Fun Fact: Within 24 hours, both Joe Biden and
Donald Trump had mixed up the
locations of recent mass shootings. It's easy to dismiss this as trivial
coincidence, but both do this sort of thing a lot.
The two Orange Ones are pretty similar. Both old boys are gaffe-prone, handsy, senile false populists with hair issues. They're both obsessed with IQ scores and crowd sizes. They're so similar that it's difficult to distinguish their statements from one another, hence there is a Trump or Biden quote quiz.
Portraying racial and social conservatism as political prudence has been a centrist standby since the late 1970s - hence Biden's anti-busing stance then and his Nixonian “law and order" focus on crime thereafter. He personifies the centrist effort to conspicuously disown the 1960s and the 1970s.
These are not just poor judgment calls or personal failings: This is longstanding centrist strategy. Their professed faith is that “liberal overreach” caused conservative ascendance, so veering right is their knee-jerk response to every setback - and every advance. Advances absolutely terrify them.
It’s political motor memory: mollycoddle bigotry and befriend big business (which means betraying labor). Prior to his infamous Sister Souljah Moment, Bill Clinton's top advisers had told him he “must become involved in highly publicized confrontations with one or more Democratic constituencies.” Well, Joe Biden had been distancing himself from liberalism for far longer.
This is all not a little ironic when you consider Biden hitching his wagon so tightly to being President Obama's Vice President. We all saw an African American with the name Barack Hussein Obama weather insane barrages of racism and Islamophobia and still crush his Republican opponents, yet centrists still think we need an old school white guy to win.
Biden’s target audience loves Obama without realizing what Obama’s presidency proved was possible. I wrote about this some before in a blog post entitled “Omitting Obama.” Eight years of “O” have had zero effect on their thinking. It's as if they had not happened.
Whether you see class in purely cultural terms or just want others to, Joe Biden sounds like a plausible populist - and even better, an acceptable one. And centrist “realism” makes Biden’s awkward racist record acceptable as well. They want to take any talk of class or economic equality off the table, but a little light racism is fine with them and always has been.
That's not hyperbole. If any comfortable conventional pundit has recommended that Biden go on the offensive with his own Sister Souljah Moment, I have not heard about it. But I am pretty certain they are thinking of it. [And it happened. See second edit below.] There is no credibly denying this when apologists paint his disadvantages as advantages. Because how are they advantages? And you cannot portray Biden’s racist past as irrelevant if you think it is an advantage today.
And if you are rationalizing that Joe Biden is cleverly fooling people, ask yourself if Amy McGrath’s disastrously dishonest campaign roll-out fooled anyone. Then ask yourself how anyone so utterly befuddled as Joe Biden can be an agile mastermind.
Low-key racism will not peel away any votes from Trump. Those who voted for Trump out of racism are overwhelmingly already Republican and not gettable. Those Reagan Democrats left the fold long ago. Do not confuse them with Obama-to-Trump voters. The two subgroups are not the same.
Obama-to-Trump voters who defected over economic issues such as NAFTA are gettable. After decades of contempt and neglect by the Democratic Party establishment, Obama's presidency seemed to reverse this distressing self-sabotaging trend. His actions did not always align with his soaring populist rhetoric (and his 2008 language was almost Sandersesque), but Obama did save Detroit with the auto industry bailout. That's why the Blue Wall never failed him.
By stark contrast, the Clinton name brand was so tightly tied to the betrayal of NAFTA that the party might as well have run Mitt Romney instead of Hillary Clinton. When Hill defended Bill's economic record, it was like Mitt saying we should let the Motor City go bankrupt.
Many working class voters wrongly rationalized that Trump didn't really mean his racist rhetoric and was just doing it to get attention. Now they know better and are gettable, but we can still fuck it up in a number of ways. Naturally, centrists have advocated or already practiced all of them.
Scolding them for staying home, voting third party, or voting Trump will fuck this up. Scorning or slandering economic populism will fuck this up. And finally, embracing racism will also fuck it up. It's not only morally abhorrent, but strategically senseless: Racists are not going to vote for racist-lite when they have the option of voting full-throated racist. They will predictably stick with Trump.
Trying to woo those voters will fail as spectacularly as trying to woo conservative suburbanites did in 2016. It will also demoralize the base, which also happened in 2016. Yes, demoralizing your base with infidelity is definitely an immense liability. Enthusiasm determines turnout. Who knew?
The point here is the racists are not coming back and we should not even try to get them back. They're solid Republicans now and hopelessly lost.
But by contrast, those Obama-to-Trump voters are gettable. Thus, the key to winning is fighting against inequality across the board - racial, sexual, economic, etc. It's good politics because it's not awkwardly hypocritical and it promotes crucial coalition-building.
Let’s revisit that infidelity analogy. If your current partner sees you still trying to seduce their bitter enemy (who you incidentally have zero chance of bedding anyway), how forgiving is your sweetie going to be of your fruitless pursuit? But winning back someone you had lost by now behaving yourself seems a lot more likely - provided you prove you are truly serious. Picking Biden doesn't signal seriousness, picking Sanders does. Biden is more malarkey, Sanders is no bullshit.
So what does your fed-up partner want to see and hear? Not more gas-lighting guilt trips.
EDIT 09/10/19:
Consider this brilliant Twitter ridicule the Cliff Notes version of my post.
Second EDIT 09/12/19:
CALLED IT! Today on “Morning Joe," Bill Maher advised “This race is begging for someone to do a kind of a Sister Souljah moment with that far left.”
The two Orange Ones are pretty similar. Both old boys are gaffe-prone, handsy, senile false populists with hair issues. They're both obsessed with IQ scores and crowd sizes. They're so similar that it's difficult to distinguish their statements from one another, hence there is a Trump or Biden quote quiz.
They both make
absurd boasts about their abilities, support, or accomplishments. Trump trumpets that
he has a “great relationship with the blacks,” while Biden brags he has
the “most progressive record of anyone running.” Time after time, they say
strange things that would make a cat laugh.
Also, both seem loath to make sincere apologies, which is often a non-issue because angrily doubling-down (frequently incoherently) is their favorite response to criticism so it rarely gets to the non-apology point.
For example, when Corey Booker said Joe Biden should apologize for waxing nostalgic about the “civility" of segregationist senators, Biden shot back that Booker should be the one to apologize(!) As with Anita Hill, Joe Biden tried to smooth things over with a phone call - but of course no apology was part of that. As a New York Times headline explained “Joe Biden Called Cory Booker. But Apologize? It’s Not the Biden Way." Eventually he did, but it took a lot of push back, which does not bode well if being a decent adult decision-maker still matters after Trump.
The fact that the two Oranges ones got in a silly tiff over who would win in a schoolyard fist fight tells you all you need to know. Mixing up cities is their least significant similarity, but it adds to the total - and more importantly draws attention to it.
To clarify, I'm not saying Biden is as bad as Trump. But what I am saying is the less like Trump our candidate is, the better. And we can do much better and thereby improve our odds.
Some centrists don't get this. They see these dismal similarities as advantages for Biden that will “win over” Trump voters. Their argument is both shallow an amoral. It puts personality over policy. To them, the above litany of defects are actually assets because they think both candidates come across a genuine guys who bluntly say what they think. In short, they both talk like Archie Bunker.
These centrists think that's all the populism we need - the persona, not the policy. While Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren talk of breaking up the banks, Joe Biden has spent his political career promoting the banking industry's interests. Biden wrote the draconian bankruptcy bill that made it easier for creditors to squeeze and hound borrowers. Vocally opposing that vicious bill is in large part what put then Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren on the political map when she famously clashed with him in the 2005 Senate hearings on it. But that's not the form populism centrists feel comfortable with. They want a candidate who says “malarkey" but defends billionaires. And so they support Joe.
And of course, these timid centrists think Biden being a straight white guy is also important. At a Biden rally, HuffPost reporter Brain Marans discovered, “Everyone here who I have spoken to who is firmly in Biden's corner cited electability. Two women said they thought a woman is too risky for that reason; a man said Buttigieg being gay might turn off some voters too." Of course, “electability” is in the eye of the voter so myopically pursuing it as a strategy might actually backfire.
Also, both seem loath to make sincere apologies, which is often a non-issue because angrily doubling-down (frequently incoherently) is their favorite response to criticism so it rarely gets to the non-apology point.
For example, when Corey Booker said Joe Biden should apologize for waxing nostalgic about the “civility" of segregationist senators, Biden shot back that Booker should be the one to apologize(!) As with Anita Hill, Joe Biden tried to smooth things over with a phone call - but of course no apology was part of that. As a New York Times headline explained “Joe Biden Called Cory Booker. But Apologize? It’s Not the Biden Way." Eventually he did, but it took a lot of push back, which does not bode well if being a decent adult decision-maker still matters after Trump.
The fact that the two Oranges ones got in a silly tiff over who would win in a schoolyard fist fight tells you all you need to know. Mixing up cities is their least significant similarity, but it adds to the total - and more importantly draws attention to it.
To clarify, I'm not saying Biden is as bad as Trump. But what I am saying is the less like Trump our candidate is, the better. And we can do much better and thereby improve our odds.
Some centrists don't get this. They see these dismal similarities as advantages for Biden that will “win over” Trump voters. Their argument is both shallow an amoral. It puts personality over policy. To them, the above litany of defects are actually assets because they think both candidates come across a genuine guys who bluntly say what they think. In short, they both talk like Archie Bunker.
These centrists think that's all the populism we need - the persona, not the policy. While Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren talk of breaking up the banks, Joe Biden has spent his political career promoting the banking industry's interests. Biden wrote the draconian bankruptcy bill that made it easier for creditors to squeeze and hound borrowers. Vocally opposing that vicious bill is in large part what put then Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren on the political map when she famously clashed with him in the 2005 Senate hearings on it. But that's not the form populism centrists feel comfortable with. They want a candidate who says “malarkey" but defends billionaires. And so they support Joe.
And of course, these timid centrists think Biden being a straight white guy is also important. At a Biden rally, HuffPost reporter Brain Marans discovered, “Everyone here who I have spoken to who is firmly in Biden's corner cited electability. Two women said they thought a woman is too risky for that reason; a man said Buttigieg being gay might turn off some voters too." Of course, “electability” is in the eye of the voter so myopically pursuing it as a strategy might actually backfire.
Portraying racial and social conservatism as political prudence has been a centrist standby since the late 1970s - hence Biden's anti-busing stance then and his Nixonian “law and order" focus on crime thereafter. He personifies the centrist effort to conspicuously disown the 1960s and the 1970s.
These are not just poor judgment calls or personal failings: This is longstanding centrist strategy. Their professed faith is that “liberal overreach” caused conservative ascendance, so veering right is their knee-jerk response to every setback - and every advance. Advances absolutely terrify them.
It’s political motor memory: mollycoddle bigotry and befriend big business (which means betraying labor). Prior to his infamous Sister Souljah Moment, Bill Clinton's top advisers had told him he “must become involved in highly publicized confrontations with one or more Democratic constituencies.” Well, Joe Biden had been distancing himself from liberalism for far longer.
This is all not a little ironic when you consider Biden hitching his wagon so tightly to being President Obama's Vice President. We all saw an African American with the name Barack Hussein Obama weather insane barrages of racism and Islamophobia and still crush his Republican opponents, yet centrists still think we need an old school white guy to win.
Biden’s target audience loves Obama without realizing what Obama’s presidency proved was possible. I wrote about this some before in a blog post entitled “Omitting Obama.” Eight years of “O” have had zero effect on their thinking. It's as if they had not happened.
Whether you see class in purely cultural terms or just want others to, Joe Biden sounds like a plausible populist - and even better, an acceptable one. And centrist “realism” makes Biden’s awkward racist record acceptable as well. They want to take any talk of class or economic equality off the table, but a little light racism is fine with them and always has been.
That's not hyperbole. If any comfortable conventional pundit has recommended that Biden go on the offensive with his own Sister Souljah Moment, I have not heard about it. But I am pretty certain they are thinking of it. [And it happened. See second edit below.] There is no credibly denying this when apologists paint his disadvantages as advantages. Because how are they advantages? And you cannot portray Biden’s racist past as irrelevant if you think it is an advantage today.
And if you are rationalizing that Joe Biden is cleverly fooling people, ask yourself if Amy McGrath’s disastrously dishonest campaign roll-out fooled anyone. Then ask yourself how anyone so utterly befuddled as Joe Biden can be an agile mastermind.
Low-key racism will not peel away any votes from Trump. Those who voted for Trump out of racism are overwhelmingly already Republican and not gettable. Those Reagan Democrats left the fold long ago. Do not confuse them with Obama-to-Trump voters. The two subgroups are not the same.
Obama-to-Trump voters who defected over economic issues such as NAFTA are gettable. After decades of contempt and neglect by the Democratic Party establishment, Obama's presidency seemed to reverse this distressing self-sabotaging trend. His actions did not always align with his soaring populist rhetoric (and his 2008 language was almost Sandersesque), but Obama did save Detroit with the auto industry bailout. That's why the Blue Wall never failed him.
By stark contrast, the Clinton name brand was so tightly tied to the betrayal of NAFTA that the party might as well have run Mitt Romney instead of Hillary Clinton. When Hill defended Bill's economic record, it was like Mitt saying we should let the Motor City go bankrupt.
Many working class voters wrongly rationalized that Trump didn't really mean his racist rhetoric and was just doing it to get attention. Now they know better and are gettable, but we can still fuck it up in a number of ways. Naturally, centrists have advocated or already practiced all of them.
Scolding them for staying home, voting third party, or voting Trump will fuck this up. Scorning or slandering economic populism will fuck this up. And finally, embracing racism will also fuck it up. It's not only morally abhorrent, but strategically senseless: Racists are not going to vote for racist-lite when they have the option of voting full-throated racist. They will predictably stick with Trump.
Trying to woo those voters will fail as spectacularly as trying to woo conservative suburbanites did in 2016. It will also demoralize the base, which also happened in 2016. Yes, demoralizing your base with infidelity is definitely an immense liability. Enthusiasm determines turnout. Who knew?
The point here is the racists are not coming back and we should not even try to get them back. They're solid Republicans now and hopelessly lost.
But by contrast, those Obama-to-Trump voters are gettable. Thus, the key to winning is fighting against inequality across the board - racial, sexual, economic, etc. It's good politics because it's not awkwardly hypocritical and it promotes crucial coalition-building.
Let’s revisit that infidelity analogy. If your current partner sees you still trying to seduce their bitter enemy (who you incidentally have zero chance of bedding anyway), how forgiving is your sweetie going to be of your fruitless pursuit? But winning back someone you had lost by now behaving yourself seems a lot more likely - provided you prove you are truly serious. Picking Biden doesn't signal seriousness, picking Sanders does. Biden is more malarkey, Sanders is no bullshit.
So what does your fed-up partner want to see and hear? Not more gas-lighting guilt trips.
EDIT 09/10/19:
Consider this brilliant Twitter ridicule the Cliff Notes version of my post.
Second EDIT 09/12/19:
CALLED IT! Today on “Morning Joe," Bill Maher advised “This race is begging for someone to do a kind of a Sister Souljah moment with that far left.”
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