I know it seems weird, but if the Dems should win control of the Senate this November, I think there’s at least a chance they’ll get rid of the filibuster if the President is pushing them to do so, but I think there’s pretty much no chance they will if nobody of importance is pushing them.
So yeah, I prefer ‘a chance’ that the Dems can pass the legislation they want to pass, to their having ‘no chance’ of doing so.
You can argue over how big a chance ‘a chance’ is, but it’s damn sure more than ‘no chance.’
But that’s exactly how he was elected: he was elected with 48% of the country feeling he was either woefully unqualified or a total jackass. The electoral college gives him a chance to win again for the same reason he won the first time.
The implication of your post, I believe, is that Biden is a crazed ideologue, as determined to harm struggling Americans as John Bolton is to go to war with Iran.
What you’re failing to note is that Biden represented Delaware: a state with an economy dominated by banks. A large proportion of the voters who sent Biden to the Senate worked for banks or worked in jobs that support the banking industry.
Biden’s championing of bills that help banks is not evidence of bad character; it’s evidence that he represented constituents who want to see banks given Congressional support.
Again, I’m not a Biden fan. But fair is fair, and leaving out this important factor in his support of the bankruptcy bill is dirty pool.
How in the world am I attacking Biden? Both my post and the article I linked clearly state that the attacks on Biden are bullshit and lies.
Seems to me we are doing the exact same thing, saying “one reason to not nominate candidate X is that he might be vulnerable to attack Y in the general election.” Which IMO is entirely legitimate.
He would need a perfect storm to replicate another electoral college win / popular vote loss. 77,000 voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan decided that election in 2016. With the influence of Russian interference (there is no doubting they meddled, even if collusion is unproven), the twenty-five year smear campaign against the Clintons, and that historically a two-term presidency isn’t followed by a third term for that party, those were factors that aided him. Yet he only squeaked in.
In 2016 there was a feeling of “what have we got to lose” even among the left hence the frequent commentary over who exactly was the lesser of two evils. Trump was an outsider riding on a wave of bombastic populism. Now he’s had three full years on the job and a lot of the warnings Clinton made have come to fruition from the cry-baby foreign policy tantrums to the roll back of Obama era progress to the rise in hate crime. Turn out will be higher among democrats because they’ll have seen the courts take a right-wing swing, the supreme court have two right wing faces added and Ginsburg can’t possibly get through to 2024.
Do you think it is generally “dirty pool” to criticize politicians for doing things that are popular with their constituents? Most of the Senate Republicans who are refusing to impeach Trump are doing exactly what their constituents want in that regard. Do they, on that account, not deserve to be called a barrel of treasonous motherfuckers?
In 2005, Biden was IIRC a seven-term Senator from a deep blue State, five years from re-election. Unlike those Republicans, the chance of him facing any meaningful political consequences for doing the right thing was basically zero.
Granting for the sake of argument that the bankruptcy bill was actually less popular in Delaware than it was in other States, all that would prove is that the people of Delaware have economic interests which are diametrically opposed to the interests of the nation at large, and that politicians from Delaware should not be trusted.
I think Biden is no better a candidate than Mondale, Kerry, Gore and Dukakis. And I’m not a Bernie guy. Don’t see Biden beating Trump but I never saw Trump beating Clinton so I’m no expert.
If you want to interpret it that way, I can’t stop you. But it was certainly not my intention.
Not at all. The way ‘centrism’ has been defined for awhile now on the Dem side of the aisle is: liberal on social issues, but corporate-friendly on economic issues. While I certainly believe this is a malign force in our politics, it’s also unfortunately a very normal one, and it’s glossed over so well in the mainstream press that it took me many years to recognize it for what it is.
In this sense, Biden is your standard centrist Democratic politician.
No, I remember quite well how he was (quite fairly, IMHO) characterized as “the Senator from MBNA.”
Yeah, his constituents would have had his hide if he hadn’t voted against every one of those amendments.
AYFKM?? They would have barely noticed, the way most of us barely notice votes on minor amendments even on bills that really matter to us.
Not to mention, you’d have a hard time convincing me that the bankruptcy bill mattered all that much to the people who weren’t in the upper echelons of the banks’ and credit card companies’ hierarchies. Especially given that the bill had come up and failed in several previous years, and the effect of the bill’s repeated failure on the jobs of most of those employees had surely been negligible.
In response, I must say this: you can choose who and what you want to represent.
If he felt he was being true enough to his ideals while representing MBNA et al. as much as he was, then that’s fine for him, but the rest of us should take into account that that’s who he is.
If he felt like it was causing him to make too-significant moral compromises, then he could have moved to (quite nearby) Pennsylvania, a state that he brags about his kinship with, and run to represent them in Congress.
If he felt like it was causing him to make too-significant moral compromises but he kept on doing it anyway, then he was a moral coward.
He didn’t open Door #2, and neither of the other two choices speaks well of him.
Bravo!! Donating mosquito nets is all fine and dandy for charitable billionaires, but helping finance political change is the important key today to improving the future of America and the entire world.
Would he do anything about wealth inequality? I thought I heard him say something about that in the last debate but can’t find anything on his website.
I don’t expect many people show up to see Steyer , they just announced the visit yesterday. But it’s right near the NC State campus so maybe students show up for the free food.
Wealth inequality is one of Steyer’s plus points as a candidate. That and climate change are the two subjects he’s driven on. For wealth inequality Steyer being a billionaire gives him that unique edge whether you like it or not.
He is positioning himself as someone who has the best position to debate the economy against Trump and beat him on it because he’s been a job creator and wealth creator. Those fancy buzzwords corporate America loves applies to him. Therefore the republican tactic of focusing on corporate America doing well reflecting the rest of America is nullified. Trump will talk about how unemployment is very low, the stock market is doing great, consumer confidence is high etc. But Steyer can talk about the numbers behind those numbers: how the pockets of the 1%, of which he belongs to, benefits from this economy. But the average worker is having to live paycheck to paycheck, the middle class is not expanding, many people are holding multiple jobs to make ends meet, young people not having a foot on the career ladder leading to the housing ladder etc. He can speak about it from the point of view of it being a democratic party and liberal talking point but also that he has the experience of seeing it first-hand.
One of the best lines of the debates imo is when Warren made a straw man comment of candidates defending billionaires shortly after Steyer had made a pitch on how he plans to deal with income inequality to which Klobuchar responded to Warren saying “not even the billionaire is defending billionaires”.
He’s not my candidate as I don’t want the presidency to be a play thing for billionaires, he doesn’t really have anything to contribute on foreign policy and his ad spending is obscene, but he makes some solid points on wealth and climate change.
I agree, and this pledge is also going to serve as an example to those egotists who may be considering 3rd-party runs if they fail to win the Dem nomination. They now have an extra reason to feel ashamed of themselves, as well they should.
It is possible to have a positive impact on the nation (and world) without being President, after all.
