Amy Klobuchar is ending her bid for the presidency and will endorse Joe Biden. She is joining other mainstream Democrats in coalescing around Biden to head off the potential for Sanders to lead the ticket which could be disastrous not only at the presidential level, but also in many down ballot races.
Right now, Democrats are doing what Democrats always do: They form into a circular firing squad and snipe at one another to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Currently, the Dems have three viable 2020 candidates – Warren, Sanders, and Biden. Buttigieg, as great as he is, can’t get out of single digits in national polls, and let’s face it – it’s not his time and he should prepare to run for governor or Senator from Indiana and then come back in 10 years. His time is in the future. There have been no votes cast in any primary yet, but the intramural feuding is well underway with Warren supporters smearing Biden and amplifying Trump’s idiotic conspiracy theories, Biden supporters saying Warren is unelectable, and Bernie supporters hating everyone.
Warren is sticking to a Medicare for All plan that doesn’t have the slightest chance of ever seeing the light of day, wants to fund it by taxing billionaires, vows to shut down the US oil industry, and is threatening businesses that she’s going to jail CEOs. Sanders vows to also shut down the US oil industry and tax billionaires; he’s more circumspect on healthcare policy. Biden is staying down the middle, making the electability argument as his main selling point.
Let’s be blunt here. As much as you’ll hate to hear it, big sweeping policy changes and turning industries and healthcare on their heads is NOT a winning strategy. Dems have only one choice, and that is Trump, not Trump. Period. Short of him being removed by impeachment (which I believe is a slim to zero chance), or him keeling over from his artery clogging diet, getting him out of office through the ballot box is the only viable chance to rid ourselves from this metastasizing tumor sitting in the Oval Office.
The New York Times published their latest poll this week that pretty much sums up what Real Clear Politics has been reporting for months – Biden is the clear choice for the best chance to beat Trump:
This is the summary of the latest poll. Sanders is second, Warren a distant third, yet Warren is catching up to Biden in the early primary states, though she is the worst of the front runners to face Trump, and her rhetoric is making it even harder for her to compete.
Before you say it, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I know – Biden is old, failing, sleepy, confused, (insert your insult here _________). What’s really weird is that none of those adjectives are used on Sanders or Warren even though he is older than Biden and is ACTUALLY suffering from a heart condition, and Warren is only a few years behind both of them. The issue here, and the ONLY issue here is beating Trump. Biden, especially if strengthened by a younger vibrant VP candidate is the highest probability candidate to beat Trump. Warren and Sanders are not. Period. Want to lose suburbanites, and middle of the roaders? Threaten to take away their healthcare and triple the price of gasoline. It’s stupid, and a losing strategy.
As much as all of us hate it, this is NOT the election for sweeping policy changes. This is the election of winning. That is the only goal. The choice is Trump, not Trump. If you think things are miserable now, imagine if this SOB got another 4 years. He has already destroyed the State Department and the Justice Department. After he packs another 2 or 3 ideologues on the Supreme Court and hundreds of lunatics in the federal court system, he would have virtually destroyed our democracy. The risk is too great to lose this one – the cost is too high.
The Dems just have to stop the infighting and focus on the only goal for 2020 – beating Trump. It’s arithmetic.
Friday, the DNC Rules and Bylaws committee proposed a rules change for the 2020 campaign. The new rule is directed straight at Bernie Sanders:
The new rule specifically requires that someone running for president must declare in writing his or herself as a member of the Democratic party and that they will run and serve as a Democrat. Easy, right? Not so fast. The two party system in the US is cemented in place by statute, creating an almost impenetrable wall to outsiders. Party primaries are paid for by the taxpayers, and getting on the ballot in all the states as an independent presidential candidate is virtually impossible. Because of this, the only realistic path to the presidency is as insurgency in one of the two entrenched political parties. You saw that in spades in 2016 where Trump used his television persona to hijack the GOP and Sanders’ grass roots campaign almost uprooted Hillary’s coronation.
This rule seeks to stifle competition for the nomination, all while DNC political operatives are loudly denying that fact, which is as obvious to normal people as a hillbilly at a Newport garden party. Even while these operatives are all sniffy that outsiders understand their actual intent, Sanders supporters aren’t happy. Mark Lonabaugh, a senior Sanders advisor, call the new resolution “stunning”.
Someday, establishment Dems will have to face the fact that they are way out of step with their constituents. The Sanders phenomenon should have shaken these pillars of the party to the core, but it didn’t. They are ignoring, at their own peril, the 13 million voters, many first time voters, who went for the tottering old candidate from Vermont instead of the tottering old candidate from New York, Chicago, Arkansas (pick your accent). He brought a message of social justice, equity, and fairness that the Dems abandoned in the 1990s. And it appears that, rather than learning from that experience, the DNC is trying to keep it from happening again by further rigging the rules in favor of the establishment.
Oh, and one last thing – While the DNC specifically designed a rule to keep out insurgents, there are no adopted rule changes to eliminate or significantly reduce the influence of superdelegates, and no rule that prevents a presidential candidate from controlling the national party until AFTER they are nominated. It appears the Democratic party is the LEAST democratic organization in US politics, and that should piss you off.