The Chris Moeller Archives

Where it stands

There will come a moment this fall when Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee for president, will look into the camera at a nationally-televised debate and begin answering a question. We’ll be dialed into his response because Joe long ago learned the cadence and posturing of the traditional American politician. He executed better, in fact, then almost all of them. But in the middle of his response, he will go blank. The cognitive synapses that used to function so well as he was hustling us will fail him. The words will trail off. We’ll see the blood drain from behind his facelift, and then it will drain from our faces as well, as we realize what it is exactly that we’re witnessing. Something already foregone. Four more years of President Trump.

It didn’t have to have been that way. The Revolution that the party bosses deprived us of in 2016 had been graciously-- and shockingly (to some of us)-- offered a second time to the Democrats, and what did they do? They crushed it again-- because the Revolution means an end to oligarchy, and though they claim to despise the incumbent president, they know their stolen loot is safer with him working in the Oval Office than it is with Bernie Sanders.

Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on? 

Senator Elizabeth Warren was poised to be something she’s never wanted to be. She had a revolutionary’s love for the adoration that people would have for her, but she possesses not the revolutionary’s spirit. She was for Medicare-for-All, then she dropped it to chase after that tantalizing middle ground. She decried Super PACs and refused to take money from them-- until her treasure chest of small donations proved too meager to keep up with the one that's funding the Revolution. She began working in public policy in 1995 for the very purpose of opposing Senator Joe Biden’s corrupt bankruptcy bill, and then, years later, as a presidential candidate, she owed the very chance she even had at the nomination to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign of 2016. But instead of joining with the Revolution when it mattered, dropping her pathless campaign to the presidency after an almost-cruel third-place finish in her home state and failing to finish above third place in any state, she continued her Dead Woman Walking bid, ostensibly over some ridiculous pipedream that the bosses would broker her to nomination at the summer convention in Milwaukee as, I guess, some sort of “unity” candidate, even though they have shown no compulsion to even entertain such an idea, and, if they did, it would go completely against the voters’ wishes.

Over a spat she claimed took place in private when Bernie Sanders supposedly told her a woman couldn’t beat Trump head-to-head, she refused to shake his hand in each of the two most recent debates even as she did shake the hand of Michael Bloomberg, a man she had basically called out as a racist and a sexist in her famously-prosecutorial style at each of the same debates. After her weak showing on Super Tuesday, she refused even then to make a distinction between the candidates Sanders and Biden, saying only that Biden compromised too much with Republicans, but that Sanders did a poor job of coalition-building.

The Elizabeth Warren politician, the one-time conservative Republican (like Hillary Clinton), that stubbornly went after the “too big to fail” banks, displayed that stubbornness now in an effort to crush a youth voter revolt that boasted nearly one in two Democrats under the age of 30, and to possibly alienate an entire generation of idealistic progressives. Rather, she’s thrown in with the bosses that run the party, their corporate donors, and the corporatist, militarist superdelegates. Warren arguably has done more than either of Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar to elevate Joe Biden to the cusp of the nomination this week. It’s pretty easy to imagine how different the reaction would be in much of the Democratic world if Sanders and Warren were in reverse positions and Bernie was refusing to concede.

Which side are you on, which side are you on? 

Rushing to rally behind Biden, Pete Buttigieg is a special case of political grossness. He’s the son of a respected socialist author and he’s a one-time major fan of Sanders, at least according to a prize-winning essay he wrote in high school. Somewhere along the way, though, Pete became an apparatchik for the establishment, a company man. In his last debate, he did some red-baiting of Sanders, and then, according to a campaign memo, chose to leave the race precisely over his personal concerns that he was aiding Sanders. He’s a fascinating case study. After school-- and a Rhodes Scholarship-- Pete joined the McKinsey Group in Washington, then enlisted in the military to fight in the Afghanistan War after it was a decade old. (He never saw combat.) His goal, it seems, of one day becoming a “check all boxes” candidate that could challenge for the presidency, presumably included a fall back plan, which now kicks in, to become a highly-compensated Washington lobbyist.

He looked, for all the world, like a new Obama, young and charismatic, outwardly optimistic, and with one history-challenging characteristic of diversity. At times he even seemed to be doing an Obama impression on the stump, mimicking the former president’s pattern of speaking. He became the favorite of the billionaire class, even spouting at one of the debates, hilariously, “billionaires are people too.” He started a “national investors circle” for his biggest donors and one of his aides was caught telling potential donors by email that they needed to pony up and buy access to the candidate before the line got too long.

Like Warren, he was for Medicare-for-All before he was against it. But he failed, like she did, to show voters more authenticity than the Revolution’s leader. That lack of perceived honesty produced some sometimes-embarrassing results, like when he failed to get the support of even one black voter in a poll conducted in South Carolina. His South Bend, Indiana police force shot a black man to death during the early part of his campaign, and he had fired the black police chief of the majority-white police force in a majority-black city. His offensive pandering to black voters challenged the lows of even Joe Biden. Before Biden thought to invent a story, on the eve of the South Carolina primary, about how he was once arrested in South Africa trying to meet with Nelson Mandela, Mayor Pete put out a release where he fabricated the endorsement of a number of African-American leaders. Both Biden and Buttigieg had to cop to their lies, but neither were ever, or have ever been, confronted with those lies by panelists during the televised debates, even as Bernie Sanders had to answer 253 times for the reported bullying by his followers on the internet.

Which side are you on, which side are you on? 

Trust me, this is not what the Democratic bosses wanted. We wouldn’t have ever had a Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Bloomberg if the inner circle wasn't scared to death of the advanced mental impairment and indefensible public record of Joe Biden. But they had to do it. They had to float these other candidates, and you can add Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, Beto O’Rourke, and Deval Patrick to the list as well. They all struck out with voters, to varying degrees, and finally, Sanders became too much of a threat to still be facing a team of options. No candidate had ever won in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada previously and then been denied the nomination. The last two alternatives fell on their sword this weekend so that Biden could be elevated to the top, and now they’ll hope for the best-- knowing that at the very least, their money and power positions are safe, and that the anti-Trump “opposition” in Washington can continue to be quite lucrative even in the wake of bone-crushing defeat. It dawns on me that it’s a little like a title bout where you know your fighter is going to be destroyed, but oh, that pay day!

If his Super Bowl Sunday interview with Sean Hannity is any indication, Trump is going to hammer “Sleepy Joe” over the 1980s crime bills he supported. Trump has been trying to make in-roads with African-American voters, and he can point to a mild record of prison reform for himself while slapping hard down at Biden over the senator’s dismal “tough on crime” history. At the very least, African-American turnout will likely be smaller than it’s been for the last few electoral cycles. Trump will once again be the anti-war candidate because the Democrats have found their wagon hitched to yet another signature-backer of the War on Iraq, while Trump can call out that military fiasco for what it was, and point to a recent peace agreement (to his credit) with the Taliban, at last an end to the fighting in Afghanistan after Obama and Biden inexplicably extended the war by the full length of their eight years in office.

Biden will walk out onto stages across the Rust Belt, where Clinton met her Waterloo, and he’ll be going there having to defend his four decades of horrible trade deals that helped to financially devastate many of those communities, while Trump can claim-- with at least a tiny amount of honesty-- that he’s the president that finally tried to get tough on China. Though he’s largely a con man and a married-for-life crony-capitalist, he did pull us out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and attempt tariffs on the Chinese.

Biden will also be carrying the legitimate weight of having to front the ticket of a party largely perceived to have rigged its process. Yes he will-- and they did. It wasn’t a Putin conspiracy, but they’ll try to Red Scare the voters for sure. When they undoubtedly fail to win back the Sanders voters they’ve alienated, it won’t be the hand of Putin, it will be an All-American reality. They’ll have nothing to offer Sanders voters. You all must know, that even when you’re throwing around weighted dice in politics, and elevating your preferred candidate through back-room chicanery, you still have to offer them something. What will Bernie demand? What will his supporters demand? What can they even offer? I can think of nothing that would be pacifying to what I know of the majority of his backers that would also be realistically offered.

Voters aren’t stupid. Many of them formed in around Joe Biden yesterday, and that’s frustrating to many of us, but it’s not on them. They take their cues from the party leadership. They don’t devote their days to politics, and they want a candidate this time around that has the best chance of beating Trump, and for weeks, the party leadership didn’t offer them a unified answer on whom that candidate was. But when Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropped out together, ending their campaigns in a surprise, never-before-seen pre-Super Tuesday sort-of-spectacle, and immediately throwing in with Biden-- with Warren refusing to do something similar in reverse, the voters took the cue.

This is what Sanders was up against all along-- and why it’s clear now that he’s back to being simply the generation-defining figure of an ongoing movement that will continue long after he’s gone. He’s still in it for 2020-- and needs to be fought for by tooth and by nail, but Biden already has enough delegates, in my view, for the bosses to force the brokered change to Biden, even if Sanders manages to garner the most delegates. It needed to be a Sanders blowout to make the brokering impossible for them to attempt.

Biden will get pummeled by Trump though in November. A friend at work asked me today for predictions-- a wager, actually-- as to which of just ten states each that the Democrats and Republicans can rely upon in November. I said that, with Biden at the front, I can’t guarantee ten states for the Democrats. Biden won't inspire voters, and that means the down-ticket races will suffer as well. We’re accustomed to being outcasts here on the Left-- those of us to the left of the liberals that have failed us time and again, and so that role will fit again. There needs to be principled, aggressive, peaceful, civil disobedience in Milwaukee this summer, promised of the kind that might be worth the drive. This is a true Revolution, one I already didn’t presume to ever see, and it’s bigger than Bernie Sanders and as long as the arc of history. Which side are you on, which side are you on?

posted by CM @ 9:13 PM