Voting is always an ethical dilemma. For people thinking about voting for Joe Biden, one of the things that they might not be thinking about as they fantasize about the somewhat remote possibility of a liberal stalwart replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsberg is the higher probability that Biden, given his history, will start another war in the Middle East.
How did we get here? Most Trump voters are voting against Biden and most Biden voters are voting against Trump. And this is the way it is in a lot of elections.
Ironically, Democrats picked Joe Biden as their nominee in part because they were worried that Bernie Sanders would be smeared as a socialist. But now Republicans are framing Biden as a socialist. And of course progressive think that he is too conservative.
According to a journalistically dubious article stating anonymous sources, President Trump calls members of the US military “suckers.” Who knows if he actually said it? But if he did, he wasn’t entirely wrong.
In 1933 the German parliament passed a law that turned itself into a rubberstamp in favor of Adolf Hitler. In 2020 the Republican Party decided not to issue a platform. Instead, they turned themselves into a rubberstamp in favor of Donald Trump.
On Super Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee and President Obama carefully coordinated the replacement of Bernie Sanders by Joe Biden as the Democratic frontrunner for president. The new progressives would be upset but didn’t care because they figured progressives would have to vote for Biden no matter what. Now that that’s not the case, they are upset that their plan is not working.
Everyone knows that Republicans have little appetite to help impoverished Americans get through the COVID-19 economic lockdown. But there isn’t much difference between them and Democrats when it comes to reality: neither of them will actually expand any political capital to get help to the people who need it.
Every candidate attracts unrealistic expectations but the Democratic idea that Joe Biden is going to fix everything that is wrong under Donald Trump has brought magical thinking to a fever pitch. Newsflash: if things get any better, it won’t be much better.
Earlier this year when Bernie Sanders was in the lead for the Democratic presidential nomination, his centrist opponents said that he would be a bad standardbearer because the Republicans would call him a socialist. Now Joe Biden, anything but a socialist, is being targeted just the same way as though he had been Bernie Sanders.
Normally political parties try to attract constituencies but Democrats have an unusual approach to try to get progressives on board with their decidedly corporate centrist candidates this year: yell at them and call them names.
