“Do you really think Sanders or warren would be doing better?’”: a comment I see pretty often. the answer? Sanders would have some issues, but absolutely Warren would be doing better, probably some other candidates who didn’t do as well also.
This question isn’t about Biden or Warren or other individual politicians, of course, it’s really another left vs. moderate thing, implying that more leftish politicians Just Can’t Get Things Done.
So, how would Warren + some of the other candidates deal with a 50/50 senate?
I Know these would be different
Progressives More Socially Accepted, Moderates less so
Which means fewer people telling the filibuster that they are awesome, supporting bipartisanship, etc.
”Washington is wired for Republicans”, “Out of touch consultants doing the same thing over and over”. The pattern’s obvious if you pay any attention at all to politics: lots of campaign people, media people, party people, etc. lean right wing on a deep level. Biden has hired a good amount of more ambitious, leftish types but still reinforces this as the big moderate in the dem primary race. But a more prog/leftish president will hire a different group of campaign people, promote and support more proggy groups, even just having a more leftish person in power changes how people respond.
How does this effect the filibuster crew? They talk to people. They get support and attention, get told they are important, get praised or blamed or criticized for things. Talk to a different set of people, and these incentives change: Manchin probably has a collection telling him about his great bipartisanship and bringing up deficits a lot, Sinema does the “get cancelled” thing of looking rebellious while being told she’s smart and important. Change who they talk to, force them to talk to people who aren’t kissing up to moderates or Republicans, they don’t get this kind of praise.
You can maybe see social effects in real time. For COVID relief at the beginning of the year, when dems started somewhat in the same direction, and the filibuster crew resisted and nitpicked the bill, but still mostly passed it as a lot of people expected. But after 6 months of “blame the progressives” and the New York Mayor race, and arrogant southerners who think they’re better than us* telling midwesterners how to vote, among lots of other attacks on progressives, the story changes and they refuse to compromise** or support anything of value.
*This is irony, if it isn’t obvious.
**I can play the compromise game as well, ha ha ha.
Opposes Filibuster from the Beginning
In the primary, most candidates, including Biden (and Sanders, which is a big strike against him) argued for keeping the filibuster. Warren argued for its removal, some other candidates were fine either way or didn’t say much. It was a pretty big issue, at least on here, I wrote about it second point here.
Why is this helpful? Various dem leaders have taken awhile to drop or work around the filibuster for various things, having a president support this from the beginning, as a party leader, makes this faster, possibly passing some bills like debt ceiling more quickly and avoiding as much drawn out negotiating.
Student Debt
Of course, Manchin and the Filibusters (Sinema vocals, Manchin guitar, Feinstein bass, Warner drums, others filling in on keyboard or backing vocals), may be determined to cause trouble no matter what anyone else does, even with the best majority leader (almost Freudian slipped and wrote minority leader. Or maybe muscle memory from before 2021.). A president can still do other things, and Warren has come out for removing student debt.
Maybe this gets challenged, though internet questions who could actually sue over this (probably someone finds a way), there is some legal stuff to back this up (here, and possibly a department of education internal thing), so still quite possibly makes it through. This means even if the filibuster crew does its thing, you get a visible, obvious immediate benefit for a big voting group.
Good Chance these would be Different
Lots of Other Presidential Things, Other Programs
“But Biden/Dems have done lots of things as well”, there has been a lot done, but also a lot of sluggishness/ resistance. From congress, we have the COVID relief bill from spring 2021, which still took a lot of time thanks to the Manchin slowdown, and than any big bill have pretty much ben shut down. Presidentially, we have slowness and resistance in sending out masks or tests, the student loan payment pause, you can maybe throw in slowing evictions (that was never really sorted out after the executive order and supreme court.)
These programs could have been done faster, without needing lots of asking, and there are other policies:
-Immigration enforcement: Republicans occasionally bring up “the border” even with continuing a lot of their programs, so less destructive enforcement probably means little for immigrant haters while supporters will have something to look to.
-Sending vaccines or patents to other countries, ramping up production if possible: there were 1-2 posts here about obstacles to doing this, and I haven’t seen anything since. If nothing else, this reduces the chance of variants. Also might help diplomacy, whether or not people change their votes in response.
-I’ve heard marijuana pardons or conviction removal as a possibility.
-And probably others I just don’t know about/haven’t seen.
Would other candidates be better? Warren’s an obvious on here, has run on relieving student debt, and putting out lots of proposals during the primary means she and her hires are looking to put programs like these into action. A number of candidates were willing to support more aggressive = creative proposals: postal banking, more intense global warming action, etc.: this likely means supporting some of the listed parts above.
Improve the Mood of the Country
The U.S. right now is sick. Not just with COVID, and I’m not talking physically: the culture/psychology/general mood is poisonous. The COVID response with anti-vax/anti-treatment is part of it, but you can seem other conservative actions like Critical Race complaints, book banning, or the existence of this sort of politics. Resentment runs thick, you can even see it on this site with angry comments at removing student debt, or general complaints of “why are you talking about (problem, improvement) when (other problem) exists” as if helping with one thing must mean avoiding another.
Meanwhile, the country for years has been the land of Can’t Do Things. Even before the 2016 election, getting cheaper and faster built/better maintained infrastructure, cheaper and better health insurance, were all doable but somehow not happening in the great big U.S.A. Building renewables/cutting greenhouse gases is a more recent one: doable with the technology getting better but avoided. Add more recent fixing COVID, fixing up police departments, prosecuting January 6th people, plus that very basic BBB bill to this list. What’s new recently is the blatant resistance, not based on any economics, engineering, or such, to doing any of this: It’s just dismissed as “unpopular” or “impractical” or ‘don't want that”, or like with BBB or voting rights bills, a “disappointment to liberals”. I even see this in day to day life, though this post is already long enough so I won’t go into details. Apart from internet politics: I notice over and over again on this site and others: You give posts/podcasts complaining about something or commenting on something lots of attention, but links to group organizing for elections, descriptions of organizing, or such you give far less.
Day to day life is as sick as the politics (really, they overlap a ton): Tweets like this about work culture ring true, and I feel the low level angers/resentment/resistance in all sorts of personal interactions.
It’s a shit environment when you put it all together. Feelings wise, helplessness, resentment, and rage are a low level draining, toxic environment to operate in. Hard factors wise, we’re missing out on useful programs because many of you simply refuse to support them, or resist them, out of resentment or helplessness.
Could a president help with any of this? To me its a bunch of woo-woo, but many of you praise good speeches after a disaster, or presentation, or such, so clearly think this is at least a little important.
Orange man obviously fucked this up a lot: just being an all out asshole and supporting others, promoting corruption, we all know the drill. Biden was supposed to help out by being friendly and calm. But he did in the primary run as a candidate of not doing things (“I’m not like Bernie”, “this is America”), and does praise Republicans and Moderates a good amount: these groups continue to cause problems and get away with a lot.
Would would other candidates do better? First, other candidates were more willing to fix problems, to act optimistic and ambitious. Warren’s the obvious choice here, arguing that problems can be fixed and knowing how to do it. Other candidates did some of this as well, being willing to support bigger goals more ambious projects, etc. A president proojecting optimism, abilitity to solve problems, willingness to make improvements is a valuable thing.
Second: Accountability. Lack of this allows a lot of societal sickness to continue. Ant-vax podcasters, anti-mask people, Manchin, Sinema, orange man, regular everyday school board disrupters and anti-vaxers: all of these people act like asses and are allowed or rewarded for doing so. In general, the more right wing you are, the more you can get away with. biden has in general been too damn friendly politically, and dems too willing to go bipartisan, to really establish good accountability. A tougher minded president, willing to enforce more and attack more, does better at holding people responsible. (Warren is an obvious pick here with things like financial enforcement and lack of filibuster support, I could also see Gillibrand being tougher on members who oppose things she’s pushing for, or some quieter candidates who still stand firm on stuff like COVID enforcement.)
(Two people who would not help are Sanders and Harris, based on their supporters. See this and this and..this post is long enough as is, I can link in the comments if you really want. Sanders was tolerant of far too many conspiracy friendly “make friends with Rogan” “Need to be more racist” types of supporters and campaign people, hardcore Harris supporters are the angriest, most conspirational of moderates. Both feed their own forms toxicity.)
“But the Country wouldn’t have voted for anyone else!”
Is Biden the only possible person the country would have picked? I can’t prove how other candidates would have done, I didn’t see these theoretical elections. But Biden as only possible candidate has some issues:
-Safe, moderate, generic, familiar candidate. The best choice to win an election. Got an even higher fraction of the primary vote than Biden did (It’s someone else, Ha!, I tricked you. :) ) Mr. MacAuliffe proceeded to pretty solidly lose an election in what had been a good solid blue state (and probably still is, really. Light bluish can still go slightly rep in a bad election) Or go with Cunningham, Gideon, or other questionable senate races.
Biden’s campaign doesn’t seem as bad as MacAuliffe’s, I don’t know enough about the other races to compare, but all use the same sort of conventional, standard people that run most democratic elections.
-Biden’s primary campaign...not that great. “But he got chosen!” “But he had the voters that mattered” “But...”. Biden coming into this primary was the most well known candidate, the previous vice president of a popular president. In his company are Al Gore, who was chosen by all states in 2000, Hillary Clinton who was picked (close elections, but still a win) by Iowa and Nevada. The closest to Biden was Mondale in 1988, with three of the first 4 states voting against him: Mondale was the vice president of the losing Carter, which isn’t a great comparison.
For such a candidate, losing in the first three states and not coming close in the third, maybe throw in fundraising issues also, and requiring several candidates to drop out is a not good performance. Some of you will point to black voters, but this is nowhere close to enough: If the first four states lumped everyone except Biden, Warren, and Sanders into, say, Klobuchar, the split would be roughly 34 Klob, 27 Sanders and Biden, and 12 Warren* (If Warren drops, her voters split differently than candidates like Klobuchar or Buttigeig would. Admittedly, I’m not sure what Steyer’s supporters do, but these don’t change the results much.)
Whether Biden, MacAuliffe, or anyone else, we didn’t see the same elections with other candidates, so we can’t actually say what would have happened. But it is pretty clear these types of candidates make a lot of goofs in elections, and often aren’t the best ones.
*I wanted to do a quick and dirty estimate of the whole primary, but surprisingly didn’t have a quick and dirty google to grab the demographics of the whole thing. So I tried to regress early primary state results into demographics, but forgot you need more observations than variables, and the results didn’t end up sensible. So backup option 3 it is: what the vote percentages would be in the first 4 states together if each state’s votes were the proportional their delegates. Distorted by caucuses, but it's getting late as I write this. Demographics are more rural, more black, less latino, less educated than the country, which in the primary probably little effects the vote, maybe biases it towards biden a bit compared to the whole country.
Remember; This isn’t actually about Biden and Warren (Gillibrand, Inslee, Booker, O’rouke, etc.)
We don’t have time machines to change the results, and if we did we’d probably kill Hitler, stop the Dinosaur extinction, give modern tech to historical culture of choice, etc. way before changing this election. Maybe some the the 2020 candidates run in the next competitive primary, likely new people show up also.
The actual problem is this:
From here:
"Here's the thing," Ocasio-Cortez said. "I can't point to one major agenda where Progressives or this so-called Left sidelined the action of the party in some dramatic fashion that can lead to this. I mean, the moderate end of the party has received everything that they have wanted from President Biden, including President Biden as the nominee himself. They got their President. They got their agenda. They got their sequence; they got their infrastructure plan with no BBB. They got all of it, and I can't really point to any real substantive or serious or intellectually rigorous argument as to anything that the Progressive Wing has done aside from supporting President Biden oftentimes more than the Moderate wing of the party has in a way that could lead to sinking poll numbers."
I’ve written a couple posts on this and will probably write more: The opposition to anything progressive/leftish has been ridiculous the past year. It’s not based on what you think will improve the country or your lives, intense opposition is entirely about not letting the progs score sore a win, forcing compromise for the sake of compromise, and playing to social expectation that supporting right wing stuff deserves actual power, while supporting more leftish stuff demands serving others, being a “team player” (doormat), putting others feelings first, etc.
Of course, the proggier point of view has done a far better job over the pat year (Manchinema did screw everyone over on BBB and voting rights, global warming is continuing to get worse, republicans are not in fact your friends.) and a lot of you just can’t admit it, so have to push arguments that, really, moderate actions are the best anyone can do. Which includes arguing that other presidents couldn’t do better, or that the generic moderate white guy is the only candidate enough people will vote for, and running anyone else in even some bluish districts is an automatic loss.
And so this post exists to punch those arguments down.
Want a better run government, elect more proggy candidates. Cisneros is the obvious one, I know of a few other primaries and at some point should put a list together.