As the grandson of a Teamster Truck Driver, I’m very proud to announce this:
The 1.4 million member trade union the International Brotherhood of Teamsters endorsed Joe Biden for president Tuesday, its board unanimously voting to throw its support behind the Democratic ticket.
“The Teamsters have a friend in Joe Biden,” Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa said in a statement. “From his very first election to the Senate until now, Vice President Biden has been on the side of working Americans supporting their right to organize, their desire for fair wages and their need for a secure retirement.”
P.S. I’m looking forward to this:
Democrats added another Republican to their lineup of speakers at the convention on Tuesday: Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State under George W. Bush.
Powell already endorsed Biden, and he also backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in his 2008 and 2012 campaigns. But this is the first time that he has spoken at a Democratic convention.
“Our country needs a commander in chief who takes care of our troops, in the same way he would his own family,” Powell said in a clip released on Tuesday. “For Joe Biden, that doesn’t need teaching. It comes from the experienced he shares with millions of military families, sending his beloved son off to war and praying to God he would come home safe.”
And Ady Barkan has been making the case I have been making:
Looking back, are there lessons progressives should take from this year’s primary?
That is a hard question. I do think that the pandemic proves the need for the political revolution that Bernie Sanders offered and the big structural changes that Elizabeth Warren laid out in such detail. I do think that had the pandemic come a few months earlier, we would have gotten a different result in the primary.
But, Franklin Roosevelt did not run as a progressive reformer in 1932. Lyndon Johnson was a Southern segregationist for the first two decades of his career, until he began to transform himself in the late ’50s. Even Abraham Lincoln was a moderate compromise candidate for the Republican Party in 1860. And yet, all three presided over bursts of social, legal and political revolutions because the American people demanded them. I hope that the same can be true of President Biden.
By the way, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ interview in People Magazine is worth a read:
The two of you went head to head in the primary race. You’ve talked about not holding grudges ...
Biden: Well, we go back a long way. She was friends with my Beau, my son. The first time I was aware of who she was, I got a phone call from Beau saying, “I want you to nominate Kamala Harris for the United States Senate. She’s a friend of mine.”
Harris: That is how I got to really know Joe as a person, hearing about him through his son. But I also want to add this: Joe Biden had the audacity to say he was going to have a woman as his vice president. He didn’t apologize for it. In a country where we still have so much to do to fight toward our ideals, he just fast-forwarded the whole thing.
Biden: The government should look like the country. There’s a new law of physics in politics: Any country that does not engage more than half their population in sharing the full responsibilities of governance and power is absolutely going to lose.
Let’s get ready to win the White House and the U.S. Senate. Click below to donate and get involved with Biden-Harris ticket and with these Democratic Senate candidates:
Sen. Doug Jones (D. AL)
Al Gross (I. AK)
Mark Kelly (D. AZ)
John Hickenlooper (D. CO)
Jon Ossoff (D. GA)
Raphael Warnock (D. GA)
Theresa Greenfield (D. IA)
Paulette Jordan (D. ID)
Barbara Bollier (D. KS)
Amy McGrath (D. KY)
Adrian Perkins (D. LA)
Sara Gideon (D. ME)
Sen. Gary Peters (D. MI)
Sen. Tina Smith (D. MN)
Steve Bullock (D. MT)
Cal Cunningham (D. NC)
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D. NH)
Jaime Harrison (D. SC)
MJ Hegar (D. TX)