The Joe Biden Campaign Thread

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superrific

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If you want to talk about Joe Biden's campaign or anything related to it, here ya go. Don't bring that to other threads.

In response to some posts and also some GOP complaints: there was nothing "anti-democratic" about Biden stepping aside. I've been words thrown around like "replaced" or "forced out." Yeah, that didn't happen. You might be able to make that claim if he went all the way to the convention and the delegates refused to vote for him. But let's think about what happened:

1. It appears that voters didn't like the idea of Biden as president for the next four years. So Biden stepped aside in a race he realized he would lose. That's democracy in action.
2. One of the factors that forced his hand was the money -- namely, the lack of it. That is also our democracy in action. We have a system in which lots of money is required to run for president. So within that framework, appealing to donors (especially small dollar donors) is democracy. This is one of the constraining factors on presidential ideologies. Presidents have to earn votes from swing voters. To do that, they need to raise money, and typically that money will come from the base.

So Biden was having trouble raising money. That's democracy.

3. The timing was precipitated by the aging process. It was a bit inconvenient but there's no real difference between a president deciding not to run for re-election in March and in July. Remember: primaries are a recent invention. For the majority of our history, candidates were chosen at party conventions, by delegates. And it's possible, if Kamala wins, that the parties will rethink what primaries are about and how to structure them.

Now, if anyone wants to tee off on Biden or the Dems or anyone else, please go for it.
 
Oh, one more point I forgot: the logic behind Biden running was not just incumbency. It was also that primaries weaken the party. There's this idea going around that the primary process "strengthens" the party because it unites the party around "the people's choice." To the extent that's been true in the past, in today's world of unlimited money for negative attacks and the concomitant phenomenon of campaigns mostly going negative -- I just think that's wrong. And it's especially true when the losers go on and on about how the process was rigged or stolen (e.g. Bernie Bros in 2016).

The fear on the Dems side was that there would be a bruising primary that would leave us with a candidate who will still have to run in Biden's shadow. His absence would loom over the race. And there was the problem of Kamala being unpopular and widely seen as a weak candidate, but one with enough support in some areas of the party as to create disunity issues.

And what happened instead is that Kamala just killed it. I think we are not appreciating just how amazing her campaign has been. She went from a potential liability to a well-liked, charismatic, and impressive candidate overnight. The VP pick was a home run. The entire party rallied around her in a matter of days, or maybe even hours. This is just not something that happens in politics today.

If we had known that Kamala would have the rollout she's had, then Biden would have stepped aside before. Or at least it would have been much, much more difficult for him to stay in.
 
I was defending Biden until the very end under the premise that yes he is visibly slower in his verbal skills and some cognition related things but that is simply a result of him getting older and he absolutely doesn't have dementia or anything like that. An older person who takes a second longer to get the right answer is still fine in short.

His presidency is the best presidency in my 39 years on this planet. Just absolutely outstanding. What sense does it make to throw that all away because he takes longer to answer question? I believed he earned the right to go for reelection. All the more stupid that his challenger is Donald Trump, the single worst candidate for major political office in US history. Yet, we know tens of millions will vote for him.

Lastly, I did not believe the United States was ready to vote for a black woman who I knew was the only possible replacement. Unfortunately, we just have too many people who are either outright racist/sexist, "slightly" racist/sexist, etc. It would seem I was wrong about that, though the election still hasn't taken place, and
 
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