The Democrat Establishment Learned Nothing From 2016

It was funny that the day my article on how Bernie Sanders could win the Democratic nomination this year like how Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 posted, both Pete Buttieg and Amy Klobuchar suddenly dropped out to throw their support to Joe Biden.  Biden who until winning South Carolina was dead in the water.  Really he had as many wins as Buttieg but Buttieg just drops out with most of the states still in play?  Klobuchar dropped out when her home state of Minnesota was voting the very next day?  The timing of this being the day before "Super Tuesday" stunk to high Heaven.

It was pretty obvious what happened:  the DNC was thinking the same thing I was and so they pressured Buttieg and Klobuchar to drop out.  I wouldn't be surprised if a VP or Cabinet spot was brought up.  And then Bloomberg ended his expensive but low-results campaign to also throw his support to Biden.  You can clearly see the Democrat establishment circling the wagons, rallying behind the candidate they think has the best chance.

And the thing is, Biden is basically just Hillary 2.0.  We're hearing all the same bullshit out of the establishment:  he's "electable," "moderate," centrist," "safe," and so on.  And he'll beat Trump.  Just like the electable, moderate, centrist, safe candidate did in 2016, right?  Right?

It's astounding how utterly obtuse people can be when it comes to repeating the mistakes of the past.  They really learned nothing at all from Hillary's electoral college loss.  They still think if they have a recognizable face with a moderate agenda basically promising not to rock the boat that they'll win.

And just like 2016 it's all bullshit.  A "friend" on Facebook reposted this British op-ed from January going into exactly why Biden is such a bad candidate.  First, you have the shit with his son Hunter and the Ukraine.  That has all the potential to become the "her emails" of 2020.  Because as the author says, even if it's true nothing illegal happened, it's like Hillary's emails:  it just looks bad.  I mean Biden is going to go to the Rust Belt and West Virginia telling poor people like me how much he cares and is going to help them when his son was getting a $50,000-a-month pencil sharpening job with a Ukraine oil company?  I mean that's twice what I make a YEAR.

And let me just point out something else here:  Trump got impeached for coercing Ukraine to dig up dirt on the Hunter Biden thing.  Rudy Giuliani was in Ukraine to gather dirt on the Bidens.  So throwing all your support behind Biden to force him on Democrat voters is just playing into Trump's tiny hands.  It's the match-up he wants.  Clearly.  He wasn't gathering dirt on Bernie or Bloomberg or Buttieg; his team has been preparing for Biden and now the DNC has given them exactly what they want.

And sure you can say, "Well Trump's kids..."  But like we saw in 2016, no one cares!  It didn't matter that Trump was using an unsecured cell phone or that he and his kids are continuing to use unsecured devices.  The cult of Trump doesn't give a shit about anything he does.  As he said, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they wouldn't care.  And the Republican establishment is a bunch of lemmings anymore; they'll happily follow Trump over the cliff as long as they get tax breaks for the rich and stuff the courts with conservative morons who'll make us the Christian version of Saudi Arabia or Iran.

Here's a good quote about Biden's issues from the article:

Joe Biden will face many of the same problems. He has been in Washington since the age of 30, representing Delaware, the “capital of corporate America”. He is infamous for his connections to the credit card industry, and he has lied about his degree of support for the Iraq war.

That doesn't even mention Biden's role in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings for instance.  There's plenty of shit that talented muckrakers can find on Biden without even having to go to Ukraine. 

And unlike Obama or even both Clintons, Biden doesn't really have a great backstory.  He's just an old white man, a career politician with a knack for putting his foot in his mouth.  He's not the first black presidential nominee or the first female presidential nominee or a veteran or a celebrity like Trump.  There's nothing to inspire or motivate voters, especially the younger ones.

Because the most damning thing for Biden is that I don't think many people are supporting him because they really want HIM to be president; they just don't want Trump to be president.  In one of those how-to-sell-books books I read it talked about how you need to have people who will evangelize your books, people who will go sing your praises to all their friends (online and offline), relatives, coworkers, etc.  That's what you really need to sell books and get reviews.

And it's how you win elections.  For better or worse, Trump has his crowd of MAGA-hat wearing people who will wear their hats and jackets and jerseys and bumper stickers and whatever.  I used to see one guy who had a whole little pro-Trump mini-float thing he'd tow everywhere with his truck.  Can you imagine anyone doing that for Biden?  How energized do you think kids saddled with student loan debt are going to be for another Democrat with big bank ties?  You can say, "Well young people don't vote anyway," but why should they?  You have two candidates who don't give a shit about them.  Neither will help them with student loan debt or do anything real about global warming and the destruction of the environment they have to live in.

Just being "the guy who isn't Trump" isn't going to win a lot of people over, not unless things go to Hell in a handbasket with coronavirus, the economy, or some natural disaster.  I mean Democrats impeached him and it didn't move the needle at all.  If anything, Trump's poll numbers went up afterwards!  Because people don't really give a shit about minor scandals--unless it's a Democrat they don't really like much in the first place.  As the article put it:

At the same time, compared to Trump, Biden has:

• No money
• No voter enthusiasm
• No organization
• No agenda
• No real argument for himself

Ask yourself: how likely is such a candidate to win? Is such a person really the one you want to run against Trump? Look at the enthusiasm Trump gets at his rallies. It is real. Trump has fans, and they’re highly motivated. How motivated are Biden’s “fans”? Is Biden going to fill stadiums? Are people going to crisscross the country knocking on doors for him? Say what you want about Clinton, but there were some truly committed Clinton fans, and she had a powerful base of support. By comparison, Biden looks weak, and Trump is savagely effective at preying on and destroying establishment politicians.

Maybe Biden does have money now and I'm sure the DNC will help with the ground game, but everything else is still valid.  People aren't excited about HIM; they're just excited because they don't have a scary real progressive like Bernie Sanders because most establishment "Democrats" are actually Republicans-Lite.  The DNC and its "superdelegates" don't want someone like Bernie because how can they get money from rich CEOs, Wall Street bankers, and so on then?  The two-party system is really a game with loaded dice.  The house is going to win because in the end they both want the same thing:  $$$$.  Not a better country.  Not a future for their children or yours.  They just want to line their fucking pockets.  Propping up someone as flawed as Biden just proves this.

One of the arguments people make is, "Well we need a Democrat for the Supreme Court and Federal judges, etc."  That's a valid point, but it's not a sexy point.  It's a boring, overly logical point that those "undecided" voters don't care about.  And in a lot of red states you're asking people to stand in line for 7 hours to vote for a Democrat who might get to appoint a Supreme Court justice--if Moscow Mitch doesn't block it again?  It's a logical argument, but not a persuasive one.

Finally, let me just put this to you as a question of logic.  In 2016 the narrative was that all these poor blue collar slobs were so downtrodden and beaten down because they didn't have good jobs and all that so they latched on to Trump's promises despite the racism, misogyny, and scandals.  So how smart do you think it is to run the guy who was VP in 2016 and the 7 years leading up to it?  Hurm...