IAN American, however, if I were a US citizen and the GOP did have a “decent-good”, or even an excellent candidate, at this point in US history there’s no way in hell I would not vote for Biden
.
I mean it’s their fault, why wouldn’t they be blamed?
Fundamentally if you are a US voter and don’t vote for Biden in November and Trump wins then all the bad things that will happen because of that are your fault. That’s how democracy works. Whether you vote for Trump because you think he’s God Emperor, you vote for JFK jnr cos vaccines are bad, or you don’t vote because you disagree with US support for Israel, it’s literally your fault.
Sure there is lots of blame going round you can validly point fingers at the media, the Democrats, the two party system etc, etc. That doesn’t change the fact that election results are caused by voters (and abstainers).
That’s not a good campaign message (and I do think Biden will win FWIW) but it’s true.
Goddammit, I hope so.
The problem with blaming the voters is that it doesn’t take any effort or skill by the campaigns into account. By this logic, the DNC and Biden’s campaign manager could run the lousiest, laziest, worst campaign in history but if Biden loses, they should just kick up heels, drink margaritas and sigh, “It’s all the voters’ fault. Nothing we did contributed to or caused this.”
Who’s to blame if Biden loses?
American voters, Trump, Biden, debates, unexpected news events, American voters, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, social media, mainstream news media, crank websites, American voters, sunspots, vaccines, chemtrails…
But mostly American voters.
That doesn’t follow at all. Its possible to recognize the ultimate cause is the voters and still see that Democrats have done a terrible job of selecting a candidate (Biden is a perfectly good president but he’s a terrible uninspiring candidate, the Democrats have utterly failed to see these are two different things)
Hell even if Biden does win handily the fact it’s even in doubt, should hopefully get the Democrats to see they need to choose better candidates.
What do people have to say about politicians like Hillary Clinton condescendingly telling voters to get over themselves?
Though I may agree with the sentiment, I worry that it will have the opposite affect because of the way she put it.
The problem with this rationale is that it is essentially railroading voters into voting for the least worst option (which, from a pragmatic standpoint, it true) even if they have fundamental disagreements, and nobody likes to be railroaded.
Also, nobody likes to be the target of condescension even when the message is correct. Hillary Clinton tacitly blaming the electorate for failing to see how she was better when she obtusely neglected to campaign to substantial swaths of her ostensible demographic comes of as being narcissistically entitled. For those of us who held their nose and voted for her as a “better than all other options” candidate, it’s a slap in the face from someone who wouldn’t own up to her own errors in judgement.
If Biden’s campaign position is to be the “somewhat less wrong” candidate and he loses because of it, he (and his handlers) are at fault. Blaming voters for being “stupid, ignorant, shallow, dishonest people who are incapable of critical thinking” is essentially criticizing the fundamental basis of unrestricted democracy, essentially arguing that the franchise should only be opened to enlightened people like thou. (Which, in fact, is what the Founding Fathers intended when the restricted the franchise to rich, white landowning males, a perspective that has since been criticized as not democratic.) Biden’s job is to persuade the majority of voters (or more unfortunately, the majority of groupings under the Electoral College) that he is the best candidate for the job. And frankly, if he can’t do that after four abysmal years under Trump, then something is far wrong with Biden or democracy as a concept.
Stranger
I see you must mean this:
‘Get Over Yourself!’ Hillary Clinton Chides Undecided 2024 Voters to Jimmy Fallon
If she still was a politician, it would be a gaffe.
If she is going to be interviewed while campaigning for Biden, it is inevitable that she will utter a phrase that, when pulled out in isolation, as it will be, annoys some swing voters. But maybe her appearances will remind some hesitant voters to go out and vote.
That’s one problem with it.
The other is that, assuming Biden loses, we will want to prevent his VP, or another Trump heir, from winning in 2028. And doing so will require attracting some small but significant percentage of Trump 2024 voters. So blaming them would be a mistake.
P.S. Will there be a free and fair election in 2028? I think so, and it would be foolish to give up the possibility. Consider: it would take Trump a long time to bend our democracy to his will
I’m going to disagree with this a bit.
Biden has forces arrayed against him that only one candidate before him (Hillary Clinton) has had to contend with in any meaningful way. Let’s be clear: It doesn’t matter what candidate Dems run. That person would be eviscerated. Not Biden, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders or or or or name-of-candidate-here could overcome the coordinated smear machine and underhanded tactics.
Fox “News”, OAN, Trump, the Republican SCOTUS and Republicans themselves, together with their Russian/Chinese/North Korean/Iranian/Netanyahu assistance are going to run that person through a meat grinder in the run-up to this election. It will be the dirtiest election fight ever in modern history, using tools that are hard to fight such as social media and a partisan SCOTUS manipulating rules around elections and gerrymandering. Never before has a major political party pledged to refuse to accept the outcome of an election – even before that election has happened. Republicans are doing that for 2024.
Most Americans are ignorant of the extent to which these forces are working in concert toward a common end: A weakened USA with little sway on the world stage, and power for themselves alone.
Biden has done a masterful job in his 3 1/2 short years in office. That Comer and his Merrye Band of Dipshits in Congress cannot find a single thing over more than 40 years of public service for which to impeach Biden speaks volumes about his integrity. Against incredible odds and a recalcitrant majority in the House, he has accomplished many things that Republicans couldn’t get done when they controlled the House, the Senate and the Presidency. Those metrics should speak for themselves, but they don’t. Because…
American media fiddles while Rome burns, barely reporting Biden’s many accomplishments and clutching their pearls over every Trump fart and grunt. American voters love their spectacles as much as any Roman ever did.
There are things Biden does or is doing that I don’t agree with. But I understand why he’s doing them. I wish he were 10 years younger. But he isn’t. Not even the hint of a deal breaker for me, against the sociopath running on the Republican ticket with his Project 2025 plans and enablers.
In the end, I trust in the fundamental decency of Biden and hope that I can persuade enough of my fellow citizens to appreciate that a less-than-perfect choice for President is still a far superior option than the all-out self-destruction Trump intends to bring. Moreover, electing Biden is not enough. We must also maintain a majority in the Senate and take back the House.
We will never have another chance. If Republicans take any part of government in 2024, we’re cooked.
And it’s not just Biden’s responsibility. It’s very much ours, too.
I agree with that assessment, however, I honestly don’t know what the answer is to a situation in which many voters believe that there is a Democrat-led child abuse scandal going on in the basement of a pizza joint, who think that shoving a UV light up their asses or ingesting bleach is a good thing, or that the election was stolen - without any statistical evidence - and on and on and on.
.
I don’t materially disagree with anything you’ve written here, and while I wouldn’t characterize Biden as having done “a masterful job” it is far in excess of what I expected. I would take four more years of Joe Biden in any degree of mental decline over a minute of Donald Trump as president, and I despair of a Trump presidency even if he were to choke on a chicken drumstick days into his reign.
But the reality is that in a democracy, the will of the majority, however influenced by propaganda, is the rule. If Biden, and the Democratic Party in general cannot persuade voters to their cause, particularly in the face of a GOP that has turned not only hard right but toward overt proto-fascism, then something is either terribly wrong with how the electorate views their choices, or fundamentally flawed with democratic institutions as a way of coping with economic, social, and environmental challenges. And while I am not under any illusion that Trump et al have any compassion or interest in the well being of the nation at heart, if Biden can’t persuade the electorate that voting a failed real estate magnate and multiply bankrupt casino tycoon who already fumbled a softball-level pandemic and multiple international crises is a bad deal, then…what the fuck is wrong with the country as a whole?n Is it the voters or the strategy for dealing with their issues? Blaming “The People” for being stupid or ignorant is like convicting a frog for being green; the condition hasn’t and will not change.
What leads people to believe this kind of patent nonsense? There is always a fringe minority who will believe any crazy conspiranoia nonsense from alien abduction and Moon landing hoaxes to Bigfoot and Flat Earth theory, but when something this ridiculous becomes mainstream it is in some measure because people think they are being consistently lied to.
And frankly, they are; the fiscal deregulation of the late ‘Eightes and ‘Nineties leading directly to financial scandals like Enron and Worldcom, and the mortgage crisis of 2007/8 undercut a lot of savings and retirement investment (that people were forced into by the move to 401(k) accounts) were all built on lies facilitated by the failure of government oversight and trusted ratings bureaus, and since then the public confidence in what government and regular media present as ‘truth’ has fallen to historic lows. Trump isn’t some kind of original creation from his own genius (he’s not that smart or creative); it is an outcome of a loss of public confidence in government and fiscal institutions combined with a propaganda campaign by the GOP that has been waged since the Nixon era but finally found its footing in fiscal insecurity and the corporatization of political finance, brought to you by the (Bill) Clinton administration.
Stranger
Have you ever read How to Win Friends and Influence People?
If it’s our responsibility to stop Trump, we need to very gently express our voting preference while, over and over and over, flattering Trump supporters. Posts departing from that would have to be censored.
And I think that would go against the whole idea of a forum like this.
So we have no political responsibility now except to say what we think.
If Trump wins, the responsibility will be to privately, and to the best of our ability, help victims of the new order.
Again, I do think a lot of this frustration of people blaming voters vs candidates comes down to irreconcilable world views, with folks arguing past one another. I guess I’m just a glass half-empty kind of guy. Best candidate = least worst option. For me, they’re literally synonyms.
Honestly then, I really do blame you personally. If you can’t get it, you are part of the problem. No joke.
Too f-ing bad.
You have two choices for president essentially. Not 100 million. Two. Pick the best or least worst.
This sort of hand wringing has just become idiotic by now. YOU HAVE TWO CHOICES.
Yeah, if that is your choices. But there are a lot of people who think there should be better (or at least different) choices. The problem is that most of the ‘different’ choices aren’t materially better, or at least able to achieve better outcomes, than what is already on the menu. Trump appealed to a lot of people not because he was somehow obviously better but just different and promised to “drain the swamp”, even though he mostly installed bottom dwellers in his actual administration.
Bernie Sanders took largely the same approach (albeit from the opposite end of the political spectrum) even though he’s accomplished virtually nothing in his decades-long Senate career except as being known as the “Rider King” for sticking amendments in other bills, and presenting no evidence that he could coordinate any kind of broad scale agreement even across the Democratic party, much less bipartisan support for any initiatives he might advance. If “glass half full” is your best option, then you’re going to get a half full glass of something. And that may well be the best you can hope for. But for a segment of the electorate, that is no longer enough, especially when the glass gets smaller and is full of toxic water.
Honestly then, if you don’t think there is a problem between the option of voting for one lizard or another, then you are missing the problem. No joke.
Stranger
Except what do we do when one lizard could seriously weaken NATO and the whole post-WW II project and possibly turn the entire international order into a nasty racism-tinged might-is-right structure? And when one block of voters has no problem with that at the ballot box, even if it’s going to seriously hurt a lot of people, including some of themselves.
Do you think there is no significant difference between the two choices of Biden and Trump?