Joe Biden appears to have a sizable lead in the polls. Yes, it is early, and it could be due to name recognition. But the “woke wing” of the Democratic party appears to be, well, a bit stunned.
Well, it might be those, well, misguided voters who think that Biden will appeal to enough “Obama to Trump” voters to flip the states back. Will Bunch writes:
As someone who, by scribbling notes at today’s rally, has now officially covered 10 presidential elections, I wondered if the obsession with “electability” — voting for someone not because he excites you but you think he excites people who aren’t like you — can be a dangerous trap. Just ask Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton — each crowned before they weren’t elected.
Biden’s DJ probably should have ditched the Stevie Wonder for some Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift, because this was a crowd that clearly wanted to party like it’s 2015, when Obama seemed to have everything under control and Biden was his wingman. A small part of that may be a craving for the center-left politics of the two men. More of it, I think, is a simple dream of a decent human being in the Oval Office again.
But a lot of the craving for 2015 is likely a desire to return to a world where bright May Saturdays were for softball games and cookouts where no one was rolling their eyes over the latest presidential tweet — where for the most part people didn’t think about politics at all. I was struck Saturday by how many people walked out of Biden’s speech before it was even over — praying that their affable Uncle Joe had things under control, and that we don’t get fooled again.
The poor “woke” liberals can’t understand it:
But getting elected is not about appealing to the bland median. It’s about appealing to the people who actually feel motivated to turn out and vote.
The Democratic Party of 2019 does not look much like Joe Biden. Women, African-American, Latino and Asian voters are all much more likely to say they support Democratic candidates than Republican ones. White voters, male voters and especially white male voters generally support Republicans.
Those assumptions about electability reflect entrenched biases more than political science, and have a dash of arrogance to boot. An electable candidate, the thinking goes, has to be authentic and broadly appealing. But authenticity itself is coded as white and male when it’s defined by white men.
You see…the dumb voters are currently being fooled by white men who define what is electable and what isn’t!
I mean really…Joe Biden just isn’t…well…that “woke”:
Former vice president Joe Biden defends his support for the 1994 crime bill that many blame for mass incarceration of blacks. He declares that most Americans are “satisfied” with a private insurance system reviled by the left. He justifies the North American Free Trade Agreement as a pact that “made sense at the moment.”
And to the dismay of many liberals, he won’t call for a study of slavery reparations, saying the nation has other ways to fight racism.
In his opening weeks as a presidential candidate, Biden has rejected much of the conventional wisdom that drove the first stretch of the Democratic nomination fight, refusing to play to the party’s liberal wing, focus on the wrongs of the past or call for revolutionary transformation.
To the surprise of many, he has been rewarded with a lead in the polls that, so far at least, has proven durable and steady. As a result, his candidacy is challenging assumptions about what Democratic voters want in the era of President Trump.
At its heart, Biden’s campaign is a gamble that his rivals are wrong in seeing the current Democratic Party as liberal, angry and ready for revolution — a case he made in unusually pointed terms at a rally in Philadelphia on Saturday.
“I know some of the really smart folks say Democrats don’t want to hear about unity,” he said. “They say Democrats are so angry that the angrier a candidate can be, the better chance he or she has to win the Democratic nomination.
“Well, I don’t believe it.”
But this latter article seems a bit more thoughtful than the previous two that I quoted:
That raises the question of whether the party’s center of gravity lies less with vocal activists than with a quieter group of voters that is less likely to join Twitter or show up at campaign events. “His candidacy may be different,” says Biden’s campaign pollster John Anzalone, “But it is the one that is working.”
Yes. Many of us despise Trump. But that doesn’t mean that we want the perpetually outraged and triggered running things either.
I remember feeling down about the 2016 election but then thinking: well, all of this “women are going to get Trump…their anger will be heard, blah, blah, blah” flopped, bit time. And I was worried that instead of thinking that the old “shut up and listen to me as I wag the finger in your face” tactics failed and that we should try something different, that people would just double down on what didn’t work before.
Yes, I know what we won’t win the “white male working class” vote (though we might do a bit better) but that isn’t the point. Frankly, the “white men are the enemy” thrust is a real turn off to me, even if they invite me to be “one of the good ones” (i. e., an “ally”). And it is my guess that this is not what many Democratic primary voters are looking for; the D electorate is NOT twitter.
But time will tell. Frankly, I am hoping that my favorite candidate (Amy Klobuchar) or second favorites (Kamala Harris, Corey Booker) can make inroads; I honestly think that we need new blood. But…I think that I can understand Joe Biden’s appeal.
Life of an old goat 