There is less than a month to go until the Iowa Caucus. Yesterday’s strike by Donald Trump on a high ranking Iranian military official has led to widespread condemnation from every major Democratic candidate, but it is interesting to note the nuances and predict how voters might react. It shifts the field in a way we have not seen since the December 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein stalled Howard Dean and jumpstarted John Kerry.
Biden in his answers shows his expertise about this issues and his own role, bolstered by the Kerry endorsement, of brokering the JCPOA and defending the Obama administrations approach to Iran. He takes the more centrist tack that this action may have been morally just, but a dangerous provocation with a decision making process that was neither bipartisan nor multilateral making it far less effective. He also attacked the Trump administration for showing no concern about the potential blowback in the region.
Buttigieg echoes all of those concerns but links them to his own military experience in Afghanistan and reminds audiences that the Iraq War was the first foreign policy decision in his lifetime. A clear dig at Biden’s vote and a reminder that Pete is the only candidate in the race born after the Vietnam War. Unfortunately voters cannot help but be reminded that small city mayors make few foreign policy decisions.
Warren simply tweeted no more middle eastern wars and no war in Iran while Bernie gave a lengthier response that also highlighted his consistent opposition to most controversial military action overseas during his own 30 years in Congress.
Who does this benefit? I think we will continue to see the field polarize between its extremes. Bernie consolidating the left of center vote while Biden consolidated the center left vote. Buttigieg could be helped because of his military experience or hurt because a mayor of south bend never makes a 3am phone call. I suspect it stalls his momentum to Biden’s benefit. Warren will continue to lose out since foreign policy is the area she struggles with the most and Bernie’s own views offer a more comprehensive shift in American strategy abroad. The question “who do you want in the situation room?” is finally relevant for the first time since the 2004 and 2008 primaries.
This episode has further confirmed my support for Bernie. He is the only major candidate (Williamson is as well) that is against war, and has consistently held the moral and correct vision that we should not engage in these disastrous endeavors (including unquestionably following Israeli and Saudi interests). He is the only one that even opens the door to thinking that the US is not a just and blameless foreign actor. Every other candidate embraces the status quo of past decades – thinking that these engagements are ok, as long as we are smart about it. If you can’t be unequivocal on this potential war of choice, I can’t trust you as Commander in Chief. And, for all those saying “we need to see the facts” before a decision, you are going to trust THIS administration and pentagon to give you facts?!?!? That position is too stupid and dangerous to take seriously.
I suspect these events will likely bolster Biden as people want comfort. They, as usual, will ignore his bad record on these issues. He’ll just feel safer and that will be enough.
Sanders may gain some from this, and will likely solidify people leaning his way over Warren’s. He is taking his typical class angle on a potential war and arguing that the working class will pay the brunt of this war. Maybe this will be effective in some communities.
As this campaign continues and with new developments like this, it increasingly seems to me that we’ll repeat the same political and policy mistakes we always make, learning nothing from recent history. But maybe we’ll get luck this time . . .
I like Bernie, but he I s most certainly not “the only major….candidate who is “against war”. Yikes!
They are all “against war”.
Every one of them.
They also all know how untethered to knowledge, judgment, and morality this alleged ‘president’ is when it comes to Iran.
All of the candidates sound good. But Tulsi Gabbard is the only one who has spoken to the fundamental misalignment of our Middle East strategy. It’s seldom spoken of, but Obama committed us to an unprovoked proxy war against Iran in Syria, which was meant to fracture the “Shia Crescent” with hard power, while simultaneously declawing Iran’s nuclear capability with diplomacy.
Obama’s policy only succeeded in turning the middle east into a bigger powder keg, just waiting for a neocon to fling a match. The death and suffering caused by US bombs and CIA fighters is enormous, so who is really surprised when they fight back? And why are we even fighting the Shia and Iran, who had nothing to do with 9/11? No one will answer these questions, but they will call you a “Putin/Assad puppet” for asking them.
Gabbard has earned my respect, more than anyone in Washington. After seeing the horrors of war firsthand, she has a genuine personal commitment to peace. She has dared to rebuke the foreign policy establishment, however gently, knowing it would likely end her political career. If she were elected (here’s hoping for 2024), there is no doubt that she would invest the political capital needed for major strategic realignment in the middle east.
For the rest of the candidates, I’m not sure they would spend the political capital, although Bernie is the most likely by far.
I have very little respect for Gabbard at this point for a host of reasons; she is near the bottom of my list.
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This is revisionist history at best. The US had no interests in Syria until the protests started and the opposition looked to the US for help. Assad had an opportunity to peacefully step down and give power back to his people. Instead, he slaughtered them with barrel bombs and chemical weapons. There was little political will for an air campaign early in the fighting that would have at least grounded Assad’s Air Force, and little political will for a Congressional resolution authorizing retaliation for the chemical weapons attack.
It’s insulting to the millions of refugees fleeing his barbarism to argue as you and Gabbard do that Assad is an innocent victim of an American campaign.
Lack of political will to involve ourselves in Syria should have meant that we stayed out of it. Instead Obama went against his better instincts, tasking the CIA with the job. And he should have known better — we all saw what happened when the CIA involved itself in Afghanistan in the 80’s. No one can honestly say this has made our country safer.
Civil wars don’t last the better part of a decade without massive foreign involvement. US support for the Syrian opposition constituted the largest CIA operation since Afghanistan and was second only to Saudi Arabia’s involvement. As of 2017, US officials estimated that CIA trained and supplied proxies were responsible for 100,000 of the Assad regime’s casualties..
In spite of the above, Islamists (ISIS and al-Nusra) were always the strongest anti-Assad forces in Syria. By fighting BOTH Assad and his primary enemy, all we accomplished was to lengthen the war and increase the bloodshed (eventually drawing-in Russia, which was entirely predictable). Our involvement in Syria was not only reckless and illegal, it was a humanitarian catastrophe.
Americans have a strong desire to normalize and reform our foreign policy. The Democratic establishment and corporate media have instead given their blind allegiance to the foreign policy establishment. Only in this context can an Iraq War veteran and moderately anti-war candidate like Tulsi Gabbard be viewed as a crazy Saturday morning cartoon villain.
Biden getting a boost? I don’t think so. The man is not just a gaffe machine – he is unable to speak and think clearly even in front of friendly audiences.
Watch the “if you’re a miner you can sure learn to code” video. It’s not edited. This is Joe Biden in his own words.
I hear you, and I agree about where he’s at. He’s incoherent at best.
But he’s in the lead now because people aren’t paying close attention to that. People know Uncle Joe from the Obama years and know that he doesn’t have overwhelming and clear baggage. “Most people like him, so he can win.” I think if there is one truth in our modern politics it is that most people don’t care about policy and especially don’t care about records.
None of Biden’s supporters here will engage on the issue of his incoherence. They just wave it away. It scares me. When this is a two person race in the general, this kind of stuff is actually going to get attention. He’d be up against Trump, so pretty much anything could look better, but I still wish we weren’t ignoring this.
Incorrectly nested comment moved
I invite you to describe which portion of that clip you find “incoherent”.
I profoundly disagree with your characterization of that video.
I did not find it “incoherent” in the least. He identified with his audience. He described his experience in Detroit, relevant because Detroit suffered from the departure of technology workers. He described a program that successfully recruited and trained replacements for those workers — replacements who happened to be women of color. He then tied that experience to his audience, asserting that people who are able to mine coal are well able to code.
What part of that is “incoherent”? It struck me as a more concrete and practical proposal than anything I’ve heard in this campaign from anybody.
Joe Biden speaks the truth about job retraining programs. I know he is right because I, myself, was the beneficiary of such a program 30 years ago when I was laid off and entered a biotech program that got me off unemployment and into a good paying job .
People do not care about his gaffes. They know him well, so they are irrelevant.
These ain’t gaffes. It’s mental decline. This ain’t the Joe of the Obama years. We shouldn’t dismiss it.
One more time — there is no “gaffe” in this example, and there is no “mental decline”. To the contrary, I hear a well-argued case for job retraining.
If you’re watching the same video as me, then I suggest you watch it again. My takeaway is that if there is some cognitive issue with the video in the above link, then that issue is NOT with Mr. Biden, and instead with the viewer.
That short video is not a good example of the point – I was not speaking directly about that video in my reply. It’s the general incoherence that I see that I was referring to. Here’s one short example from the other day (I could not find the longer, 2 minute video, that is worse). This is his response to some edited videos that went around the day before. The videos were cut to remove context, which was easy because the whole speech made no sense. The cut videos made him look like he was saying something racist. The unedited videos showed that he was just rambling and making little sense.
The learn to code thing is just foolish, and condescending.
Interesting. So you’ve moved from “These ain’t gaffes. It’s mental decline” to “The learn to code thing is just foolish, and condescending.”
I get that you don’t like Mr. Biden. I think commentary like this is just abusive and insulting.
So you can diagnose that from a video? What you might be seeing are symptoms of stuttering which has been a lifelong struggle for him. I know you like to throw shade at every Democratic giant, but this is getting ridiculous!
You’re seeing the same man as in 2008 campaigning?
I don’t know what willful blindness is worse – the one not recognizing his clear decline or the one believing that the Hunter Biden episode won’t be an outrageously effective hammer against him.
I think both are concerns, but it has been interesting to me to see the backlash against Castro and Harris for going after Biden. There was also a backlash against Huckabee-Sanders when she attacked the way he spoke. He may very well be Teflon Joe in a manner that Hillary Clinton was not.
Even the Hunter stuff people seem to be shrugging off as ‘his family has gone through enough’. I think we underestimate how much sympathy he gets even from non-Democrats for being a decent guy and the personal trials he has endured. For me, the concern is less about the age of the candidate and more about the age of his ideas.
He and Sanders are roughly the same age and between the two of them, Sanders has had more recent health issues. But Sander’s ideas are a lot closer to where the party is going while Biden’s are closer to its been. We simply do not know which direction is more popular with primary voters until the actual voting starts.
Instead of “willful blindness”, I see only confirmation bias from you. You’ve offered absolutely no evidence here (despite two attempts) of any decline at all, never mind “clear”.
Mr. Biden is not my candidate. I think his nomination will be bad for America and bad for the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, your excessively personal attacks on his mental state (Hunter Biden is fair game) are tedious and boorish.
Please stop.
Yup. No evidence at all that he ain’t got it . . .
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/12/20863709/democratic-debate-abc-biden-record-player
Referring to a record player just dates himself a bit, though vinyl has been making a comeback recently.
Stipulated that Biden rambles – what else you got?
Lies (or forgets) as well.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/06/politics/fact-check-biden-iraq-war-repeat-iowa/index.html
Mouth gets ahead of brain. None of what you have presented concerns me regarding doing the job as opposed to talking about it. You seem to be clinging to style matters. Biden will not be called the Great Communicator – that’s fine. Where’s your diary on whom you actually support?
@ Where’s your diary on whom you actually support?
I don’t know if he’s written a diary yet, but doubleman has been pretty clear that he supports Bernie Sanders.
I don’t recall him coming out and saying it, put it was pretty easy to surmise. The point of course is that whether by diary or comments I wish he would make a positive rather than negative case.
Here’s another one for you.
Is this mental decline, general stupidity, or outright lying?
I’m for Sanders, strong second preference for Warren. Don’t care about anyone else still in the race (Booker would be my next choice but he’s not going to get it). I think Biden will be a disaster in the general, and if he somehow ekes out a win, would be a terrible President – at a time when being better than Trump is simply not enough.
There may be a bit of wishful thinking there, but I reject your choices. I of course emphatically disagree with both parts of your final sentence.
He’s pitched it before – that the GOP will return to “normalcy” once Trump is gone. I find that thinking downright dangerous.
I’m aware. I think it’s part of the appeal, but I don’t think it’s dangerous. Obama never seemed to figure out the GOP wasn’t going to give him the time of day either. Would you call his presidency “dangerous”?
Obama’s Presidency is one of a few bright spots and lots of disappointment. On things like judges, we will be paying the price for more than a generation. Thinking the way Biden does after seeing/living that experience is dangerous.
I don’t think I’ve noticed the first and I’m not going to cave to the second.
I watched that video of Joe Biden about the successful government sponsored program to teach laid off coal miners to learn computer programming. I believe Joe Biden in his own words.
Anything in that video about dealing with credit card debt?
I’ll believe a stuttering truth teller over a silver tongue liar any day of the week.
He wasn’t even stuttering in this clip. I really don’t understand the complaint.
Did you know he has struggled with stuttering all his life?
Agreed. And I want Biden in the situation room.
^i think this could be why he ultimately wins the nomination and beats Trump. I thought the same thing about Hillary though…
Now to just distribute his votes correctly among the states so the EC doesn’t shaft us again!
I think jconway has nailed the moment, other interesting comments about other interesting things upthread notwithstanding.
There will be plenty of other other moments, however, so I wouldn’t write off anyone’s chances based on this.