Today, former Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, endorsed Joe Biden for president : “There’s never been a time more urgent for leadership at home that can work for the middle class and tackle existential issues like climate change where we are moving dangerously backwards. Joe is uniquely the person running for president who can beat Donald Trump and get to work on day one at home and in the world with no time to waste.”
Kerry will campaign with Biden tomorrow in Iowa on the ‘No Malarkey’, 8 day, 18 county barnstorming bus tour.
Thank you Secretary Kerry for this important endorsement.
Go Joe! SCORE !
Please share widely!
fredrichlariccia says
World War Zero is a new bipartisan group founded by Kerry and Arnold Schwarzenegger that aims to unify the public behind climate action. I just learned about it today when John Kerry announced it on MSNBC Morning Joe show with a full 2-page spread in the NYT.
doubleman says
Why another group of celebrities to talk loosely about climate action when there are thousands of other groups, and hundreds of millions of people across the world active on the issue?
Here it is:
With people like Hillary and Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Christy Todd Whitman, John Kasich, John Podesta, Meg Whitman (and a bunch of other CEO types), and celebrities like Sting, why not come out with a full-throated endorsement of the Green New Deal?
The people are united on climate action. It’s been folks like these in their positions of power that have slowed progress.
doubleman says
Haha. And Gordon Brown. And Hank Paulson. And Stan McChrystal. And Olympia Snowe.
The people you can trust.
doubleman says
Ha. This is too good.
A 16-year-old Swedish girl has done more for climate action in the past year than all of these people will do/have done in their lives combined.
terrymcginty says
“A 16-year-old Swedish girl has done more for climate action in the past year than all of these people will do/have done in their lives combined.”
Okay. What’s your point?
It sure is easy to snipe from sides at the imperfections of others. I am glad that more of our country’s leaders are banding together to join the movement. I am also thankful for Greta Thunberg. The two are self-evidently not mutually exclusive.
doubleman says
They are a group of people who have been in positions of great power and upheld movement on climate over the years, and now they want to make it happen through . . . content? This is for celebrity awareness, not real action.
If they want to make a difference, they could come out strongly for the Green New Deal today, have the companies they sit on the boards of to endorse the plan. I’m not going to hold my breath for a group with Meg Whitman in it to lead.
I hope I am wrong but this strikes me as clear performance work and not any kid of real commitment to a movement.
Christopher says
You must have woken up on the wrong side of bed this morning! Your comments today have been awfully harsh.
fredrichlariccia says
Right! Why unite in common cause with allies when you can tie your knickers in a knot throwing a purist hissy fit.
bob-gardner says
I agree with you, Fred, that Sanders’ position on Israel is moderate and reasonable, and that it was inappropriate for Biden to throw a purist hissy fit.
petr says
A 16-year-old Swedish girl has made you feel good about your position but, in fact, has neither advanced nor retarded the situation one iota.
What, really, has Greta Thunberg changed?
Christopher says
I believe they will be together for an event in Nashua on Sunday.
fredrichlariccia says
Kerry on Biden : “The only team who’s worked more closely than the two of us is Trump and Putin.”
fredrichlariccia says
“Couldn’t have said it better myself. I’m honored to have John Kerry join me for the No Malarkey barnstorm.” Joe Biden
fredrichlariccia says
“Biden would restore American leadership and respect in the world overnight.”
former US Ambassador to Russia in the Obama Administration, Michael McFaul
fredrichlariccia says
“Other candidates have their strong suits but on national security and foreign policy, Biden is the most qualified candidate in either party.” Former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul
doubleman says
This the same guy who took down his tweets after expressing giddily that Evo Morales was forced out of Bolivia in a military coup?
jconway says
Robert Gates sums it up nicely for me:
Gates is not wrong about that and you could through in economic and social policy too. Good guy, bad record compared to the field.
doubleman says
Joe Biden yesterday.
Fred – do you agree with Biden that Sanders’s position is “bizarre”?
jconway says
Sanders should press foreign policy more in this campaign. He’s been consistently right on the major questions and it would help him stand out from Warren who has no plan for foreign policy as well as emphasize his biggest differences with Biden. It goes without saying he is right on this one too.
Obama-Biden tried eight years of carrots and gave the most military aid to Israel in American history. They not only got nothing in return, but Netanyahu actively campaigned for their domestic opponents in 2012 and 2016, insulted the president on the floor of the US Congress, and did everything he could to derail the Iran deal. Now this corrupt nationalist has gotten even more from Trump without having to do anything on the Palestinian question. We are incredibly lucky there has not been a third intifada.
doubleman says
100%
I think Bernie’s approach to Israel is right and reasonable. Details on the kinds of leverage are important, but military aid should absolutely be conditioned on a number of things, with humanitarian concerns being the most important.
If you think that the status quo on Israel over the past few decades is good and right, you don’t offer the kind of foreign policy leadership anyone should be excited about.
Christopher says
I attended this event and both Biden and Kerry did great! It focused a lot on foreign policy which I guess is not surprising given the resumes of those two gentlemen. It occurred to me they would make an interesting, though unlikely, ticket. Biden took a few questions. I was going to ask for clarification and context regarding his perceived coziness with banks in DE, but was not called on.
doubleman says
Joe has some interesting ideas about what we (Democrats, presumably) are trying to do with this election.
Christopher says
He made similar comments at his rally/town hall in Nashua today and I agree. We need a strong second party that has not gone nuts and it’s fine for that party to be center right. The Europeans can show how it’s done. Right now we have one party and one personality cult and that is not healthy for democracy.
doubleman says
Comments like Biden’s are disqualifying to me. The GOP is a cancer, plain and a simple. It needs to be destroyed. There are enough differing opinions within the Democratic party to argue over things. If you think the Republican party needs to be around, you’re admitting that you’re not interested in progress. You’d rather try to be a liaison between the left wing and a right wing party than actually govern.
Right now we have a group ok with fascism, racism, and against science, a center-right party, and an insurgent left wing within that center-right party. Biden wants a return to some mythical time when the GOP was good. Please point to a time in the last 40 years when that was true.
If we want to have some similarity to European countries we’d have the Democrats and the DSA as the two dominant parties and the GOP would be a party with 5-10% support that would be gaining popularity now amidst late capitalism’s failures and racist demagoguery.
Christopher says
I’ve learned it doesn’t take much to disqualify someone for you:( The Dems are a center-left party by any reasonable measure. While I agree with you about the current state of the GOP it hasn’t been THAT long since we’ve had conservatives who weren’t nuts (Pretty much any nominee of theirs before 2016 fits that description to some extent; even Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan are mainstream by comparison). I’ve done a lot of comparative political study. Our Dems are comparable to continental Social Democrats (or Labour in the UK) while the GOP at least historically have been like Christian Democrats (or UK Tories). We need to have a center right party that actually cares and is not nihilist. If you listened to Charlie Baker during the 2018 gubernatorial debates he was arguing conservative solutions to shared goals. I haven’t watched since Johnson became PM, but previous Tory PMs during Questions Time would not brag about how many Brits were denied NHS care as our right-wingers probably would. Instead they would argue that conservative solutions actually increased the quality and amount of NHS care. I do not know enough to independently verify those claims, but my point is the difference in attitude is key. You appear to be arguing for a single-party state and that I cannot abide.
SomervilleTom says
@Our Dems are comparable to continental Social Democrats:
Nope. Our Democrats are to the right of every continental counterpart.
We do not have, nor do we need, a “center right party”. If anything, the Democratic Party of Barack Obama was that. The administration of Barack Obama governed to the right of Richard Nixon, for crying out loud.
In this case, doubleman is precisely correct. The GOP is a cancer on America. It has been for decades. This is a party that produced Richard Nixon and then declared after the fact that he was removed in a partisan coup. This is the party that betrayed Democracy to the Iranian hostage-takers in order to put Ronald Reagan in office. This is the party that sold weapons to Iran to fulfill their part of that Faustian bargain and then arranged for a pardon after some of them got caught. A party that attempted to justify those illegal arms sales to Iran by coupling them to an illegal war in Central America explicitly forbidden by Congress and fought anyway.
This is a party that engineered the impeachment of a popular Democratic president as payback for the Richard Nixon impeachment. A party that trumpeted their alleged “fiscal conservatism” and exploded the federal budget deficit and national debt each time they had the chance.
This is the party that — for the very first time in American history — invaded a sovereign nation based on lies. A GOP administration that developed and pursued formal policies of abuse, kidnapping, torture, and murder.
This is a party whose entire economic dogma is based on lies, a party that knows its economic dogma is based on lies, and a party that ignores that dogma and gives away trillions of dollars to the ultra-wealthy each time they have a chance.
This is a party that has swallowed the Trumpist koolaid with enthusiasm and is now actively lying and doing all in their power to support the closest thing to Adolf Hitler that this nation has ever had.
The GOP is a cancer that needs to be eradicated.
doubleman says
Yes. Our Democrats would be a centrist/center-right party. Sanders would be a mainstream Social Dem. But that’s not really important. Ending GOP control everywhere is what matters, and Biden is explicitly saying he has no interest in that.
Christopher says
Biden favors unified Dem control; don’t be silly. He has also said that absent that he can work with the other side. Guess what? We don’t always win, but we still have to govern. You sound as though you think that if we end up with divided government nobody who was elected should bother showing up since they won’t get everything they want and God forbid anyone compromise. That is the attitude I expect, and polls bear out, for the other side. Polls on our side tend to favor reaching out.
doubleman says
He has a funny way of showing it with his regular praise of the Republican party and even some of its nastier characters, like Mike “A Decent Man” Pence. Too many Democrats, Biden included, view compromise as the ends, rather than the means. The ends should be making peoples lives better and using power for those goals. Compromise may happen, but it is not always necessary and should not be the goal itself.
The Republican party, to its credit, understands this and uses its power for its goals all the time, including illegitimate ways to gain more power. The Democrats are caught flat-footed time and time again because they don’t get it.
Right now, it looks like we’re going to pass Trump’s updated NAFTA deal, in the midst of an impeachment inquiry. That’s how committed Democrats are to compromise as a goal.
Republicans want to win. Democrats just want to play.
Christopher says
I have said the current GOP is broken, right? Maybe my info is a quarter century old, but I conveyed exactly what we were taught in my undergrad comparative politics courses. The American center of political gravity also tends to be to the right of the European center so that has to be taken into account as well. I won’t necessarily agree with it, but there has to be a place in the conversation for the philosophy of lower taxes, less government, and market solutions. We are making caricatures of ourselves with some of the comments on this thread.
doubleman says
I think that’s the point. Democrats are akin to Labour or other large Social Dem parties in Europe in terms of size and standing compared to their conservative parties, but those parties are almost all further left. American politics is much further right than most other western countries. The Democrats, therefore, are more like center-right parties in terms of ideology. If the “conservative” party in a country still protects public benefits and universal health care, you see how different we are. Recently there has been a sharper rightist shift in many countries around the world as a response to late capitalism and austerity policies that is a breeding ground for racist rightist populism.
Plenty of them in the Democratic party. I’m surprised that the past 40 years have not disabused you of the notion that the Republican party has a consistent philosophy like that. It’s a myth. The Republican party is dedicated to corporate power, racial grievance, and hating the Other. At the very least, the complete embrace of Trump by evangelicals should show you that any claim to a coherent, benevolent philosophy is total bs.
SomervilleTom says
Perhaps. The economic data demonstrates rather convincingly that that place is alongside the similar philosophy that objects “want” to remain motionless or that little humans inside our heads that tell our brains what to do.
This philosophy has been tried and has failed over and over. Governments the world over have lowered taxes, reduced the size of government, and attempted “market solutions”. The results have been increased wealth concentration, increased corruption, and in too many cases a collapse of the economy.
One of our parties has explicitly embraced and enthusiastically transformed itself into an anti-science, anti-fact, anti-truth mob of bullies, thugs, and miscreants. That party should be destroyed. Its leadership should be investigated and prosecuted for being the criminal organization that it is.
Two criminals with close ties to Russian organized crime and funded by Russian oligarchs tied to Russian organized crime have been working with Donald Trump’s personal lawyer for years. That lawyer claims to have been working pro bono for Mr. Trump, while the evidence compels the conclusion that he has in fact been being paid — handsomely — by dirty money from Russian organized crime through Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman.
We now know that last April, Devin Nunes — ranking minority member of the Minority on the Intelligence Committee — was having multiple phone conversations with the same Lev Parnas.
Corrupt politicians with illegal ties to Russian organized crime and helping launder dirty Russian money ought to be investigated and prosecuted. If and when the political party they affiliate with itself becomes a criminal organization (under the definition in the RICO statutes), then it should be similarly investigated and prosecuted.
Mr. Biden is both dead wrong and woefully out of date in his assessment of the GOP. His comments about the GOP are just more evidence of his unsuitability for the office he seeks.