Democratic Primaries
In reply to the discussion: Why I Work Against Bernie Sanders During the Primaries [View all]PatrickforO
(14,570 posts)Voting for Jill Stein was not good judgement. Clinton was far from my favorite candidate because there were nearly as many 'never Clintons' as there were 'never Trumps.' But if those Bernie supporters had swung behind Clinton, we would not be having the current national nightmare.
I do have a friend, though, who makes an interesting point. He says that if we look at Obama, we see a president who was better than merely 'good.' We see someone who led us through a great recession, rallied Congress to pass a national healthcare act, and put a whole bunch of good policies into place. Plus, the guy got Bin Laden. But he had the temerity to do all that while at the same time being black, and this caused the white supremacists to crawl out from under their rocks.
So, in 2016, we went from a smart, good, moral president who was black to a disgusting, foul, corrupt, treasonous, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, deregulator who has created messes it will take decades to clean up, lost us the confidence of our allies, promoted the interests of hostile foreign powers and illegally withheld aid from an ally for his own political gain.
But he's white.
It may be, Mineral Man, that my friend is right. Your comments about Bernie aside, because I agree with you, it may be we needed this descent into the Trump nightmare so that we could look on it in horror and so regain our decency and goodness as a people, end the American Empire, and regain our republic - the republic our founders intended we have.
Corporations and oligarchs have so much control through the dollars=free speech doctrine codified by the Citizens United and other disastrous court decisions, and Moscow Mitch has so successfully packed the federal courts with many-times-unqualified right wing idealogues, that we may well suffer into the next generation.
But we have to keep trying. We cannot give up. I suspect Biden will be the nominee, which is sad to me. It will once again seem to me that the party 'machine' has gone centrist out of cowardice at potentially losing an election rather than supporting the bold change that can inspire new generations of Americans.............but we have to get rid of Trump. We have to. So, if Biden gets the nod as I expect he will, I will support him. Enthusiastically, financially and as a volunteer.
I know you disagree, probably vehemently, with what I just said about the 'machine', but I will tell you that there are millions of people who will expect a President Biden and a (hopefully) Democratic Senate and House to make sweeping, bold progress on healthcare. On climate change. On the tax codes and on educating Americans that taxes aren't some kind of 'gummint' extortion but are necessary to pay for programs we need. On preserving and strengthening Social Security through imposing the 1999 'lock box' that Biden voted against. On preserving and expanding Medicare.
We also need to revise our trade agreements to be fair to American workers, and better dovetail workforce and economic development strategies so that the millions of American languishing in crummy jobs that are all that they had left after their good jobs disappeared are given some relief. We are going to have to be a bit more aggressive that I think Biden wants to be in adjusting policies to be more pro-worker.
The Republican party has become a party of treason, holding the needs and interests of foreign (and domestic) oligarchs above the interests of the American people. It cannot be allowed to stand. But we who make our way through the ruins the Party of Trump has created must do more than merely play 'clean up' while the peanut gallery - what Maddow calls the right wing noise machine - sits back and blames us for the problems. We have to get aggressive and go back at these cretins line by line.
Well, enough of that. We are both within the middle two thirds of the Bell curve, I think, though you might not think it of me. I will, of course, be supporting Warren as her photo on my signature implies, but again, I and hopefully every other Democrat in good standing will be supporting whomever our nominee is.
Because we must get rid of Trump.
There's a lot to do, and because of the urgency of climate change, it can no longer be business as usual.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden