Donald Trumps dream candidate?
More to the point, Joe Biden is the dream choice of the American
Corporate Empire. What a dream race! A candidate with dimensia
running against a demented president.
Open the Gates, America! The Corporate Plunderers are coming in!
Carl Jarvis
On 3/5/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Biden Would Be Donald Trump's Dream Opponent
Joe Biden making a speechDemocratic presidential candidate and former Vice
President Joe Biden gives a speech in Iowa in 2019. (Gage Skidmore /
Flickr)(CC BY-SA 2.0)
Donald Trump had the perfect opponent in the 2016 election. Running as a
populist billionaire taking on the Washington elite, he couldn't have asked
for a better rival in Hillary Clinton, who carried heavy political baggage
and who, for many, personified the so-called establishment. While Trump's
populist shtick was easy to pick apart, Clinton was the wrong person to
promote the message she was trying to get across to voters.
By nominating a candidate whose place in the Democratic Party establishment
was undeniable and who lacked credibility on issues like money in politics,
the Democrats simply let Trump run as the anti-establishment candidate. Not
only that, but the Clinton camp even tried courting establishment
Republicans who couldn't bring themselves to vote for their own party's
candidate.
Here was a man who had openly bragged about bribing politicians, yet
Democrats couldn't go after Trump on the issue because their own candidate
was one of the politicians to whom he'd donated in the past. The Clinton
camp raised (and spent) far more money than Trump, but whether this
actually
helped or hurt her is unclear, as it also gave credence to the perception
that she was the candidate favored by big donors Meanwhile, Trump
positioned
himself as the self-financing candidate who couldn't be bought.
As the Trump campaign's onetime CEO, Steve Bannon, put it shortly after the
election, "Hillary Clinton was the perfect foil for Trump's message. From
her email server, to her lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street bankers, to
her FBI problems, she represented everything that middle-class Americans
had
had enough of."
This time around, Trump should have zero credibility running as a
"populist." The president has presided over the most corrupt administration
in modern history, plagued by investigations and numerous indictments that
have led to convictions of some of his closest associates. Trump has
nominated Supreme Court justices who defend money in politics, and his
major
legislative achievement has been to give billionaires and corporate elites
major tax cuts.
Under Trump, corporate America has thrived while real-income growth has
declined for most working- and middle-class people. Inequality has
continued
to reach historic levels, and billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mike
Bloomberg have seen their wealth surge. In 2020, Trump is no longer even
pretending to self-finance his campaign. With his recent predatory budget
proposal he has made it clear that he is getting ready to gut programs like
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, during his second term.
It should be easy for Democrats to expose Trump as the corrupt charlatan
that he is. In an age when a majority of voters rate political corruption
as
America's biggest crisis and nearly 8 in 10 Americans agree that there
should be "limits on the amount of money individuals and organizations" can
spend on political campaigns, how hard can it be to defeat a hugely
unpopular president who makes Richard Nixon look half decent? The surest
way
for Democrats to lose to Trump again would be to follow the same strategy
as
2016 and nominate a candidate who embodies the establishment, carries a ton
of political baggage and lacks credibility on issues like corruption.
By the looks of it, Democrats might just pull it off. After Super Tuesday,
it appears that Trump will have another perfect foil for his message in
2020. Former Vice President Joe Biden has regained his place as the
Democratic frontrunner after a successful showing on Tuesday, thanks in
large part to party elites, and some of his former rivals, quickly
consolidating around his campaign the day before. Though the race is far
from over, Biden is now well-positioned to win the nomination. By selecting
Biden, Democrats will effectively let Trump and his deeply corrupt
administration off the hook yet again.
Biden is a lot like Clinton, but worse in almost every measurable way. On
issue after issue, Biden has consistently been to the right of Clinton
throughout his fifty-year political career. He has a record of advocating
cuts to Social Security and Medicare; he helped write the 1994 Crime Bill
that led to an explosion in mass incarceration; he played a critical role
in
passing the 2005 bankruptcy bill that stripped bankruptcy protection from
some of the most vulnerable people. Biden also supported and championed the
Iraq War.
This list goes on and on. Beyond his extremely problematic record, which
will make it hard for Democrats to go after Trump about, say, cutting
Social
Security (which Biden himself supported not too long ago), Biden has his
own
personal scandals that will make it very difficult for him to cast Trump as
corrupt.
While his son Hunter's business dealings in Ukraine may not qualify as
corruption, it was doubtless unethical and sleazy for Biden's son to take a
high-paying consultant gig with a foreign firm while his father was vice
president (and Biden's refusal to acknowledge this conflict only makes it
worse). The behavior of Biden's family will haunt him in the general
election. As Ryan Grim wrote in The Intercept last October, Biden's son and
brother have been "trading on their family name for decades, cashing in on
the implication - and sometimes the explicit argument - that giving money
to
a member of Joe Biden's family wins the favor of Joe Biden." Predictably, a
majority of voters believe it was inappropriate for Biden's son to take a
job with the Ukrainian firm, and Trump will exploit this and use it to
defend his own family's nepotism and corruption.
In the lead-up to the general election, Biden, who has recently struggled
to
string coherent sentences together, would provide the slick demagogue
Donald
Trump with all the ammunition he needs. We were given a little preview of
what to expect in President Trump's Super Tuesday commentary: "The Democrat
establishment came together and crushed Bernie Sanders, AGAIN!" he gloated
on Twitter, once again positioning himself as the anti-establishment
populist.
On Monday, the Democratic establishment proved that it still has far more
control over the party than the Republican establishment did over their own
party in 2016. No one stands to benefit more from an establishment triumph
than Donald Trump. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has the credibility to call out
Trump on his corruption and neoliberal economic policies, is still in the
race, but his chances are looking much slimmer than they were just a week
ago.
Democrats have a choice: They can follow the same strategy that ended up
costing them all three branches of government in recent years, or they can
go another way. The stakes couldn't be higher.
Conor Lynch
Conor Lynch is a freelance writer and journalist living in New York. His
work has appeared in The Week, Salon, The New Republic, and other
publications. You can follow him on Twitter.
Conor Lynch
