Biden and Bernie/Bernie and Biden ... I don't care what the order is. I want them both.
The anti-Trump “Left” ranges from The Squad to Mitt Romney (lets see how he votes He’s voting to convict!) at least and I’ve been worried about uniting this raucous and sprawling coalition around what I believe should be our primary objective: Defeating President Trump in the 2020 election. Perhaps the one idea that unites the entire opposition is the realization that Trump is a clear and present danger to the American republic who must be removed.
I have been profoundly disturbed by the DNC’s machinations to attempt to block Sander’s path to the nomination. It’s both ethically dubious and an extremely risky electoral strategy. I’ve also been displeased with reports of the aggressive tactics and language used by some of the so-called “Bernie Bros”, and I’m more than a little concerned by some of Biden’s lackluster debate performances.
However, my primary concern is that none of our candidates have the ability to unite the “left” against Trump because the left is too big to be united by one individual or one set of ideas. While you may love your particular candidate of choice, the electoral problem is that a victory by any single candidate will leave a substantial minority of the party in the cold. This is big problem because waiting in the wings is a vast international network of disinformation specialists who are waiting to exploit any hint of disunity across the left. With the imminent Impeachment acquittal and the Trump co-option of the Justice Department, there is absolutely nothing standing in their way except for our own efforts to unify and combat them. Whether you are on the left, right, or center of the anti-Trump movement, we need every one of us if we are going to defeat Trump.
This is why I am calling for a unity ticket that unites progressives and moderates around the shared goal of defeating Donald Trump. The only way to achieve this is for the candidate with the most votes to select the candidate with the second most votes as her or his running mate. At this moment, the most likely alignment would be a ticket of Biden and Sanders or Sanders and Biden to represent our party in the election this November. I firmly believe that if the party had taken this rout in 2016 and Clinton had selected Sanders as her VP, Hilary Clinton would be President and this nightmare of an administration would never had occurred.
This is based on the assumption that Biden will win the moderate “lane” of the primary and Sanders will win the progressive lane and that one of the two will end up with the most number of delegates. I’ll admit my bias is in favor of this ticket because I think it gives us the best chance to win. I can see advantages for both Biden and Sanders at the top of the ticket and am fairly indifferent to which one it is. However, the point is that the voters will get to decide whoever ends up winning each lane and who holds the top of the ticket, and the large plurality of voters who wanted something different will also get their representation. The strategy holds whether the process delivers Warren and Klobachar, Sanders and Bloomberg (oh my!), Buttigieg and Warren, whoever. The point is to address our differences ourselves and not allow them to be used by our enemies to defeat us.
P.S. I’d meant to write this before the Iowa Caucus, so that folks would not think I was writing this just because my favorite candidate lost, but then life intervened. Full disclosure on my leaning and biases: I don’t actually have a favorite candidate and at different times during the process have voted for Inslee, Harris, Warren, and Biden in the Kos monthly straw polls. I’ve never voted for Sanders, but I’m not against him as a candidate and would support him 100% in a general election campaign and it’s possible I could vote for him in the primary if Biden continues his lackluster performances. I’m not crazy about Buttigieg. I could live with Bloomberg or Klobuchar but I’m not going to vote for either in a straw poll or primary. Mostly, I just want to defeat Donald Trump and I’m going to vote for the candidate that I think gives us the best chance of doing that if only I could figure that out!
