Biden and Bernie, the Democrats' Binary Choice for Our Future
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
10 March 20
As the result came in on Super Tuesday, March 3, Joe Biden told his
supporters: "Make no mistake about it. This campaign will send Donald Trump
packing. This campaign is taking off."
Later that same evening, Bernie Sanders told his supporters: "When we began
this race for the presidency, everybody said it couldn't be done. But
tonight I tell you with absolute confidence, we're going to win the
Democratic nomination, and we are going to defeat the most dangerous
president in the history of this country."
The message from each candidate is essentially the same: Dump Trump. But the
tone is strikingly different. Biden makes it sound like politics as usual,
insider politics as he's known it since 1972 when he first won his Senate
seat. Bernie draws a starker vision of the stakes in 2020, reflecting the
drama of a outsider's career beginning with his 1981 election as mayor of
Vermont's largest city (which became affectionately known as the "people's
republic of Burlington").
To win the Democratic nomination for president, a candidate needs 1,991 or
more delegates on the first ballot. Neither Biden nor Bernie is quite a
third of the way there yet. Bloomberg reports Biden with 664, Bernie with
573, and the only other candidate still in the race, Tulsi Gabbard, with
two.
In their Super Tuesday speeches, each about 12 minutes long, Biden and
Bernie avoided talking about each other by name, but provided an informal
basis for comparing and contrasting each other's campaigns. Both called for
inclusion. Biden mentioned "revolution," only to back away from it:
BIDEN: "We need you. We want you, and there's a place for you in this
campaign. People are talking about a revolution. We started a movement. We
even increased turnout. When the turnouts turn out for us, that can deliver
us to a moment where we can do extraordinary, extraordinary things. Look,
our agenda is bold, it's progressive."
SANDERS: "We are going to win. We are going to defeat Trump, because we are
putting together an unprecedented grassroots, multigenerational, multiracial
movement. It is a movement which speaks to the working families of this
country who are sick and tired of working longer hours for low wages and
seeing all new income and wealth going to the top 1%.... We will not give
tax breaks to billionaires when a half a million Americans sleep out on the
streets. Will not allow 49% of all new income to go to the 1% when half of
our people live paycheck to paycheck."
Biden makes dog whistles to Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren) supporters when
he uses "revolution" and "progressive" without specificity. Sanders has
talked about social revolution in the past, but here he simply described one
aspect of it, his intention to shrink the anti-democratic distribution of
wealth that has distorted American politics for decades. This is something
of a pattern, with Biden offering glossy, soft-focus pretty pictures and
Sanders calling for harder-edged realities.
On health care:
BIDEN: "It's a vision, where health care is affordable and available to
everybody in America, where we bring drug prices down under control with no
more surprise billing, access to hospitals in rural areas as well as urban
areas, access to care. A bold vision. We're going to invest billions of
dollars to find, and I promise you, cures for cancer, Alzheimer's and
diabetes..
SANDERS: "It is a movement which says the United States will have healthcare
for all as a human right.. What makes this movement unique is we are taking
on the corporate establishment, we are taking it on the greed of Wall
Street. The greed of the drug companies who charge us the highest prices in
the world. The greed of the insurance companies."
On climate change:
BIDEN: ". leading the world to take on the existential threat of climate
change. I'm going to start by rejoining an outfit I helped put together, the
Paris Climate Accord, and we're to move it a long way."
SANDERS: "And given the existential crisis of climate change, we are saying
to the fossil fuel industry. We are saying to the fossil fuel industry,
their short-term profits are not more important than the future of our
country, or the world."
On education:
BIDEN: "A country where the quality of education will not depend on your zip
code, where they triple funding for low income school district providing
raises for teachers, full-time school for three, four and five years old,
and increasing exponentially the prospects of their success. Free community
college providing credentials for every job for the 21st century, and
significant reduction in the cost of going to college and your student debt.
If you volunteer, you pay nothing."
SANDERS: "It is a movement that says we will bring major reforms in
education, making sure that all of our kids can go to college without coming
out in debt."
On immigration:
Neither candidate addressed immigration in any detailed way. Biden said
only: "and by the way, every dreamer, have hope, because I'm coming and
you're not going anywhere. Now, we're going to provide a pathway, a pathway
for 11 million citizens. If the other guy had voted for the, well, I don't
know if she can get into that. I won't get going.."
On the political establishment:
Biden had nothing to say.
SANDERS: "But we are not only taking on the corporate establishment, we're
taking on the political establishment. But we're going to win because the
people understand it is our campaign, our movement, which is best positioned
to defeat Trump. You cannot beat Trump with the same old, same old kind of
politics. What we need is a new politics that brings working class people
into our political movement. Which brings young people into our political
movement. And which in November we'll create the highest voter turnout in
American political history."
On the myth of American exceptionalism:
BIDEN: "Trump has fanned the flames of hate and sought to divide us.. He
doesn't have any compassion, no regard for the values that made this country
who we are.. He doesn't believe that we're the beacon to the world. He
doesn't believe we're all part of something bigger than ourselves. That's
why I've said from the moment I announced for this candidacy, we are
literally in a battle for the soul of America..
"There's nothing we can't do. This is about the future. It's not about the
past. It's about our children and our grandchildren. It's about leading this
country and leading the world once again. Folks, we just have to remember
who we are. My Lord, this is the United States of America, and it's time for
America to get back up, and once again, fight for the proposition that we
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created
equal, and that by the creator with certain inalienable rights. We say it so
often in school, we don't realize how profound it is. We've never lived up
to those words, but up to this President, we've never walked away from it.."
In a stark contrast of styles, Sanders hardly even alluded to American
exceptionalism, but chose a tactic Biden hardly employed at all. Sanders
made several direct, head-to-head comparisons between himself and his
unnamed rival:
SANDERS: "One of us in this race led the opposition to the war in Iraq -
you're looking at him. Another candidate voted for the war in Iraq.
"One of us has spent his entire life fighting against cuts in Social
Security and wanting to expand Social Security. Another candidate has been
on the floor of the Senate calling for cuts to Social Security, Medicare,
Medicaid, and veterans' benefits.
"One of us led the opposition to disastrous trade agreements, which cost us
millions of good paying jobs. And that's me. And another candidate voted for
disastrous trade agreements.
"One of us stood up for consumers and said, 'We will not support a
disastrous bankruptcy bill.' And another candidate represented the credit
card companies and voted for that disastrous bill."
In another stark contrast, Sanders demands justice, especially economic
justice. And Biden, while gesturing toward justice, puts more emphasis on
healing, without quite explaining what that's supposed to mean in the real
world: "We need a President who can fight, but make no mistake about it, I
could fight, but look, we need this badly, as badly, someone who could
heal.. We need a President who can heal the country as well, and that is
what I will do as your President. I promise you."
These two speeches represent the candidates' freely-chosen issues that they
consider important, for one reason or another. It's hard to argue that the
chosen issues are not important (with the exception of exhortations to
American exceptionalism, which is mostly an exercise in self-flattering
denial). But are the chosen issues of March 3 the most important issues of
the day? What about endless war, Afghanistan, war crimes, Yemen, more war
crimes, the nuclear war-fighting escalation, the trillion dollars spent on
"defense" every year? The only other candidate still in the race, Rep. Tulsi
Gabbard, with two delegates, has built her campaign on those issues. And the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) has just excluded her from the next
Democratic debate. The Gabbard campaign sort of predicted as much on March
4:
We can't count on the DNC, the corporate media, super PACs, or name
recognition to move us to the next phase.. The corporate media and the
establishment they serve decided a long time ago that they'd do everything
in their power to silence Tulsi's voice, distort her platform, and dismiss
our movement.
They don't want Tulsi on the national debate stage taking on the military
industrial complex, speaking the truth about the cost of war. They don't
want her calling on [DNC chair] Tom Perez to resign and talking about how to
reform the party. They don't want her to, once again, become the most
Googled candidate of the evening. They want to starve her of oxygen, and our
campaign of momentum. Silence us. Count us out.
Maybe that March 15 debate will bring up some of the omitted or
under-explored issues, such as immigration, impeachable offenses, failure to
uphold the Constitution or the law, COVID-19 preparedness, nepotism,
interference in judicial proceedings, dark money in politics, voter
suppression - especially voter suppression with its bipartisan history and
Supreme Court blessings - or some other egregious offense to the public
welfare.
So that's where we are now. Barring some spectacular surprise, the
Democratic presidential nomination has come down to a binary choice between
Biden and Bernie. How is that good news?
That's the tragedy of a party where, no matter how you define it, the only
real Democrat in the race isn't a real Democrat.
