Before I get to my point, I want to tell you something that long time followers of this blog and of my social media know: I am not a partisan. I am an unabashed progressive, but I am not under the illusion that the sad state of our country is entirely the fault of republicans. I have praised republicans on the rare occasion when they do good things (like when Jan Brewer took the Medicaid expansion for Arizona), and I point out when democrats do things to fuck us all over (like when Richard Neal shut down a bill that would end surprise billing in health care).
So if you’re the kind of person who approached politics from a team mentality, I’m probably not going to be your cup of tea.
If you’re the kind of person who would like to figure out how we got here in earnest, and are interested in having respectful discussions to that end, then read on. But if you’re a person who cannot under any circumstances be exposed to any opinions that you don’t agree with, save yourself some grief and just follow someone else who parrots your rigid ideology.
I like being challenged. I devour information that I don’t agree with because it either changes my opinions, or helps me craft a more compelling argument to support the opinions I already have.
Now on to the point of this piece. My congratulating Mitch McConnell. No, not for keeping control of the senate, but for becoming the next president (at least on all domestic matters). Biden is going to not lose (I chose those words for a reason that will become clear later) this election with a 290 electoral college total so he will be sworn in as president next January. But in the process, he murdered down ballot democrats. A lot of people can’t figure out how democrats not only didn’t manage to take control of the senate, but also lost several seats in the house. I think I have at least a piece of the explanation.
I’m going to start by telling you something that I tell ammosexuals who insist that arming teachers is the solution to our school shooting problem: if your solution doesn’t start until after the shooting does, I question your commitment to solving the problem.
If your answers about what happened in this election don’t include Biden and the democratic establishment, you’re not really applying yourself to solving the problem.
I bit my tongue for the past 6 months because I didn’t want to do anything to damage Biden’s chances of not losing this election but good fucking god, I’m relieved to finally be able to get it all out.
Problem number one is that Biden didn’t have a platform that he really wanted to talk about. He really just ran a “return to decency” and an “I’m more palatable than Trump” campaign. Once we got stuck with Biden, I actually thought this strategy was the best one he could employ because when Biden speaks, people vote for someone else.
That’s what has happened in every election Biden has ever run in outside of Delaware. He got his ass handed to him by white working class voters in the first three primaries, and by Latinos in the third primary. He should have been finished when he came in 4th in New Hampshire. For a former VP to come in 4th in a primary is devastating, and it should have ended then. But the party was laser focused in stopping Bernie, who won the first 3 primaries. So everyone that Biden lost to dropped out of the race on the eve of Super Tuesday (after already making their ad buys) and endorsed the guy they beat. I have never seen such a blatant, “No, you don’t decide elections. WE decide elections” message from the DNC before. I suspect we’re going to see it more and more as the electorate moves further and further away from them.
But I digress. When people had choices, Biden was on the top of no one’s list because his message was not appealing. That’s why everyone else had to drop out to give him the illusion of viability. So speaking was not going to be a winning strategy for Biden. Communicating his ideas was not going to get him votes so in my opinion, Biden ran the best campaign Biden could run. The problem is that it didn’t leave down ballot democrats with any sort of message to transmit to voters. There was no platform for them to champion.
To compound this problem, Biden furthered the narrative that Trump is an aberration in the republican party and that without Trump, republicans are just peachy. His social media accounts kept sharing Lincoln Project content, and he had 4 republicans speak at his convention for every progressive who spoke. He should have hit republicanism hard, but he did the opposite. That further hurt down ballot democrats. Not only didn’t they have a platform to champion, but they had a nominee who was basically telling the country that their opponents weren’t so bad. It was really the most ass backward strategy I’ve ever seen.
And what did he get for all his republican outreach? A higher percentage of republicans voted for Trump in 2020 than did in 2016.
So now we have a nightmare scenario where republicans still have control of the senate, which effectively makes Mitch McConnell the president (on all domestic matters, anyway). Biden gets to do nothing without Mitch’s blessing. Nothing. No stimulus, no COVID funding, no nipping at the edges to marginally improve health care access for a small group of people, no nothing. Any economic recovery package we might get will funnel at least 95% of the gains to the top 1% because that’s where Obama set the bar for democrats.
In other words, Biden has no chance of success here but all of the liability is on him. Mitch gets to tank his presidency, get some nice cookies for his big donors on the name of bipartisanship, and then gets to pick up more seats in 2022 because the working class will be even worse off than they are at this very moment.
As if that’s not enough, there was a report out last week that Biden was vetting John Kasich (among other republicans) for his cabinet. GOD FORBID that we might get a democratic cabinet when we vote for a (supposedly) democratic president. So Biden’s brilliant plan is to elevate one of Kamala’s 2024 republican challengers to a cabinet level position.
That’s fantastic because it would definitely be bad form to stop shanking democrats when the election is over.
Oh no mes petits lapins, you will not get to breathe a sigh of relief when Biden is sworn in. We’re going to have to be more vigilant than ever.
