"Joe Biden isn't moderate, he is on the right wing of the Democratic party."

[brooklynite]

I've apparently gotten into a twitter fight with Rachel Bitcofer and her minions...

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

[Turin_C3PO]

1. It's bullshit anyway.

Biden is not a moderate, he’s a liberal. So was Hillary Clinton.

[Turin_C3PO]

7. He has a few bad votes

but he’s a liberal. Bernie has some bad votes too, such as backing the gun industry and voting against Flint clean water.

[Turin_C3PO]

12. No,

I mean supporting the murderous gun industry.

[ehrnst]

13. Five no votes on the Brady bill...

[Celerity]

15. shielding gun manufacturers from liability is NOT supporting your RW talking point meme (2A rights)

welcome to DU

enjoy your stay m8

[Turin_C3PO]

23. Every political

graph has Biden placed firmly on the left of the scale. His bankruptcy bill was bad, no doubt. But he has a long history of voting on the right side of the issues. He wants to expand the ACA to include a robust public option. He wants to make community college free and reduce student loan debt burden. That is not him being a fiscal conservative. I’ll go into this election, not holding my nose, but proud to pull the lever for Biden.

[Todd79]

18. I'll give you the first one

Biden was wrong on Hill.

After that let’s see here-

A liberal who voted for the disastrous crime bill?
Bernie Sanders voted for it

https://www.inquisitr.com/5856673/video-bernie-sanders-1994-crime-bill-joe-biden/

A liberal who voted for a pointless war?
Biden voted for the war, but Sanders voted to fund the war too.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/16/blood-traces-bernies-iraq-war-hypocrisy/

A liberal who voted to deregulate Wall Street?
Guess what!!! Bernie voted to deregulate Wall Street.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/01/17/politics/bernie-sanders-wall-street-deregulation-debate/index.html

[BidenBacker]

39. AUMF

Joe worked with Hagel & Lugar to have an interim authorization passed that woulda made Dubya & Gang come back to Congress only after they had exhausted all other avenues dealing with Iraq before whacking them. Lugar could only get so many GOP votes so Joe tried to get enough Dems to pass it on a bipartisan basis. Sanders was one of those who refused to go along. If he and some others had, then Dubya, Big Dick & Rummy wouldn't have been able to invade Iraq before the ink on the AUMF was even dry.

Biden and many others didn't trust Dubya as far as they could spit and tried to put a leash on him, but as usual Sanders (among others) was totally uncompromising which only accelerated our race to war.

That's a long story in a nutshell...if folks knew the whole story then Sanders would come out looking a lot worse and Biden a lot better. Mindboggling that Bernie is now using that as one of his attack points but you can get away with that kinda shit if enough people are ignorant of the facts.

[Mister Ed]

44. Thank you for this information.

And yes, I sure wish more people knew this. Hell, I wish I'd known it.

[BidenBacker]

46. Here is a brief article I found just to show I'm not bullshitting people

It's the best I could find after so many years but it will give you just a small whiff of what I was talking about...

https://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-te.iraq03oct03-story.html

The Senate is expected to approve a resolution in strong support of the president's position, though a lively debate - possibly including more than one Democratic alternative - is all but assured.

Biden and Lugar want a chance for a vote on their proposal, which Daschle has endorsed. They are seeking to narrow the president's authorization so that force could be used only to protect U.S. security or to disarm Saddam Hussein.

By contrast, the compromise agreed to yesterday would allow force to be used to defend the nation or to enforce "all relevant" U.N. Security Council resolutions on Iraq. That language, Biden argues, could empower the president to go to war for other reasons, such as forcing Hussein to cease human rights abuses against Iraqi citizens or to free non-Iraqi prisoners.

Administration officials said Bush has no intention of using force for such reasons.

The Biden-Lugar resolution would also require Bush to either delay the use of force until the United Nations has approved a new resolution intended to disarm Hussein, or certify that the Iraq threat is "so grave that the use of force is necessary" even without international support.

There were all kinds of amendments being proposed back then but they all got shot down. The one Joe was trying to get through was the Biden-Lugar resolution which woulda reined in Dubya and gotten the UN involved. But it never even made it to a vote. While Joe was trying to get Dems on board Gephardt in the House who was eyeing a run for POTUS kinda backstabbed him by cutting a deal with Dubya and once the House folded any deal to put a leash on Dubya was dead so they ended up passing a full-blown AUMF and we all know what happened after that.

Had some Dem Senators like Sanders, Boxer, Wyden and others agreed sooner before Gephardt signed on to unrestricted military force they mighta been able to prevent a war. We'll never know.

Why Biden doesn't fight back with what really went down is beyond me. Maybe he forgot all about it...LOL.

[dansolo]

49. I remember Gephardt's backstabbing

Him and Lieberman were the worst. i seemed to recall John Edwards was in that group as well, which is why I was shocked to see him suddenly become the liberal darling before his infidelity scandal took him down.

[BidenBacker]

47. A clip from another article

“The administration’s arguments just don’t add up,” Sen. Russ Feingold said on the Senate floor in October 2002. Sen. Paul Wellstone similarly raised concerns, questioning a lack of planning on the Bush administration’s part to account for the potential fallout from military action. He also raised questions about the potential death toll not only among Americans, but also Iraqi civilians, and the billions of dollars that would have to go toward a rebuilding effort.

Biden’s skepticism, however, was largely reserved for the Bush administration’s specific ask: a catch-all war authorization for Iraq. Biden supported a narrower war power authorization prioritizing the WMDs. He joined Republicans Sens. Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel, the latter of whom would go on to be Obama’s defense secretary years later, in crafting an amendment to the war authorization to limit the scope of Bush’s powers.

But another Democrat foiled that effort: Rep. Dick Gephardt, the House minority leader, struck a deal with Bush to authorize the use of military force in a war — a move that angered Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate, including Biden. Gephardt, at the time weighing a presidential run, was accused of playing politics.

And Biden blinked.

Hey, Joe tried but he couldn't pull it off. My respect for Hagel & Lugar went up quite a bit as I learned what happened. Those two didn't trust that SOB Dubya either.

[Mister Ed]

48. Again, many thanks. I'll try to share this info with others. n/t

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. Joe is where your median Democratic voter is.

[relayerbob]

3. His platform is significantly to the left of both HRC and Obama

But Sanders thinks his "revolution" is mainstream. Sorry, dude, 30% of the Democratic Party is less than 15% of the population as a whole.

[PatSeg]

4. Joe has always been considered liberal

but now he has been tagged "moderate" and "centrist" by Bernie's campaign and the media just echoes those words. Also, Hillary ran on a very progressive platform in 2016. It just wasn't far enough left for Bernie's camp.

Mitt Romney is moderate. Joe Manchin is moderate. Susan Collins is moderate. Mark Warner is moderate. Joe Biden is a liberal, who is a pragmatist that gets things done.

[Turin_C3PO]

6. I wouldn't call Romney and Collins moderates.

They’re moderate Republicans to be sure. Now Manchin is a true moderate, voting with Dems about half the time, I think.

[PatSeg]

20. Yes

I agree. Romney and Collins are moderate republicans, not nearly the same as moderate Democrats these days. There were a lot more Democratic moderates, but I can't recall them right now. They are often from some western or southern states. I remember Blanche Lincoln was a moderate and she helped ax the public option for the ACA. Max Baucus too.

[Todd79]

24. Don't forget old Zell

Hell he was more conservative than a lot of GOPers.

[PatSeg]

31. Oh my god

Zell! Yeah, he was a conservative and a really odd guy. Do you remember when he wanted to challenge Chris Matthews to a duel?

[Todd79]

34. Oh yeah

LOL I spent 2 years in Georgia and he was my governor at the time. Him and Traficant were flat out bonkers.

[bucolic_frolic]

8. Her predictions are just too good to be true, yes I know 2018

but she's the relief pitcher of pollsters, and they throw strikes until they don't

[Sloumeau]

9. brooklynite, what you said was something simliar to what I would have said.

Rachel ran a whole series of numbers in order to predict how the House races would go in 2018. Ask her to look at her numbers for 2018 Democratic House members and see who did better, the Moderates or the Leftwing/Liberals/Progressives/. The Moderates kicked butt.

[NCProgressive]

10. Bitecofer needs to shut up

She is too overrated by the media.

[2naSalit]

27. Her five minutes of fame should have been over

at the end of Bill Maher's show last week.

[dhill926]

29. I agree...

was not impressed by her at all...

[Awsi Dooger]

42. How did Rachel Bitecofer manage 5 minutes of fame in the first place?

That's the type of person I used to walk in 5 minutes during Las Vegas debates. They'd be running away from the sportsbooks cursing at me with their back turned, as my friends howled.

Bitecofer argues against the concept of swing voters, saying turnout is everything. Then she whines about moderates on the ticket because supposedly the moderate ticket in 2016 led to progressive defection.

In other words, Rachel believes in ideology changing votes or removing votes only when it is convenient to her argument. Progressives are free to change their mind and run away when the ideology doesn't suit their biases. But brainstorming Rachel doesn't think that actual moderates and independents are prone to changing their minds and changing their votes or staying home when the ideology is too far to the left.

James Comey altered the outcome of the 2016 race. He led to sizable change of preference that Hillary could not afford. Minus Comey's letter, Bitecofer's argument falls apart. Nobody would care about her in the slightest. Instead she used a wave election cycle to forecast a wave and somehow people were impressed.

Then she doesn't even bother to acknowledge why 2018 played out as it did, with moderates sweeping all those vital suburban races. Again, that reminds me of the geniuses in Las Vegas who would predict a team to cover the spread based on one criteria -- like the running game -- then the team actually covered it based on an entirely different criteria -- like turnovers and the passing game -- yet the geniuses howled and howled as if they nailed it all along.

[Go Vols]

14. The center is neither right or left

The landslide 1984 presidential election defeat spurred centrist Democrats to action, and the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was formed. The DLC, an unofficial party organization, played a critical role in moving the Democratic Party's policies to the center of the American political spectrum. Prominent Democratic politicians such as Senators Al Gore and Joe Biden (both future Vice Presidents) participated in DLC affairs prior to their candidacy for the 1988 Democratic Party nomination.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democrats

[TwilightZone]

28. Biden isn't in the center. Manchin is in the center.

Manchin is one of the few moderates in the party at the national level.

Biden is left of center:



https://www.ontheissues.org/joe_biden.htm

Manchin is moderate:



https://www.ontheissues.org/Joe_Manchin_III.htm

[Go Vols]

35. I am old enough

to know what Dems used to represent.They don't represent the people they used to.

[TwilightZone]

36. That doesn't make your assertion any more accurate.

[Go Vols]

40. It also dosent invalidate

Last edited Tue Mar 10, 2020, 01:16 AM - Edit history (1)

my original post either.

Edit:https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1287&pid=650612

Edit: Tell me how its got better since '84.

[IronLionZion]

17. OnTheIssues has Joe Biden as a solidly left liberal

https://www.ontheissues.org/joe_biden.htm

based on decades of votes, speeches, and policy positions

[Progressive2020]

19. Biden

I think that whether Biden is moderate or not is a secondary argument to whether he is fit to be President. It is all over social media that Biden is in cognitive decline, senile, suffering from dementia, whatever you might call it. You do not see this argument too much here on DU, but this is a Democratic bubble.

This cognitive issue is being pushed by Sanders people but also by Trump people. Biden needs to get out a head of it, because it is not going away. Trump will use the argument against Joe should Joe win the Democratic Nomination, which seems likely at this point.

Biden and Bernie are scheduled to debate on March 15th. Biden needs to take that opportunity to show that he can speak and think clearly and can stand up to criticism and arguments from Sanders. Consider it a dress rehearsal for the General Election.

I think that we need to address the cognitive issue here on DU, because this topic is blowing up all over social media. It will not go away unless Joe can address the topic. He needs to dismiss it by showing that he still has a sharp mind on the debate stage and through the rest of this campaign. We need to get out ahead of the issue, I think.

[moonseller66]

22. Bull shit! We need to remind ALL the people of...

the Orange Sphincter's cognitive problems; his educational disabilities; his immoral beliefs; his Russia Loving BS; his lies; his stuttering...should I go on?

But to choose to ignore all that and then claim to worry about Biden's problems without attacking the attacker is insane and defeatist. That's just what the media wants.

Fight among yourselves while a total moron runs the country down and the media happily provides the way.

Bullshit!

[Progressive2020]

25. Yeah

We do need to attack Trump on all of those things. My point is that Trump and his people will not hesitate to attack Biden on anything they can find, and that seems to include the dementia argument against Joe. My other point is that we need to prepare for these attacks and have a counter-attack planned.

[SharonClark]

38. Trump claimed Hillary was on her last leg

and she’s doing fine.

That Trump makes up shit about any and all people who challenge him and that some Sanders supporters are equally good at spreading lies tells you all you need to know about them.

[Mister Ed]

45. When I hear, "It's all over social media", I think: "Hmmm. Bots. And a disinformation campaign."

Donald Trump really is in a state of mental decline. And he wasn't that sharp to begin with. That's why the Trump camp is pushing that meme. In politics, it's good strategy to attack your opponents on your own weak points - for example, Bush surrogates attacking Kerry's military record in 2004.

I just wish Sanders people weren't joining the Republicans in that dirty game.

[dansolo]

50. But her emaaaaaaails!

This is the same bullshit that was pulled on Hillary.

[TwilightZone]

26. "right wing of the Democratic Party" - aka center-left?

Which would make Biden center-left. There is no wing of the Democratic Party that is right of center, and the left wing of the Democratic Party are people like Sanders (when he's a D) and AOC. Even Manchin is a moderate and Biden is left of Manchin.

He's trying to be cute by including the "of the Democratic Party" part.

[aka-chmeee]

30. I don't care if he is on the right wing of a rabid bat...

He's the guy I want to re-occupy the White House for the Democratic Party.

[randr]

32. Ouch, my foot!

[Blue_Tires]

33. I give up...

I'm done trying to argue with the willfully ignorant...

[LiberalFighter]

37. Only their definition of moderate and progressive matters.

Only their definition of moderate and progressive matters.

For clarity.

[Go Vols]

41. Reading is ...

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1287&pid=650612

[LiberalFighter]

58. Yet Biden is in the middle of the pack for Democratic Senators back in 2008

Link to tweet

?s=20

[Hortensis]

43. Silly, outrageous lies reveal a lack of honest ammunition. nt

[Just_Vote_Dem]

51. Biden is the one we need

After 4 long years of the Orange Nightmare

[dawg day]

52. Joe Manchin is on the right wing

Biden is a moderate.
He is also a moderate in temperament, which is very appealing at this point.

[Turin_C3PO]

55. He's in the middle

of the Democratic Party which makes him a liberal or progressive.

[dawg day]

57. Yes, he is a liberal within the general population-

But is he left of center among the Democratic population, which is more liberal than the population as a whole?

Not that it matters much to me. Before Trump, I was very much of the mind that policies matter more than personalities (though I did recognize that Obama had the best temperament of any president ever, probably).

Now after Trump, I think we need a personality that isn't extreme. So a moderate temperament-- easygoing, able to forgive, able to laugh at him/herself, able to admit mistakes- appeals to me a lot.

Of course, people with that sort of personality tend to be... liberal.
(I'm whispering that because my best friend gets furious when I imply that liberals are likely to be, well, better people.)

[beachbumbob]

53. attacking moderate demcrats is always the extremist line of attack anyways,

we really don't care about their opinion on the people we support to WIN

[LanternWaste]

54. Horn tooted.

[Blue_Tires]

56. Fuck Bitecofer and fuck Cassidy...