, he gave a paid speech in Michigan in which he praised an endangered Republican congressman only weeks before the election. His remarks were spliced into ads for the Republican candidate, who narrowly won re-election.

More recently, he said his successor, Vice President Mike Pence, was a “decent guy,” prompting criticism that forced him to backtrack and say that “there is nothing decent about being anti-L.G.B.T.Q. rights.”

This week, his critics unearthed a 2015 video clip of Mr. Biden praising his own predecessor, Dick Cheney-- “I think he’s a decent man,” Mr. Biden said. It drew widespread attention on social media, and condemnation from the left.

As Mr. Biden has elevated the urgency and centrality of defeating Mr. Trump, he has sought to play down the policy differences with his Democratic rivals.

“We agree on basically everything, all of us running-- all 400 of us,” Mr. Biden said in Dubuque.

His Democratic rivals would disagree, however, and there are real ideological divides in the party.

Mr. Sanders, for instance, is the chief advocate of imposing a sweeping new Medicare-for-all health care system that would guarantee coverage and end the current system of private insurance. Mr. Biden is advocating a more incremental approach: adding a “public option” for anyone to buy into the current Medicare system, without unwinding the existing insurance marketplace.

Early polls show why Mr. Biden would want to elide any disagreements. Only 23 percent of Democrats said he had the “best policy ideas” in a recent poll by Quinnipiac University. But 56 percent of Democrats said he had the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump.

Some Democrats say the idea of trying to predict electability and casting Mr. Trump as an “aberration” was tried by Mrs. Clinton in 2016-- and it failed.

“I feel like the party went through this and the 2016 election showed that Trumpism isn’t just Donald Trump-- it’s the entire Republican Congress, too,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive Democratic strategist unaligned in the 2020 contest. “Until there is someone in the Republican Party who can stand up to Trump, then none of them are better than Trump.”

Republicans aligned with Mr. Trump say that, whatever the president’s failings, he has overseen a growing economy, the appointment of a vast array of conservative judges and a huge tax cut. They note that they offer dissent when they disagree with his policies; Mr. Trump recently suffered setbacks on his desired nominations to the Federal Reserve, for example, because of Republican opposition.

In a 21-candidate Democratic field, Mr. Biden, of course, is not the only candidate running as a potential healer. Senator Cory Booker has described seeking “to channel our common pain into common purpose.” Senator Amy Klobuchar talks up her bipartisan credentials. And Senator Michael Bennet entered the race this past week making the case for moderation as a “pragmatic idealist.”

But Mr. Biden is, by far, the most prominent... “We have to unify this country,” he said. “It’s not just about-- the other side is not my enemy, it’s my opposition. And folks, we’ve got to take it on, we’ve got to take it on in a real way.”

This afternoon, Bernie's campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, reiterated that "This election needs to be about so much more than beating Donald Trump. It is a mistake to think that this election is simply about beating one man-- an aberration of a president-- and that everything will simply return to 'normal.' The reality is that 'normal' in our country before there was a President Trump still meant an immoral lack of healthcare, unlivable low wages, rampant corporate greed, a racist criminal justice system, and a corrupt political system. So, no. It is not enough to just defeat Donald Trump. Returning to 'normal' is not acceptable." This is pretty harsh in terms for the "back to Normalcy" candidate, Status Quo Joe Biden, who has absolutely no reason to be running for president outside of his own inflated ego.

Biden is a partisan hack who is full of shit. There are no values; there are no policies-- he has been clear, he would be the first to compromise away Social Security benefits, Medicare benefits, gay equality... anything that doesn't touch him-- there is only a toxic careerist drive for another utterly worthless politician, whose grasping for short-term comfort helped Fred Upton win reelection in Michigan last year.