We Deserve Joe Biden
A decent, well-meaning lefty runs for higher office. They inspire and offer hope in representation that might actually listen to us and our communities for once, and fight for the things we truly believe in, rather than simply sell their values to the highest bidder.
But then, shenanigans happen in some form or another, virtually always conveniently advantaging an establishment candidate and disadvantaging those that more strongly threaten corporate and establishment power.
It happened to Charles Booker. It happened to Tiffany Caban. It’s happened to numerous others who have made real runs for public office, both large and small. And, in a country that is entirely too entrenched in a mindset that the presidency is The Only Election That Matters, it happened to Bernie Sanders not once, but twice.
And yet, time and time and time again, even decent, well-meaning lefties in the end always seem to accept these outcomes with little to no question, if only so that they may politically live to fight another day. Even those who do raise a small fuss and try to fight for every last vote receive almost no public attention, organization, and demonstration in support of these actions, let alone demand for them.
Why is that?
Case in point: It’s not like we lack the evidence to question the legitimacy of this absolute farce of a 2020 Democratic primary.
Last-minute poll closures and moves. Absolutely, embarrassingly long lines. Broken machines and other excuses to push provisional ballots (or, as Greg Palast dubs them, “placebo ballots”). Flash drives full of votes even going missing altogether!
All this after the absolute circus that was Iowa, where even establishment media began to ask questions and call out disparities in the results coming in.
And, in the wake of the Dems’ app in the state literally changing tallies and failing to allow paper screenshots to post…is it really such a stretch to ask about the integrity of the voting machine and tabulator tallies, as well?
Because our privatized, closed-source voting machines are full of more holes than Swiss cheese. Little wonder, then, that some would puzzle over unadjusted exit polling and speculate on how the numbers in these machines were re-allocated away from Bernie on Super Tuesday.
A Caucus99 blog post summarizes the sheer absurdity of how that night transpired best, mass-corporate-candidate-dropout-and-endorsement-circus known as “Bloody Monday” notwithstanding:
We are supposed to believe that Joe Biden won almost every Super Tuesday state on earned media alone.
In other words, we are supposed to believe that Joe Biden won almost every Super Tuesday state without campaigning.
Not a dime spent on ad buys in those states. Not a single phone bank. Not a single door knocked on. No GOTV on Election Day, or before. The doors of his campaign office in southern California were literally locked.
When I was in college, my Latin professor once said to me, “FDR proved that one can become President any number of times. Truman proved that anybody can be President. And Reagan proved we don’t need a President.” Well, Joe Biden has not only proved that you can run for President any number of times; in 2020, he proved we don’t need presidential campaigns.
When does a presidential candidate refrain from campaigning in a state? Or, to put it more broadly, when does any candidate for political office refrain from campaigning in an area? It’s when they have no doubt of the outcome. They either know they’re going to win, or they know they’re going to lose. If the issue were in doubt, they would campaign to get the outcome they desire.
When does a presidential candidate refrain from campaigning in all the Super Tuesday states? Ordinarily, that would signal that the candidate knew he wasn’t going to win the nomination; it would be a sign that his campaign was winding down its operations. Because, unless you are an incumbent president, you cannot be sure that you will win your party’s primaries in that many states while making no effort whatsoever to win them. With that many delegates at stake, only a crazy person would be so confident as to make no effort to win. Unless, of course, he or his staff knew that his victories would be arranged for him.
Such speculation wouldn’t hold sway in the first place if we had real audits, actual paper ballots counted by hand (or, at the very least, open-source voting machines and tabulators with plaintext paper trails), publicly and transparently-managed voter rolls that can’t be purged without substantial evidence the persons in question are not qualified, automatic voter registration from the moment you turn 18, and, overall, elections infrastructure that wasn’t an entire corrupt and contracted-out dumpster fire from top to bottom.
But we don’t, none of these problems are new, and both major parties continue to treat the integrity of our elections — of democracy itself — as little more than a cheap, seldom-discussed game of Electoral Fight Club.
Otherwise, for one thing, you’d hear a hell of a lot more about how the sordid registration-purging scheme known as CrossCheck may have cost Clinton the election than about Jill Stein, Susan Sarandon, or the dastardly Russians.
The above problems really are just the tip of the iceberg…but as if all of that weren’t problematic enough, a COVID-19 pandemic then began to bring the country to a screeching halt.
And yet, even as practically everything else was being closed and postponed, Joe Biden and his team were, unbelievably, misinforming voters about the safety of voting in-person during a pandemic, and scoffing at the notion they should be rescheduled to ensure Vote By Mail procedures could be put in place for the sake of voters’ health and safety.
As for the DNC, not only did chair Tom Perez second this absurdity, he went on to condemn Ohio for rescheduling their primary for that very reason (so much for “respecting” states’ decisions). Worse, the national management of the party that “believes in science” even threatened to strip states of half their delegates to the national convention if they postponed their primaries too far into June.
These actions had tragic, but utterly predictable consequences: Multiple souls contracted COVID-19 as a result, and at least one poll worker died from the virus.
It was those who insisted on rushing through such primaries who should have lost delegates, not those who had the sense to take action in consideration of the heath and safety of their constituents. Those states who recklessly endangered lives — and further, the lives of these voters’ families — suppressed untold numbers of votes under the Grim Reaper’s specter of a contagious pandemic, and the resulting outcomes of these elections should have been considered wholly illegitimate.
The DNC and Biden continued playing the same false tune in spite of science and sanity, however, to the point of leaving local and state party officials in Wisconsin high and dry as they tried unsuccessfully to postpone their own primary election amid Republican opposition over state Supreme Court races held on the same election day.
Eventually, Tom Perez and his friends would finally begin to speak out against this — on the day of Wisconsin’s primary. That night, Biden himself suddenly changed his tune, questioning the wisdom in having held the primary in-person and suggesting they should have been moved to Vote By Mail.
As it would just so happen, Bernie would suspend his campaign the following morning, describing the decision as a “painful” and “difficult” one.
I can’t imagine being put into such an atrocious position — understanding the importance of and stubbornly wanting to stay in the race, especially at a moment in which various crises make it clearer than ever your policy prescriptions are desperately needed — but knowing that doing so would mean your last opponent and the establishment lined up behind him would continue to weaponize a pandemic and jeopardize even more lives, all for the sake of stopping you.
And while you could blow the whistle on these sociopaths and their depraved actions, doing so would decimate the only immediately viable “opposition” to the fascistic Frankenstein they themselves created. Yet, even this wouldn’t quite stop them from continuing to toy with lives. It would simply give them more of a haphazard excuse to marginalize and exile you — and, to your mind, the movement you worked so hard to build up.
Say what you will of the man’s mistakes throughout this campaign, both prior to this point and since. But in this particular moment, he was confronted with a real-life Kobayashi Maru: a no-win scenario.
Yet all the while, the psychopathic establishment had the absolute gall to blame him for the crime of running in a democracy! The projection from these psychopaths is truly off-the-charts. There’s no way in hell the same party managers brazen enough to hold “Stop Sanders” meetings would have treated the risks of in-person voting this flippantly had Bernie been the one in the lead by a few hundred delegates.
Now, I am once again asking: why are we putting up with this absolute bullshit? Because much of the madness and hell we’re in right now can be traced right back to this sorry-ass party robbing us of our representation four years ago. Fact is, we should be under a President Sanders seeking a second term right now, rather than the mask-off nightmare the Democrats were too corrupt, arrogant and stupid to defeat.
I don’t give a damn how jaded you are about Bernie right now. If we don’t take a stand, here and now, in demanding the representation we’ve now twice been denied — if not for the man himself, than at least for the sake of election integrity and the popular policies we voted for— then frankly, we deserve Joe Biden, and all the rightward-sliding hell that comes with him.
If we don’t take a stand for truly free and fair elections, our electoral infrastructure will only continue to crumble more quickly than our roads and bridges are.
Why bother? Democrats won’t let Bernie have it anyway! And? Since when was the left so goddamned pathetic as to let them dictate to us what we can and cannot have?
Because as desperately as this country needs a new party, I have some bad news: so long as we allow our democracy to be stolen without a fuss, behind a sea of opaquely managed, secretive processes and infrastructure, it will be child’s play for them to continue “not letting us” win under a different party line on the ballot, too. The Globetrotters and the Generals are having entirely too much fun keeping every electoral basketball court in the country all to themselves.
And if all we ever respond to these charades with is apathy and bitterness, rather than putting two and two together in the streets, we’ll lose what few threads remain of our democracy, and all we’re ever going to see until the planet is lost to either a nuclear war or a climate catastrophe is decent, well-meaning lefties increasingly inexplicably lose to corporate assholes, but to whom they’ll always feel forced to ultimately acquiesce to for the sake of stopping the latest model of Scariest “Greater Evil” Ever.
Frankly, we can no longer afford to settle for limp-wristed “ideological victories.” I cannot overstate how colossally fucked our country is if we don’t demand some democracy and policy changes, starting right the fuck now.
So, American Left, my final question to you is this…
Which side are you on?
