Thursday, March 8, 2018

Enough with Joe Biden!




There is a person who has a blog, and says he is progressive, and at whose site I used to post responses. This went on for a good five years. I recently made the decision to stop because it became very apparent the author and every respondent, expect for myself, is not actually progressive but merely a self-identified Democratic Party voter.

I find most of those who, after Election 2016 resulted in a Republican pickup of the presidency for Donald Trump, and that we get a lot of Democratic Party Loyalists playing Go Fish with trying to figure out who should be their party’s 2020 nominee, that they were [in 2016] and still are [here in 2018] out of touch.

They remain out of touch because they have no idea why the Democrats lost the White House with nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. (They lost the White House because of income inequality not being addressed by the two-term Democratic incumbent president, Barack Obama, and that they were not convinced his would-be party successor—one with a long, cozy relationship with Wall Street and who was a board member on Walmart—would effectively confront and possibly solve that crisis.) They think they can look at Donald Trump’s behavior and assume that that was disqualifying. They think that Hillary Clinton appearing to have been better behaved made her more qualified. They think the presidency of the United States calls for qualifications. It does not. It has constitutional requirements for eligibility. There are differences in their meanings between those words qualified and eligible. An example: I am eligible. I meet the requirements of eligibility to be president of the United States.

This comes from people who, given the choice between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as the two leading candidates for the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination, chose Hillary Clinton.  This is the same group who thinks that time didn’t move forward, and they couldn’t go wrong with the Clintons. Plenty went wrong with Bill Clinton. In addition to being a Democratic Party U.S. president who provided leadership like a Republican, he had a lot of related losses: In 1980, after one term, he was unseated as Governor of Arkansas before winning it back in 1982. In the 1994 midterm elections, and his second year in office as the 42nd U.S. president, Clinton’s Democratic Party lost majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. The Democratic Party, under Clinton, also lost the U.S. Senate and the majority number of governorships—and never won them back during the remainder of Clinton’s presidency. In 2000, Clinton’s vice president Al Gore lost his bid for the presidency to a neoconservative governor (and draft dodger) from Texas. In 2008, Clinton’s wife Hillary lost her bid to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination to a four-year U.S. senator, from her birth state Illinois, who would go on to win the general election to become the 44th U.S. president. In 2016, she lost her bid for the presidency to a series-television, reality-competition host. So, despite Bill Clinton having been a four-term governor of Arkansas and a two-term U.S. president, the Clintons have had lots of electoral losses.

These Democrats Party Loyalists—who would naturally like to believe they have their fingers on the pulse of the U.S. voters but, in reality, don’t even have that on their political party—will likely not want to consider the following.

Joe Biden will never be president of the United States.

Joe Biden should never be president of the United States.

Joe Biden voted for the U.S. to go to war in Iraq. No one who was in Congress, and who voted to go to war in Iraq, was later elected to the presidency of the United States. The last two losing Democratic presidential nominees—John Kerry (2004) and Hillary Clinton (2016)—voted for that war. The Republican nominee from 2008, John McCain, voted for that war. They all lost.

No one who voted to go to war in Iraq was later elected to the presidency of the United States, so far in history, and it is likely to remain that way just as turned out that no member of Congress who voted to go to war in Vietnam was later elected to the presidency of the United States.

Why are there any Democratic Party Loyalists pushing for the 47th vice president? They are doing it just to toss out a name that, just as it has been the game of the rest of corporate Democratic Party Establishment, deliberately avoids Bernie Sanders.

However much of the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries results one believes, the most telling sign of where this party base is going is with the youngest voting-age group: 17–29 (in primaries)/18–29 (in general elections). In general elections, there are four commonly recorded, exit-polled age groups: 18–29; 30–44; 45–64; and 65+. The youngest age group nationally carried for Bernie Sanders with at least 70 percent of their vote. In the first two contests, Iowa and New Hampshire, he received over 80 percent of their vote. (He reached that level in the third, Nevada.) In the Top 10 populous states Barack Obama carried with re-election in 2012, but with the exceptions of New York and California (which was late on the schedule and not exit-polled), Sanders won 80 percent or more of those under 30. In the closed primary state Pennsylvania, he won over 80 percent from that age group.

The significance of the 18–29 vote is this: They are the first age group to carry for Democrats. After the 1980s, the Democrats lost in the U.S. Popular Vote only once—John Kerry in 2004. The only voting-age group which nationally carried for Kerry was 18–29. (He lost in the U.S. Popular Vote by –2.46—that is, 48.27% for Kerry; 50.73% for re-elected George W. Bush—but won 18–29 voters by +9 points.)

In the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Bernie Sanders won the two youngest age groups: 17–29 and 30–44. Hillary Clinton won the two oldest age groups: 45–64 and 65+. Hillary carried the age groups which were nationally carried by the 2012 presidential election by losing Republican nominee Mitt Romney. They voted in 2016 for Republican presidential pickup winner Donald Trump. Those 45 and older, in 2016, were born 1971 or earlier. They were there for the 1990s Clintons. To a lot of them, Bill Clinton was to Election 1992 what John Kennedy was to Election 1960—young (for a U.S. president), charming (and that was how a lot of people felt then of Hillary), and a real winner. (“In 1996, he won re-election—the first two-term Democratic Party U.S. president to do so since the four terms won, during the 1930s and 1940s, by Franklin Roosevelt.” Then again—had Kennedy not been assassinated, in 1963, he would have been re-elected in 1964.) But, we are not in the 1990s anymore. The Clintons are definitely not gold. And Joe Biden is no longer actively in political office—not as a United States senator from Delaware, and not as the 47th vice president of the United States.

For those who truly think Donald Trump will get unseated, with Election 2020, by his Democratic challenger, it helps to correctly identify specifically who offers the kind of leadership which has the ability to move people to let that person unseat an incumbent U.S. president. The following are examples why that person will, and should, not be Joe Biden.





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