(sorry for the flurry of responses… still new to Discourse and not sure how to multiquote)
Because, as I said above, Biden has no long term vision or plan for fixing any of the structural issues. I get why a return to “normalcy” after Trump seems appealing, but it’s delusional to think that’ll fix any of our underlying social issues that caused Trump in the first place. Putting a Biden in there might mask it over for a few years, but the next Trump will be far worse because the problems will continue to get far worse under Biden. He has no chance of fixing any of them.
Edit: Aha! Figured out how to multi-quote. Just select-quote one after another.
Hell, I would’ve thrown a vote to Kanye if he didn’t get all God-blah-blah.
As it stands, I’d say none of the candidates do. Write someone in. Why does it matter? You’re throwing away your vote regardless of who you vote for, because none of the candidates are capable enough to handle the crises before us. Let the system collapse – hell, HELP it to collapse by siphoning power away from the shitty two legacy parties – and hope we can build something better from its ashes. The average person really has no meaningful representation in federal politics anyway, so the symbolism of it all is far worthwhile than placing your faith in generic old white guy #46.
Please, tell us who does!
CMC
No, it isn’t.
American common sense compels us towards reality. You not only want ice cream for dinner, you want Captain Kangaroo to tuck you in at night. That is a nice stack of goals you’ve got there, but people have been trying to accomplish those goals for a damn long time. In the meantime, I don’t think it is a waste of effort to take a little leap forward and get Trump out of the fucking White House…which would be a great way to start work on that list of yours.
It’s insanity, not reality, to keep trying this same failed strategy with the same lame-duck Democratic Party. What is “real” about electing a candidate like Obama, but weaker than Obama, against a GOP that’s stronger than ever?
Where the hell is your stronger candidate…or do we just sit on our thumbs and spin until she/he comes down from the heavens?
I think boycotting both legacy parties, in a show of support for the viability of third parties, would be a good start. Of course, it’s a tad difficult to convince the other 300 million Americans of that. If we’re being real, I’d say the only way this system changes is not through electing incremental improvements of old white man v46.4204 but through upheavals of our political system that board moderators have warned me not to discuss, so I won’t. If we’re not being real and just being academic for the sake of internet arguments, hell, like I said, you’re throwing away your vote an yway you measure it. Might as well make it symbolic.
Ma, ma, where’s my Pa? Living with the Kardashians ha ha ha?
CMC
I can’t think of something the Republicans would love more. Even if for some bizarre reason you could convince 50% of the people not to vote at all, the next President of the United States would still be the one who got the most votes…and the Republicans would jump for joy because controlling/rigging the voting system would be that much easier. You don’t want to take the ball and go home-You want to hand that ball over to the Republicans on a silver platter then claim no responsibility at all for what happens next.
I disagree with some of the premise of the OP.
Biden was one of the worst democratic candidates, but not because he was the most boring but because he’s gaffe prone. The fact that he’s ideologically conservative, with a small ‘c’, I don’t personally like but that’s probably a minor positive for his election chances.
During normal times I’d agree with this.
But the trump era is special. He’s done easily a dozen things worse than Watergate, and is busy eroding all the checks and balances and rule of the law the US once had. We need him out, stat.
I don’t understand the “more boring than Hillary” accusation. Hillary Clinton is not boring. She has many flaws, but mundanity isn’t one of them.
As for Joe Biden, he knows a whole lot about foreign policy. He was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a long time, and served as its chairman more than once. I don’t agree with every position he’s taken on foreign policy (or domestic policy), but his experience in the area should help the country rebuild its relations with our allies and strengthen us against our opponents. Assuming, of course, that he wins in November.
I don’t see how a Biden victory over Trump would be meaningfully different from this outcome. The Democrats have been hamstrung for decades. Even when they had power, they had no vision and no desire to upset the status quo, unlike the GOP, who’s fighting tooth and nail to destroy America for their benefit. shrug
You think Biden is going to save us? It’s a funny, desperate thought.
If she were a man, there’d be nothing at all outstanding about her. Her platform… what was it again?
OK, that sounds like a genuine positive, while we still have allies.
There are vanishingly few people who I don’t know personally but only through TV and new reports who I would say I “admire”. Perhaps thinking that one would (should?) admire a person who they’ve only ever seen on TV is what’s wrong with our society.
I don’t need to admire the person I vote for. I simply need to think that they’ll do things that make my life better (either directly or by improving our society) once elected. That’s it. If more people stopped having stupid debates like this and measuring a person’s worthiness based how much they’d enjoy a beer with said person maybe we’d get somewhere.
While there is a lot to hate about establishment democrats, like their open and blatant support for the Iraq war which Biden’s supporters try to deny or minimize to this day, that’s a general rule. Biden personally doesn’t really have any individual bad points on that front, and the fact that there are major problems that the establishment wants to fix right now means he’ll be interested in fixing them. Currently our boat is full of holes, and we need someone to patch them and get it floating again - none of our allies believe they can rely on us, almost no countries even allow Americans to visit, and internally we’re seeing the largest protests in our history and are on track for more deaths from Covid than any war. This is really different from 2016, when Obama had finished his ‘ran as a progressive, acted as moderate-to-right’ time as president, and Hillary came out offering ‘more of the same, but tighter with Wall Street’.
As far as race goes, I think that black people are not that bothered by an insensitive comment from four decades ago, since they’re used to living in the US and you’re not likely to have a viable presidential candidate who’s never said something questionable on the topic. The fact that Biden, a powerful, old white man was willing to spend eight years playing second fiddle to a black man, backing every play he made and supporting him completely, says a lot about where he is on racial issues today. This is something really noteworthy about Biden that people (especially his supporters) seem to gloss over - there are not a lot of white men in their 70s who have wealth, power, and influence who would choose to spend eight years saying ‘what do you want me to do, boss?’ to a younger black man.
He has actually gotten other countries to build a wall around the US and to pay for it - it’s just that the wall is there to keep our plague rats contained, not to keep those terrible foreigners out. Look at what countries you can visit with a US passport today vs those you could in 2015!
That’s not how any of this works.
I’m confused. You want a President who will come in and make sweeping changes, but you also want a President who has no power or influence?
I would have really liked someone younger, and would have preferred someone either not white or not male - or maybe both. But taking age, gender and race out of the equation, Biden was definitely in my top choices. And almost all of the people he is vetting for VP will probably be good Presidents if they need to step up. With the exception of Warren (who looks to be very healthy yet), they are all relatively young. Plus, I think he listens, and I think he is used to a cooperative President/VP arrangement, so a woman - likely a woman of color is going to have a voice.
For those who think we need to “Drain the swamp!”, “Fire them all!”, “Burn the whole system down and start from scratch!” I think you might be pretty terrified of what rises from the ashes.
A bunch of personalities and opportunists jumping into the fray (shudder). You really want a batch of new political parties created by Oprah, Steve Bannon, Kanye West, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, etc?