Many Democrats have faced off in a duel between adrenalin fueled Bernie Sanders supporters and, by comparison, chillaxed Joe Biden supporters. Likewise there have been a number of articles in the progressive media portending with trepidation doom for the progressive movement if Joe Biden is elected.
Today, Political Magazine published an article with the subtitle “2020 promises to offer two old men but no new ideas.” It is by POLITICO co-founder John Harris.
ALTITUDE
The premise of the article can be summed up here:
Instead, this promises to be a race above all about character and personal qualities. It will be waged by old men—age 73 for the incumbent, age 77 for the presumptive challenger—whose essential worldviews were formed decades ago and whose essential instincts and preoccupations are backward-looking.
The main idea of Biden’s campaign is, in the phrase that had its origins in a malapropism by Warren G. Harding, a return to normalcy. He has the usual roster of standard Democratic policy positions but they are not animated by an arresting new vision, like Barack Obama’s “hope and change” message of 2008. Instead, Biden’s promise is mostly about the restoration of civility and precedent.
Invoking Warren G. Harding’s slogan is obviously not an accidental attack against Joe Biden. Consider how Harris disparages Biden:
Thomas Friedman would, I venture to say, disagree with John Harris.
Tom Friedman begins by noting that Bernie Sanders “often cites Denmark as the kind of country he would like America to be under his ideology of ‘democratic socialism.’ His view is that “Bernie Sanders, with his hostile attitudes toward free trade, free markets and multinational corporations, probably couldn’t get elected to a municipal council in Denmark today.”
Here are some excerpts from his OpEd:
In short, Sanders cherry-picks Denmark. He stresses what he loves — all that the Danish state provides — and then he ignores two things: one obvious and important and one less obvious and even more important.
The obvious and important one is the relentlessly entrepreneurial capitalism that generates Denmark’s prosperity and that is celebrated there. The less obvious, but more important, feature of Denmark’s success is the high-trust social compact among its business community, labor unions, social entrepreneurs and government. That’s the real secret of Denmark’s sauce.
Friedman believes that Sanders sincerely wants to eliminate income in equality as much as any progressive.
His conclusion:
The truth is, Joe Biden would make a much better Scandinavian-type leader than Bernie Sanders.
Biden, in my view, would be much more likely to — and able to — build a new social contract in America than a President Sanders, because Biden not only genuinely cares about the working class and the homeless — and understands the need for access to lifelong education and health care — he also knows that you don’t get there by demonizing the engines of capitalism and job creation. You have to find a way to work with them.
Denmark did not become Denmark because of a revolution. It evolved where it is today through a steady iteration — unleashing its entrepreneurs on the world to generate as much wealth as they could while constantly forging a dialogue at home among all the stakeholders about how best to share enough of the profits to have a truly just safety net, while not destroying the free-market, free-trade engines of growth, and while maintaining a high sales tax so everyone contributes something.
If Denmark’s social contract is your model — and it’s a good one — then I’d trust Biden much more than Bernie to head us there.
If Bernie Sanders doesn’t send a clear message to his supporters, both among voters and in the progressive press, that the time for going negative against Joe Biden as someone living in yesterday he is essentially going along with Trump’s characterization of him as “sleepy Joe.”
We don’t need more divisive articles like the following. This is from progressive activist Jim Hightower (the Texan in the cowboy hat) on AlterNet:
Just when you thought this political year couldn’t get any weirder, along comes the entire Democratic Party establishment rushing en masse to the cliff’s edge, hurling itself headfirst into the presidential contest. What has spurred this gaggle of political operatives, fat-cat donors and former presidential hopefuls is a collective impulse to unite behind the very worst candidate the party could possibly put up against President Donald Trump in November’s election: Joe Biden.
While practically everyone in the political swirl admits privately that the former vice president is pretty slow, awfully corporate and practically bent double with a bag full of very bad political positions he’s taken during his decadeslong career as a Washington insider, his establishment cohorts are now resurrecting his dormant campaign by ecstatically proclaiming that he’s a “winner.”
Here’s another example by writer/poet Anis Shivani on Common Dreams, republished on AlterNet:
It begins with what the author thinks Bernie should say in the next debate:
“I’m going to make the case tonight that Joe is unelectable in a general election, that he’s the weakest adversary we could put up against Trump. When you need a steady leader to fight the rise of intolerance and xenophobia in this country and around the world, the last thing you want is someone who put in place the policies that helped bring about the state of anxiety that caused people to jump on Trump’s bandwagon in the first place. Being a leading supporter of disastrous trade policies like NAFTA and TPP, which my 2016 opponent in the primaries also supported just as vigorously, is the kind of thing that will cause us to lose the Midwest and other vulnerable parts of the country. If you thought that the Democratic party’s firewall collapsed in 2016, wait till you have Joe at the helm; it may be gone for a generation. There’s understandable fear and panic among Democrats about what four more years of Trump might mean, but I want to argue tonight that the least likely way to put Trump out of business is to nominate a candidate with as much personal and political baggage as Joe.”
Because, despite Biden’s orchestrated and meteoric resurrection from the dead, he is by far the most compromised of the establishment candidates.