I hope Biden takes Bloomberg’s money. Maybe 2 billion or so can polish that senile turd. Jeez, he just confused his wife with his sister. He’s pathetic and he sounds drunk. I wish I drank. Trump’s going to beat him like a drum.
Actually, I think he’ll be under indictment in Ukraine before then. Trump and his cronies are still working on it and they’re making good progress since they got rid of the ambassador and all the tattletales. He’s already under investigation there.
Yup, he sounds plastered. I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks so. Biden and Trump both claim to be teetotalers. I’m highly skeptical.
Even if Biden beats Trump, how is he going to win reelection in 2024? His cognitive function and speech will be all the worse by then. He’d likely lose to a Republican challenger, or would have to step aside to let some other Democrat run.
I’ll take Biden in a war of oratory with Trump. 
Was there any monkey business in the Oklahoma caucus in 2016? Didn’t really follow that one. In Minnesota, the Bernie Bros tried to block all the parking at caucus sights in addition to their usual bullying.
Not only that, but Biden will probably constantly move to the right to appease republicans into cooperating with him (and they won’t cooperate with him).
Ah well.
No, you’re not wrong. He’s very weak, for several reasons:
1). His policy platform is unclear. Good candidates have signature policies that everyone knows, and a vibe (for want of a better word) which can be summed up in a sentence. Trump has this. He’s about trade, the economy, and building the wall. His vibe is confident and patriotic, and his slogan, “Keeping America Great” does a good job of putting that in people’s heads.
Bernie has this, too. He’s about M4A, student debt relief, and fixing wealth inequality. His vibe is justice, fairness, and community, and his slogan “Not Me, Us” does a good job of putting that in people’s heads.
Questions for Biden supporters:
2). Biden can’t attack Trump on many of his negatives. For instance, Biden can’t attack Trump for being a sexual predator. And if he tries, Trump will tweet a video of Biden sniffing women’s hair, or inappropriately touching little girls, or sucking a woman’s fingers without consent (expect to see that one a lot - yuck!) and that’ll be the end of that.
He also can’t attack Trump for being racist. Biden has worked with some profoundly virulent racists over the course of his career. He spoke at Strom Thurmond’s funeral. He called Obama ‘Clean’ and ‘Articulate’. And yeah, Obama picked him for VP, but it’s 2020. The “I have black friends” defence carries very little weight these days. Besides, what specifically has Biden done for Black Americans? What’s he sponsored? What’s he voted for? He needs to have a quick and convincing answer to this question because Trump will be asking it a lot.
If Biden gets picked, expect to see Trump surrogates retweeting Kamala’s rhetorically effective takedown of Biden in the first debate. The fact that Biden opposed bussing will be an effective distraction if he tries to accuse Trump of racism. And yeah, opposition to bussing was common back in the ‘80s, but guess what? Already, you’re no longer talking about Trump!
For this reason, it’s going to be very hard for Biden to use Trump’s incoherence as evidence that he’s unfit for the job. Bernie wouldn’t have had this problem. Age hasn’t dulled Bernie’s faculties one bit.
4). Bernie inspires people, and he has a proven ability to organise them on a massive scale. Joe Biden simply doesn’t. I’ve seen videos of Bernie speaking to packed auditoriums, bringing struggling people on stage, talking about their problems as if there was no-one else in the room, and comforting them as they’ve broken down in tears of gratitude. You just don’t get that with Biden.
Bernie’s supporters are energetic, highly motivated, and, most importantly, support him because they actually want what he’s selling.
Biden’s supporter’s aren’t energetic, aren’t highly motivated, and aren’t entirely sure what he’s selling. Indeed, a lot of his supporters only support him because they anticipate that other people will support him. This is one explanation for why Biden enjoys so much black support. Black people think white people will prefer him.. I’m not saying they’re wrong, but they did think the same thing about Hillary Clinton and look how that turned out.
Clearly, a campaign motivated by energetic people who believe in it is going to be more inspiring than a campaign led by half-hearted pragmatists who only back it because they think it’ll sell with people who are not them. Bernie’s supporters will walk through fire for him, and that enthusiasm is contagious. You simply cannot say the same about Joe Biden.
I suppose no post hyping Bernie would be complete without saying something about “socialism”. I don’t know if the socialist label would cost Bernie the next election. However, I do know that the Washington Insider label cost Hillary the last one. Joe Biden is a Washington Insider. Hell, as VP for Obama he’s one of the most Insider-iest Insiders in Washington. There’s a poll which has been doing the rounds recently, showing that people would be less inclined to vote for a socialist than a Muslim or an atheist.
Leaving aside questions of veracity (after all, a lot of people would be embarrassed to tell a pollster they wouldn’t vote for a Muslim) I’d be keen to see a poll asking whether people would be less inclined to vote for a socialist than a Washington Insider, given that Congress has an approval rating slightly below that of super-gonorrhea. Hillary said that, apparently, no-one likes Bernie. Maybe that’s a point in his favour?
Anyway, it’s late where I am and this post is already long enough. But, long as it is, it barely scratches the surface of why I think Biden is a dreadful candidate. If he gets the nomination, Trump will wreck his shit like it’s nothing. It’ll be stomach-turning.
You mean, move to the right to get legislation passed.
It’s legislation that changes people’s lives - shit that gets passed into law -, not campaign promises.
Good post, IMO.
I am largely in agreement with what you wrote.
I’d add that Biden will bring nothing to down-ticket races. Zero. Zilch. His presence at the top of the ticket will not change the Democratic Party to what so many people want it to be, and that will be a terrible error for legislative purposes.
I’d rather have 10-15 issues that are achieveable than 3 “signatures” that don’t have shit chance of passing.
No, I mean the republicans will recognize Biden is a gullible old man showing signs of senility and they will prey on him. Constantly pressuring him to move to the right (cut social security and medicare, appoint conservative judges) by saying they will work with him, and at the end of the day they probably wont.
They ran that scam on him with the ACA. The GOP kept saying ‘make the legislation more conservative and we will vote for it’ so Biden and the democrats would, and the GOP didn’t vote for it anyway.
All of the same attributes that helped Hillary Clinton defeat Donald Trump.
The main appeals of Biden is that as a white man he isn’t threatening to rural whites as much as a socialist, a woman or a black person is.
He also reminds people of better times during the Obama years.
Every claim made by **asahi ** about Biden can be made about every democratic candidate.
Also fuck moderate judges. Lets get some left wing judges appointed instead.
Assuming Biden gets the nom one way or another, he needs to hammer home on healthcare. That’s probably the biggest shift as far as talking points/issues between the Clinton-Trump election and a potential Biden-Trump election. The message needs to be that Trump promised he had a better plan for Obamacare, couldn’t come up with a plan and settled for trying to repeal the entire law through the courts.
I think there should also be a focus on Trump’s abuse of the constitution and rule of law, but unfortunately it hasn’t diminished Trump’s approval at all so far. It’s still probably better to keep bringing up Ukraine because we know Trump is going to be spewing conspiracy theories and if you don’t actually respond it looks like conceding defeat.
Pointing out Trump’s bigotry is probably important as far as drawing turnout from minority groups, but I unfortunately think that people have already picked sides for the most part on that.
Ah, well, Bernie can go back to the Senate floor and waggle his finger.
Oklahoma was a primary four years ago (and before that too, but that wasn’t relevant)
Biden is a centrist Democrat and the majority of Democrats are centrists. He does extremely well with black voters, and their lack of turnout in key states was sufficient to explain the narrow margins Trump won them by. He isn’t a socialist.
And that last statement is everything. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a democratic socialist of Bernie’s ilk. Except to the people for whom the word socialist eats into their brains with all the terror of a ten-foot zombie tarantula. And that’s probably half the country. If Sanders gets nominated, no matter what he says, no matter who supports him, no matter how good his ideas are, the country will hear SOCIALIST SOCIALIST SOCIALIST a thousand times a day. Nothing else will penetrate. The party will be so demonized that it might need a generation to recover.
Sanders is the worst possible candidate for the real America of 2020. Anyone hiding the word SOCIALIST until the bottom of a long post probably recognizes that unconsciously. It is death. You have to go back to Al Smith in 1928 when the word CATHOLIC was similar anathema to find an equivalent. Democrats told themselves then that being a Catholic was meaningless, that nobody really cared, that his plans and ideas were better than Hoover’s. None of that mattered against the perpetual din of CATHOLIC CATHOLIC CATHOLIC. A generation later that identification no longer dominated. Today it’s a total non-issue. A democratic socialist will be similarly accepted in another generation. Maybe sooner.
But not in 2020.
The Democratic candidate cannot be a SOCIALIST. Nothing else compares. Nothing. Whatever Biden’s faults are - and yes, they are many and he never was my candidate - at least he isn’t a SOCIALIST. Every other adult politician in the party understands that, which is why Buttigeg and Klobuchar dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden. They did it for the Democratic party and because the only thing that matters in this election is defeating Trump. A SOCIALIST will lose the Presidency, keep the party from winning the Senate, and maybe lose the house as well. No sane Democrat could stand to see that happen.
You have two choices. A SOCIALIST and Trump winning or a non-socialist and the chance of defeating Trump. That’s it. Like it or not. That’s reality in 2020.
Gee maybe if you spell out SOCIALIST in all caps one more time you might convince me!!
Ah well. Sanders has solid, and sometimes overwhelming majorities among voters under the age of 45, and each year millions of conservative older voters die off and are replaced by their grandkids at the ballot box.
Society is changing. It wont happen overnight but we will get a progressive movement in the coming decades.
I don’t give a fuck what you CALL his position. I believe it’s the morally correct position. And I think it’d be possible to sell it to America with the right marketing, just like any other goddamn thing on God’s earth.
I started out as a libertarian. Sanders successfully sold me on his ideas. I say “his ideas” because they’re more than “SOCIALISM.” The rapacious healthcare and insurance industries need to be smacked down. That’s more important to me than anything else, and he’s the only one who’s going to get it done.