Excellent point. Both systems often lead to “strange bedfellows.” It’s just that in one system the bedfellows are within a single “party,” while in the other they’re different “parties.”
Apparently the DNC has decided Biden will delegate almost all authority to “implementers” with valid credentials in their field, and his veep will be a strong female with the cojones to deal with becoming POTUS due to Joe’s incapacitation or retirement while still in office.
Or so my wife tells me.
I hope the DNC is as wise as your wife.
There are plenty of things I admire about Biden, chief among them that he is very different from Trump.
And he just released one of the best campaign spots I’ve ever seen–with nary a mention of the Orange Menace!
Isn’t the point that proportional representation, ranked choice voting etc. actually allow for meaningful compromise instead of centrifugal polarization? When you can be explicit about your policy goals and compromises in an electoral or legislative process, you can do a bit of give and take. When all you can say is “red or blue”, nuance is a lot more difficult.
I consider myself pretty far left on most things, but I’m also a supporter of the death penalty and second amendment. There’s no party or politician that neatly encompasses those ideologies, and having only two choices for president means those ideologies have to be assigned to an arbitrary left right spectrum even if the death penalty could be legislated separately from single payer health-care, for example. It makes no real sense.
Then take that system and apply our campaign finance system, ie legalized bribery, couple that with the efficiencies of scale of a pro-capital and anti-labor economy, it’s a perfect recipe for the entrenchment of wealth and power. It’s not a recipe for democracy, but for democracy theater.
How do you ever incrementally fix a situation like that without a wholesale revolution? When has power that entrenched ever willingly surrendered it for the benefit of the public without threat of revolution?
It’s an honest question. Does that actually happen, historically? Is there an electoral or legislative pathway, more reasonable than a series of revolutions, by which the United States could fix its accumulated electoral issues?
To be a bit clearer, it’s not that I’m demanding a government that both provides single payer health-care and ruthlessly enforces the death penalty. That may have been a tortured example.
Rather, it was more the idea that a two party winner takes all system, coupled eith American nuances of the electoral college and campaign finance, means that extreme polarization is the inevitable outcome, because all political issues have to be assigned a red or blue position on a one dimensional spectrum. The center cannot exist for long except for issues that are completely apolitical (like what? Who’d have thought something as simple as wearing masks during a global pandemic would be controversial?)
It forces the politicization and radicalization of all public issues and resources, because the only options are “us” or “them”.
As for electoral reform itself, the GOP is entirely opposed to meaningful democracy, wanting to further entrench power among WASPs. The Democrats pay it lip service but never make it a policy priority. So when neither team is interested in even examining the brokenness, what is the pathway by which incrementalism can achieve that outcome, especially on a timescale that takes into account the looming crises on the horizon?
You can’t just say “a revolution risks too much, therefore incrementalism” if incrementalism has no chance of success and a long history of failures. How is trying the same thing over and over a viable strategy? Of the world’s extant democracies, how many got there with vs without revolutions and complete overhauls of their governments?
With a revolution, you’d have more than two choices!
Thing about Biden is his mind is clearly going away and probably wont last more than a couple of years so whoever he picks as his VP most likely will finish out his 4 years. So whatever woman he chooses will be the first woman president.
Why should that make a difference? Trump’s mind has clearly been gone for years and he’s still president.
Completely false. Biden is sharp.
Trumps mind has already gone.
Biden’s mind is not “clearly going away”. There’s zero evidence of that beyond the occasional verbal gaffe, which every modern president has on record.
He does not get lost, forget where he is, require assistance in conversing with people, nor demonstrate particularly bad judgement. He is alert and aware, and he’s been conducting regular meetings over Zoom with supporters and voters.
If he has stumbled over his words or ideas from time to time, that’s easily explained by his known stutter. I suspect the worst that you can say is that his coping mechanisms that have hid his stutter for decades are starting to break down a bit.
But that’s nowhere near the same as senility.
“Hamberders” and “covfefe” . . . need any more be said?
CMC
Thighland
Yo-semites
His speech yesterday was clear, sharp, on point and he even pronounced Harris first name right.
All the evidence points to trumps mind going- he cant walk down a incline that Biden trotted down, he cant drink a glass of water with one hand, he confused WW1 and WW2, etc- so of course the MAGA hat wearers accuse Biden of being the senile one. 
The MAGAts and the most die-hard Sanderistas. Politics makes strange bedfellows indeed.
They’re not really that far apart (although both are horrified to hear this). Both movements are looking for a messiah figure who will sweep away all our problems with a wave of his magic wand.
Mispronouncing unfamiliar words is not evidence of cognitive decline, either.
Powers &8^]
Maybe not, but I’m pretty sure Biden wouldn’t have struggled with them. Biden actually reads things, like books.
Speaking from personal experience, reading doesn’t help you to pronounce unfamiliar words correctly.
However, every adult human in America has heard both Thailand and Yosemite spoken aloud and knows how to pronounce them. This is not an issue of failing to correctly pronounce an unfamiliar word. This is an issue of Trump’s brain turning into mush making him unfamiliar with things he doubtlessly once knew.
I don’t think that’s a warranted assumption, nor is the one that assumes hearing them spoken aloud is sufficient to recognize them on a teleprompter.
Powers &8^]