#there will be young electeds and activists coming up who might actually get us closer to that off switch

[fremedon]

I'm not making this a reblog because there have been a lot of posts this applies to and I'm sure there will be more.

But if you ever do find that perfectly pure candidate that you feel can vote for without morally compromising yourself--that person with a completely stainless career and no blood on their hands--they will still step into the morass created by all their predecessors. They will have blood on their hands from the moment they take office. The blood comes with the office. There is no way to avoid that.

If they want to not execute the evil and unjust laws which they have just sworn to faithfully execute, they will have the choice of flouting the law or changing it. Both of these are difficult, take time, and cannot be done by one person's fiat.

Laws are made by Congress; changing a law--even the worst one on the books! even that one!--means getting a majority of both houses on board. This is drastically easier if the president's party has a majority in both houses, but still requires coordinating literally hundreds of people to do what you want; if the president's party does not have that trifecta, it may simply be impossible until after the next elections.

Flouting the law--just deciding to ignore it--sets a worrisome precedent: In general, we would like the executive branch to follow the laws of the country! But beyond that, it is also difficult and also requires coordinating with hundreds of other people. The administrative state is designed to run on rails. The administration can hand down guidance on the interpretation of laws--which often as not gets challenged legally and needs to be resolved by the courts, which is a whole other level of complication and, currently, a whole other level of fucked up--but ordering federal agencies to violate the law wholesale is usually going to be a non-starter. Even when the law is bad. Until the law is actually changed, which, see above, sometimes the most that can be done is harm reduction--delay implementation, narrow the scope, tie it up in red tape.

And. Look. I want you to find that perfect candidate. I long for the day that someone can make it all the way into the highest office without ever compromising their morals. But if they do, they will become complicit with all the horrors their predecessors left to us. There is no way to dismantle those horrors without taking on some degree of complicity.

When the machine is covered so thickly with blood, pulling the off switch still gets blood on your hands.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

yet another reason why we can’t let it go

This reality show nightmare we wake up in every day happened because of a pile-up of multiple injustices, failures, and outright institutional crises. There were a lot of things that we couldn’t have seen coming (Russian interference, Comey), couldn’t have predicted how bad they would be (sexism, press failures), or couldn’t have stopped once the election was in full swing (voter suppression, Electoral College).

One of the few things we could’ve seen coming and, as voters and activists, could’ve stopped, was the sheer political clusterfuck.

To look at just what was in our control, strip out all the names and the specific identifying injustices. Candidates A, B, C, blah blah.

A well-liked two-term Democratic president is about to leave office after a presidency which is widely regarded as successful. Intuitively, you might expect that this success would give the president’s party an advantage. But “fundamentals,” the statistical models that predict how a given election will turn out regardless of the specific candidates, show that it’s difficult for an incumbent party to keep the White House for a third term. 

It’s an uphill climb for Candidate A, but our hero is up for the task. Before serving as a high-profile member of the current administration, Candidate A had a long record of public service, including a distinguished career in the Senate. A is an earnest policy geek who takes pride in finding practical ways to improve on long-term challenges, and a fundamentally decent person who understands and takes seriously the challenges of the presidency – exactly the kind of person you want in the Oval Office.

Candidate B is a near-neophyte with a sketchy past who’s spent their life coasting on inherited wealth and prestige, a thundering moron whose pathological incuriousness allows them to lie shamelessly and constantly. Somehow B performs as a moderate Republican, despite a troubling reliance on religious extremists and advisers with dangerous foreign policy views. B is so patently unfit for the office, it’s hard to believe they might actually win.

It’s quite the contrast, but seventies hold-over left-wing crank Candidate C quickly loses interest in airing their more trenchant criticisms of money in politics, preferring to run around telling impressionable young voters that there’s no difference between the parties and complaining about how unfair the election was because the special interests had structured the debates against them, blah blah zzzzzz. This schtick is so unfair to A and helpful to B that those special interests – who are actually aligned with B, because both sides are not actually the same – start buying ads for C in order to weaken A’s support with their party’s base.  

Candidate C will peel off some votes in critical swing states, but the real damage they do is harder to quantify. Their rhetoric about the corrupt political duopoly poisons the well, turning idealistic young voters into disengaged cynics. It also creates kind of a philosophical permission structure for people who can’t be bothered to understand the issues or appreciate the stakes – if they’re all the same and it doesn’t matter, why bother with your civic responsibilities?

That wouldn’t matter much, since left-wing criticisms of the status quo rarely make it out of academic circles – except nobody, but nobody, loves ignoring the issues and denying the stakes more than the mainstream press. Policy journalism is hard. Passive-voice declarations about how “people” find one candidate more charismatic than the other are easy. 

Instead the meta-narrative becomes about “authenticity” which, because it is not actually a thing, is so conveniently intangible that it can be unmoored from truth entirely. B, unburdened by intellect or moral character, speaks in comically oversimplified terms which felt true because they plugged into deeply biased unconscious expectations, and is thus considered “authentic.” A, a highly intelligent person who is either unwilling or unable to mislead voters about the complexity of the world and the sometimes unsatisfying ways to improve it, is labeled “untrustworthy.” Petty sniping about A’s clothing or body language drowns out basic fact-checking. 

In gleeful agreement with the “centrist” (functionally conservative) media are left-wing performance artists like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon who spend months screeching at anyone in earshot about how both! Are! The! Same! Only! C! Can! Save! Us! They rationalize this by loudly proclaiming A’s inevitability – which, if they really thought both sides were the same, wouldn’t matter to them. They also insist that B is so awful, a B presidency will break the system, whereas an A presidency would not – which, again, means they are not the same. (“Waiter, we’ll take cake or a shit sandwich. Doesn’t matter to us…..No, no, it’s fine, he’ll bring us the cake, and anyway, only eating shit will make this place get better cake…...Ugh, I didn’t want to eat shit! Why did you order shit, you fucking NEOLIBERAL WHOR– hey, where are you going?”)

As A gamely tries to explain the issues to the public, tap dance for the press, and chase the left’s elusive goalposts without alienating moderates, Republican officials in swing states suppress the votes of minorities and other likely Democratic voters in numbers greater than the expected margin of victory.

The election ends up closer than anyone thought it should be. The networks say that B has squeaked out a lead in the key states, and A quickly concedes out of respect for the peaceful transition of power, despite having gotten more actual votes. This ties A’s hands as a steady stream of information about irregularities in key counties makes the reported results look more and more suspect. Perhaps if A had a little more goodwill from the left, or at least wasn’t being actively undermined by their own side, they could’ve really fought back, but as is customary, the Democratic circular firing squad is lined up at dawn the next day. By the time it gets to the Supreme Court –

Oh, did you think this was about last year? Silly goose! I’m talking about the 2000 election. But I understand the mix-up.

That’s why we can’t fucking let it go. 

I understand the temptation to treat Hillary Clinton as some kind of political Typhoid Mary. If people can say that SHE was so uniquely terrible because of that TOTALLY DESERVED chorus of complaint (so unlikeable! So bland and convictionless!) from the corporate media and the self-righteous purity pony left…..well, they’d still sound like kooky truthers denying the mountains of evidence about Russian interference, FBI-fetishizing conservatives exonerating Comey the Keystone Kop for his coup d’état, or just assholes too sexist to acknowledge even the most glaring sexism, but they can at least tell themselves they didn’t do anything wrong. That’s harder to sustain when you realize those same complaints were made by the same groups of people (sometimes the same individuals) about an entirely different person. Not just any person, either, but an actual movie star who does more for climate justice before he gets out of bed in the morning than Ralph Nader, Jill Stein, and Bernie Sanders will do in their whole lives.

Similarly, it’s easier to fight about MESSAGING than it is to deal with voter suppression, or to make people give a shit about making the Electoral College less unfair before people vote. And, well, there’s a pretty rotten incentive structure for everyone who either has or wants a platform in either the mainstream media or progressive niche outlets. It’s high effort and low reward to draw attention to the systemic problems which might remind the gatekeepers of how they acted before the election; it’s easier and savvier to validate the more comfortable narrative.

The consequences for ignoring this stuff in 2000 could hardly have been more severe - and yet, by 2016, they were. This is well past “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” If you were old enough to vote in 2016, this happened in your lifetime. One critical reason that the Sanders campaign needed younger millennials is that EVERYONE OVER THIRTY REMEMBERS HOW THIS STORY ENDED THE FIRST TIME. 

There’s a lot of reasons it’s important for Hillary Clinton to write her damn book, and one of them is: Al Gore didn’t, and here we are.

[thisdaynews]

Team Biden beats the press

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/team-biden-beats-the-press/

Team Biden beats the press

The first thing you notice at a Joe Biden event is the age: Many of the reporters covering him are really young. Biden is not. The press corps, or so the Biden campaign sees it, is culturally liberal and highly attuned to modern issues around race and gender and social justice. Biden is not. The reporters are Extremely Online. Biden couldn’t tell you what TikTok is.

Inside the Biden campaign, it is the collision between these two worlds that advisers believe explain why his White House run often looks like a months-long series of gaffes. For a team in command of the Democratic primary, at least for now, they’re awfully resentful of how their man is being covered. And yet supremely confident that they, not the woke press that pounces on Biden’s every seeming error and blight in his record, has a vastly superior understanding of the Democratic electorate. This is the central paradox of Biden’s run: He’s been amazingly durable. But he gets no respect from the people who make conventional wisdom on the left.

Story Continued Below

“I don’t know of anybody who has taken as sustained and vitriolic a negative pounding as Biden and who has come through it with the strength he has,” said a top Biden adviser. “So why isn’t the argument not that he’s a ‘fragile front runner,’ but instead why is this guy so strong? How is he able to withstand this? Because it is unrelenting. Every story that has been written about Biden for a month has been negative! I would ask Warren and Sanders and these folks: He’s been pummeled for months. For months! So why is he going to fall apart now?”

In mid-June, when I spent a few days on the Biden campaign trail, one of the biggest stories on Twitter to circulate about his swing through eastern Iowa was about a young female activist who said she felt intimidated by Biden when she asked him a question about his reversal on the Hyde Amendment. A photo of the encounter went viral, with almost 25,000 likes and retweets. To many influential commentators on lefty Twitter, where Biden is sometimes accorded only slightly more respect than Donald Trump, it was a disrespectful and blatant act of Biden mansplaining. Vice reported breathlessly, “In the photo, Biden, the current Democratic frontrunner, is pointing his finger in Cayo’s face with his eyebrows raised.”

During another stop, at a diner in Eldridge, Biden’s only comment that made news was a cringe-inducing remark to a 13-year-old girl’s brothers: “You’ve got one job here, keep the guys away from your sister.” He’s been using a version of this avuncular bit of schtick for years, but this time it created a furious Twitter outrage cycle. (Biden seems to have learned a lesson and abandoned the line.)

On the same trip, Biden spoke at a mid-day event in Clinton, Iowa. At one point he discussed the benefits of electric scooters as a transportation solution in city centers, and he explained that after a rider hops off a scooter, he plugs it in. He pantomimed someone inserting a power cord into an outlet, which, as anyone who has used one knows, is not what you do. Reporters, myself included, snickered at the micro-gaffe.

To many Biden supporters, who polls consistently show are older, more working class, and more culturally conservative, these alleged gaffes are eye-rolling examples of the absurdity of the press or the woke left. They think the young activist in eastern Iowa should toughen up, that the throwaway line to the 13-year-old is endearing, and that Biden’s lack of precision when he speaks, about scooters or so many other things, is a sign of his authenticity. And they grouse that Biden is held to a standard President Donald Trump is not.

How Democrats see such episodes is at the heart of the Democratic primary. One side views these sorts of typical Biden campaign-trail moments as evidence of a politician well past his prime — casually sexist in a way that might have gone unremarked in, say, 1973 when he first joined the Senate. His supporters see them as good examples of why he’s the lovable Democrat best-suited to beat Trump. What is clear is that the critics, who are louder and more visible online and on cable TV, have had absolutely no impact on changing Biden’s status as the steady front-runner in the race.

This woke-working class divide is at the heart of the most salient fact about the Democratic primaries: Nothing has damaged Biden. Biden entered the race with about 30 percent support nationally and he has that same 30 percent today.

Perhaps this could all begin to change tomorrow night in Houston, when for the first time Biden and his two closest competitors, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, will be on the same debate stage. But so far, just as the press has been unable to disrupt Biden’s bond with his core thirty, his Democratic opponents seem similarly at a loss to understand, let alone undo, Biden’s enduring appeal.

***

Given Biden’s resilience and consistent lead in the national polls, his advisers range from bemusement to rage in their frustration with how he has been treated by the press and many liberal elites.

They brandish the many predictions of his demise as evidence of their more sophisticated understanding of the Democratic electorate. “He’s still leading the race nationally. He’s leading in Iowa. It looks like he’s in a dead heat in New Hampshire,” said the top Biden adviser. “I don’t know why the story in New Hampshire isn’t how Bernie Sanders went from sixty to fourteen. And why is it that Biden is beating Warren in Massachusetts? And he’s way ahead in South Carolina. And this is all on the back end of really the most vicious press I think anyone’s experienced. So that to me is a statement of strength. And anyone who’s sitting around waiting for him to fall apart—you know what, it hasn’t happened yet.”

To Biden’s advisers and allies, the gap between a press corps, as well as the wider online political class, that is largely in its twenties and thirties and a candidate who would be 78 at his Inaugural explains a lot about why the pundits and Twitter activists are so confounded by the former vice president’s resilience.

“You have a press corps in which most of them were in college when Barack Obama ran for president and they have fundamentally no understanding and experience in how politics works,” said a well-known Democrat backing Biden. “They have not really covered a true Democratic primary ever because there hasn’t been one since 2008. The 2016 race didn’t become a real primary until very late and the press corps never thought Bernie would win. And Bernie never got the treatment from the press corps that opponents like him typically get. So they haven’t seen this kind of race.”

This dynamic has produced what Beto O’Rourke might call a fuck-you attitude inside Biden world toward the press and liberal social media influencers who drool over Elizabeth Warren’s every policy paper and see Biden as hopelessly square.

The well-known Democrat said of the Biden press corps, “They view this party as dominated by woke millennials and through the lens of coastal issues. They are products, increasingly, of fairly elite schools and they don’t talk to a lot of voters who don’t look and talk like them except their parents, who also tend to be similar to them. Occasionally they are shocked to learn they have relatives who voted for Donald Trump. And they were not on the ground in the Midwest primaries for governor races in 2018 in Michigan and Ohio and Wisconsin where more moderate and older and more experienced candidates won against young cool left — often people of color — primary opponents.”

They are, this person argued, obsessed with a Democratic Party that exists only on Twitter. She pointedly noted that there are Democrats “outside of those 18,000 voters in Queens,” referring to the total vote share — it was actually closer to 17,000 — for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her June 2018 primary victory. “And by the way, those didn’t even tend to be the economically disadvantaged people of color who live in that district. They were the quote ‘new people’ if you talk to anyone from New York.”

Her point was that the AOC phenomenon “is emblematic of what most reportersthinkis going on nationally.”

To Biden world, it’s the media’s cultural affinity for this New New Left that explains why the Biden-will-soon-collapse storyline has such staying power.

“I get this question all the time: Why does the press hate him so much?” she said. “And the answer is because they are younger and they want someone cooler.”

***

Last Saturday, 19 of the Democrats running for president spoke at an all-day convention of the New Hampshire Democratic Party in Manchester. The event attracts the state’s most important activists, as well as a good smattering of Democratic political junkies from around the northeast, and campaigns are under pressure to create some theatrics with supporters and signage and post-convention parties in nearby parks and beer halls.

On stage before the party delegates, several candidates began to make a more robust case against Biden. Elizabeth Warren owned the room, and the day, with an electric performance that also showcased her campaign’s ability to organize. She brought in many supporters from Massachusetts and outfitted them with inflatable thunder sticks, producing a well-choreographed but authentic audience response that her campaign immediately used for a promotional video. (“We did the same thing with Dukakis in ‘88,” one longtime Democratic strategist noted about busing in supporters from the neighboring state.)

Biden’s message is that Trump represents a unique threat that requires Democratic voters to be careful and ultimately risk averse in choosing a nominee to face him —an unmistakable warning not to elect someone too far to the left, such as Warren or Sanders.

Warren’s response remains subtle, for now. “There is a lot at stake and people are scared,” Warren told the crowd on Saturday. “But we can’t choose a candidate we don’t believe in because we’re scared. And we can’t ask other people to vote for someone we don’t believe in. I am not afraid and for Democrats to win you can’t be afraid either.”

The assumption embedded in Warren’s line is that many of Biden’s supporters aren’t really enthusiastic about him, that they are backing him out of some misguided sense of obligation and fear, which also might explain his modest crowds and the lack of any Biden thunder-stick moments in this campaign.

This line of attack drives people inside the Biden campaign mad. To them it smacks of elitism and suggests that Warren and her most vocal supporters believe that Biden’s voters, who polls consistently show are more likely to be working class and people of color, are somehow not smart enough to understand why they support him.

“This gets back to the vitriol of the left,” said the prominent Democrat. “They seem to feel like, ‘Why don’t you dumb voters see what we see? If we yell at you enough will you start to listen to us?’”

“The party is older than people think. It’s more centrist than people think,” said the senior Biden adviser. He noted that Biden’s favorability rating among Democrats has been in the mid 70s since the start of this race.

“But they say he’s out of step with the party! Well he’s the only person to demonstrate substantial support across a multiracial coalition. So actually he is mostin stepwith the party. But no one ever sees it that way because that is not the world as seen through Twitter.”

Speaking early in the day on Saturday, Biden gave his typical stump speech about beating Trump and rebuilding the middle class, but the only thing that really made any news was when, at one point, he accidentally said “hump” instead of “Trump.”

Other candidates have begun beta testing a more direct anti-Biden message, and the intensity of the message seems closely correlated with how poorly the candidate’s campaign is faring. “Democrats are long past believing that we want to be led by folks that supported the Iraq war and are long past a generation of politicians that couldn’t do anything about the income stagnation that exists in this country,” Sen. Michael Bennet told me in an interview backstage. “When you hear the vice president, who I’ve nothing but the highest regard for, say that if we just get rid of Trump it will all go back to normal, which is what he’s saying, it misses the 10 years that I’ve been in the Senate when it’s never been normal. And for the last six years of the Obama administration he couldn’t get anything done.”

Like others, Bennet argued that the polls were misleading and would get more volatile as voters focused more closely on the race. “If history is any guide, the people that are leading today are not going to be the people that win in Iowa and win in New Hampshire,” he insisted, adding with self-deprecation: “And I’m prepared to let history be our guide since I’m at 1 percent today.”

After his speech, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, played cornhole and ate ice-cream at a nearby park while mixing with supporters. In an interview, he made an anti-Biden case that put him somewhere between Warren and Bennet.

“Every single time Democrats have won it’s somebody who’s generally viewed as outside of Washington, typically somebody from a new generation and somebody with a different approach,” he told me, noting the victories of Kennedy, Carter, Clinton and Obama. “And every time we’ve tried to do something very conventional, and very safe and had a very established Washington nominee, every time we’ve come up short. This is not just a pattern. This has essentially been an iron law for the last 50 or 60 years.”

The Biden camp scoffs at the generational argument. “The last guy who tried this was out of the race in a week, that congressman from California,” said the senior Biden adviser, who couldn’t remember the name of 38-year-old Eric Swalwell, who tried in vain to create a viral moment about generational change during the first debate. “He was going to pass the torch.”

Swalwell told me he was wrong that this was the right moment for that message and doubted that a candidate like Buttigieg would be any more successful than he was. “I felt like I was in a bad traffic jam with no offramp and no way to get ahead,” he said in an interview about his short-lived campaign. “And certainly the lead car was the vice president. I don’t know if this is a generational election because of who the president is. Beating him is so important because of who he is and what a threat to democracy he is. It is still early and there are still other generational candidates but my sense is that this isn’t a ‘Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow’ election. The stakes are so high with this president that there is a fear of rolling the dice.”

Perhaps the one line of attack that just might work against Biden is, at least for the moment, the only area of criticism considered strictly off limits by almost every campaign. Most of Biden’s opponents are scared to directly confront the one issue that both his gaffes and all the talk about generational change tiptoe around: his age.

I rode with Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana, to the convention arena. He is supremely confident and polished and in the back seat of his SUV discussed his successes as governor, his frustrations about being excluded from the next debate, and his concerns about the leftward lunge of his party. The only time he seemed to hold back was when I raised the issue of whether Biden was really up for the job. “I think that’s one for the voters to figure out more than me,” he said. (His campaign manager escalated the rhetoric slightly in a memo sent to reporters on Tuesday that said, “there is a growing fear that the candidates promising revolutions are out of step with general election voters while others fear Vice President Biden may be unable to take down Trump.”)

In the afternoon, the issue of Biden’s age and mental acuity suddenly burst open in the airless media room where most of the candidates, though not Biden, spoke with reporters after their speeches. I asked Rep. Tim Ryan, who the previous day had been quoted saying that Biden was “declining,” whether he meant declining in the polls or mentally declining and he made it clear he meant the latter. Pressed further by reporters, he would only say “there’s a lack of clarity” when Biden speaks. (“You know, with Ryan, if he declines anymore he’s going from like one to zero,” the senior Biden adviser told me in response.)

But Ryan was alone in raising the issue. Afterward I visited Sen. Amy Klobuchar in her suite and, she too refused to engage on the subject when I mentioned Ryan’s remarks. “I’m running my own campaign,” she said through bites of an apple, explaining why she wouldn’t discuss Biden or any of her other opponents. After five minutes of pressing her about how to differentiate herself from Biden, she essentially ended the interview. Like several other candidates, her strategy remains one of waiting for Biden’s collapse rather than trying to trigger it.

But offstage, in the backrooms of the SNHU Arena and nearby hotel lobbies where activists and aides gathered, the discussion frequently turned to whether Biden is up to the task of facing Trump.

“The narrative that Biden has staying power is bullshit,” said a senior adviser to one of Biden’s rivals. “It is just too fucking early. Did we not learn anything from 2016 that polls are shit? The dude does not know what is going on. He is not in fighting shape to beat Trump. You put him on stage together with Trump and they’re both gonna forget shit but Trump is sharper. The dude is just old and it’s showing and they’re fighting every day to make the case that’s not happening but it is.”

But only Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state legislator and supporter and informal adviser to Sen. Kamala Harris, was willing to say the quiet part out loud.

“Joe Biden has been running for president since before I was born,” Sellers said. “Joe Biden is nearly 80 years old and he’s running to be president of the United States. My dad was president of an HBCU and will be 75 this year and his doctors told him he couldn’t do it anymore. He didn’t have the energy and strength to lead that campus anymore. Doesn’t mean he wasn’t a great man and a great leader and a great visionary. But it is a justifiable conversation.”

Sellers went further and lumped Sanders and Warren into the debate about age. “The three front-runners are all older than Ronald Reagan was when he took over,” he said. “Democrats are afraid of criticism, which is silly to me. But we are going to have a contentious primary on vigor and issues about fitness to be president.”

Then he paused and added, “But at the end of the day I’ll take a 90-year old Joe Biden over Donald Trump.”

The tricky part about attacking Biden is that few Democratic voters have any hostility toward Biden personally. The most aggressive public attack against him was by Harris in the first debate, when she confronted him about his past positions on busing and working with segregationist senators. She juiced her fundraising in the days following the debate and received a spike in national polls, but her numbers soon settled back down to where they were, at about seven percent. Biden’s advisers now frequently mention the episode as a cautionary tale for others.

“Kamala going after Biden didn’t really work out for her so I’m curious to see how many try that again on Thursday,” said a Democrat close to the Biden campaign. “How do you tear down the front-runner that everyone actually likes?”

He added, “Do I believe that Joe Biden is the future of the party? No. But he’s the right person to beat this president in 2020.”

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