The Joy

Update: Thank you Steve in Manhattan at Crooks & Liars for sharing this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up! Hope everyone enjoyed the DNC this week, hope you've ordered your BALLZ TO THE WALZ t-shirts like I have, and get the damn vote out for every Democratic candidate across all 50 states! Let's EFFING GOOOOO....

There is a thrill to the Democratic Party campaign I haven't seen in ages.

The current national convention in Chicago is humming with delight, musicians showing up to perform during otherwise staid roll calls, genuine laughs and cheers from audiences not just sitting there applauding politely on cue. For all of the discontent from the media elites, and for the legitimate criticisms from protestors outside that the party is ignoring the suffering in Gaza, and for all the dread about another trump attempt to hijack the elections; the Democratic voting base is enjoying the moment with the kind of hope for the future not seen since Obama's victorious celebration in Grant Park when he won in 2008.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon is documenting the atrocities sorry bad habit, documenting the pleasantries:

Organizers kicked off the Democratic National Convention by immediately demonstrating that they know how to throw a party better than Republicans. Democrats scheduled their elderly leader who rambles on too long for the first night, not the last. President Joe Biden's Monday night speech started slow and only got more boring, but the crowd cheered him gamely, chanting, "Thank you, Joe!" Part of that was real gratitude for the surprisingly effective job he's done in his four years in office. But the cheers reflected the attendees' joy at knowing this whole thing is done with. It's time to move forward with a candidate who embodies their hopes for the future...

That word matters.

In contrast, Donald Trump's capstone speech at the Republican National Convention was disastrous. Biden may have been long-winded and boring, but Trump was all those things while also sounding objectively weird. His speech ping-ponged between self-pity and incoherence, delivered in that odd sing-song quiet voice he uses when his aides tell him to act "serious." The crowd, always eager to flatter the cult leader's ego, cheered, but it felt forced and exhausted...

It's odd how the RNC was barely a month ago, and yet is utterly forgettable now. The only detail I can recall from it was how a number of attendees band-aided their ear in honor of trump's surviving that assassination attempt the week before... an event that has already dropped off of most people's awareness and something that failed to generate any level of sympathy or concern outside of the MAGA base.

As Andrew O'Hehir wrote about the RNC last month, the convention was "a startlingly quiet, polite, low-energy event." We did witness the audience get hyped up for Hulk Hogan, but even that has caveats: It was the last night, so more people bothered to show up. Hogan is a professional wrestler, an expert at riling up crowds over nonsense. (Though the actual message of his speech was terrifying and fascistic.) And frankly, after four days of listlessly wandering around hoping something interesting might happen, the attendees seemed eager to feel something. But Trump destroyed Hogan's hard work with his whining, droning, weird speech. 

On Tuesday night, Harris made the contrast crystal clear by holding a rally at the Fiserv Forum, where the RNC was held. (Personal insert: Milwaukee is literally up the road from Chicago, so Harris traveling to Fiserv wasn't a burden) It speaks volumes about the enthusiasm gap that it's not even surprising that the turnout and volume at this Harris rally outdid what Trump got at his own convention last month.

The difference was dramatic enough that Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, appeared at the DNC by remote video from Milwaukee. It created the visual effect of more than doubling what Trump was able to turn, despite covering his ear with a comically oversized bandage and everything...

One of the things about long political campaigns is the belief in Momentum (the Big Mo as Bush the Elder called it), and if the differences between the party conventions are any evidence, all of the Big Mo is with Kamala:

With Harris as the nominee, however, you can feel Democratic voters unclenching. This is not a crowd that feels "triggered." The mood is giddy. There's a scent of hope in the air. There's plenty of criticism of Trump, but it's no longer coming from a place of cornered animals trying to survive. The tone towards that babbling old fascist is one of contempt. Instead of flinching, Democrats are laughing in Trump's face. No wonder he's even more obsessed with crowd sizes and ratings than usual. He used to be the one offering entertainment value, even if it was only to his base that just wanted to inflict pain on their perceived enemies. Now it's Harris who is captivating, this time to a nation that wants to feel something other than despair...

I can speak to the enthusiasm among the political circles I keep: both the TNC Horde and the Balloon Juice commentariat are bouncing off the walls like it's a romper room. Hell, even the Rude Pundit is giddy:

It was simple. I thought, "Man, we need this." And by "this," I mean all the joy and energy and possibility being embodied on that stage. But it's not only about this moment. We need this because the one thing that's been missing as we emerged from the worst part of the Covid pandemic (and recognizing that Covid is still very much a problem) is a catharsis, some release where we all recognize that we survived. And it's not just a catharsis for getting through the lockdowns and mass deaths and required health safety measures. It's a catharsis for surviving the presidency of Donald Trump, which took this country down some incredibly dark alleys, leaving it battered and weary, with a good deal of PTSD.

We couldn't actually celebrate, or even fully exhale, because hanging over all of us was the tension of what would bring the Trump saga to its end. We waited for something to validate the anger we had and to demonstrate that things would be different. We hoped that Trump would be convicted and sent to prison, but that didn't happen and may not. 

The election of Joe Biden was an absolutely necessary step to get to this point. We needed someone who knew how the federal government worked inside and out, an old hand to get to the bridge and right the ship, weld the holes, scrub off the rust, get rid of the piles of garbage, and get us back on course, all while restocking the bar. We were all scared out of our weary minds in 2020, awaiting the even deadlier next surge of Covid deaths that was coming in January 2021. Then January 6th happened, and our sense of security in the very things that are supposed to function in this country were undermined, all while watching a large percentage of the population go down a red-capped abyss of crazy and conspiracies they will likely never return from. Biden's skill was in allowing the rest of us to chill out, to see that the government hadn't lost the ability to actually work.

In the last few months, though, everything kept hitting us, even as Trump was found guilty or liable, owing hundreds of millions of dollars. All of it still didn't lead us to anything like a feeling of completion, a feeling we could, indeed, move on. We were hit again and again with insane Supreme Court decisions, with the polls that showed Biden losing, with Biden's obvious signs of aging, with this feeling that it was all going to go south again. We would stick by Biden if we had to (and more than a few were doing so gladly), but, my god, we needed celebration. We needed joy. Real joy, not the kind of joy that says, "We made it," but the joy that says, "We crushed it." We need to face our American demons, who are easily identifiable, and we need to unify to exorcise them and send them back to whatever crevices in the earth they crawled out of, not just defeat them at the polls...

A previous Democratic leader once clarified that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," but FDR spoke to the rational demands of the moment and to the urgency of recovering from the Great Depression. The demands and urgency we face today have more to do with recovering from the emotional traumas of things like 9/11, the failed War on Terror, the economic chaos threatened by Silicon Valley "disruptors" looking to profit from fanciful shell games, the overwhelming Culture War madness of misogynists looking to take rights away from women and of racists looking to take rights away from ethnics they deemed "Other".

The opposite emotion to Fear in many ways is Joy, a means to build well-being for the self, the delight of the new and the willingness to celebrate. In the face of Republican Fearmongering, it has been a long time since Democrats fought back using Joy not as a shield but as a weapon, cutting through the dour unhappiness of the likes of trump and JD Vance who scowl at their rallies and lie about how America is "doomed" unless they take over as our overlords.

The Democrats are campaigning this year on Joy, not as a slogan but as an emotional buttress, a foundation on which all other policy positions will rest, allowing the nation to build not only on the successes of Biden's administration but on the future of Harris' potential tenure.

This is a campaign movement of Joy that can thrive, that can inspire millions to turn out to vote, with every sign this post-convention that the Democratic ground game will run with this emotion all the way to victory in 2024.

...

Just remember to keep the lawyers on payroll to stop trump and his Republican lackeys from the electoral chaos they're planning to unleash, please and thank you.

Ballz to the Walz, Dems

I said this earlier about the importance of making a Vice Presidential pick for your campaign: Your pick sets the tone.

So the tone Kamala Harris set for the Democratic Party by selecting Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate is this:

BALLZ TO THE WALZ, BABY.

What? It's a perfectly cromulent phrase from my youth as a suburban white punk. It means to "go all out," to blitz, to push forward with great force, to fight and not stop until the fight is done. Learned it in middle school, said it through high school, and then didn't really say it much in college because the study load was a bit fatiguing.

I am awaiting the inevitable t-shirt from Etsy, by the by.

The Balloon Juice community is all aflutter, as are my folks from the TNC Horde. To get a sense of why, here's Russell Berman at the Atlantic (paywalled) to explain it some:

In the realm of presidential politics, progressives have become accustomed to disappointment. Joe Biden wasn’t their first (or second) choice in 2020. Nor, for that matter, was Kamala Harris. And Democratic nominees typically pick moderates for their running mates. So when Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her choice for vice president this morning, progressives experienced an unusual feeling: elation...

Progressives had latched onto Walz’s dark-horse candidacy over the past two weeks, seeing him as a more appealing option, both ideologically and politically, than Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, whom many believed to be the front-runner. Walz, a former teacher and high-school football coach, impressed liberals with his governing success in Minnesota, where he’s signed legislation enacting paid family leave, expanding the child-tax credit, protecting abortion rights, and lowering the cost of insulin. More recently—and perhaps more important—he charmed them with his folksy takedowns on cable news of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.

“He’s just plainspoken and direct, and he’s very funny,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who served with Walz in the House, told me. “He’s got the common touch, and I think it’s an ingenious choice.”

In Walz, progressives believe they have found a Democrat who can connect with rural and white working-class voters in the crucial battlegrounds of the Midwest without compromising on the party’s policy platform. “He’s the anti-elite candidate. He comes across as the Everyman,” Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of the progressive group Our Revolution, told me this morning. He called Walz “a perfect counterbalance” to Harris, whom Republicans have tried to portray as, in his words, “an out-of-touch California elite...”

Harris’s announcement drew praise across a wide ideological spectrum, from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. In the final days leading up to the selection, however, the largely behind-the-scenes contest between Walz and Shapiro had become a stand-in for larger Democratic fights that the party’s embrace of Harris had otherwise suppressed. The proxy war dismayed some party allies, who urged progressives to stop their attacks on Shapiro. “It’s a false binary,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, told me. She said that although she was “ecstatic” about the choice of Walz, she would have been just as happy if Harris had picked Shapiro or any of the other finalists, including Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky...

Harris' selection of a popular regional governor does more than just help lock in Minnesota: Walz's brand of Democratic politics has the means to appeal across the entire Rust Belt (every state in the Great Lakes region) that can provide the same electoral appeal that Shapiro or Beshear (or Gretchen Whitmer from Michigan) could have provided.

But with Walz you get a little more: Someone with a personal narrative - he and his wife used In-Vitro to have children, for example - in clear opposition to the fearmongering hypocrisy that trump's presidential ticket is offering to voters. He's not only been a soldier - 24 years of National Guard service in the artillery, putting in the years most other political wannabes would shrug off - but also a high school social sciences teacher and football coach. Someone who would be a key figure in any small town community across America.

And while he was a high school football coach - leading his team to the state finals, no less - he took the time to become the faculty advisor of that school's first Gay/Straight Alliance student group. This is one of many reasons why progressives are elated: Walz is Pro-People, has been since even before Obama and Biden stood public for gay marriage.

Where trump's pick of Vance doubled down on trump's open hostility towards immigrants, women, blacks, gays, trans, and young people, Harris' pick of Walz doubled down on getting a candidate who's eager and grinning from ear to ear and willing to work on solving problems instead of making things worse.

Balls to the walls, guys. Let's get the vote out for Dems this year.

Eulogy for a Fellow Gator

Just a quick notice tonight that Bob Graham, former Governor of Florida and later Senator, passed away yesterday (via AP News): 

Former U.S. Sen. and two-term Florida Gov. Bob Graham, who gained national prominence as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks and as an early critic of the Iraq war, has died. He was 87...

Graham, who served three terms in the Senate, made an unsuccessful bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, emphasizing his opposition to the Iraq invasion.

But his bid was delayed by heart surgery in January 2003, and he was never able to gain enough traction with voters to catch up, bowing out that October. He didn’t seek reelection in 2004 and was replaced by Republican Mel Martinez.

Graham was a man of many quirks. He perfected the “workdays” political gimmick of spending a day doing various jobs from horse stall mucker to FBI agent and kept a meticulous diary, noting almost everyone he spoke with, everything he ate, the TV shows he watched and even his golf scores...

Graham's name came up often during the 2008 Presidential cycle as a possible Veep pick for Barack Obama, but the thing about his diaries came up and it got to be a joke that having someone that dedicated to writing everything down wouldn't be a good thing in the Oval Office. Alas.

Graham was a major figure in Florida in my youth - when my family moved here in 1977 - and had put his name to a lot of early efforts towards wildlife and shoreline preservation as the development boom of the 1980s shook the state. They literally added his name to the reconstructed Sunshine Skyway Bridge as he was a major proponent of getting a larger, grander span installed after the 1980 tragedy that collapsed the first one.

 

See the sail-like cables holding up the span?
Graham signed off on that. One of the earliest 
bridge designs using that look, and quickly became
popular for a lot of other bridges.
from Wikipedia Commons.

Graham was also one of those national figures from the days when bipartisanship actually worked, who had built up a solid reputation for inquiry and administrative detail. He was one of the few who challenged Dubya's claims to invade (and occupy) Iraq. He was also the last of the big-name Democrats - alongside Lawton Chiles - who helped lead Florida before the partisan takeover by the Far Right Republicans by the early 2000s.

Graham was also a Florida alum (Class of 1959) with a dedicated Bob Graham Center for Public Service named after him (I'll be lucky - with my resume - to get a brick outside Library West graffitied with my name on it).

So, for all the party-goers at the Swamp restaurant across the campus on University Avenue, pour a glass out for Bob. 

(Gets told they tore that restaurant down for a Wawa convenience store)

WHAT THE HELL?! Bloody developers took over the city council, didn't they? /headdesk

Are there ANY drinking pubs across the street from Ben Hill Griffin Stadium? ANY?!

Ugh. Thank the Gods that Bob's not around to see this travesty.

Go Gators.

Painful Way to Kill Your Political Career, Dean

Oh, while I was surviving MegaCon yesterday, apparently the Democratic Party officially started their Presidential primarying in South Carolina, with incumbent Joe Biden stomping hard on his primary opponents with 95 percent of the vote across the entire state (via Asma Khalid at NPR):

President Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, according to The Associated Press. It is the first official nominating contest for the party, and one that Democrats hope sends a message to Black voters.

As the incumbent president, Biden had been widely expected to carry the primary. Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and author Marianne Williamson were also on the ballot...

The Democrats are changing up the order of primaries this cycle, trying to shift away from the small populated states like Iowa and New Hampshire that also don't display the demographic diversity of the party itself. South Carolina isn't a major population state like California, New York, or Illinois - Democratic-leaning states - but it's big enough to matter.

Unwilling to play by the new rules, New Hampshire still held an unsanctioned primary last month allowing write-ins to happen for the Democrats while the Republicans held theirs officially. Biden STILL cleaned up there without campaigning a single day there while his opponents Williamson - you might remember her from last time - and Phillips showed up and begged for votes. 

You might notice I haven't run a Character profile - based on Professor Barber's work - on Dean Phillips even though he threw his hat into the Democratic primaries months ago: Mostly because I viewed Phillips attempts to kneecap the incumbent candidate Biden was doomed to failure. In the modern era of presidential elections - I would say turn of the 20th Century with McKinely (not Teddy!) - there hasn't been a successful challenge against a first-term President within the party. Teddy Roosevelt tried to against his successor Taft but failed (running third-party instead). Truman and LBJ technically quit their campaigns for re-election when they saw the writing on the wall, so we can't be certain how those would have turned out. Thing is, Phillips was in no position - he was a literal unknown backbencher congresscritter with no national profile; he lacks the natural charisma any challenger needs to prevail; and Gods know what he was actually campaigning for - to challenge a well-known relatively popular figure like Biden who isn't quitting any time soon. 

If I can quote from Tori Otten at New Republic:

Phillips is running a long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against President Biden. If you’re wondering how that’s going for him, Phillips won just 19.6 percent of votes during New Hampshire’s unofficial Democratic primary on Tuesday. Biden won 55.8 percent—as a write-in candidate.

Following his New Hampshire loss, Phillips revealed Wednesday morning on Fox & Friends that he had attended one of Donald Trump’s rallies to try to connect with far-right voters. When his actions prompted backlash, Phillips spoke out against political divisions...

Phillips then tried to point to the 2016 Electoral College map which shows a lot of Republican Red. But he erred by thinking geography matters instead of actual population density: Online critics hit Phillips by pointing out the Democratic Blue places on the map have more people who actually matter ("Land doesn't vote, people do!")

“There was probably a lane for someone to do reasonably well against Biden,” tweeted Osita Nwanevu, a columnist for The Guardian and contributing editor for The New Republic, “but being maximally annoying to every constituency in the Democratic Party at once wasn’t it, obviously.”

I exaggerated a bit earlier when I said nobody know what Phillips is campaigning for: He's actually campaigning on the belief that Biden is old, and that Biden's too unpopular to both the Democratic voting base and the independent voters overall.

Depending on which poll you're looking at, Biden's popularity isn't as healthy as it ought to be - considering the positive economic news Biden keeps generating over the past year thanks to his Infrastructure Bill efforts - but then again polls this far out from November are unpredictable as hell.

And regarding Biden's popularity with the Democratic voting base, those massive wins in New Hampshire (unofficially) and South Carolina - where Williamson beat out Phillips by a percent - ought to bury that particular narrative right quick.

Democratic voters will support their incumbent candidate, especially considering how Biden seems to be the only candidate who can keep donald trump at bay. It's likely - again, no guarantees - that the Indy voters who turned out against trump in 2020 will do so again in 2024 and vote for Joe. Phillips is essentially committing political suicide doing all this.

How Phillips got talked into thinking he could be a savior candidate to outduel Biden and then defeat trump remains a scandal of its own. Approached by a "political strategist" in Steve Schmidt, a campaign advisor most famous for talking John McCain into taking Sarah Palin as his Veep running mate, who claims he's "worried" about Dems relying on an aging President Biden (as though trump is any healthier three years younger and clearly more physically and mentally unfit). You have to look at who's paying Schmidt - deep-pocket "technocrat" billionaires worried about their tax cuts and Biden's pro-union stances - to get an idea of who's really worried about 2024 (and who they really want to win, which is trump). Schmidt basically went fishing for an egocentric millionaire among the Democratic ranks to be the stalking horse to weaken Biden's standing within the party itself.

Good news is, that's not working.

Bad news is, we're getting a clearer picture of how the real Political Establishment - not just the deep-pocket billionaires paying for everything, but also the "expert consultant" class and the upper-income media punditry - don't view trump as the dictatorial, openly destructive force that he is.

Gods help us. This 2024 election is going to be a war, with disinformation coming from every media outlet "convinced" that Biden can't win... even though Biden is winning the primaries and proving his popularity with actual voters with barely a finger lifted.

Get out the vote, America. Support Biden. Stop trump (and his billionaire buddies).

And let Dean Phillips crawl back to some state college on a guest lecturer gig for the rest of his life. His political career is toast. If he thinks he can make a comeback in 2028 based on his dismal performance this year, he's more delusional that trump.

Biden Going Big

As we go past the official "First 100 Days" of a Biden Presidency, the common refrain in the Beltway media is how "Biden is going big" in terms of pushing an aggressive economic agenda rivalling the New Deal for ambition and scope.

To Elia Nilsen at Vox.com: 

The Biden administration’s theory of policy so far is to go big. The same goes for its politics.

Taken together, President Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan and newly introduced $1.8 trillion American Families Plan come out to slightly over $4 trillion in proposed new spending. It’s an enormous investment in American job creation; the last bipartisan infrastructure bill Congress passed in 2015 clocked in at about $305 billion — about one-thirteenth the size of Biden’s proposed plan. And Obama’s $800 billion stimulus plan of 2009 was about one-fifth of Biden’s plan, not even taking into account the $1.9 trillion in Covid-19 relief that has already been signed into law.

That sheer amount of proposed federal funding is meant to do a lot of things, but the main goal is to get as many jobs to as many people in as many voter constituencies as possible. Under Biden’s plan, infrastructure no longer calls to mind images of white men in hard hats; it includes working mothers, home health aides who care for the nation’s elderly, and workers of color across the nation. Women and people of color were crucial to Biden’s presidential win, and they are also crucial elements in his jobs plan...

To EJ Dionne at the Washington Post (watch out for paywall) Biden is harking back to the Democratic glory days of FDR and LBJ:

President Biden on Wednesday night went big, populist, folksy, hopeful, urgent — and bipartisan and partisan at the same time.

Addressing a pandemic-reduced gathering of lawmakers at the Capitol, Biden proposed a sweeping program of change that would create four more years of free schooling, expand child care and family leave, and attempt to beat back climate change through large infrastructure investments...

Biden welcomed the help of Republicans again and again, but he took clear aim at their favored economic doctrines. “My fellow Americans, trickle-down economics has never worked,” he declared. “It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom up and middle-out.”

And he took a victory lap on progress against covid-19, proclaiming that widespread vaccinations were offering “a dose of hope.”

This address wasn’t exactly the New Deal or the Great Society, but it was equally ambitious. Biden, reassuringly unradical with his plain, avuncular demeanor, is bidding to create a new common sense rooted in political lessons that Democrats have learned the hard way...

Going big - pushing for ambitious national programs on scale the United States hasn't seen since the 1960s - is more than just pushing back against the economic malaise we find ourselves in thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic: This is basically pushback against the last 40 years of the Far Right's "glorious" Pax Reaganica, where Big Government was "evil", deficits from massive tax cuts starved our public sector into a broken mess, and the rich got richer while the rest of us suffered.

This is Biden playing not only to the national audience - offering them a way out of low wages and little hope - but playing to a liberal and Progressive base eager to change the direction of the nation away from massive inequality the Far Right has been creating.  

The good news for Biden and the Democrats is how well the public is responding to these proposals. Back to Nilsen at Vox:

A range of polling shows that Biden’s expansive view of what counts as infrastructure has fairly broad support among the American public.

A recent NBC News poll found that 59 percent of respondents supported Biden’s American Jobs Plan. A recent Vox and Data for Progress poll found that 68 percent of likely voters support the plan. And a Monmouth University poll released Monday found 68 percent of respondents supported Biden’s infrastructure bill, with another 64 percent supportive of the ideas in Biden’s American Families Plan, which aims to make child care, higher education, and health care more affordable.

As Republicans and Democrats argue over the semantics of what constitutes “infrastructure,” Monmouth polling director Patrick Murray told Vox that Biden’s broad brush does not appear to be turning off voters so far.

For instance, Vox and Data for Progress polling found that a majority of likely voters of all parties supported Biden’s proposal of putting $400 billion into bringing down the costs of long-term care: 88 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents, and 55 percent of Republicans support the idea. And recent polling from Politico and Morning Consult shows that a large majority of Black voters support Biden’s pledge to increase housing options for low-income Americans; 80 percent of Black voters support that measure, and 58 percent “strongly” support it.

In other words, voters seem to care more about things that directly impact their lives than they do about whether these things meet a strict definition of “infrastructure...”

In short: People are back into believing that government can be a positive force in their lives, generating better jobs and better wages and better lives. The "Government is the Problem" meme is dying off, much to the horror of the Far Right clinging to the strands of political power.

But why exactly is this happening?

Isn't Biden supposed to be a Centrist, a post-LBJ pro-business Democrat who wasn't so great on issues of race and women's rights or on liberal issues in general, who tacked to the middle in order to push bipartisan deals through a Congress that is no longer the bipartisan haven he knew?

Well, kind of. This is all due to Biden's Presidential Character of being a Congenial Passive-Positive at the head of a Big Tent political party.

This isn't from my 2019 review of Biden's Character - where I worried Biden's easy-going nature made him vulnerable to Republican treachery - but from my 2020 followup that found Biden was doing a good job of building "the Big Tent" coalition of Democratic Moderates and Progressives. In fact, let's go to the direct quote from Aubrey Immelman about Biden's skills in forging that Big Tent:

Leaders with Biden’s personality profile are likely to exhibit an interpersonal leadership style, characterized by flexibility, compromise, and an emphasis on teamwork. The general tenor of a Biden presidency likely will be conciliatory, which could render a prospective President Biden vulnerable to manipulation by pressure groups and handicap him in negotiations or conflicts with foreign adversaries...

In short: Biden is someone willing to dance with those that brung him (got this from Molly Ivins). But where Immelman - and myself - might view that openness as a vulnerability to manipulation, there IS another way to view it as Biden building his teamwork between the various factions of his own party. To make that Big Tent work and push a broad, Big-Fucking-Deal agenda in a successful fashion.

Biden is pushing a big Progressive/Liberal agenda in the mold of FDR's New Deal because it's what his own Democratic ranks want. He will be more congenial and flexible with them, even as he tries to reach out to obstructionist Republicans, because he is a Democrat and they are Democrats and this is their Big Tent and that's how he'll roll, son. As long as Republicans refuse to barter or deal with Biden in any sane fashion, Biden's agenda won't reflect their interests, doubling down on their obstruction but also their obsolescence as Biden happily bulldozes forward.

Edit: I just found this article on MSNBC by Medhi Hasan and need to include it here as emphasis:

This was definitely how Biden behaved, at times, during the Democratic primaries. He never pretended to be at the head of a transformational movement, a la his former boss, Barack Obama. He didn’t enter office backed by a loyal cult, as his predecessor, Donald Trump, did.

Yet he and his administration have spent these first 100 days embracing the progressive wing of his party, along with labor unions, youth groups, climate campaigners and sundry activists. “Progressives say they’re being included, heard and respected by the Biden White House,” Politico reported in February.

Compare and contrast this outreach with the Obama era, in which White House press secretary Robert Gibbs dismissed people on the “professional left” who “ought to be drug-tested,” and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel denounced liberal activists as "f---ing retarded.”

Biden, on the other hand, proudly invoked Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ support for the American Rescue Plan in the immediate aftermath of its passage through the Senate. His chief of staff, Ronald Klain, has been dubbed the “left whisperer,” having become “a point of rapid response for many on the left who are angling to get within earshot of the president,” The Daily Beast wrote.

Real access has been matched by real impact. Does anyone really believe the Biden who launched his presidential campaign in 2019 looking for a “middle ground” on climate issues would have committed to cutting U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2030 without pressure from groups like the Sunrise Movement...?

Here's the thing: Biden is listening. It's what Congenial characters do. And it's how he builds his world around him.

This IS what I wrote before about Biden: He's the Democratic Party answer to Ronald Reagan. Not Reagan the hard-core Conservative, but Reagan the Uniter, Reagan the Big Tent builder. Reagan was able to pull together divided Republican factions into a cohesive whole, dominating the electoral cycle of the 1980s in a way that only a Passive-Positive Congenial figure could. For all the damage Reagan did as President to the liberal foundations of 20th Century America, you have to admit his administration oversaw a massive, active period of policy changes and formation you wouldn't expect from a "passive" leader.

Biden can be the same way as President overseeing a massive wave of policy changes, only in favor of that liberal foundation that can be re-forged for the 21st Century America.

All Biden has to do is break loose the remaining obstructionist logjams - sadly enough, from Democratic Senator Centrists unwilling to see this moment in history for what it can be - and get his American Families Plan working.

This can be a big moment. Biden knows it. He knows it'll be good for his Democrats and it'll be good for his fellow Americans.

Any day now. All he has to do is get a few more Democrats to join this Big Tent moment and let it roll forth.

Official: It's Biden / Harris 2020

Word dropped this afternoon, all the speculation is done, all the fighting steps up a notch, and we finally have a WINNER!

It's DAN QUA- wait wrong Veep announcement.

It's KAMALA HARRIS!

As mentioned often before, the selection of the Vice President doesn't do much to improve - or worsen - a Presidential campaign as long as the pick is a sensible, solid one. It's a first test for the President: showing off his/her decision-making of who'll they also pick as Cabinet members, agency bosses, what have you. It underscores the direction and theme of the campaign as well: Picking someone with foreign policy cred is one thing, picking a Veep with economic reform ideas is another.

Biden picking Kamala Harris says four things:

1) He is looking at keeping a big tent going for the Democratic Party. Much of Harris' voting record is a solid Left history. Despite her image and reputation as a state Attorney General, her history as a U.S. Senator ranks her pretty high on the liberal scoring charts (govtrack ranks by "most conservative" so in liberal measurements Harris is at the other end). Biden is recognized as more Center than Left, so getting a solid Liberal Left candidate should appeal to many at that end of the spectrum (she's closer to Bernie Sanders than Elizabeth Warren).

2) He is showing no ill-will to the time in the debates when Kamala went after Biden for his school busing stance and other not-good positions early in his Senatorial career. Once Harris dropped out of the primaries, she eventually backed Biden for the ticket to show party fealty, and Biden as a long-time player had to respect that. There's also Biden's Passive-Positive traits of Congeniality and team-building: He has a world-view of bipartisan outreach, and repairing bridges to party leaders who opposed him fits that world-view. This is Biden's way of signaling to other factions in the Democratic Party (and any moderate factions left among Republicans) that he will have an Open Door of sorts to his Oval Office.

3) He is demonstrating to the Party and to the general voters that he keeps his word: Biden promised he would choose a woman as a Vice President and so he did.

4) He is living in his comfort zone. Not that he and Harris will see eye-to-eye on every issue, it's that Biden is one of those Senators who viewed his time in that setting as membership in an exclusive club. Senators tend to favor Senators as political allies even when they're disagreeing on issues (note how John McCain wanted fellow Senator Joe Lieberman as his Veep in 2008 even though Lieberman was a Democrat(!)). Biden had to be thinking "If Kamala was cool enough for the Senate she's cool enough for my campaign."

Voting, of course, still matters. Turnout remains key for Democrats to overcome the obstruction and suppression the Republicans are already signalling to the world. What today's decision does is move the campaign closer to cohesion and planning for the big run to November. It's a moment to stir up support and fundraising and momentum in the media (by the buzz on Twitter today, it seems to have done all three).

It also means I need to make more 2020 bumper stickers!

In the Reach of Her Arms

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size   
But when I start to tell them
They think I’m telling lies
I say
It’s in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips
The stride of my step   
The curl of my lips 
I’m a woman
Phenomenally
Phenomenal woman   
That’s me
-- Maya Angelou

Oh, by the way, while everyone's been distracted by an out-of-control pandemic made worse by Republican incompetence, the 2020 Democratic primaries kind of wrapped up a week or two ago with Joe Biden winning enough delegates to secure the bid.

So now the guessing game moves on to "Who will he pick to team up as his Vice Presidential candidate?"

You know my feelings about Veeps, having been burned by the likes of Dick Cheney, but as the office is still required and the nomination still valid, I gotta put my two cents in on this.

We already know that Biden had promised - when the field of nominees went from "a lot of well-spoken and qualified women" to "what the hell happened to Kamala and Liz?" - that if chosen he'll nominate a woman Veep, so that narrows the list a bit among likely Democrats at the state and federal level.

There's been a lot of guessing since Sanders dropped out - unofficially giving Biden the lead - of the likely candidates, with some of the names more likely than others especially as a few - Amy Klobuchar just confirmed this weekend she didn't want to be in consideration - have risen in national awareness.

Names like Liz Warren, Kamala Harris (both of whom were serious Primary contenders until they fell out), Governor Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), Senator Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin), Senator Tammy Duckworth (Illinois), Representative Val Demings (Florida), and Should-Have-Been Governor Stacey Abrams (Georgia) have been bandied around as the best choices.

In trying to game out which candidate gets picked, you need to consider the factors that always go into a Veep selection:

Geography: Thanks to the 12th Amendment requiring the President and Vice-President to be from different states, parties have looked at geographic balance for their top ticket. In the days of olde, that usually meant by region - North to South, and then Midwest, and then Pacific coast - although it doesn't mean as much nowadays. In terms of all 50 states and territories, the only place Biden can't choose is another candidate from Delaware. By custom he really should avoid any Mid-Atlantic state like Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, maybe even North Carolina. The best possible candidates here - Harris in California, the current Governor of New Mexico Michelle Lujan Grisham - would be obvious ones. Everything else is fair game, and in terms of value... well that's the next element.

Battleground: What matters more than Geography nowadays is the closely contested major and mid-sized states in terms of Electoral College value. Thanks to the broken nature of the EC, a state won or lost by 5,000 votes means that WHOLE Electoral value of that one state - which can sneak you past the 270 EV requirement - can skew the results. A state that can turn on the campaign ability of a well-liked Veep that also has a double-digit Electoral value - say Michigan (16), Florida (29!), or Arizona (11) - would really help fill the ticket. In this regard, Whitmer, Demings, and Abrams from Georgia (16) are the most likely choices.

Party Unity: One of several things that hurt the Democrats in 2016 - aside from the Russian meddling, media hatred of Hillary, Hillary's general unlikability with independent voters - was how the Far Left - Progressives - felt ignored by Hillary's choice of Senator Tim Kaine (VA) for her Veep. While Kaine is a solid and reliable Democratic figure, he's also a pro-business Centrist much in the same mold as Clinton. If Hillary had chosen a more Progressive, reformist candidate to balance the ticket with her - certainly not Bernie himself, because that would have been awkward and distracting - she could have kept enough of the Far Left from protest-voting for the Green Party and siphoning votes in key states.

Biden's in the same predicament: a veteran party figure with too much of a pro-business profile and Centrist ways, he may have to look for a ticket candidate with Progressive bona fides. Warren is the most likely Progressive with a recognized resume of reforms, while Harris has a hard reputation on business reforms and accountability but also a law enforcement background that may not help her rep at the moment. The Progressive creds for the remaining top women in the field are not as established but as long as they stand proud on Civil Rights, pro-choice, business reforms, and pissing trump off to no end, they should suffice.

Demographics: Already considered, because there's been a seismic shift in how women are voting since 2016. It's the big open reason why Biden pledged to secure a woman on the ticket as a show of solidarity. It's also a serious matter - especially as the issues of police brutality and racism has changed the mood of even White voters - for Biden to consider a Black Woman for this. If he goes with a White Woman even one noted as strong on Civil Rights, it may sour on some voting blocs within the party...

Charisma/Name Draw: Personality counts in an election, and as long as you're not nominating a wet blanket - or Sarah Palin - you should do fine (Even Bush the Elder won once with Dan Quayle(!)). You want someone not only able to present well at campaign speeches and debates (if any take place) but also make the Democratic Party think well of the future. Biden is old and the Dems - and the nation - are overdue for a leadership shift to younger generations.

This is where younger possibilities with nationally-recognized names gain in value. Warren is currently 71 years old, and while a marquee name with a devoted fanbase she's not necessarily the future of the party. Demings is 63 years, which puts her uncomfortably in the senior age bracket: In terms of name recognition she was just this year part of the House Impeachment process regarding trump's extortion of Ukraine, which is solid cred with the party base. Harris is 55, which puts her on the edge of the Gen X demographic (which neither helps nor hurts, to be honest). Michigan's governor Whitmer is 48, and gained national awareness during the COVID response as a target of trump's - and his Far Right fanbase's - ire, which gives her a boost. Stacey Abrams - who gained national recognition as a serious candidate for Georgia's governorship and "lost" due to questionable electoral behavior by her rival Republican who just happened to be the state officer overseeing the election itself (Kemp's failure to recuse tainted the results to where even Republicans were shamed by it) - is 46.

The way things are shaking out, Kamala Harris is the most likely candidate to be Biden's Veep. She had scored early points with the Democratic base when she attacked Biden's credibility on school business and racism, so for her to accept the ticket spot would be a gesture of unity. It'll be the first time since Lloyd Bentsen from TX (1988) that the Democratic ticket had someone on the ticket from the Western half of the U.S. (Bill Clinton being from Arkansas counted more Southern than Midwest). The biggest knocks against choosing her are that 1) California is solid Democratic state, she doesn't help flip a Battleground state 2) her experience in the legal profession as prosecutor and as State Attorney General may hide some police brutality skeletons that might sting, and 3) Harris didn't exactly run a sound national campaign and needs to show improvement as a campaigner this time around (That Active-Negative character I tagged her with didn't help). Gretchen Whitmer from Michigan - being White - could be a surprise choice, but would make sense in terms of long-term party leadership as well as helping secure a region - the Great Lakes "Rust Belt" - that didn't show up in 2016 as hoped. Val Demings would be an interesting choice and would signify Biden's interest in trying to clinch Florida (these 29 Electoral College numbers are very tempting), but like Harris she has a law enforcement background (Orlando police chief) that may rub raw with Democratic voters even though Demings is openly calling for police reforms. Stacey Abrams' name would generate the most excitement as a symbol of Black voters fighting against GOP voter suppression and her placement on the ticket could help flip Georgia to Blue (and maybe help the other Southern states encourage voter turnout), however she'd be considered inexperienced at the federal level compared to the other choices.

I'd grade it as: Harris (CA) around 60 percent odds,
Demings (FL) around 20 percent odds,
Whitmer (MI) around 10 percent odds,
Abrams (GA) around 10 percent odds.

The thing about a candidate choosing a Veep: All we learn from it is how that candidate is going to govern. Biden's choice will showcase his leadership style (which as a Passive-Positive is going to lean towards someone who works well in a Congenial team setting).

Choose wisely, Joe.

The 2020 Democratic Primaries End But the Fight Against trump Remains

Given the intensity of the last two months focusing on the ongoing nightmare of trump's failed responses to coronavirus, the importance of yesterday's announcement from Bernie Sanders' campaign wasn't the top news it deserved to be. And yet, attention must be paid (via Scott Detrow at NPR)...

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders suspended his 2020 presidential campaign Wednesday, bowing to the commanding delegate lead former Vice President Joe Biden established.

"I wish I could give you better news, but I think you know the truth. And that is that we are now some 300 delegates behind Vice President Biden, and the path toward victory is virtually impossible," Sanders told supporters in livestreamed remarks, shortly after he had broken the news to campaign staff.

What this does is leave Biden on the Democratic primary ballot without a serious challenger, pretty much guaranteeing he secures the delegates for the nomination. All that's left now are the Choosing of the Veep and the Recriminations of the Utopian Idealists Who Can Never Accept a Moderate Centrist And Will Openly Threaten to Vote A Second Term Of The Shitgibbon As Our Punishment.

I hope I am kidding about that second part.

A quick postmortem about how Sanders failed to win in 2020 when he had done so much better in 2016 should look at these factors:

It is turning out - especially when you saw Sanders winning Michigan in 2016 but getting nuked in 2020 - that Bernie did better in 2016 because he was the Not-Hillary candidate. A lot of us, myself included, knew Hillary was hated but never understood how hated she was even among Democratic voters. And not because she was more pro-business than the Progressives would like: A lot of that hatred was on a personal level, pure vitriol towards her as a target for rage. As a result, Sanders got more votes and delegates than he would have gotten had a more popular candidate run back then. By 2020, thinking he was more popular than he truly was, Bernie jumped into this primary cycle thinking he was the front-runner, and to some extent he was (besting other genuine Progressive opponents like Warren and Inslee), but he just wasn't as popular as Biden.

Biden winning this primary cycle violated a couple of campaigning norms: He once again did a weak job organizing his campaign, was floundering at fund-raising, and hadn't even done a lot of advertising to promote himself. Bernie beat him at each of those factors. What Biden did have was the endorsements: The benefits of a party elder is that a lot of people owe you at least one favor, and you don't even have to call those favors in because they'll still back you because you're a known - and well-liked - factor as a leader on the stage. Those endorsements - especially Jim Clyburn who personally turned South Carolina into Biden's biggest victory - carries a lot of weight with much of the party base. Bernie - still marketing himself as the Outsider - couldn't even beg an endorsement from any other major players (he did get several, but only from some of the freshmen Progressives like AOC).

And even with Biden's shaky record on civil rights, women's rights, and other questionable votes as U.S. Senator, he had the marquee name by now, something he didn't have in 1988 nor 2008. He ran essentially as "Uncle Joe" from the Onion satires and people went with that.

That "well-liked" aspect for Biden helped him and hurt Bernie. I've mentioned it before - I will live and die by Professor Barber's Character Chart - that Biden is Passive-Positive as opposed to Bernie's Active-Negative. For all the outreach Sanders' campaign tried to do with the larger voting blocs of the Democratic Party - Southern Black voters, College-educated Whites - he still could not win them over on a personal level. His personal abrasive and uncompromising nature was still in full effect this cycle. It's telling that when Warren dropped out last month, rather than give her endorsement to Bernie as the most likely Progressive to defend her many plans, she refused to give any endorsement at all (whereas the major Centrists who dropped out - Buttigieg and Klobuchar - both heartily endorsed Biden within hours).

That Passive-Positive nature for Biden - his congeniality - means that he has a better skill set in building coalitions, which a lot of the Democratic leadership - and enough of the party voting base - see as more necessary in an election cycle where turnout and unity are key. Given how he's not as focused on forging agendas, he's actually in a good position to absorb and promote the agendas of other party figures. It's expected that he's going to take all the good and popular ideas that Warren, Buttigieg, Harris, Klobuchar, and even Sanders offered this primary season and merge them into a Big Tent platform.

It did not help Bernie that yet again he was campaigning on a platform of Revolution: Changing the American system from Capitalism to a Euro-style Democratic Socialism. Primarily his push for a Medicare-For-All system that would overturn the privatized health care system currently in place. Change frightens people, and are only receptive to it under the proper conditions. In 2016, a lot of Liberal and Progressive voters - having been burned out by Obama's pragmatic Centrist agenda limited by Republican obstructionism - did feel the need to break the system to enact greater left-leaning solutions. But a lot has changed in four years of horrifying misrule by trump and his Republican cronies. Right now, the mood among Democratic voters is desire for Stability, not Revolution... no matter how much the Progressive Left can argue the merits (and there are a few) of that Revolution. Biden offers the nostalgia of the more sane, more calm Obama years, not the uncertainty and possible chaos that Sanders offered.

One last thing was how Bernie Sanders and the Progressives overall were hoping for a large Youth voter turnout to secure enough primary wins. For all the talk and even solid evidence that the younger, Millennial-age bloc was solidly Far Left on major issues... not a lot of them turned up at the primaries when it mattered. This is less a criticism of Bernie than it is a criticism of our nation's failure to treat voting rights serious enough. Unlike other nations that employ Universal Voter Registration, the U.S. - supposedly the Home of Democracy - makes our voting voluntary, you have to go out of your way to register. And in that regards, not enough young voters do (a combination of decades of failed civics lessons in school, the reality of young people moving enough times to not keep a current address to register which also adds to GOP voter suppression efforts, and perhaps a sense of futility among the young that they will never be taken seriously as a bloc anyway).

Put that all together and you have Bernie Sanders being disastrous in 2020 where he did better in 2016, even without any changes to his persona or his platform, even if his platform could have appealed to enough Democratic voters if only Bernie made himself more amenable about his Idealism.

Now it's all pretty much Biden vs. trump.

Right now with Biden there's not much of a platform, but then again 2020 isn't going to be about the issues. This election cycle for Democrats is about one thing: Getting rid of donald "Shitgibbon" trump. It's going to be about the mismanagement, the corruption, the inaction in the face of crisis, every last failure of trump's regime. It's about trying to rise above the open voter suppression the Republicans are bound to use as obstacles across half the states, not just hacked ballot machines but voter roll purges and negative social media psych-ops stuff.

For all the cheating the Republicans are bound to do this November, the best solution to stop them is to overwhelm them with turnout. They can only deny so many voters, they can only undercount (or even override) so many ballots. If the Democrats can jump the voter turnout up by 8 points compared to 2016 across every state - the way they were able to in 2018 - the Dems ought to clear enough Electoral College numbers to win.

This is where Biden - with the help of Harris, and Warren, and Buttigieg, and Klobuchar, and Booker, and Beto, and Castro, and Bernie - needs to step up the voter turnout efforts. He may not be good at it but he better hand off that job to someone - someone like Howard Dean who pushed the successful 50 State voter drive in 2006 - who CAN ensure every left-leaning Moderate/Centrist and every solid Liberal and every Far Left Progressive are united in showing up and kicking trump and Mitch and every other Republican bastard out.

Turnout matters, people.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND FOR EVERY LOVED ONE YOU HAVE, AMERICANS - especially today as trump crows about a COVID-19 body count that a more competent leader WOULD HAVE avoided - PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE REGISTER TO VOTE and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE VOTE DEMOCRATIC STRAIGHT UP AND DOWN THE BALLOT.

The Post-Florida Democratic Primary Blues

For Sanders supporters, I mean. There were three states this mini-Super Tuesday although they're three major states: Illinois, Arizona, and my home of Florida.

And oh Lord was Florida a bloodbath for Bernie. Via John Whitesides and Ginger Gibson at Reuters:

Joe Biden coasted to a blowout victory over Bernie Sanders in Florida’s Democratic presidential primary and was projected to win Illinois on Tuesday, edging closer to the nomination to face President Donald Trump in November’s election.

Biden rolled over Sanders by nearly 40 percentage points in Florida, the largest of the three states voting on Tuesday, and beat Sanders in every county in the traditional political battleground state.

Edison Research and television networks projected Biden also won in Illinois, where he opened a huge lead of more than 20 percentage points over Sanders with 41% of the precincts reporting...

The easy Biden wins appeared to be a sign Democrats were ready to unite for the campaign against Trump, and could increase pressure on Sanders, 78, to end his presidential bid. Democrats have worried about a possible repeat of 2016, when they believe his long, bitter primary battle with Hillary Clinton played a role in her upset loss to Trump, 73.

In somber remarks broadcast from his home in Delaware, Biden, 77, said the coronavirus outbreak demanded leadership from the White House and appealed to the many young supporters drawn to Sanders, a democratic socialist U.S. senator.

“Let me say especially to the young voters who have been inspired by Senator Sanders: I hear you. I know what’s at stake. I know what we have to do,” he said. “Our goal as a campaign and my goal as a candidate for president was to unify this party and then to unify the nation.”

Young voters between ages 18 and 44 were the only major demographic that backed Sanders in Florida and Illinois, the Edison polls showed...

Thing about Florida was, Bernie didn't do so hot back in 2016 either, but he at least won 33 percent versus Hillary and a number of counties. This time, he was under 23 percent and every county went for Crazy Uncle Joe.

And while Bernie is doing his best to appeal to young voters, a strong and growing demographic for liberal-leaning votes, his turnout is still meager at best. It's not enough to foment the revolution in the Democratic Party he's hoping to achieve.

Also, Bernie, it really doesn't help you to say nice things about Fidel Castro in Florida, even to Democratic voters. It's just not sane. But that's Bernie for you, sticking to his ideals but not out of practicality more like ego...

Twitter is awash of Bernie supporters screaming about the unfairness of it all, how Biden is a lying monster, how the Dems are backing a loser when it will come time to stop trump. However, it's not convincing anybody I know. It's all petulant sour grapes now, and it's the kind of self-harm that this nation doesn't need. And yet... sigh.

Personally, I was hoping Warren would still be in the race by now, but she wasn't and there's my Blues for you.

I'll have more to say later, but for now I have to cope with the Coronavirus crisis my own way. Translation: My library finally closed to the public and we've got a lot of cleanup work to do.

Predicting Character: Warren Is Planning for Everything

Man this has been on the back-burner for the longest time, stuff keeps popping up, I keep getting all these distractions like I need a hole in my head (and yes, black comedy is keeping me going at the moment),

But I can't hold off on this much longer. The primaries officially kick off in less than two weeks I think, and my surgery is set almost a week away. So no more delays...

I've been tracking the habits and behaviors of the top four Democratic candidates facing off against Loser of the Popular Vote trump, having visited my personal fave Kamala Harris, then Joe Biden, then Bernie Sanders, and finally with this post Elizabeth Warren. During this stint, Harris had to drop out as she couldn't keep her early debate win momentum going (as well as keep up with the fundraising), all the while watching the dark horse candidates like Pete Buttigieg get a week or two in the spotlight much like any other primary with 2000 candidates all vying to be the Not-Hillary uh Not-Biden swaying the Democratic voting base to side with them.

We're at the point the field is winnowing (which is good) but we're also at the point where the candidates are starting to play the state-by-state pandering game that sells well in Iowa and New Hampshire but doesn't do so well for the bigger states like New York, Florida, Illinois and California where most Americans live anywho. (Yes, I am ranting in favor of a 50-state one-day primary thank you again)

All except for Warren as far as I can tell. Warren's been campaigning in a different style than most of the other front-runners. She's been campaigning as the Idea Candidate.

"Warren's Got a Plan For That."

Want Medicare 4 All? Warren's got a plan for that. Cancelling college student debt. She's got a plan for that. Robbing three casinos in one night? You damn betcha she got a plan for that!

Okay, I kid about the Oceans 11 thing (but hey if Warren calls me needing that guy on the computer to hack into the mainframe, I'll refer her to somebody and take the driver's gig instead), but Warren is serious about putting out plans and proposals for families and workers and everyone who's key to the Democratic voter turnout. It's why Warren has been getting a solid number of support groups like the Working Families PAC to switch their votes from Bernie to Warren.

As such, Warren is more of a threat to Bernie's hold on the Progressive Left forces in the Democratic ranks than she is a threat to Biden's hold on the Moderate/Centrist forces. Even though given Warren's range of topics she's supporting and covering puts her as a major candidate for BOTH factions.

So why isn't she polling any higher?

Because Biden's lead as a Passive-Positive figure appealing to a majority of the Democratic base is kinda hard to punch against. Because Sanders' True-Believer BernieBro faction isn't going to give up their ideal Utopia of a revolutionary democratic socialism... something they believe Warren isn't really going to support if she wins this November. Because the mainstream media still has a problem with women candidates and the harsh coverage shows.

Which is a damn shame because Warren's character traits suggest she'll be a strong Adaptive figure in the White House that trends towards an Active-Positive administration.

To refer to this New Yorker article by Sheelah Kolhatkar:

...Warren is one of the country’s foremost critics of Wall Street firms and big banks, which make much of their profit, in her view, by abusing consumers and taxpayers. It’s a perspective that has grown out of Warren’s work as an academic and has shaped her ideas as a politician, propelling her from Harvard Law School, where she was a professor specializing in bankruptcy law, to the Senate, where she has represented Massachusetts since 2013.

On many economic issues, Warren has been remarkably prescient. She has spent decades warning Americans about the pernicious effects of income inequality, predatory corporations, and consumer debt, and about the failures of our financial system—issues that are at the heart of the 2020 Presidential campaign... She is attempting to position herself as a pragmatic advocate for the middle class, someone who can bring systemic reforms to education, health care, and democracy itself. But, unlike the Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Warren doesn’t describe herself as a “democratic socialist,” and says that she isn’t trying to do away with capitalism. “I believe in markets,” she says, over and over. She says that she simply wants to make them work better for more people...

As I noted, it's that last bit - Warren's unwillingness to join the Far Left completely, even as she pushes for reforms that would clearly fulfill a lot of what the Far Left hopes for - that scares the BernieBro faction. But it shouldn't (back to Kolhatkar):

...With the help of advisers working from her headquarters, in Boston, Warren has been releasing a torrent of detailed policy proposals. She has issued a plan to dramatically reduce student debt and to offer free tuition at public colleges; a plan to unwind large agriculture conglomerates in order to make the market more equitable for family farms; a plan to require large corporations to pay more in federal taxes; a plan to dismantle the behemoth technology companies and regulate them like utilities; and new legislation to address opioid addiction, modeled on a bill passed by Congress in 1990 to combat the H.I.V./aids epidemic. She has announced an “Economic Patriotism” plan, intended to create opportunities for American workers, and has issued proposals targeted at Donald Trump, including one that would make it permissible to indict a sitting President.

Together, the proposals promise a new level of government intervention in almost every aspect of economic life. Some of the ideas are pragmatic; others seem aimed more at marketing than at implementation. Regardless, “I have a plan for that” has become a rallying cry for her campaign—an echo of the way that “Nevertheless, she persisted” became a tagline for Warren supporters after Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, used it to describe Warren’s refusal to stand down during the confirmation hearing for Jeff Sessions, Trump’s former Attorney General. In May, the comedian Ashley Nicole Black wrote, on Twitter, “Do you think Elizabeth Warren has a plan to fix my love life?” Warren responded, “DM me and let’s figure this out...”

There's a couple of things to point out here about character traits: Warren's self-deprecation with that last bit, but overall a detailed, comprehensive view of every problem facing the nation and a willingness to answer those problems. A lot of this fits into what Professor Barber established as Active-Positive traits: Problem-solving, engagement, and a willingness to take stands.

When confronted with the challenges of running any election, specifically her run at the U.S. Senate in 2012, this came up:

Many voters saw Clinton as flip-flopping and opportunistic; Warren comes across as straightforward. She rarely brings up breaking the “highest and hardest glass ceiling,” as Clinton often did, although she acknowledges its existence. She told me that, when she was considering running for the Senate, in 2012, people advised her against it because of her gender. In the previous election, Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general, had been beaten by an inexperienced Republican, Scott Brown. “Massachusetts is not going to elect a woman. It’s just not going to happen,” Warren was told again and again. “Every time I heard that,” she said, “I’d think, I’m definitely getting in this race...”

As I mentioned before about Truman, an A-P figure relishes the challenges of a political fight not for their own sake but for the issues and communities affected. As an aside, it should be noted Coakley didn't do a good job of campaigning, even failing at proper support of local sports teams - it's Bawston, it mattahs - while Warren proved adept at the game.

When I asked Warren how she would survive all that, she said, “I know how to fight and I know how to win.” She pointed to two of her major accomplishments in Washington: the creation of a new regulatory agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in 2010, and her Senate campaign against Scott Brown.

“After the financial crash, I knew that we needed a consumer agency to keep big banks from cheating people,” she said. “People told me two things: ‘It’s a great idea’ and ‘Don’t even try it. You can never get it passed into law. The big banks will never permit this. They’ll fight you every inch of the way.’”

She paused. “But we got organized. We fought for working people. We built a grassroots movement. And President Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law.”

A little more than a year later, Democrats encouraged Warren to challenge Brown for his seat, despite considerable odds. “I decided that I was not going to wake up on the day after the election and he would still be my senator, voting against my values, and I would have done anything less than everything I could to stop that from happening,” she said. “And I went from down seventeen points to beating Brown by seven and a half points...

While this attitude shares the ambition of the Active-Negative, you'll notice a good amount of "we needed," "we fought," "we got organized." A good Active-Positive speaks in the "We Can" voice (opposed to the "I Must" of the A-N), which tends to be the overall delivery from Warren.

And speaking of Warren's work with the CFPB:

A person involved in the effort to get the C.F.P.B. included in the bill told me that Warren’s drawn-out bankruptcy battles had helped her acquire the skills to get things accomplished in politics. “She was pretty good about both the inside game and the outside game, and how the two intersect,” he said. “The inside game is very important: you need to get a bill passed in Congress, and she understood this and got C.F.P.B. into Dodd-Frank. And then she did a lot of press interviews and a lot of things to engage the public.”

After the legislation was approved, in 2010, Warren seemed the obvious choice to lead the new agency. But Neil Barofsky, who oversaw the bailout with her, told me that her desire for the role never entered into her decision-making. The head of the new agency would initially report to Geithner, and Barofsky recalled a hearing in which Warren aggressively questioned Geithner about his treatment of the insurance company A.I.G., which had paid its traders generous bonuses after taking taxpayer funds. “If she had pulled punches in that hearing, nobody would have known,” Barofsky said. “And she just eviscerated him, and exposed the hypocrisy and the failure of the program.”

News outlets later reported that Geithner opposed the idea of Warren running the C.F.P.B. He wasn’t alone. The financial industry mobilized to derail her potential nomination. “You remember preapproved credit cards?” Warren told me. “I was a pre-rejected nominee...”

...Obama, facing intense resistance, nominated Richard Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general, for the role. But he asked Warren to help set up the agency; she spent a year doing that. Under Cordray, the C.F.P.B. forced financial institutions to return twelve billion dollars to customers who had been targeted by scams such as unauthorized overdraft charges and illegal fees for student-loan repayments. Congressional Republicans kept up their opposition; by 2017, they had introduced a hundred and thirty-five bills and resolutions to weaken or eliminate the agency...

One measure of respect in politics is the class of enemies you make. Warren is arguably the most hated Democrat among the super-rich financial institutions and corporations trying to squeeze more money out of Americans (and the world) than ever before. In that regards, she deserves serious consideration to run against the most corrupt financial figure of the last 50 years in trump.

So how would I grade her as a candidate for the Presidency?

Elizabeth Warren - Senator, Massachusetts.
Positives: Popular Senator who has had national coverage since her consumer advocacy in the 2000s, has worked as a major player of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is aware of the challenges of reining in fraud and financial corruption, she would be the one of the few candidates if elected to hold businesses accountable and do a lot of things to end the income inequality threatening the nation. Would be the first Woman President to actually sit in the Oval Office (sorry Hillary). Would be someone capable of undoing a lot of the fiscal damage trump has done since 2017. Also, Kate McKinnon can play her on SNL.

Negatives: Along with Biden and Sanders, Warren is part of an aging Boomer population (despite the appeal she has to a lot of Gen X and Millennial liberals/moderates). Still is answering for questionable past behavior revolving around a college-period claim of Native American ancestry (which trump and fellow haters are using to drag her real name through the mud). Is too Pragmatic a figure for the Progressives to accept and too Reformist for the Moderates to trust. Like Hillary before her, Warren has to overcome a legitimate problem with sexism in our nation's media and voting population.

Chances: She's currently in the mix in the early primary / caucus states for the Democratic primaries, but she's low on funding compared to Biden and Sanders (and also to the rich guys Steyer and Bloomberg who are spending millions in ads she can't afford to make and air yet). If she can pull off an upset or two early on - maybe Iowa, maybe New Hampshire - and weather the push by the media to drop out before the big states, she may gain momentum the way Obama did in 2008.

Character Chart: I've already pointed out how I view her as an Active-Positive figure. She shows the Adaptive trait of accepting and taking on policy ideas of fellow candidates (with a willingness to admit where she got the ideas from), working with a level of Self-Confidence (her primary trait IMHO) and Long-Term Planning (the gamemanship skills of a Kennedy/Obama) that other A-Ps have deployed. Like Truman before her, she does the homework to debate her points with aplomb and directness. If I had to compare Warren to anyone, it would be FDR (A-P), a reform-minded charismatic willing to fix a broken system rather than replace it outright.


Okay, that's all I got for the four three main candidates for the Democrats to choose from. Having lost my primary candidate in Harris - whom I supported for her early advocacy for better teacher pay and boosts to education funding - I've decided to put my support to Warren, whose agenda mostly matches my own hopes for a better government taking care of the citizenry. Past all that, I am willing to support ANY Democratic candidate - even Sanders but definitely NOT Gabbard - due to the reality of how dangerous it is letting trump and the Republicans retain ANY power in our government.

If I had a preference order, it'd be 1) Warren, 2) Booker, 3) Klobuchar, 4) Biden, 5) Sanders, 6) Maybe Mayor Pete, I'm not sure who's left in the equation 7) Anybody but Gabbard.

Predicting Character (again): The Jocularity of Joe Biden

Okay, that WAS the title was I going to use back in 2015 for the 2016 Presidential campaign. Gods, the time flies...

It's been almost four years since then, so has anything really changed for Joe Biden? In terms of biography, his career is something that reaches back as far as 1974 (!) and covers a lot of ground. If we can refer to Evan Osnos' New Yorker article on him from 2014 (highlighting character traits):

Over the years, Biden has acquired a singular place in the pop culture of American politics. In a White House that privileges self-containment, Biden ambles between exuberant and self-defeating. He was barely in the West Wing before the Onion declared, in a headline, “shirtless Biden washes trans am in white house driveway,” establishing a theme—“Amtrak Joe,” the hell-raiser at the end of the bar—that is so enduring that it obscures the fact that he is a lifelong teetotaller. (Too many alcoholics in his family, he says. He grew up sharing a room with his mother’s brother, and recalled of the experience, “Even as kids, we noticed Uncle Boo-Boo drank a bit heavily.”)

Instead of raging against the indignities of the Vice-Presidency, Biden luxuriates in the job. Perched in his chair during the State of the Union address, peering down on his former congressional colleagues, Biden makes a pistol out of his finger and thumb, and blasts away, winking and gunning with no evident irony... The full package—the Ray-Ban aviators, the shameless schmalz, the echoes of the Fonz—has never endeared him to the establishment, but it lends him an air of authenticity that is rare in his profession. It has also produced a whiff of cult appeal, such that his image now has more in common with Betty White than with John Boehner. In May, after a teenager invited Biden to her prom, he replied with a corsage and a handwritten note encouraging her to “enjoy your prom as much as I did mine.” On Twitter, people went affectionately berserk.

Other than the President, nobody in the White House attracts more divergent public appraisals than Biden. In a column before the 2012 election, Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the Times, urged Obama to drop Biden as a running mate and replace him with the Secretary of State at the time, Hillary Clinton. (The campaign studied the idea, too, until polls showed that it would make no difference.) ...That summer, a survey by the Pew Research Center and the Washington Post asked people to come up with a single word to describe Biden; the most frequent responses, nearly equal in number, were “good” and “idiot.” Republicans rejoice in casting Biden as the consummate pol, careless, blustery, and a fogy. “Vice-President Joe Biden’s in town,” Senator Ted Cruz said, at a dinner for South Carolina conservatives last year. “You know the great thing is you don’t even need a punch line? You just say that and people laugh.”

And, yet, in the final month of the campaign, Biden reminded everyone why he was on the ticket. After Obama’s disastrously muted performance in a debate against Romney, the Vice-President prepared to face his counterpart, Paul Ryan, the then forty-two-year-old Wisconsin congressman, who has the eyes of a foal. Onstage, Biden wore a lupine grin. He guffawed, taunted, and interrupted. (When Ryan said, “Jack Kennedy lowered tax rates and creates growth,” Biden cut him off: “Oh, now you’re Jack Kennedy!”) The theatrics drove some viewers crazy, but the campaign was thrilled; Biden had arrested the slide, and when Obama prepared for his next debate advisers reportedly told him to channel some of Biden’s pugnacious energy. In the months that followed, the President deployed Biden again, this time to Capitol Hill, where he tapped relationships built during thirty-six years in the Senate to strike a deal that averted the fiscal cliff one day before the deadline. By the end of 2012, the White House was extending him the ritual courtesy of hailing the power of its No. 2. A headline in The Atlantic asked, “the most influential vice president in history...?”

That last bit is a bit of a historical joke itself: Over the years, most Veeps had no influence at all, not until the Cold War against the Soviets where the chain of succession required better informed VPs. It is also a rebuke of the previous Veep ahead of Biden - Dick Cheney - who *did* wield incredible influence in Bush the Lesser's administration to where historians (and myself) consider Cheney a shadow President.

Back to the bio:

In contrast to Dick Cheney, Biden has made his mark by reinforcing the President’s supremacy, rather than maneuvering around it. “Cheney’s influence, while significant, was always overstated, and Cheney got dialled back as the Administration went further along,” David Rothkopf, the editor of Foreign Policy, said. “While Biden has been a strong voice on foreign policy, it has never been asserted, as it was about Cheney, that he was trying to advance his own agenda. Even when there were differences of opinion, Biden was seen as being loyal and supportive of the President...”

Leon Panetta recalled listening to Biden work the phone at the White House: “You didn’t know whether he was talking to a world leader or the head of the political party in Delaware.” Biden has an inexhaustible appetite for “the connect”—the rope line, the hand cupped around the back of the head, the eye contact with a skeptic in the crowd. “He kind of brings them in and hugs them, verbally, and sometimes physically,” Secretary of State John Kerry told me. “He’s a very tactile politician, and it’s all real. None of it’s put on.” ...To a degree that is rare among politicians, Marttila said, “the process of meeting people energizes him.” Biden is such a close talker that he occasionally bumps his forehead into you mid-chat, a gesture so minor that it’s notable only when you try to picture Barack Obama doing the same thing.

The full Biden plays better around the Mediterranean and in Latin America than in, say, England and Germany. A former British official who attended White House meetings with Biden said, “He’s a bit like a spigot that you can turn on and can’t turn off.” He added, “For all of the genuine charm, it is frustrating that you do feel as if he doesn’t leave enough oxygen in the room to get your points across, particularly for those who are polite and don’t interrupt..."

Getting, and staying, “in the deal” is one of Biden’s favorite ways to describe relevance, and he has elevated the acquisition and maintenance of respect to the level of ideology. Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., is the son of a car salesman. His father had been wealthy as a young man, but business soured; vestiges of his brush with prosperity were a polo mallet in the closet and an acute sensitivity to signs of disrespect. Once, at an office Christmas party, the boss tossed a bucket of silver dollars onto the dance floor and watched the salesmen scramble to pick them up. “Dad sat frozen for a second,” his son wrote, in a 2007 memoir called “Promises to Keep.” Then “he stood up, took my mom’s hand, and walked out of the party,” losing his job in the process. Biden’s mother, Catherine Finnegan Biden, reinforced the hyper-alertness to status. “She told us, from the time we were little kids: Nobody is better than you,” his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, said. “And you’re no better than anybody else...”

There are also the tragedies in Biden's personal life that define a lot of the habits he sticks with to this day:

In the weeks before he was sworn in, Biden worked out of a borrowed office in Washington. His sister was helping him get organized. One day, his brother Jimmy called and asked to talk to her. She turned white. “There’s been a slight accident,” she said. Biden sensed something in her voice; he felt it in his chest. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” he said. (His wife) Neilia had been driving with the kids to get a Christmas tree when their station wagon was hit by a tractor-trailer. Neilia and (daughter) Naomi were killed. Beau, age three, and Hunter, age two, were hospitalized. Biden said later that he considered suicide. He could not imagine taking his seat in the Senate, but senior members urged him to try Washington for six months. “They had lost their mom and their sister, so they cannot lose their father, and that’s what made him get out of bed in the morning,” Valerie said. She moved in and lived with her brother and the boys for four years. He never moved from Wilmington. And so began the ninety-minute commute each way on Amtrak, the ritual that would become a fixture of his life...

(After disastrous behavior from his first Presidential campaign and bad choices during his Senate Judiciary Chair duties) Biden worked hard to rebuild his reputation. In 1994, he led the effort to pass the Violence Against Women Act, which heightened protections against abusive partners, and helped him win back the support of women’s groups. Biden always liked the old bipartisan courtesies in the Senate, and he mourned the arrival of more combative members who “really had no respect for the institution of the Senate,” he told me. “By that, I mean they wanted to make it the House. I’ll never forget the first time I heard someone on the floor of the Senate refer to the President as Bubba.” Biden’s friendships were so varied that he was the only senator who was asked to speak at funerals for both Strom Thurmond, the former segregationist, and Frank Lautenberg, the New Jersey Democrat, who called Biden “the only Catholic Jew...”

Biden became an envoy to an implacable Congress. David Plouffe, one of Obama’s political advisers, saw Biden’s mission as a question: “Where is the deal space?” His belief in compromise over ideology put him closer to the President. “They really have the same mind-set there,” Plouffe said. Biden held on to his locker at the Senate gym, where he liked to kibbitz. He coached Sonia Sotomayor before her Supreme Court confirmation hearings. When the White House needed to pass the $787-billion stimulus plan, Emanuel asked Biden to call six Republican senators. He got yes votes from three of them, and the bill passed by three votes. He became a willing deal-maker. Too willing, in the eyes of Harry Reid and other Democratic lawmakers, who faulted Biden for not driving a harder bargain in the fiscal negotiations...

There's a lot more at Osnos' biography, so I encourage you to read the whole thing.

So how does this translate for Crazy Joe Biden?

Joe Biden - Vice President, Delaware
Positives: Extensive, comprehensive political career from nearly 30 years in the Senate to Vice-Presidency. Knows as much about legislative procedures as anyone on the ticket (definitely way more than trump). Has staked out the "Establishment" Centrist position and the "Moderate White Male" role in the horse race, giving him a comfortable portion of the voter base (this is why most of the other moderate White guys running for the Dem ticket are polling under 2 percent). Is already well-positioned to appeal to non-party voters that trump is clearly losing through his partisan (and racist) governance. Is the biggest defender - outside of Obama himself - of the ACA/Obamacare reforms which many Americans now view as the baseline of healthcare (which makes him a more comfortable vote vs. the more radical Dems promoting wholesale changes with "Medicare For All"). Has a personal biography - personal brush with death, dying son which motivates Biden's healthcare ideas - that few Republicans can mock (trump will still try). Basically he's running on his association with Obama who is STILL the most respected man in the United States, and while coat-tails are hard to prove this is a legacy campaign that can attract all the voters from 2012 that made states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin go Blue.

Negatives: This is his third serious attempt at the Presidency, and even on his third try is making gaffes and miscues that would have - and did - sunk his first two tries. Is seriously not a good campaigner on the national stage. Is running a Centrist bipartisan campaign during a primary when he OUGHT to be appealing to the more left-leaning voter base. Has openly stated he thinks once trump is out of the White House that the Republicans - even Obstructionist "Moscow Mitch" - will regain their senses and behave themselves (insert headdesking here). His platform boils down to "I'm not trump" (which also counts as a positive because there's at least 65 million people who will vote on that point alone). Does not necessarily flip any battleground states. Will get confronted on his age and personal health (even though he's barely older than trump), and is already showing signs of not keeping his facts straight.

Chances: Surprisingly steady. Where his off-color tone-deaf "jokes" - and willfully blind pandering to a bipartisanship that no longer exists - would have killed a lesser candidate's campaign, Biden's been coasting on two key traits: 1) Enough people know him from his Veep days serving with Obama to trust him, 2) and he's not leaning too far Left on the electoral spectrum to scare off the more moderate Dem voters who usually sit out these primaries. Even after getting pummeled by Harris in the first debate (where Biden lost support in the double digits) he regained those numbers and is back in the high 30s of the polling numbers. His second debate didn't create any further disasters, which for him is a major step forward and solidified his lead. Thing is, this is a long primary process and anything between now and March 2020 - when things heat up - could still crash his momentum.

Character Chart: Biden's more noticeable acts in office - both in the Senate and in the Veep's office - points to a Congenial nature. He's passed an extraordinary number of bills while in the Senate - benefits of a long career there - and during that time worked with a large number of both Democrats and Republicans to get them passed. That required knowing how to barter for votes, which requires either an Active-Negative view - like LBJ, who understood power and how to horse-trade for it - or a Passive-Positive view that required checking your Ego at the door and doing what was best to get the deals done.

This explains, partly, why he's convinced that a more bipartisan Senate/Congress is possible if he wins the Presidency in 2020: Biden still thinks of himself as a Senator, as part of a select clubhouse that despite political opposition and ambitions still share the same workspace.

It may explain why Obama picked him to serve as Vice-President: Biden was not only the counter-balance to Obama's weakness with inexperience in 2008, but Biden was a deal-maker who knew how Congress worked and could help Obama pass legislation like healthcare reform that required such skills. (The Congenial nature would also mask any personal ambitions that most politicians have, which gave Obama the room to grow into the role of national leader without a "mentor" hogging the same spotlight) Unlike the more ambitious Hillary - or most other choices Obama could have gone with as Veep - an Active-Positive like Obama could have lived with the likes of Biden without worrying about internal power struggles.

If you want the simplest, easiest-to-understand description of him: Joe Biden is the Democratic Party's answer to Ronald Reagan. The affable elder who can draw in a big tent of party voters and not upset the independent/moderate voters needed to make that tent bigger.

This explains why Biden's polling keeps leveling up instead of sinking down as the primaries drag on. Democratic voters, having been burned in 2016 by the loss of moderate-leaning Midwest/Rust Belt voters who flipped from Obama to trump, may be terrified of supporting more proactive, progressive options and want the most likable, most "electable" candidate they know. And they know Joe: Perceived in public opinion as the wacky uncle / comic sidekick to the more professional, cooler Obama. One of the more shocking polling numbers is the support among Black voters (especially Black women voters) that Biden currently enjoys. Even after getting burned on his busing stance by an actual Black Woman campaigning for the office, Biden is still the preferred choice because he's the more likable choice.

And this is in spite of the reality - something I've noted before - that Biden himself isn't all that charismatic or memorable.

Which is where the concerns kick in by the other factions within the Democratic party worried that Biden may win the nomination but then campaign poorly against a dark force like trump and lose that November. trump may not be an effective debater, but as 2016 proved the debates are almost meaningless anymore. What will matter to voters in the booths when the choice has to be made is "Will this person lead?" Granted, a lot of Americans have seen trump in action and know damn well he isn't leading he's destroying, but can Biden prove a better choice?

Biden is insanely conciliatory towards a Republican party that has shown harsh partisan behavior towards both the Democrats and the nation ever since Obama was sworn into office in 2009. There is every possibility that if the Republicans retain the Senate (and worse, win back the House) they can easily refuse to work with a Biden administration, even to the point of refusing to appoint his Cabinet and judicial nominations outright. This is not a position that can win over a lot of Democratic primary voters who have only known McConnell's obstructionist ways over that time period, but is also not a position that can win over moderate voters who want things done.

It's not that the voters will stick with trump in this situation, but that they might not show up to vote (again, but for slightly different reasons) at all. Which can hurt the down-ballot votes, etc. etc. Biden is not that safe a choice, unless the Democratic Party across the entire voter base is on board with him (and with the BernieBros already threatening to no-show against anyone NOT Bernie, this is a problem).

These are concerns, not great ones, but they need being answered well before the Convention should Biden win the primaries: He'll need to select a near-perfect Veep for the ticket one that can appease enough Progressives, and he will need to agree to a more left-leaning platform than he already has (which may mean agreeing to a Medicare-For-Many compromise), AND he will need to push hard (the whole party has to) on a campaign to flip enough Senate seats to avoid outright obstructionism. Unfortunately, Passive-Positive types like to work in a comfort zone, and some of these efforts may burst that particular bubble to where Biden won't campaign better than he needs to.

If he wins, Biden will also have to confront a lot of problems that most Passive-Positives aren't happy to confront. trump has already dismantled much of the operations of the Executive branch, probably to the point of a full rebuild of many agencies. Foreign policy issues have to fight through the toxic environments trump has created with almost all of our allies (on the bright side, those allies will be happy to get ANYBODY not trump and may forgive a few bumps while re-establishing relations). Biden would have to cope with the reality that his faith in a bipartisan Congress won't really be there when he starts working.

One other concern will be how he sets up his own White House. The potential for inviting in some of the more unsavory types - not only corrupt power brokers among Democrats but also corrupt Republicans Biden is likely to invite to create a diverse administration - will be high. While a lot of Passive-Positive Presidents (Grant, Harding, Reagan, Dubya) end up presiding over corrupt administrations - because they bring in friends or party hacks who abuse the President's trust - there is a good chance Biden won't rule over such an administration. There have been Pass-Pos leaders like Taft who worked as reasonable and relatively scandal-free leaders. A lot depends on who Biden brings with him, not only his Veep choice but also his Chief of Staff, his Cabinet, and any Congressional allies he relies on to get an agenda passed.

As a personal note: I've made a personal preference already - Harris, followed by Warren - but in all likelihood I will support the Democratic nominee in 2020. Biden will NOT worry me as much as this article may seem - I am throwing out there a lot of hypotheticals anyway - but I do worry about the poor campaign performance. At some point, the gaffes become inexcusable and the loss of general voter support could happen. I just want the best possible Democratic candidate winning in 2020. I'm not entirely sure that's Joe.

Next Up On Predicting Character: ...Sigh. Yes, I *have* to give him a fair shake...