Over a career in elected public office lasting more than 46 years, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has seen campaigns from the rudimentary, family-run effort that first launched him unexpectedly to the U.S. Senate as a 29-year-old to the sophisticated, data-driven juggernaut that helped elect him and Barack Obama twice to the nation’s highest offices.
But rarely has he trusted anything as much as his own gut instinct, attuned to the middle- and working-class sensibilities of his former neighbors in towns like Scranton, Pa., and Claymont, Del.
And so as he sat in his office one day in October and watched footage of a Donald Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., not far from his childhood home, Biden sensed trouble.
“Son of a gun. We may lose this election,” Biden said, recalling his reaction during an interview in his West Wing office.
“They’re all the people I grew up with. They’re their kids. And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist. But we didn’t talk to them.”
Now, as the Democratic Party struggles to understand what went wrong in an election that left them with the least power in state and federal offices in decades, that same instinct leads Biden to offer a diagnosis and a prescription for what he sees as a more successful approach, one which pushes back, if ever-so-gently, against a powerful current in Democratic politics.
…
If Biden entered the race, former Sen. Ted Kaufman wrote in the memo, which quickly became public, it would be because of “his burning conviction that we need to fundamentally change the balance in our economy and the political structure to restore the ability of the middle class to get ahead.”Biden, of course, did not run. The emotional toll of the death that spring of his eldest son, Beau, made a campaign an impossibility.
But the clarity of Kaufman’s memo contrasts notably with Biden’s critique of Clinton’s campaign. In the interview, Biden pointed to questions that came even from members of Clinton’s inner circle, revealed in emails made public by WikiLeaks, about whether the Democratic front-runner had figured out why she was running.
“I don’t think she ever really figured it out,” Biden said. “And by the way, I think it was really hard for her to decide to run.”
Sure there was an overlap in districts between the Sanders voters in the primary and Trump on Nov. 8. Nevertheless, it’s a long shot to predict Sanders would have beaten Trump if he had been the DP candidate. This is all pure theoretical chatter. The popularity of Sanders with young voters was a great asset and for me an indication Clinton was heading for a tough election night.
President Sanders? Bernie would have beaten Trump | LAT – Dec. 22, 2016 |
Trump won the election by prevailing in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that, together, gave him 46 electoral votes. In Michigan, he edged Hillary Clinton by just three-tenths of a percent. In Wisconsin, the margin was eight-tenths. In Pennsylvania there was a slightly larger gap of 1.2%.
All three of those states usually lean toward the Democratic candidate. This time around, most working-class white voters — many of whom voted for Barack Obama in the last two elections — saw Clinton as the incarnation of a political establishment that was indifferent to their struggles.
They were won over by Trump’s boasts that he would protect American jobs and challenge the influence of Wall Street. Who else in the 2016 campaign made similar promises, with far more conviction? Bernie Sanders, of course.
Polls and interviews with voters, both before and after the election, identified a significant overlap between Trump voters and Sanders admirers. Among non-college-educated whites in the old industrial states, many were simply looking for someone to address their concerns and shake things up in Washington.
They went with Trump on Nov. 8, but plenty of them would have voted for Sanders if he had been on the ballot. Would it have been enough to tip Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania? Given the small numbers needed, the answer is very likely yes.
Joe Biden.
Part of another, smaller pendulum movement, this time within the Democratic Party..
The swing is always there.
Watch.
AG
More like his burning conviction to save the TBTF banks. Biden has always carried their water.
The sky is falling because now the banks are out and the oil companies are in.
Meh! To me, this last election was like asking medieval monasteries if they wanted to be invaded by Norwegian vikings or Danish vikings.
2020 to be Booker, Biden or Cuomo? Gag.
Actually, the question that could be most profitably asked…profitably if it could be asked in a way to elicit a good, truhful answer, of course…would be:
Followed…if a sufficient number of people answered in the affirmative, which would not happen today, here in what we laughingly call “Civilization”…by the kicker question:
I imply no special wisdom to Biden. He is a big, good-looking, healthy, intelligent and talented specimen of American manhood. He got lucky genetically, then he got lucky politically and he had the personal wherewithal to turn those lucky breaks into a fine, mainstream political career in the Permanent Government. He’s not hustling us, he believes in what he is doing. You can see guys like that everywhere in the system, usually in some kind of boss position. I would have no trouble hoisting a couple with him if I met him unawares in a bar. We’d talk sports. politics or the news of the day and tell a couple of jokes.
Then he’d go back to work for the controllers and I’d go back to work as a morality-driven artist.
So it goes.
You cannot change those kinds of genetics and I wouldn’t dream of trying unless directly and sincerely asked to do so. It’s not only pigs that you can’t teach how to fly, it’s humans.
And birds too, if you get right down to it.
One can either fly or one cannot.
Dassit.
Later…
AG
Yeah, I’ve got nothing against him, personally and I really empathize with him on his son’s death. But politically, I don’t want him.
He’s like an honorable enemy. We could get along if we weren’t on opposite sides of the war. I could be wrong but I don’t think he despises us like Hillary does. But, I’ll bet he has that east coast elite mindset.
And I’ll bet he doesn’t. I know Scranton PA well enough to recognize his act. Working class Irish growing up in a blue-collar town in the ’50s. I went to school with a number of similarly brought up Scrantonites. It was a tough town and they were tough boys.
Then to Wilmington, another tough town then. Still is, actually. He was a star athlete in two places where there was a great deal of interaction between white and black kids. He didn’t lick his anti-segregationist attitude off he street, he learned…and earned…it in the athletic trenches and in general interaction with other athletes and students.
Bet on it.
He didn’t go to any kind of Ivy League college, either. He went to a Catholic prep school (read “downscale” compared to the New England-ish Protestant versions) , did his undergrad at the University of Delaware and postgrad at Syracuse University. I dunno about the University of Delaware but I certainly know about Syracuse. Another tough town with an attitude much like Scranton only a little richer because of the university.
HRC?
Wellesley? Yale?
I ran into a number of Wellesley girls during my two years in school in Boston. They were even snootier than the Radcliffe students, which is going some. Yale is the very definition of “east coast elite mindset”…a supposedly liberal school set in a deteriorating city with serious ghetto and racial problems, face to jowl with those problems and unapologetically flaunting its wealth a few blocks block uphill from some truly nasty neighborhoods. Only the New Haven police force and the Yale cops really separate the two places. Them and a park in the middle of town that pretty much defines the border. This is the place from which the CIA has historically drawn its ruling stock.
Her “attitude?”
Miles away from what Biden learned during his formative years.
Miles away.
Bet on that as well.
AG
Yeah, I’ve been in Syracuse.
MICHIGAN DNC, ffs. After their sterling performance.
A Democratic Party meeting in Michigan breaks out into violence due to Hillary Clinton supporters.
Jimmy Dore reports…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng5tQ5Q2XKQ
Guess the permanent members are thinking it’s a temporary set-back like 2004. Instead of a more permanent one as in 1980 — but starting with a much lower level of power than in 1980.
Same with the environmental movements.
Could we say that this is the silver lining in the presidential loss?
“Remember all those posts explaining how the Democrats had a demographic lock on the Electoral College? Yea, well I have some unsurprising news about that.
A careful look at the numbers reveals some insights into how the Blue Wall failed Democrats in 2016. It seems to come down to a single conclusion – Democrats did not effectively communicate a message to their base, white, black or otherwise, to persuade them that the party would take their concerns seriously.”
An analysis posted at Forbes can be summarized in these three paragraphs:
h/t Blue Wall mea culpa
George Michael tweet May 15, 2011:
The “good” “Christians” exploiting homophobia to get their war on. So much more civilized than the headchoppers going after gays and lesbians.
The Guardian — Barack Obama: I’m ‘confident’ I could have won a third term as president .
Yeah, that’s what Bill Clinton believed of himself in 2000. No polling can begin to answer that question because the impossibility of a third term is baked into what people say they think. If either of these to arrogant men were half as awesome as they think, their chosen successors would have easily won instead of losing to horrible GOP nominees.
A couple of snippets:
The man had nine years in which to “articulate” that “vision.” He didn’t do it because it a) wasn’t a vision b) adopted the neoliberal agenda and c) it wasn’t articulated because a majority of Americans don’t ascribe to perpetual war, privatization of public services, and outsourcing and off-shoring US production jobs. And the following is exhibit number one that he really doesn’t get it:
“Putin/Russia did it” isn’t CT? At least the GOP didn’t move mountains to fix their nomination. A DP “grounded in fact and reality” wouldn’t have found it necessary to fix their nomination.
In fact, the Republican Party moved mountains to try and STOP their eventual nominee. Given his many faults, I think it showed a real hunger by the American people for the few proposals that he espoused, anathema though they be to the Democratic Party. And yes, xenophobia was part of it. Was it ever different in the USA? Just submerged, I think.
Disagree as to the GOP mountain moving efforts. They didn’t have a candidate. The big money rally around Jeb? revealed their desperation and recognition that the two men they expected to lead the pack, Christie and Walker, were hobbled by their legal matters. But Jeb? proved to be hopeless as he lagged behind Cruz, who the party elders loathed for good reason, and Dr. Ben, who was too ignorant to be a good lapdog like GWB. Jeb? really was their hail mary in a presidential race the expected to lose and they didn’t much mind losing to Clinton.
Also disagree that Trump spoke to a real hunger for proposals. He just played opposite to Obama/Clinton in soundbites with no proposals. And he could change on a dime when the wind wasn’t at his back. That five percent of voters that decide our elections look for “change” after eight years of one party owning the WH. That “change” only needs to sound like something positive and they accept platitudes and vague or undefined measures to accomplish the change. Sanders was that rare candidate that offered specific and easily articulated and understood proposals. Including throwing out the banksters.
Trump was nothing but a Rorschach for change. Good enough in key states (but not nationally) to win against no-change Hillary. He spoke a lot of garbage that only the dumbest of conservative or Republican voters believed, but he doesn’t care because making the sale was his priority the worst that can happen if he’s held accountable for not delivering is ending up a one term POTUS.
From March 21, 2016 and keep in mind that by then the general public hadn’t seen as much of Cruz and Rubio as they had Sanders. (Of course none of those three had received anywhere near the amount of coverage that Clinton and Trump got and the pre-campaign name ID for the three was in single digits. Oops — can’t import the image; it can be seen Here at The Intercept
The general public mostly hadn’t heard of Sanders, either. The (R)’s had a dozen candidates mostly well known to primary voters. They didn’t vote for Trump because of name recognition.
Those numbers are from March (after Super Tuesday II) when the GOP field was down to Trump, Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich. By then the Democratic field had been down to Clinton and Sanders for over a month. While Sanders and the others never enjoyed the same level of name recognition as Clinton and Trump, the general public had enough awareness of Sanders and the others to offer a perceptual opinion of favorable and unfavorable. I merely submitted that they had seen more of Sanders than the other GOP contenders and therefore, his numbers compared to that of Cruz and Rubio were more solidified.
A certain portion of the electorate always votes based on name recognition. When we got to the 2016 general election that wasn’t a factor, but to claim that entering the race with near 100% name recognition didn’t favor both Clinton and Trump for their nominations is silly. The thing with the other dozen GOP candidates is that as each one dropped out, Trump got more of the drop-outs’ support than any of the other remaining candidates did. Trump took the lead within a month of entering the race. Only by three points and only at approximately 20%, but he never relinquished his lead.
He proposed a wall. He proposed arresting all illegals. He proposed taxing imports and stopping job export.
True, these were sound bites and when Democrats propose anything there is a detailed white paper gathering dust somewhere. But what percentage of the electorate actually reads those things and analyzes them? I’d be shocked if it was as high as 5%. BTW, I did read Obama’s Health Care proposal on his web site in the 2008 primary. It was long on vagueness but still didn’t look anything like Obamacare.
In 1992, “It’s the economy, Stupid!” wasn’t more than a sound bite, but people read what they wanted to in it. Mainly, a promise to fix the economy. Hillary 2016 said the economy was just fine. And it is! For Wall Street bankers.
It didn’t? Looks like the same to me, except that it didn’t have a public option or Medicare negotiating drug prices, and the mandate only applied to children. But the same generic outline he campaigned on is what passed.
Indeed, Commonwealth Fund described it in October 2008:
A far cry from the worthless crap on the exchanges. But, what the Hell? The 0.1% have their private doctors on call, paid for as a perk to CEO’s so all’s right with the world.
“I’m struggling to decipher why “uninsured” is a nightmare scenario when the average family has less than $1000 in liquid savings and the average, basic (bronze) ACA-compatible deductible in 2017 is over $6000.” (NC)
I believe less than $400 was mentioned in another study, too.
But you are talking to a wall of denial. You’re a number in the “insured” column and they don’t really need to count the actual amount of health CARE that folks receive. They are probably careful NOT to look at those statistics.
Yeah, I’m the one in denial when Voice made a claim where he projected what he believed to be true which was manifestly not. You can say the health care plan isn’t good enough — which is true — but that’s not what he said. He said that it did not resemble what Obama campaigned on when analysts flat out said it resembled Massachusetts + Medicaid/SCHIP expansion. Which is what we got.
And bound to become even more of a challenge for the middle class, regardless of Rep antics…http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/01/01/middle-class-workers-struggle-to-pay-for-care-d
espite-insurance/19841235/
I make no comparisons to O’s original 2008 program, other than he said it needed no individual mandates.
The denial I am speaking of is the refusal to admit that for SOME, ACA made matters worse.
I didn’t read the analysts. I read Obama’s campaign web site. He is a master at giving a snow job.
Mandate only applying to children is vastly different. That just establishes a minimum level of care for children and doesn’t speak to controlling adults expenditures on themselves. And what happened to the employer mandate? One of my grandsons works for Walmart. The ACA gave him Medicaid because he lives on the West Coast, but no insurance from Walmart. Is Walmart too small to be covered? When you read that 3employers will be mandated to provide insurance you don’t think that corporations like Walmart are exempt.
As for the individual exchange policies, they are total crap. I didn’t see there that individuals would be forced to buy policies that they have no hope of meeting the deductibles on, much less the out of pocket limit.
When I read employer insurance, I thought of the insurance provided by International Harvester, AT&T, Grumman and the like. Insurance that was on a par with Federal Employee Health Benefits. Not crap with $2000 deductibles and $12,000 and out of pocket limits that only cover 50% when they cover anything. Those exchange policies are only good for draining money out of already overstressed family budgets. That was not the impression one got reading his policy paper. His policy paper sounded like the health care plans of Germany, Austria, and Denmark.
I wrote a post on here comparing federal plans to a silver plan on the exchange and they aren’t too different. At least in VA. Out of pocket maximum for blue cross blue shield federal plan is like $11,000 for family. $5,000 for individual.
But it’s always the Bronze plans that are cited by Democrats. Bronze Plans are total garbage.
What’s the premium on that Silver Plan? Also, are you talking about BCBS Basic or Standard?
You can see here that either is in the neighborhood of $1500 a month premium. How many families can afford $18K a year for insurance? Yet everyone in the UK has coverage with no out of pocket cost. Store clerks and taxi drivers don’t have to pay $18K over there. I’ll venture to say that you and I (I’m sure about me) couldn’t afford it if we didn’t have that $1094.64 per month subsidy.
If I knew then what I know now, I would have voted for Edwards in 2008 instead of Obama.
No it’s the silver plans that are cited because the silver plans are the baseline for subsidies and cost sharing. If you pick a bronze plan you get worse cost sharing than with the silver — and many silver plans by virtue of this cost sharing turn into platinum plans, effectively, which doesn’t occur with bronze plans because that’s how the law was written.
I’m a bad candidate because I’m young but I believe the premium was about $300 a month without subsidies last time I checked a few years ago.
Look I’m not saying it’s the greatest thing ever, or that it’s my preferred method for health care delivery. But you said what we got isn’t what was campaigned on and I don’t agree. The fact is that private insurance through employers sucks just as much.
If a $300/month plan is comparable to a $1500/month plan, then OPM (office of Personnel Management) should start playing hardball with the Insurance companies!
Are any of the analysts factoring the ignorance of consumers?
The Guardian. Protein hype: shoppers flushing money down the toilet, say experts
Plus the labeled higher protein products are poor quality protein. Gets excreted right along with all the other supplements that are already big biz. Can never go broke promising health, beauty, and happiness in a bottle.
Al Capone was the guy who actually delivered happiness in a bottle.
Like I have stated before, Obama was a community worker before going into politics, a great investment in his person and the community. With all her experience as governor’s wife and first lady before becoming US Senator from New York, HRC became disconnected with the nation and needs of the common man. Her $15m speaking tour of Wall Street corporations sealed her image as corporate elitist and being part of the establishment that has come under attack since the financial crisis of 2008. A poor investment into her choice as a person the DP voter preferred. The DNC establishment gave her a well needed boost … even Bernie Sanders stood next to her when the polls didn’t widen her lead vs. Trump. Obama inspired the youth, HRC lost in the millennial vote.
The sixties were much more complex than this author writes to convince his readers … losing the Democratic South was caluculated by president Johnson to pass the long overdue Civil Rights legislation in 1964. This event was much more profound and caused a political earthquake that shook the nation. The one term Carter administration sealed the fate of the DP for over a decade. It was foreign policy failure with the downfall of the Shah and the attack on the US embassy in Tehran that gave the Reaganites a chance to steal the 1980 election in a similar fashion as with the Paris peace negotiations and North Vietnam in 1968.
○ Paris 1968 – The French Social Revolution
The Catholic Church in America played a negative role in preserving dogmatic conservatism which dominated its policy until the new pope Francis from Argentina [NYT] began to clean house. To lose the presidential election this year is just unbelievable!
A curious coincidence that Obama was spending his time in October in those swing states that HC lost. I also have read on NC that he was still mentioning TPP on the stump??? While Trump was reportedly sticking to his economic script that month…
Clinton plans to rely on Obama for campaign help
“He will travel to white suburbs in the Rust Belt and the Midwest and will campaign in African-American communities in North Carolina, Virginia and other swing states for the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Obama is expected to visit Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Pennsylvania and other battleground states he carried during his elections, including Colorado, Florida and Michigan.
Obama’s October calendar has been largely cleared, allowing him time to campaign wherever he is needed, according to the official.”
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/11/politics/obama-hillary-clinton-travel-us-election/
well Obama campaigning there reinforced the Obama 3rd term narrative w/o HRC having to pay attention to those states. The T vote was among other things a vote vs. the O third term.
Would be helpful to have Barack’s and Michelle’s schedules of their rallies for Clinton during the final two months. Here’s what NPR reported on Barack. I’m seeing OH, NC, and Fl and had previous engagements in CA and NV. Traipsed through the same ground that Clinton focused on.
OH was gone so early in the campaign that I’ll never understand why Clinton, Obama, and her other surrogates (including Warren and Sanders) spent so much time there. FL and NC was somewhat less of a lost cause; so, can’t criticize their effort to try to keep them in play — like insurance if one of the sure-blue states went rogue. However, doubt that’s what they were doing. Suspect they thought they had 272 EC votes nailed down and were shooting for 340 EC votes.
Why were the pre-primary (D) and pre-general election polls so far off in MI and WI? Something I either failed to note or had forgotten near the end of the Democratic primary elections is how narrowly Clinton defeated Sanders in Kentucky.
All I could find additional. From Sept.
“The president will be a regular presence in electoral battlegrounds during the remaining weeks of the campaign. Vice President Joe Biden will also be on the campaign trail on Clinton’s behalf, with plans to concentrate on Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, an aide said.
In a memo outlining requests to Obama political aide David Simas late this summer, the Clinton campaign asked the president to concentrate on six states — Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Iowa and New Hampshire — said a White House aide who has seen the memo.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-president-obama-campaigning-hillary-clint
on-october-20160920-story.html
hmm — no MI or WI appearances.
There was a primary voter through line from IA to MO, IL, WI, MI and IN. Why that stopped at the OH and PA border is a mystery to me. The narrative was a better predictor of the general election than the polling. That’s why I doubt that she could have won the trifecta: MI, PA, and WI. And she needed all three or two of the three plus NC.
From BooMan’s fp story: You Wanted Evidence on the Russians?
○ How the Democratic nominee plans to use America’s energy boom to weaken Russia | Newsweek | by Leah McGrath Goodman On 11/3/16 at 12:10 PM
Reads like a call for war on Russia a casus bellum. Writer Goodman parroting the lines of Clinton and Michael Hayden, the fearsome twosome. Nice combine, of course. Leah McGrath Goodman of Newsweek and Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto infamy.
Hayden who learned the trade from William and McGeorge Bundy in Operation Rolling Thunder. Well schooled in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
○ Drone Wars: The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing
Testimony presented before the U.S. Senate Committee by Peter Bergen
The attempted execution of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen by US cruise missile killed scores of
clan members including 14 Bedouin children in 2009 … look at what has evolved ever since!
○ Drone Strikes Cause Fierce Blowback In Yemen