I wonder if Joe Biden’s advisers are as stunned as Hillary’s about how one vote is haunting his campaign? For Hillary, it is her vote authorizing military force in Iraq and her refusal to call it a mistake. For Joe Biden it is the bankruptcy bill. The vote probably would have gone without much notice in prior campaigns, but it has been well publicized in the online community, earning Biden the moniker ‘Biden (MBNA-DE)’.
The bankruptcy bill is such a cruel piece of legislation, especially to single mothers and people without health insurance, that Kos crossed Biden right off his list of potential candidates. I’m unaware of any major or medium size blogger that supports Biden’s campaign…and it really all comes back to the bankruptcy bill.
We need to make it clear that Biden disqualified himself, not by supporting the war (most of the other candidates did that), but by shafting the neediest in favor of credit card companies. As the New York Times mulls over the potential for a liberal revival we need Democrats to learn that a vote like Biden’s means political death. That is how we will move this country back to the left.
And we have to manage the aftermath of this war. As the Times says:
Even in the sweetest of times, liberals tend to be congenitally averse to walking tall, as if they’re always half-expecting to be one step away from getting decked by a falling piano.
Years of ridicule, battering and electoral defeat will do that. The liberal imprint has been trashed by generations of conservative candidates and commentators drilled in every unbecoming association (“tax and spend liberal,” “big government liberal,” “ivory tower liberal,” “limousine liberal,” “commie, hippie, purple haired, weak kneed, bleeding heart, limp-wristed, weepy eyed, take your choice liberal”).
I’m ready to walk tall. And I won’t be walking with Hillary or Biden.
from Middle America as long as their views are the furthest thing to the left ever presented in the media. Were the actual “Left” ever to get airtime, liberals would look like the centrists they actually are.
If there were folks on TV calling for impeachment or better yet, a war crimes tribunal, you’d see a softening of the epithets against those closer to the middle.
The “talking head” shows always present someone from the right against someone from the slightly-less-right. This makes real leftists look like creatures from another planet.
that’s true. DC is also extremely hostile to the left. More proof the GOP brand for small government has always been a hoax.
I am a weepy-eyed, bleeding-heart hippie — and I’m proud of it. I’ll be walking tall, too.
This is not the only area where Biden votes with the uber-Republicans.
Being a senator from “MBNA”-land and voting for the cruel Bankruptcy Act provisions at least makes some sense. Delaware has historically been a particularly corporate friendly state, a preferred venue for incorporation among all states, and has laws (like usury laws, maximum late fee laws etc) which favor banks and credit card companies, like several others (Citicorp in South Dakota!) which want to attract the industry.
What doesn’t make sense are some of Biden’s other politics (the kind Kos doesn’t seem too concerned with either, unfortunately) as relate to criminal justice reform, and particularly the War on Drugs. Biden is on one of the committees that oversees these matters, IIRC, and has always been voting in a “bipartisan” fashion with the Republican sponsors of most of the retrograde laws of the past 20 years: mandatory minimums, harsh prison penalties for possession, more money for militarized SWAT team and militarized interdiction efforts worldwide, spraying of drugs in Colombia and Afghanistan, more prisons, etc.
The good senator seems tone-deaf that his sponsorship of these measures and thwarting of reform efforts is in not in any way a progressive or “democratic” stance, but I don’t see anything about Delaware that calls for that (except, perhaps, “border state” racism).
With other Dems such as Sen. Leahy and Rep. Kucinich replacing Reps. Sensenbrenner and Souder and Sen. Hatch on the committees that deal with the illegal drugs – crime issues, it remains to be seen whether Biden will continue to be a stumbling block or will let some of his Democratic colleagues find a way to stop digging this particular hole.
The state of Delaware is a corporate whore with laws that favor corporations over both stockholders and other stakeholders and citizens.
While I can symnpathize with Clinton’s need to not appear to “wishy-washy” about her Iraq war authorization vote because of what the right would make of that vis-a-vis her gender, Biden gets no such sympathy for being Big Bank’s pimp on the bankruptcy law. Like Kerry, Biden just needs to put his ego on hold and just fo the fuck away from national politics and be the big fish in a tiny state.
The bankruptcy bill is such a cruel piece of legislation, especially to single mothers and people without health insurance, that Kos crossed Biden right off his list of potential candidates. I’m unaware of any major or medium size blogger that supports Biden’s campaign…and it really all comes back to the bankruptcy bill.
Could you show me where in that link Markos says he rejects Biden because of his vote on the bankrupcy bill?
link.
link.
Or this:
I sat listening to Biden making a campaign speech last night (also Edwards, Vilsack, and a representative for Obama). Whenever Biden got to talking about the woes of those without health insurance, I muttered to myself “So how many of them were blocked even from bankruptcy?”