“It doesn’t matter if you love Joe Biden. It doesn’t matter if he was your first or your 5th choice. It doesn’t matter if he checks all your boxes. What matters is that he is the guy standing between you and the utter destruction of every thing you ever held dear as an American.” Helen Chandler
Can it be put any more clear about what is at stake in this election?
Please share widely!
And it seems that the campaign and the Democrats are doggedly committed to this idea being the core of the electoral pitch. “Biden is your only hope.” He made that explicit to black voters in his terrible appearance on Friday (the same day that he said he “will never support Medicare for All” and also announced that he would not raise taxes on any household making less than $400K [an absurd cutoff]).
Biden has to do f&cking better. That’s it.
We’re cruising toward a disastrously poor turnout election with the incumbent priming the pump on having millions of votes and perhaps even entire state tallies invalidated.
Biden still can’t do half a day of interviews without putting both feet in his mouth. He is terrifyingly weak.
I’ll say it again – it’s not to late to change course and pick someone competent.
As much as I hate to admit it, I agree with this.
His statements of Friday were embarrassing. I’m preparing myself for four more years of Donald Trump.
There is no such alternate course.
Each and every Democratic Presidential candidate in the past four decades, who even held the poll position has, at one time or another, been termed ‘weak.’ And there’s always been a purported ‘better’ alternative, some of whom even had their moments in front and their weaknesses elucidated. We haven’t had a candidate of perceived native strength since we stopped using initials to describe them (LBJ and RFK…)
Sen Sanders may be competent but he’s also Jewish and a Socialist, both of which facts would have, at one time, made him a target for assassination by right wing extremists. (And let us not fool ourselves, we who held our collective breathing during the first Obama term, about right wing violence and smear campaigns) Elizabeth Warren may be the most competent but she’s a woman, which is an electoral hurdle greater for some voters then a vote for sheer idiocy (ref. Reagan, Ronald W… Bush, George W and Trump, Donald J)
In fact, if solely what we want is competence: We picked someone competent in Hillary Clinton. Now all we hear his how ‘weak’ a candidate she was… despite the nearly 66 million votes…
And, not for nothing, I don’t view Biden as strictly incompetent: I think he’s a once extremely competent person who’s lost a step due to age. That’s going to happen to all who don’t die young…
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
— Ulysses, A Tennyson
And every long-serving insider candidate amongst this group has lost. But now we have one with additional failing faculties.
And we’re also seeing a campaign repeating what didn’t work last time. 88,000 black voters in Wisconsin stayed home in 2016 after voting in 2012. Joe Biden’s pitch to them is “if you’re not for me, you’re not black.”
Maybe he’ll pull it off, but all the bad signs are there and there are no signs that he plans to change or even try to do better.
At the very least, for a candidate to win they must come off as confident and strong. As the days go by, when Biden comes out to say something, he seems to project that less and less.
I’m terrified about him literally failing in September/October.
He’s crazy risky and so many are acting like he’s not.
Haven’t you heard? As long as he can boil a pot of water and cook a baby in it, he’s okay with some people.
Bill Maher is on board!
Who is it that is not, ‘crazy risky’? I ask you, in all seriousness, who is it that could surmount the obstacles before us?
There is none. Not a one who couldn’t be turned into a liability by the perfidy of the GOP. My point. The last forty years of candidates have been done dirty by the GOP. What makes you think there is someone immune out there? There isn’t.
When are you going to understand that?
I think the bigger question is whether it has staying power in a few weeks. The only people pushing this story are people who actively support Trump or those that essentially enable him by amplifying it.
Yes I’m a white male with white privilege, but honestly, if you are black and voting for Trump something is wrong with you. I think that’s the gist of what he was trying to say and not they he was taking the black vote for granted. This is the constituency that delivered him the nomination or have we already forgotten just two months into the general that Biden decisively won the black vote?
The bigger red flag was his remark that Latino turnout was not a priority. It damn well should be, especially since Arizona is really a must win state and we want to stay competitive in TX.
All of the finalists were risky in their own way. Warren or Sanders were perceived as too liberal, Bloomberg not liberal enough. Amy and Pete had an even bigger black voter problem. Bernie’s failure to win South Carolina really crippled his campaign by derailing it’s momentum coming out of Nevada. So did his not ready for prime time interview with 60 Minutes. Voters rejected the revolution for a referendum on Trump.