The Wrong Man-- In The Right Place At The Right Time

What a horrible Washington Post headline: Joe Biden Let Police Groups Write His Crime Bill.Now, His Agenda Has Changed. I saw a poll the other day released by CNN that shows Biden decisively beating Trump in November... sort of. 55% of registered voters say they will cast their ballots for Biden and just 41% say they'll vote for Señor Trumpanzee. That's a mammoth gap. BUT... just 37% of those Biden voters say they are voting for him, as opposed to 60% who say they are voting against Trump. That's an important distinction. (70% of Trump's voters are voting for Trump.)

Personally, I like voting for someone, not against someone worse. Biden is so the wrong man for this time. I can hardly think of any plausible Democrat who would be worse. (NOTE: Bloomberg is neither plausible nor a Democrat.) But Trump is not just worse. Trump appears to be an existential threat to democracy, America, the planet. Biden is... well, just ole Status Quo Joe. The guy who will probably go down as the man who became president because people figured he wasn't as bad as Trump. (Fingers crossed we're figuring this right; we have a bad track record lately.)

Biden has never been and will never be a leader-- which is what the times call for, post-Trump. He's a shrewd discerner of superficial public opinion who can hop aboard the train as it leaves the station. And now he has a team to figure that out for him and... well, he''ll be less likely to follow some of his worst instincts any longer. Some of them. But don't kid yourself about what the contours of a Biden presidency is going to look like. One place to start is looking at the 100 billionaires bankrolling his ascension to the presidency--men and women who aren't writing big checks because they like his facelifts and cosmetic dental work. Last month, Forbes made that task easy for us to see. Is 100 a lot? Well, it's actually 94 but,, yeah, it's a record number of billionaires-- and 2 more than Trump has. Yesterday Business Insider updated the Biden and the billionaires story. Hit the link to find all the billionaires giving Biden relatively small contributions and how LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman gave his SuperPAC millions, but there are other ways of looking at Biden's unsuitability.

Jacob Rosenberg at Mother Jones camp up with a perfect example that harkens back to that Washington Post headline up top: Joe Biden Doesn’t Want to Defund the Police. He wrote that Biden issued a statement making it clear as day that he "would not support defunding the police. He did say there is an 'urgent need for reform,' and he advocated for body-worn cameras and further diversification of the police force... This isn’t surprising news, exactly. Biden is a moderate. But it’s remarkable that he had to clarify his position at all. The Minneapolis City Council announced on Sunday it was disbanding the police to invest in community programs. Other municipalities are considering similar action. A world without cops, as our own Madison Pauly wrote about, is not only imaginable but increasingly something activists are putting on concrete lists of demands. Who would’ve thought a few weeks ago that Biden would have to specify that he supports keeping the cops around?"

Hector Oseguera is a first time candidate for Congress. He's running in northern New Jersey, in a district (NJ-08) that includes part of Newark, Jersey City, Bayonne and Elizabeth and all of Hoboken, Union City and West New York. Don't expect him-- or progressive candidates like him-- to see eye to eye with Biden or his status quo-like administration. Take policing. Oseguera: "Militarized policing is a perfect example of the bi-partisan slime that infects our government. Throughout the 90's, we saw the so-called Democrats cave to a right-wing perspective on policing, and pursue 'tough on crime' laws that disproportionately affected Black and Brown communities. My opponent, as recently as 2012, congratulated two police departments in Jersey City and Bayonne on $3 million grants to militarize local police forces. Just this week local activists went toe-to-toe, and won a fight against the unanimously Democratic Hudson County establishment, that in this political climate sought to spend $26k in taxpayer funds, to purchase riot gear. This announcement comes on the heels of two weeks of completely peaceful protests in New Jersey. After community activists mobilized, the local machinery backed down. Today, this campaign released its Social Justice platform that seeks to demilitarize the police, end the War on Drugs, abolish Qualified Immunity, and make "White Caller Crime" a federal hate crime. We are all too familiar with instances of White individuals calling the police on Black people for simply existing. These frivolous calls waste public resources, endanger the lives of Black brothers and sisters, and we should treat these 'White Called Crimes' as federal hate crimes. A militarized police force truly should be seen as a scourge in any democratic society, and I am proud to take a true progressive stance on the issue."

America is going to need men and women in Congress like Hector Oseguera to hold Biden's feet to the fire and remind him what it means to be a Democrat (in the best sense of the pre-JFK party). Please consider contributing to his campaign by clicking on the 2020 Blue America congressional thermometer above.