10-29-2020, 06:38 AM
(10-27-2020, 09:13 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(10-26-2020, 09:18 PM)Marypoza Wrote:(09-24-2020, 04:00 PM)David Horn Wrote:(09-24-2020, 02:41 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Fewer than 50 days may remain before I get to compare the 2020 election to others. Biden does appeal to much the same people who voted for Obama, so unless he makes headway among people who voted for Romney in 2012, I already expect the Biden 2020 map to fit something closer to the Eisenhower-Obama overlay than anything else.
On the appeal issue, don't forget that evaluation systems are different for different people. Yes, the two are similar on policy, but far from alike on the coolness factor. The people who found Obama cool may not be finding anything in Biden to like ... or dislike. He's just old and boring to them -- unlike Bernie.
-- he's senile af
Still functioning and speaking well, though. I think Bernie was better as far as vitality coming through, but he had the unfortunate habit of getting stuck on statements that he repeats too often, and an unwillingness to drop his self-identified label that is unpopular. So people voted for the guy they thought could beat Trump.
I can excuse stuttering. I can't excuse word salad and Newspeak that I associate with Donald Trump and the people around him even if the people delivering such are brilliant. Joe Biden may not be perfect, but at the least he is a solid transition to something much better than what we have now... and obviously something better than the All-for-the-Few ethos of the neoliberal era that began with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.
The dream of the Right on economics has been for an order in which 95% of the people suffer for 2%, with about 3% of the populace being the sorts of people who would thrive in any social order (physicians, accountants, engineers, entertainers... and above all else, the police and military officers). Why does that 3% do so well in al social orders? Because revolutions succeed when the revolutionaries start paying the cops and soldiers, as Vladimir Lenin so clearly illustrated. See also more benign leaders such Corazon Aquino, Vaclav Havel, and Nelson Mandela.
The 3% who know how necessary they are know that they don't need Donald Trump, who is more likely to do something that can hurt them. The 3% think that the world is far safer if the 95% (basically the proletariat identifiable by modest means and fear of the savagery of the Master Class, so that now includes such people as schoolteachers, clergy and even small-business owners who know that Trump can burn them as well as the classic proletariat. If I redefine "proletariat" to mean the people that the System can step on, then such better describes neoliberal economics than it does the proletariat as Marx saw it. The tendency for the gatekeepers of opportunity and prosperity to exploit people as they monopolize the means without creating more means of prosperity (and happiness) for people other than themselves is one to reverse. Americans will demand such over the next few years.
... It is Trump who shows more signs of senility... not that he ever shed off his juvenile character. By all accounts, Donald Trump is a non-drinker, which is about the only thing that I can say about him. On the other hand I have known plenty of alcoholics, and one pattern that I see is people who never grow up to fully accept adult roles in life. The difference with Donald Trump is that as a non-drinker he does not have alcoholic cirrhosis. (If he has cirrhosis, then it is most likely from diabetes, which would not surprise me. But diabetics can be as normal as anyone else despite a perverse metabolism. Obesity often contributes to diabetes). Donald Trump thinks like many pathological drinkers that I have known without drinking. Drink may not be the cause for people maintaining a juvenile mentality deep into old age.
Quote:Obama is more cool. But Biden may actually win by a higher margin.
Obama was running against a certifiable war hero in 2008, and he ran against an unusually-strong challenger than an above-average President normally faces. Mitt Romney would have won by a landslide in 2016 against Hillary Clinton and probably be in place to deliver at least an Eisenhower-scale landslide if running for re-election. I'm guessing that it is his wife's MS that stopped him from running in 2016.
Quote:That is due largely to who is on the other ticket, who has proved himself a failure. Trump won't be able to repeat his own performance art well enough to cover that up, this time. His act is getting old, and so is he. The dueling convention speeches were not as well known as they should be, but Biden beat Trump by a wide margin in that contest.
The point. Incumbent Presidents win by offering more of the same to people who like what came before. They run on a successful record and win, or they run from their record and lose. The only exceptions seem to be those times when the time is up for one Party's hold of the White House (Ford 1976, Bush 1992). In the last hundred years the most obvious failures as President have been Hoover (economic meltdown), Carter (international chaos), and Trump (social unrest that he egged on, and a climate of corruption and disgrace).
No, there are not "good people on both sides" when it comes to violent racism or plots against elected officials. Trump having protesters tear-gassed so that he can make a photo-op while wielding a Bible that he neither reads nor heeds (OK, I admit that it is hard for me to get into Acts without finding it easy to stop... maybe I should have been brought up Jewish) may be the definitive expression of the moral compass of this President -- well, if you want to use the word "moral compass" to describe Charles Manson.
Quote:Given the lower hurdle he has to beat of defeating a failed president, which Obama never had to do, he doesn't have to be as cool and young as Obama. And Biden has attractive qualities too, despite his approaching senility. He is likable and empathetic, and he doesn't get stuck in speaking ruts like Bernie does.
America is not ready for the Bernie Sanders agenda. I might be, but if I must choose between someone as Establishment as one can be and someone who would create a new political order in which 95% of the people suffer for 2% and risk imprisonment or some combination of hunger, homelessness, and exposure to the worst rot possible in a depraved order, then I go with Joe Biden. Donald Trump must go if we Americans are to keep our essential liberties, let alone an economic order that allows more people to find happiness and meaning in life. It is not until the Millennial Generation becomes dominant in American politics (it is not yet there) that America can make the fundamental changes that bring us a social-market order in which social class and proximity to power do not define who is happy and who is consigned to hopeless despair.
Besides, Obama is no longer quite young. He turns 60 next year.
Quote:Biden needs to continue as president and live out at least one term, and maybe even run for re-election. Either that, or another candidate needs to challenge Kamala Harris and be the nominee in 2024. Kamala Harris cannot win an election for president, and probably is never destined to be president. Kamala and the new Barrett Kangaroo Court are the two chief obstacles to any progress in the 2020s. The Democrats need to be aware of this and take appropriate action.
Alito and Thomas are getting up there in years, and Bart Kavanaugh sounds like the sort whose liver will impeach him. Donald Trump's idea of politics is to stick it to people who will never support him. It is primitive behavior, but that is exactly what one expects of a man of primitive impulses without intellectual refinement, a respect for tradition, or a moral compass. But first, Donald Trump must go. A second term of Donald Trump is the death of a political experiment that arose when brave and wise people in Massachusetts decided that a King going despotic was unnecessary and undesirable, and that the elected officials that they knew well enough for whom to vote could deliver liberty that Almighty God had granted or that was inherent in human nature.
We haven't before had a leader who stooped to the level of sticking the unpopular and detrimental to anyone who runs afoul of him. We do now.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.