PUBLISHED
May 18, 2019
A few months ago, an online
message to Democratic registrants from the National Democratic Training
Committee featured a 2020 election ticket of Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke. It
asked what we thought of this “winning” 2020 pair.
As a campaigner for Sen. Bernie
Sanders in the 2016 election, I was outraged by the Democratic National
Committee (DNC), the National Democratic Training Committee’s parent
organization, lofting a trial balloon to subliminally embed its candidate
choices on us more than a year before primaries.
The Training Committee’s
online pitch serves as a reminder that Americans have been denied the power of
choosing candidates by the machinations of the party’s ruling class since the
country’s founding. Like the DNC’s choice of Hillary Clinton for 2016, these
party elites consider all of us a dangerous “basket of deplorables.”
So it’s not surprising that
despite Bernie Sanders then being listed as the most trusted and most
popular political candidate in the country by many progressive
pundits, Biden’s name was in that online poll. He’s always been one of the
DNC’s elite, as the “Wall
Street Joe” nickname suggests about the former vice president. None of
the other candidates, it seemed, were able to qualify for that Training
Committee’s consideration. Even after Biden officially became a nominee,
a Harvard-Harris
poll on May 1 showed Sanders’s favorable rating at 49 percent to
Biden’s 52 percent by its 1,536 respondents.
Sanders’s candidacy, however,
represents the forgotten and struggling middle class boiling over at what those
plutocratic decision-makers have done to wreck what was once the party of
commoners. As The Progressivemagazine’s Editor-at-Large Ruth
Conniff recently observed:
So far, no Democratic rising
star has come close to overcoming Bernie Sanders’s big base of support. As of
the most recent Federal Elections Commission report, Sanders has raised the most
money, and had by far the largest number of small-dollar donors…. Not since
Franklin Delano Roosevelt welcomed the hatred of
“organized money” have we had a serious presidential candidate who openly
exposed class conflict in America, and stuck up for ordinary citizens against
the overwhelming power of the wealthy.
This, in turn, has triggered
paroxysms of fear and apoplectic fury among those in the Democratic
establishment. They want to win the 2020 presidential election, but not with
outspoken and grassroots-supported candidates like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth
Warren.
Like Roosevelt, these two
presidential candidates have made clear that their agendas focus on government
of, by and for most of the 99 percent. Small wonder that more than a million have
signed up to campaign for Sanders, that nearly 5,000
house parties just kicked off his candidacy and small-dollar
fundraising, and that thousands began canvassing in early May.
Overthrowing the Party
Establishment
Nevertheless, the DNC has been
artfully blackballing the people’s choice ever since the 1924
national convention in New York City, when diehard delegates of 19
candidates refused to cave to their pre-selected nominees. This forced
conventioneers to spend 16 hot summer days to cast 103 ballots under the
party’s old two-thirds
rule, which from 1832-1936 required a supermajority of delegate votes
to win the presidential nomination. As a weary Massachusetts delegate complained to
cohorts: “Either we must switch to a more liberal candidate or move to a
cheaper hotel.”
Since then, the skills of DNC
enforcers have come to rival those of the Russians accused of meddling in the
2016 election, in terms of their abilities to crush popular “outsiders” and
their planks.
For good measure, after
the 1980 nomination
battle between Sen. Ted Kennedy and President Jimmy Carter, DNC fixers staved
off delegate revolts with the insurance policy of hundreds of “superdelegates.”
The change permitted loyal party luminaries — 865 in
2016 — to vote at Democratic conventions.
But that hard-fought contest
led to furious Sanders
DNC membersforcing the party’s old guard to agree that superdelegates could
vote only if candidates tied on the first
ballot. Now, if voters want to overthrow the DNC’s pre-selected choice at
the 2020 convention in Milwaukee next
July, they will need 2,026 delegate
votes at the outset. This means campaigners must make titanic efforts to get
great numbers of ordinary people to participate in primaries and caucuses.
The DNC’s pre-selected ticket
of Clinton and Tim Kaine in 2016’s “lesser-evil” election could explain why
more than the 21
million registered voters decided not to vote. Millions more
didn’t care to register or were denied that right by state-level voter
suppression laws. Moreover, the combined third-party vote came to 7.6 million,
thanks to tens of thousands defecting from both parties.
Democrats and progressives
must center in on most Americans’ interests and issues, not the DNC’s fixation
on Russiagate,
defeating Trump rather than impeaching him, and stopping the Sanders movement.
A mid-April CNN survey of
Democrats and Independents reported that the top two issues among these voters
were mitigating the impacts of climate change (96 percent) and passing Medicare
for All (91 percent). Most respondents agreed that any Democratic
nominee should support such poll-listed priorities as tuition-free public
colleges, impeaching Trump, reparations to slaves’ descendants and restoring
voting rights for prisoners.
The Party Elites Look to Joe
Biden
The DNC kingmakers’ death-grip
on retaining the ring of power guarantees that none of those demands — embodied
in the progressive agendas of many of the declared candidates — will be addressed
or met. Desperate, the only candidate the party establishment could find was
resurrecting loyal party acolyte Joe Biden. His only electable factor was name
recognition from decades as a public servant.
At the outset of Biden’s
candidacy, because of his name and the fact that he was President Obama’s vice
president, his poll numbers started with a bang. In the first week of May, he
had a 32-point
lead over all candidates, according to a Hill-HarrisX poll of 440
Democratic and Independent voters. He had 46 percent compared to Sanders’s 14
percent, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s 8 percent and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s
7 percent. But a week later, 27
percent of those Biden supporters said their second choice was
Sanders.
As many media
pundits have pointed out, it’s still very early to make a
determination. Some voters are more familiar with Biden and see him as more
“electable” because he’s part of the DNC’s old guard, but fail to remember his
reactionary positions. Others may know little about him except as a fresh face
in the candidate lists.
The drawbacks to Biden’s
candidacy are considerable: chiefly, that he is damaged political goods and out
of touch with today’s voters — two factors that would be immediately exposed
the moment he entered the contest. The DNC chiefs also knew his poll numbers
might take a nice bounce after he entered the lists, but plummet once his track
record was more widely revealed to voters.
This public realization did
indeed come just after the DNC’s online pitch for the Biden/O’Rourke ticket.
Political pundit Norman
Solomon deduced that Biden’s candidacy was meant to “rescue
the Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders.” Further, pundit Paul
Street saw Biden’s baleful declaration that he “can’t stand by and let
[a second Trump term] happen,” as phony melodramatics, writing, “The irony is
the best thing he could do to stop a second Trump term is to stand aside.”
Other stories exhumed
Biden’s plutocratic views and cruel congressional
deeds: his ring-leading, contemptuous treatment of witness Anita Hill in a
hearing for Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court candidacy; unwelcome
advances toward several women; consorting with Senate racists; protecting
credit card companies against consumers; saving corporations from price-fixing
lawsuits; permitting banks to become investment facilities; stripping aid to
poor children; and favoring a means test for recipients of Social Security and
Medicare.
Worse were reminders about his
enthusiastic vote for the Iraq War, his hard push for the job-killing North
American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and boasts
that his “greatest
achievement” in Congress was the 1994 crime bill that launched the
mass incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders.
Ignorant missteps followed. In
an era of campaign finance reform and candidates like Sanders courting small
donations from millions of modest means, Biden spent the evening of his
announcement at a fundraiser staged
by an executive of Comcast, hustling the CEO of health insurance colossus
Independence Blue Cross, as well as “Democratic lawmakers … and other
high-powered party players.”
To secure labor’s vote, he
lavished attention on union
leaders instead of the rank and file, well aware that NAFTA sent tens
of thousands of manufacturing jobs overseas. He seems totally oblivious to the
nationwide teachers’
strikes over pay, smaller classes and taxpayer handouts to charter
schools.
Then came Biden’s foreign
bobble, though it revealed an outdated, war hawkish position. He endorsed the
Trump regime’s attempts at overthrowing Venezuela’s
government to seize its only resource: the world’s largest oil fields. His move
came despite Congress’s joint bills barring such action without its approval.
Co-sponsors in the Senate include Sanders and 69
House Democrats, including presidential candidates Tulsi Gabbard and Seth
Moulton.
The Possibility of a
Sanders/Warren Ticket
Still, the prospects for the
DNC’s choice in Biden for president may galvanize the other 22 Democratic
contenders into mass resistance by secretly pairing themselves into a final
ticket. In fact, the unofficial pairing has already begun. A Biden/Harris
ticket was just touted by some members of the Congressional Black
Caucus. And former Sen. Mike Gravel sees a Sanders/Gabbard combination
as the “ideal” pairing.
But millions of progressives
may well favor the formidable team of Sanders and Warren to beat Trump. Such a
ticket has nationwide name-recognition and overwhelming popularity among the 99
percent, stemming from the candidates’ persistent efforts in Congress on behalf
of ordinary Americans. They’ve co-sponsored each other’s bills, including
Senator Warren’s no-first-use
of nuclear weapons legislation and Senator Sanders’s Medicare
for All bill.
Warren is particularly famous
for fighting corporations and banks that
cheat customers on mortgages, student loans, credit cards, and other financial
products and services. She pioneered the establishment of the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in 2010. By the time Trump began
gutting the agency in 2017, CFPB had returned $12 billion to 29 million people
grateful to Warren.
In this year alone, Warren has
hoppered bills to jail corporate executives engaging
in fraud; support debt
forgiveness for Puerto Rico; medical
nutrition programs for the poor; affordable
housing; and prohibiting departments from shifting
dedicated money to other causes, as the Pentagon did with a billion
dollars for Trump’s wall.
She’s recently tackled student-loan
debt, with a plan to cancel up to $50,000 for families earning under
$100,000 annually. Such indebtedness has inhibited the economy, stunted the
careers of millions, and may have bankrupted thousands of helpful parents and
relatives. She’s probably drawing tears of relief and gratitude from 44
million borrowers, as well as 5.1 million defaulters of those student
loans.
Sanders’s bills over his 28 years in
Congress reflect the populist views of his Vermont constituents, the 12,029,699 voting
for him in the 2016 primaries/caucuses, and the millions still packing his
rallies.
Sanders’s years of legislating
have been dedicated to solving needs listed above. This
year’s slate, aside from his Medicare for All bill, would expand Social
Security and Medicare, provide prescription price relief, reinstate the estate
tax, and raise federal minimum wages to $15 per hour by 2025.
He’s supported the Green
New Deal, investing
in infrastructure, immigration reform,
and restoring
voting rights to the currently and formerly incarcerated. In foreign
relations, he’s for scrapping unfair
trade deals, cutting billions of bloat charged by Pentagon
contractors, getting out of the Yemen-Saudi war,
and withdrawing
troops from Afghanistan and Syria.
Once Biden entered the race,
it has become apparent to many DNC watchers and critics that its
decision-makers would fight any real “battle” threatening their status
quo, as they did in the 2016 primaries and caucuses. As their obedient
standard bearer, Biden will be uttering platitudes and warnings about the
socialist leanings of the progressives. His only platform seems to be the thin
gruel of anti-Trumpism — except for Venezuela — the bizarre “battle
for the soul of this nation” and a “middle-ground” approach
to climate change, a stance that set off a perfect storm of protests from
environmentalists and some fellow candidates. It remains to be seen, of course,
if he can successfully pass off his past actions with today’s voters in the
months ahead by the old alibi of “those were different times.”
Ultimately, whether Biden wins
or loses the primaries makes little difference to the powers behind the DNC.
They will still rule the Democratic Party and continue to have absolutely
little interest in addressing the needs and lives of the increasingly restive
99 percent.
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