Why we need Joe Biden to save us from Britain’s fate this November!
“One day somebody will explain to me why it is that, at a time when science has never been wiser, or the truth more stark, or human knowledge more available, populists and liars are in such pressing demand.”
“But don’t blame the Tories for their great victory. It was Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, with its un-policy on Brexit, its antisemitism and student-level Marxism-Leninism that alienated traditional Labour voters and left them nowhere to go. They looked to the left and didn’t recognise their leader. They looked to the centre and there was nobody there. They were sick of Brexit and sick of politics, and probably as sick of Johnson’s voice as I was. So they pinched their noses and voted for the least worst option. And actually, who can blame them?” ~ John LeCarré
We cannot make the same mistake. There is a better way. Remember 1972.
Remember Brexit. We cannot afford to lose this time.
Joe Biden for President.
All the polling for a few years showed a Labour loss. Corbyn was historically unpopular – stunningly unpopular, like if McConnell ran for President, no Dem candidate comes close. There is no similarity to the Brexit issue here. Le Carre is right when he lists the “un-policy on Brexit” first in his reasons. More than anything else, voters wanted to be done with the Brexit issue. And then there’s the antisemitism charge – do you think there are similarities there on the left in the US? And then there was a true militant Marxism strain to Labour, which goes far beyond anything like the democratic socialism or strong progressivism of Sanders and Warren.
The argument for Labour’s loss foreshadowing a loss for left-leaning candidates here is incredibly weak.
If we want to take 1972 as determinative then we have to look at a popular President with a booming economy. The election was before Nixon became entangled in Watergate. Is Trump popular now? Nope. He’s already impeached and a polls show a majority thinking he should have been removed. Is the economy booming? Sort of. It’s not like the early 70s when wages were actually growing. It’s a stock market economy benefiting wealthier Americans. If people really like the economy then maybe no one can beat Trump. If people are not happy and those feeling left behind can be the difference, then wouldn’t a campaign and candidate focused on those voters be more effective? (I say this as a Sanders supporter but know that Warren has a similar focus.) Joe Biden wants to win over Republicans more than he wants to appeal to the tens of millions who feel left behind and don’t vote regularly.
If you want to look at electoral history for instruction, why are you ignoring 2016 and 2004?
Because “electability” gives us license to cherrypick history (and everything else), and enshrine our personal preferences with the veneer of a truth immune from factual evaluation.
That is what is so wrong about the entire “electability” project. It is bias disguesed as hard-nosed thinking.
Yes, I agree. But when a bulk of Dems are voting based on “who can beat Trump” people can’t easily side step the arguments.
But re: Biden, regardless of whether he can win, we know that he’ll be a terrible President. LOL
Here he is talking about the GOP in the past day.
And here’s a GOP senator.
Maybe a left-leaning candidate or a different moderate candidate wouldn’t be able to get good things done as President – that’s possible, even likely. For Biden, however, we know he won’t be able to. Republicans being reasonable partners was one of the core defects of the Obama administration and Biden is making it a core part of his pitch in 2020. Absolute foolishness.
Joe Biden really does seem to have his head in the sand about today’s GOP.
I am reminded of the German Jews in the 1930s who peacefully boarded the trains that took them to their deaths, secure in the belief that the German government would never physically harm them.
Joe Biden will not believe his GOP colleagues mean him harm until he finds himself in jail or worse.
Joni Ernst already said if Biden is elected, she will vote to impeach him on day one……
I missed the part where Joni Ernst has declined to seek re-election to the Senate in favor of seeking a House seat instead.
This misses the point.
Joni Erst speaks for a great many Republicans, of both houses.
“Regardless of whether he can win, we know that he’ll be a terrible President. LOL”
And the sole reason offered is that he wants to try to work across the great party divide to get things done?
Talk about “enshrin[ing] our personal preferences with the veneer of a truth immune from factual evaluation”!
I think this is a fair criticism on one level. But the problem with it is that it assumes that the concept that electability has no validity in empirical fact. Yet it does.
Social science – in this case political polling – is real.
Pretending that the errors with polling from 2016 invalidate the validity of the entire field of polling is the kind of anti-intellectualism that belongs on the fascist right, not on the progressive left.
I resent you dragging polling (form 2016? What?) into this if you are going to attribute an argument to me that I never made that you then attack as anti-intellectual and fascist!
My criticism of your “electability” argument is based on the following distinction.
With, say, Biden versus Sanders, if we avoid electability malarkey, we can have a substantive and meaningful discussion of strengths and weakness, ways and means.
We can’t do that about electability except in a very narrow band, which we are way over. I mean sure, if Deval Patrick polls at 1% in NH at this point, he’s not going to get the nod. (Veepstakes, maybe.)
Last time I checked, all the leading dems were beating Trump in the polls. So your electability arguments are not based on polls, but on your own wishes. Know thyself.
My feeling about polls is that I don’t think we can ignore them in the final analysis. I have been planning on making my primary vote partially dependent on them.
But the whole electable/unelectable narrative is now driving polling. I do not think that is a good thing or that it is honest or useful.
BTW by the pollster’s yardstick, your guy is a weak candidate. Just sayin.
I agree with every single sentence until the very end. (The reason I agree with every single sentence is you have all your facts exactly right.)
But then you get to the end and you inexplicably say: “Joe Biden wants to win over Republicans more than he wants to appeal to the tens of millions who feel left behind and don’t vote regularly.” Huh? And you say this based upon the mere fact that Biden refuses to say that we need to give up on healing the nation and dares to say that we might need Republican votes to pass legislation?
They should have voted for the Liberal Democrats.
And that’s also an amazing argument against centrism. The Lib Dems did even worse!
I think that attempting to compare Brexit to anything happening here is a fool’s errand, except at the very highest levels of abstraction — such as “populist movements historically cause more harm than good.”
Please note that I’m explicitly NOT agreeing or disagreeing with either one of you. I’m instead observing that the context of the UK is so fundamentally different from the US that these sorts of comparisons are worse than meaningless.
Not to see the connections between the various ‘populist’ (I would call them racist) movements at this point is kind of startling.
The nature of racism and xenophobia in England is utterly and fundamentally different from in America. Of course we can call populist movements “racist”, “anti-intellectual”, and so on. We can go even further — there is clear evidence widely published the Brexit and Mr. Johnson are enjoying “assistance” from Vladimir Putin just like Mr. Trump and Trumpism.
My point, though, is that there is simply no way to compare the political system of the UK with that of the US. The politics of racism are different. The UK has absolutely NOTHING comparable to black culture in America. The UK did not fight a civil war. The UK did not practice slavery in any way comparable to the US. The US system is, by design, different from the UK parliamentary system. Party structure and influence is widely divergent in the two nations. And so on.
I know they did worse. My point is they were the only solidly anti-Brexit party and if the they could have consolidated the anti-Brexit they would have done much better, possibly even supplanting one of the other parties at least this round.
Not to pile on, but Christopher’s remark expresses the same thing that is wrong with the theory that, obviously an apostle of centrist-ism must, mathematically, do better against Trump than a lefty, because the center is where it’s at.
The truth is, the political landscape is decidedly non Euclidean!
That is true, but that very fluidity is the point. Politics is always a moving target in any case.
Unfortunately, the Lib Dems decided that the best idea would be to simply ignore the referendum outright, and thus wasted their goodwill on the issue.
I think Labour ran an election on economic issues when voters very much had other matters (Brexit!) on their mind, only to find that the British aren’t so left wing as all that after all, and actually care about what they say they care about. It seems to me that a similar dynamic is unfolding in the Democratic primary: I am not sure that the general electorate is clamoring for Medicare for All or free tuition for everything, though the Twitter people are. Indeed, the issue that is an issue, at least in those midwestern states that will decide the election, is immigration/assylum, and the Democrats, like Labour with Brexit, seem to be ignoring it.
I absolutely think that Sanders as the nominee will lead to a beatdown. I would very much like to find someone in Biden’s lane, but Biden himself, I think it must be admitted, has lost a bit of hop on his fastball. That leaves Mayor Pete, who seems to have some problems once things get to South Carolina, and my favorite, Klobuchar, who isn’t getting much traction. That leaves us with the various President of Northampton and Williamsburg, Brooklyn candidates, of whom Sanders is pulling away.
Meanwhile, the economy is humming along, and the President is more popular than he has been thus far. The “trial” that House Dems rushed into has come and gone, and did not move the needle in any meaningful way.
Ain’t looking good right now, seems to me.
Parallel truths: it is simultaneously the case that a majority of Americans are now in favor of removal (as well as even larger majorities for witnesses).
Senators who must run statewide, as in CO and ME, will pay the price for obsessing over their primary races over the general, as they should. 2018 remains the model.
If Joe Biden gets swamped by Bernie, you have no one to blame but yourself. You encouraged the far left with apocalyptic talk about the Russians and climate hysteria. PEOPLE WILL DIE!!! How can you be surprised when activist youth don’t think reinstating the SALT deduction to protect property values in suburban communities with gold-plated public schools is going far enough?
The liberals have been using the left forever, now they are growing up and taking over. Look how Corbyn was hounded on antisemitism. He’s not an antisemite — except by the standards which British liberals use to paint their enemies as racists.
Not seeing any wisdom from this guy, but it does remind me of how spectacularly pundits in the center and the right continue to fail upward with all their predictions and then get paid handsomely for it. 🙁