Clueless and Shameless: Joe Biden, Staggering Frontrunner

By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News

20 June 19

oe Biden just put a spotlight on his mindset when he explicitly refused to apologize for fondly recalling how the Senate “got things done” with “civility” as he worked alongside some of the leading racist lawmakers of the 20th century. For Biden, the personal is the political; he knows that he’s virtuous, and that should be more than good enough for African Americans, for women, for anyone.

“There’s not a racist bone in my body,” Biden exclaimed Wednesday night, moments after demanding: “Apologize for what?” His deep paternalism surfaced during the angry outburst as he declared: “I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career, period, period, period.”

Biden has been “involved” in civil rights his “whole career” all right. But at some crucial junctures, he was on the wrong side. He teamed up with segregationist senators to oppose busing for school desegregation in the 1970s. And he played a leading role – while pandering to racism with a shameful Senate floor speech – for passage of the infamous 1994 crime bill that fueled mass incarceration.

Such aspects of Biden’s record provide context for his comments this week – praising an era of productive “civility” with the virulent segregationist Dixiecrat senators Herman Talmadge of Georgia and James Eastland of Mississippi (known as the “Voice of the White South”), who often called black people “an inferior race.”

Said Biden at a New York fundraiser Tuesday night: “Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished.”

To Biden, any assessment of his past conduct that clashes with his high self-regard is unfair; after all, he really means well. On the campaign trail now, his cloying paternalism is as evident as his affinity for wealthy donors.

Biden shuttles between the billionaire class and the working class – funded by the rich while justifying the rich to everyone else. His aspirations are bound up in notions of himself as comforter-in-chief.

“I get it, I get it,” Biden said during his brief and self-adulatory non-apology video in early April to quiet the uproar over his invasive touching of women and girls. He was actually saying: I get it that I need to seem to get it.

“I want to talk about gestures of support and encouragement that I’ve made to women and some men that have made them uncomfortable,” Biden said in the video. “In my career I’ve always tried to make a human connection – that’s my responsibility, I think. I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and say, ‘You can do this’ … It’s the way I’ve always been. It’s the way I’ve tried to show I care about them and I’m listening.”

Weeks later, appearing on ABC’s “The View,” he declared: “I have never in my life, never, done anything in approaching a woman that has been other than trying to bring solace.” It was not a credible claim; consider Lucy Flores, or the countless other women and girls he has intrusively touched over the years.

For several decades, Biden has made his way through the political terrain as a reflexive glad-hander. But times have changed a lot more than he has. “What the American people do not know yet is whether Biden has actually internalized any of the blowback he’s earned over the years for his treatment of women,” journalist Joe Berkowitz wrote last week. “So far, it’s not looking good.”

What’s also looking grim is Biden’s brazen adoration of wealthy elites who feed on corporate power. His approach is to split the rhetorical difference between the wealthy and the workers. And so, days ago, at a fundraiser filled with almost 180 donors giving his campaign the legal limit of $2,800 each – an event where he tried and failed to get funding from a pro-Trump billionaire – Biden declared: “You know, you guys are great but Wall Street didn’t build America. You guys are incredibly important but you didn’t build America. Ordinary, hard-working, middle-class people given half the chance is what built America.”

The formula boils down to throwing the “hard-working middle class” some rhetorical bones while continuing to service “you guys” on Wall Street. Given his desire to merely revert the country to pre-Trump days, no wonder Biden keeps saying that a good future can stem from finding common ground with Republicans. But for people who understand the present-day GOP and really want a decent society, Biden’s claims are delusional.

Biden sees his public roles of winking patriarch, civility toward racists, and collaborator with oligarchs as a winning political combination. But if he becomes the Democratic presidential nominee, Biden will suppress turnout from the party’s base while providing Republicans with plenty of effective (albeit hypocritical) fodder. Already the conservative press is salivating over the transparently fraudulent pretenses of Lunch Bucket Joe, as in this headline Tuesday in the right-wing Washington Examiner: “Biden Rubs Elbows With Billionaires in $34M Penthouse.”

When Bernie Sanders (who I continue to actively support) denounces the political power of billionaires and repeats his 2020 campaign motto – “Not Me. Us.” – it rings true, consistent with his decades-long record. But Biden can’t outrun his own record, which is enmeshed in his ongoing mentality. And so, the former vice president is in a race between his pleasant image and unpleasant reality.

As the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden is the biggest threat to Joe Biden’s political future. He continues to be who he has been, and that’s the toxic problem.

Norman Solomon is cofounder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Trump Kicks Off Re-Election Campaign: Get Ready for 'Billionaire Populist II: The Sequel'

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

20 June 19

Campaign 2020 is shaping up as a contest of populist visions

ost coverage of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign to date has focused on polls, specifically two: a Fox survey that showed Trump losing to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in a hypothetical one-on-one (but beating other Democrats) and Trump’s own internal polling that, to the glee of reporters, leaked, showing him trailing Biden by a ton in a head to head matchup.

The latter revelation was particularly humorous given that Trump later tweeted that “only fake polls” showed him behind the “Motley Crew,” his new term for the Democratic field.

Polls aside, Trump’s launch is already notable for the themes he’s choosing to stress. He released a video Monday re-hashing his 2016 populist formula. It’s not often that a sitting president promises to take on Washington, but he did it. “We’re taking on the failed political establishment and restoring government of, by and for the people,” it says. “It’s the people, you’re the people, you won the election.” We should expect more rhetoric along these lines tonight.

Last time, it was an awesome display of chutzpah when the billionaire scion of inherited wealth ran and won as a champion of the common voter. If he manages to repeat the feat this time by running from inside the White House as a political outsider — while doing one-hour ABC specials bragging about how awesome it is to travel by Air Force One and Marine helicopter — it might be time to admit Trump’s only peer in the annals of con artistry will be the guy who sold the Eiffel Tower twice.

That Trump continues to present himself as a populist isn’t surprising, since it worked last time. What’s interesting is that much of the Democratic field appears to be gearing up to use the same strategy. This would be a departure from 2016, where the battle lines coalesced around a theme that ultimately cut against Democrats: experience and competence versus change and upheaval. Trump ran on blowing it all up and won.

This time around, Democratic campaigns seem to recognize voters are still in detonation mode. Yahoo Finance just ran a piece describing the 2020 race as likely to be “competing visions of economic populism between Senator Bernie Sanders and President Donald Trump.”

This doesn’t mean the general election will be between Trump and Sanders. It does however suggest that the substantive issues of next summer’s national debate will revolve around whose campaign provides the most plausibly sweeping corrective to the failures of modern American capitalism.

As Yahoo puts it: “In a development that experts say is a reflection of the public’s increasingly fraught relationship with unfettered free markets, virtually all major Democratic contenders have pushed populist platforms.”

If there’s an early theme to the Democratic stumpery in places like Iowa, it’s been the idea of using the government to intervene in the markets to correct systemic inequities, using policies that would have been non-starters just a few years ago.

With the proposal of his “Economic Bill of Rights,” Sanders has planted a flag firmly on one side of the debate, offering guarantees for housing, a job with a $15 per hour fair wage, single-payer health care, and retirement.

Numerous candidates have proposed some version of a “Green New Deal,” with Washington governor Jay Inslee stressing the issue the most. His spokesperson Jamal Raad calls Inslee’s plan a “full-scale mobilization of the federal government to defeat climate change,” one that includes a plan to create 8 million jobs over 10 years.

Former Housing Secretary Julián Castro toured a trailer park in Waukee and talked about spiking rents, promising relief. Calling affordable housing a “human right,” Castro has proposed tax cuts for anyone paying more than 30 percent of their income toward housing.

On the education front, 18 of the 23 Democratic candidates have come out in favor of some form of free college tuition, with Castro, Elizabeth Warren, and Sanders promising free tuition at all public higher institutions. Multiple Democratic candidates have endorsed a federal jobs guarantee program, with Sanders, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and New Jersey’s Cory Booker being the most vocal. This comes on the heels of polls showing majorities of voters in all 50 states being in favor of some kind of jobs guarantee program — even states won by Trump.

On health care, many of the candidates claim to be in favor of Medicare-for-All, including Booker and California’s Kamala Harris, both co-sponsors of a Sanders Medicare-for-All bill (although those two have walked back their support somewhat).

A few candidates have gone to places even Sanders has not. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang’s plan is to pay $1000 a month in Universal Basic Income or, as he calls it, a “freedom dividend.”

“Who can be against a freedom dividend?” he’s said. “What kind of asshole do you have to be?”

The Trump version of interventionist populism is a little less ideological and a little more opportunistic, similar to an Asiatic khan who hands out camels when he hears grousing inside a tent. Earlier this year, Trump was on his way to visit an LNG plant in Louisiana and had to cross a bridge over the Calcaisieu River. Unimpressed with what he saw, he ended up offering Louisianans money for a new bridge if elected. He just signed a bill for $19 billion in disaster relief for the Florida panhandle, and when his trade war with China resulted in a threat of retaliatory tariffs against American agribusiness, Trump doled out $16 billion in aid to farmers.

Trump’s populist credentials owe a lot to his omnivorous borrowing from the rhetoric of countless anti-establishment campaigns, past and present — from the anti-interventionism of Ron Paul, to the “outside the box” campaign of fellow non-politician Herman Cain, and even to Sanders, whom he often praised on the trail, seemingly as a way to tweak Hillary Clinton (Trump said at one point in April of 2016 that Bernie was “telling the truth” about Hillary).

Since becoming president, Trump has been touting his commitment to “forgotten Americans,” a theme ironically culled from another insurgent campaign that targeted angry white middle class voters: the late 2008 primary run of Hillary Clinton. The Mark Penn-designed “invisible America” stump theme helped Hillary win Pennsylvania and nearly turn things around against Barack Obama.

“Invisible Americans” was itself an echo of Bill Clinton’s “forgotten middle class” concept, which in turn was an echo of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority,” etc. Campaign faux-populism is so constantly recycled, it’s often difficult to trace the original author of the false promises.

In 2015-2016, Trump’s prescriptions for change often involved pledges to get on the phone and alter history with the force of his Trumpiness. The Ford motor company planning to move a plant to Mexico? “I wouldn’t let it happen,” candidate Trump promised.

Trump also promised to take on the Wall Street guys who were “getting away with murder,” and jack up their taxes. “The hedge fund people make a lot of money and they pay very little tax,” he said as a candidate. “I want to lower taxes for the middle class.” He went after both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton for ties to Goldman Sachs.

Years later, we know how a lot of this turned out. He didn’t raise taxes on the rich, but did the opposite, giving them a historic tax break (middle class voters will see some cuts, just not as much). Soon after election, he put a slew of the same Goldman execs he railed against as a candidate in his White House. As a result you’ll see a lot of quotes like one from former Obama official Karine Jean-Pierre, who said voters “just won’t buy” Trump as an outsider going forward.

But there’s been so much upheaval, conflict, and overall weirdness in America in the last two years that Trump may end up benefitting just from the perception of things being different. A CNN poll from earlier this year showed 76 percent of Americans believed Trump created “significant changes” in the country, and the split on whether those changes were positive versus negative was blurrier than you’d guess — 33 percent in favor, 37 percent against.

Those numbers don’t sound all that great for Trump, until one considers that voters last time consistently said they supported change even if they didn’t know what the change in question would be. Trump, just by being Trump, has a path to winning the “change agent” mantle in any theoretical general election matchup.

It’s why people like Trump campaign manager Tim Murtaugh are able to say, without irony, that Trump “promised to go to Washington and shake things up, and he certainly has.” If Barack Obama offered Hope and Change, Trump mostly just offers change — but his underestimated strength as a politician is that he’s always understood a lot of America is crazy, pessimistic and depressed enough to settle just for that.

Democrats in 2016 ran on not being Donald Trump, which seemed at the time like it should be enough. There are polls out already this time suggesting the same strategy could work this time. That’s probably dangerous thinking. Democrats promising radical action meanwhile are probably on to something, not just as a way to re-take the White House, but because the country needs and wants it. Major structural reform is long overdue in America, and if Democrats don’t promise it, just watch tonight — Donald Trump will.