Unfit Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

[jhu72]

The most determinative factor in Biden deciding how to act will be the behavior of turkey wattle. McConnell will have to give, horse trade. If you think Kamala will control Biden in any way you are fu*king delusional. Biden knows who the president is. Kamala will play the role of bad COP.

He will stay out of the lime light, unlike Orange Duce. Orange Duce spent more time in front of the cameras than all other presidents combined, since the advent of commercial TV! Biden will be seen when it is necessary, not when he has some need to stoke his ego. This will in and of itself lower temperatures in the country.

Doesn't Mitch have leprosy or something? He won't make 2 more years.

Agreed, he has a health problem, but can probably make two more years, just in time for the dems to take the senate.

[Farfromgeneva]

Brain damage is killer too!

[Matnum PI]

Nice sentiment...

RT @RealMerrinD: I can’t wait for joy again.
For empathy.
A leader who smiles, really smiles and laughs.
A leader who cares.
A leader who shares and takes turns and isn’t afraid to cry.
A leader who appreciates others and arts and science.
We were missing so much.
#BidenHarris2020

[CU77]

Doc's posts are "full of hatred"?

That is quite possibly the most absurd thing I have read on laxpower/fanlax in 15 years.

Get you head out of your f***ing ass man. His constant barrage of posts comparing the pandemic to WWII/WWI and saying "the blood of these people" is on his hands. For once in your life, leave your f***ing basement and actually take a look at what's going on the ground.

I'm in California. We don't have basements here.

You exist on this site as a redundant source of constant negativity.

It's good to have a purpose in life.

Do not engage with me directly anymore, I already have you ignored you for a reason.

You're not doing a very effective job of ignoring me.

You are joke man. This is a LACROSSE SITE. Nobody on here has ANY expertise in how to handle a f***ing pandemic

I believe that quite a few people here (though not me) have significant medical expertise. All those JHU grads ya know.

[Matnum PI]

wow. i didn't even think about that. jill biden will be the FLOTUS.

[CU77]

I'm pretty sure CU77 worked for like Brookings and is pretty center as well as a punk rock metalhead from times long gone by...

One out of two. I work in a hard science, not public policy.

But punk rock metalhead? Oh yeah!

[kramerica.inc]

Nice sentiment...

RT @RealMerrinD: I can’t wait for joy again.
For empathy.
A leader who smiles, really smiles and laughs.
A leader who cares.
A leader who shares and takes turns and isn’t afraid to cry.
A leader who appreciates others and arts and science.
We were missing so much.
#BidenHarris2020

Nice sentiment, But we got:
A leader that smiles about putting black men in jail.
A leader that cared about banging the babysitter.
A leader who taught his sons to share and take turns with their wives.
A leader that appreciates the arts and sciences, but doesn't understand them.

Biden has a nicer "wrapper" than Trump. But he's not much different than Trump.

[cradleandshoot]

Nice sentiment...

RT @RealMerrinD: I can’t wait for joy again.
For empathy.
A leader who smiles, really smiles and laughs.
A leader who cares.
A leader who shares and takes turns and isn’t afraid to cry.
A leader who appreciates others and arts and science.
We were missing so much.
#BidenHarris2020

Nice sentiment, But we got:
A leader that smiles about putting black men in jail.
A leader that cared about banging the babysitter.
A leader who taught his sons to share and take turns with their wives.
A leader that appreciates the arts and sciences, but doesn't understand them.

Biden has a nicer "wrapper" than Trump. But he's not much different than Trump.

Kram, you are on fire. yet another post that should be carved in stone, erected on a statue for the FLP mobs to knock down.. Biden has a great wrapper but he is not that much different than trump. he just knows how to come across as a nice guy. Anybody that has spent 47 years in DC is more of a brass knuckle thug than he/she will ever be nice. That's a big f***ing deal to quote our former VP and future POTUS.

[cradleandshoot]

wow. i didn't even think about that. jill biden will be the FLOTUS.

I thought Kammie was going to be FLOTUS as well as VICE POTUS?

[PizzaSnake]

I hope Joe has a better spiritual adviser than Trump’s.

https://youtu.be/TSpdgev-e_4

[jhu72]

Update from Georgia: Biden leads by 4,200+ after counting the vast majority, perhaps all, remaining ballots.

[Farfromgeneva]

I'm pretty sure CU77 worked for like Brookings and is pretty center as well as a punk rock metalhead from times long gone by...

One out of two. I work in a hard science, not public policy.

But punk rock metalhead? Oh yeah!

My bad, was thinking you were a quant economist. Though I’m suspect of Friedman’s “seminal” piece of whether economics is a positive science these days.

[seacoaster]

Really terrific essay in the NY Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/opin ... olicy.html

"Let’s never do that again.

Soon, it appears, the worst president in modern American history will resume private life. Everyone who favors the rule of law, decency and truth is exhaling a long-deferred sigh of relief. Millions are upset that the election was as close as it was. Still, however narrowly, Americans have snatched our Republic from the jaws of an encroaching autocracy. We deserve the catharsis — whether dancing in the streets or joy-scrolling in quarantine.

Gone from the White House will be an administration whose gaslighting operation was matched only by its hostility and deadly incompetence. Gone will be the necessity for, and our stupid hope in, saviors: Robert Mueller, state attorneys general, Anonymous, “concerned” Senators Susan Collins and Mitt Romney. Gone will be the Muslim bans, the human-rights violations at the southern border, the photo-op Bible shaken like a martini after federal police gassed nonviolent protesters. The parade of disheveled presidential associates under indictment, the Jared and Ivanka leaks, MSNBC’s nightly seminars on Russian oligarchs, the presidential retweets of literal white supremacists — gone.

Given the collective frenzy of these years, Joe Biden intuited that legions of Americans wanted a return to normal — a restoration, a reversion. The earnest hope in his promise “to restore the soul of America” was that the same country that uplifted Donald Trump and let itself be consumed by internet-fueled culture wars could heed its better angels again, as it did when it elected the nation’s first Black president on a hope-and-change mandate not so long ago.

But if this election is to have lasting meaning, we cannot see a Biden campaign victory as license to cast away politics as a presence in our daily lives. We cannot succumb to the liberal temptation parodied by the comedian Kylie Brakeman to “vote for Biden so we can all get back to brunch.”

However effective it might have been at closing this race, this restorationist fantasy would be a terrible governing philosophy. Because the pre-Trump world — in which voting rights were being gutted and 40 percent of Americans couldn’t afford a $400 emergency bill — is no kind of place to go back to. Mr. Biden himself seemed to concede this point by tempering his restoration message with the slogan “Build Back Better.”

II.
On Election Day eve, I spoke with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York — the minority leader, who could, by a razor’s edge, become the majority leader in 2021 if the results of two presumptive runoffs for Senate seats in Georgia go the Democrats’ way. Because, like Mr. Biden, Mr. Schumer is an institutionalist and a moderate, I asked him about this idea of restoration versus transformation. Almost as soon as he heard me say the word “normalcy,” he began, for lack of a better term, to filibuster: “No, no, I don’t buy that.”

“My view,” he told me, “is if we don’t do bold change, we could end up with someone worse than Donald Trump in four years.” What passed for change in the past two decades (including during the Obama years) had not, he acknowledged, been “big enough or bold enough.” When I asked if Democrats bore some responsibility for that, he deflected: “There’s plenty of blame to go around.”

Even if, improbably, the Senate is on Mr. Biden’s side in 2021, he and his advisers will have to pull off a grueling balancing act: pushing federal policy to reflect popular will so that people’s lives can measurably improve, while making fundamental changes to the workings of American democracy and managing to heal rather than inflame the cultural resentments, racial hatred and party polarization that still imperil the Republic (and that the Republican Party thrives on).

Mr. Biden may take the oath of office facing a lattice of crises that make some other tough-times inaugurations look enviable: a health crisis, an economic crisis, a racial-justice crisis, a climate crisis and a crisis of representative democracy revealed and exacerbated by his predecessor. These are problems that snicker at incrementalism.

In one favorable scenario, come January, two Democratic runoff victories in Georgia leave a President Biden facing a 50-50 Senate, with his vice president, Kamala Harris, possessing the crucial tiebreaking vote. Even then, the scope of available policy reforms would still be substantially limited unless Mr. Biden sought to eliminate the filibuster that requires 60 Senate votes to get major legislation enacted. Doing away with this rule would, of course, immediately doom any chance of a constructive working relationship with Republicans.

But it could still be a risk worth taking. If Democrats win the two presumed Georgia runoffs, Senate Democrats will represent roughly 41 million more people than the Republican half of the chamber. If Mr. Biden is to meet this moment, he can’t let his cautious temperament and deep hankering for civic comity stop him from making the policy changes families need.

The most immediate problem is the plague. Mr. Trump was so inept at containing it that he couldn’t even keep it from infecting him. But the sanity and science-based competence that Mr. Biden has promised will go only so far. Suppressing the virus and executing a vaccine rollout, while boosting an economic recovery that will have slowed over the winter, would require trillions of dollars in investment and a font of bureaucratic creativity.

For tens of millions, the economic traumas of the pandemic have come on top of decades of stagnation and precariousness. Since 1989, the wealth of the bottom 50 percent of Americans has fallen by $900 billion. Before Covid-19, 44 percent of American workers were being paid median annual wages of $18,000. And the evictions now surging are coming in the wake of a housing market that has long been unaffordable. Even if high unemployment were reversed, it would hardly repair our increasingly classist and Uber-ized labor market.

And if Democrats do win the Senate? Senator Schumer told me he envisions a first 100 days filled with a raft of measures on the virus and economic relief, mixed in with policies that address inequality, climate change, student debt, immigration and more. A Biden administration’s early days “ought to look like F.D.R.’s,” he said. “We need big, bold change. America demands it, and we’re going to fight for it.”

Much, however, could still get in the way. First, Mr. Biden’s own instinct toward caution — which can easily end up enabling paralysis at a time when Democrats’ window for proving the promise of an active government could be closing. Any measure of success is likely to be determined by how seriously a Biden administration takes the inevitable calls for fiscal conservatism and austerity (despite historically low interest rates).

And there are early warning signs: Ted Kaufman, who is leading the Biden transition team, recently told The Wall Street Journal that because of Trump-era deficit spending, “when we get in, the pantry is going to be bare.”

A Biden administration could also perceive itself as owing a political debt to the most influential and visible center-right elements of his sweeping, unwieldy alliance of supporters. Young leftists of color from cities in major swing states are arguably more responsible for his win than Republican defectors like former Senator Jeff Flake and the former Republican operatives turned media darlings of the Lincoln Project. But who will have more of a voice in Washington?

On various matters of policy, Mr. Biden could find himself in an awkward fox trot with wealthy donors in liberal power centers like Silicon Valley and Wall Street — the kind of people who may love hanging “Black Lives Matter” signs in their yards more than they love Biden proposals like a Section 8 expansion that would allow more working-class Black families to live in their midst.

III.
And this, mind you, is the congenial scenario. It is a bit more plausible that Mr. Biden will face a Republican-controlled Senate, in which the majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, reprises his record-breaking Obama-era obstructionism to thwart Mr. Biden’s agenda and his re-election chances.

In this case, Mr. Biden could bypass Congress to make forceful changes in people’s lives — changes that would in their own way help address one root cause of the very gridlock those actions would be working around: lack of faith in government.

The growing sense, among both the party’s technocrats and its populists, is that their midterm fate lies in whether voters give Democrats credit for improving their lives — not on the processes used or norms violated to do so.

“A public health and economic crisis is not the time for incremental steps, small ideas or meekness,” Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a leading Democrat in the House Progressive Caucus, told me. “Joe Biden can deliver on this from Day 1 with executive orders and administrative actions that cancel student debt, lower drug prices, strengthen workers’ rights and cut emissions.” The American Prospect recently published “277 Policies for Which Biden Need Not Ask Permission,” based on the results of the Biden-Sanders unity task force.

Mr. Biden has an opportunity to seize on policies that, thanks to the heterodoxy of Trumpism, now have surprising resonance in both parties — but not for the traditional reasons of being milquetoast or appealing to corporatist moderates. A wealth tax polls surprisingly well among Republican voters. Using the Department of Justice to crack down on monopolies and threats from China has some bipartisan support. As does actual infrastructure investment and, to a limited extent, raising the minimum wage.

Mr. Biden also does not need Mr. McConnell’s permission to build a down-ballot pipeline. One of the failures of the Obama years was the attrition of the Democratic Party beneath the president: By 2017, its Senate seats had dwindled to 48 from 59, and it lost 62 House seats, 12 governorships and a whopping 948 seats in state legislatures.

Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, a progressive group that grooms candidates for office at all levels, proposes this corrective: “Bring back the 50-state strategy. Invest in all state parties to build grass-roots infrastructure,” she told me. “Set the direction and tone: No office is too small, no community too unimportant. Then raise money for all of it.”

To the extent that, for the next two years, divided government severely limits the sort of public action that progressives dreamed about in their 2020 primaries, Mr. Biden could use his office to create task forces that normalize and build a public consensus for more significant small-d democratic changes to American politics achievable only down the road.

IV.
Despite our divisions, Mr. Biden could use the bully pulpit to bring the country together. He could promote local projects of dialogue and reconciliation, and continue to hold genuinely bipartisan town halls throughout his term.

Joe Biden — simply by being himself and not Donald Trump — can make a monumental difference. His evident basic goodness and empathy being of real use. And yet the Biden way — the smiles, the giving out of his phone number, the backslapping of political foes — tends to elevate personal kindness over systemic justice.

In the end, a basic choice may stalk Mr. Biden: What matters more, the radiation of personal decency or the pursuit of structural fairness?

There are some reasons to hope that he could be a bolder president than anticipated. He is that rare candidate who tacked toward the party base rather than the center in the general election. In certain areas, such as climate change and student debt, he has shown a willingness to have his initial policy view revised by others. He is less motivated by ideology than by the path of least resistance. Whether that path aligns with donors, the Beltway consensus or organized popular movements, he takes it.

The example of Lyndon Johnson — a longtime senator and a vice president less charismatic than the president he served and succeeded who, nevertheless, became more consequential — provides a possible historical analogue. Mr. Biden could turn out to be an improbably deft salesman for progressive priorities, using his disarming, folksy, median-voter-friendly patois, that “C’mon, man” Americana vibe, to make major changes seem like common sense.

“Joe Biden’s magic is that everything he does becomes the new reasonable,” Andrew Yang, once Mr. Biden’s rival for the Democratic nomination, told me. “He has shown the ability to move the mainstream of the Democratic Party on issues before. As president, whatever he does, he will bring the whole center with him.”

[jhu72]

wow. i didn't even think about that. jill biden will be the FLOTUS.

... another bonus. Much better match to the job than the spoiled, entitled, "I could give a damn" Malaria. Good riddance.

[Brooklyn]

I marvel that people act as if a Biden victory is assured. We all know that the courts are all under republican control and they have been known for twisting the law when it suits them. It would not surprise me in the least if they suddenly "found" a whole stack of republican absentee ballots (all back dated of course) and rig the vote count in their favor.

Watch for it.

[jhu72]

Someone else gets it. Not surprised they are women. It's the machismo thing. Men (mostly simple minded ones) go for it.

[jhu72]

I marvel that people act as if a Biden victory is assured. We all know that the courts are all under republican control and they have been known for twisting the law when it suits them. It would not surprise me in the least if they suddenly "found" a whole stack of republican absentee ballots (all back dated of course) and rig the vote count in their favor.

Watch for it.

Not going to happen.

[D3 Fan]

wow. i didn't even think about that. jill biden will be the FLOTUS.

... another bonus. Much better match to the job than the spoiled, entitled, "I could give a damn" Malaria. Good riddance.

Not disagreeing but considering Melania grew up under communism, the fact that she came to America and became FLOTUS is a story worth retelling. When we stop and think about it, we are the most diverse country in the world at any point in history. As for being so utterly racist and white-nationalist, we elected Obama twice and had a FLOTUS born under communist rule and currently have the most diversified House/Senate that we have ever had. To that end, just think about what Melania's and Barack's story means to billions of repressed people around the globe. Same goes for Kamala Harris, whose mother was born in India. There is a hope and a light that the US offers that no other country has yet to match. All in all, name another country in the world where these hopes/dreams can become reality. In spite of all of our flaws, and there are many, we are still the greatest country in the world. I hope we continue to seriously look at our flaws, honestly understand what we need to do to fix them and take concrete steps to remediate them. This is not a political message, it's a personal message. DC will do what DC will do but ALL of us can make tangible changes to our lives to make things better for the marginalized all around us and I truly hope that all of us start taking positive steps to be change makers in our communities.

[jhu72]

wow. i didn't even think about that. jill biden will be the FLOTUS.

... another bonus. Much better match to the job than the spoiled, entitled, "I could give a damn" Malaria. Good riddance.

Not disagreeing but considering Melania grew up under communism, the fact that she came to America and became FLOTUS is a story worth retelling. When we stop and think about it, we are the most diverse country in the world at any point in history. As for being so utterly racist and white-nationalist, we elected Obama twice and had a FLOTUS born under communist rule and currently have the most diversified House/Senate that we have ever had. To that end, just think about what Melania's and Barack's story means to billions of repressed people around the globe. Same goes for Kamala Harris, whose mother was born in India. There is a hope and a light that the US offers that no other country has yet to match. All in all, name another country in the world where these hopes/dreams can become reality. In spite of all of our flaws, and there are many, we are still the greatest country in the world. I hope we continue to seriously look at our flaws, honestly understand what we need to do to fix them and take concrete steps to remediate them. This is not a political message, it's a personal message. DC will do what DC will do but ALL of us can make tangible changes to our lives to make things better for the marginalized all around us and I truly hope that all of us start taking positive steps to be change makers in our communities.

... perhaps, but she was given her chance to make a positive impression. I dislike her and the kids almost as much as Orange Duce himself. They are all in it for themselves and NO ONE ELSE.

[D3 Fan]

JHU72 - no disagreement there, was just thinking her story is pretty amazing. That she squandered such an amazing opportunity is pretty messed up but hopefully she serves as encouragement to others and when others rise to prominence, here's hoping they'll display more of the character traits that one would hope to see.