Biden Went Down Swinging—and He Was Swinging Left: There’s a good reason that AOC and Bernie Sanders supported the president until the bitter end of his campaign
Biden is a veteran politician, a little horse trading of policies for support is nothing new to him. And besides, if you're slugging it out with a populist nationalism type, Bernie's advice is probably some of the wisest you could ask for anyway.
Neither of them are leadership, but I still wouldn't count on that. I think having a strong show of support makes Biden stepping down look classy instead of like he's been hooked offstage like a muppet.
lol that is some headline gore - mixed contradictory metaphors? Oof.
went down swinging [fists]-> went down fighting (somewhat obvious to everyone)
swinging left -> the article is trying to say he was moving further left ideologically
… but it feels like he was swinging (fists) left a lot of the time.
For me, in response to this statement, it really comes down to Biden being somewhat disconnected from the reality on the ground for most Americans. He and his campaign have had difficulty communicating successes for a lot of reasons… but one of the big reasons is that the “wins” on paper largely aren’t translating to making enough of a positive difference to a large enough number of people in terms of lived experience. Like ok great you saved the economy… in an era where most people have nowhere near enough scratch to invest in stocks. So all the “saving” mostly goes into corporate stock buybacks and exec comp packages. The fact that they still don’t seem to understand this stuff is deeply dismaying, and I think it’s pretty clearly a party leadership issue. You can propagandize all you want, but at the end of the day, Democratic and left-leaning voters tend to be far less tribal and gullible than the Republican base these days, and trying to bullshit us on things that are obviously not entirely true is just not going to work very well.
First, and perhaps most important, the proposals Biden embraced at the eleventh hour tend to poll extremely favorably.
I hope it works out like that, but my gut feeling is that actually the "Democrats should nominate a moderate Republican" people are right. I just don't see the people who would otherwise vote for Trump being swayed by the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez sort of Democrat.
I just don’t see the people who would otherwise vote for Trump being swayed by the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez sort of Democrat.
The problem here is thinking the election will be won by convincing people who might otherwise vote for Trump to vote for the Democrat, rather than by shoring up support of traditional Democratic groups and pumping turnout. People have this 1D theory of politics where the voting population is static and arranged on a single left-right line, and thus winning is simply a matter of being the most center.
Biden wasn't losing youth voters, or Muslims, or Black voters because he wasn't moderate enough. People don't organize rides to the polls because a more center person will vote for whoever picks them up. A R->D flip may give you a net of +2 votes, but there's so many more opportunities out there to just rack up +1's by getting non-voting or unreliable left-leaning voters to the polls, and exciting those base communities gives benefits in both votes and volunteers.
The problem is the Overton window has swung so far right. We really need a way to pull that back but I don’t know how to do it. The far left isn’t emotional and chaotic enough.
Most likely in my mind is currently some combination of Kamala Harris and Mark Kelly. He's not a moderate republican, but he still has everything needed to appeal to the demographic. Most important thing I think though is that whoever serves with Kamala has to be a fairly strong counterpoint.
My personal favorite though is Andy Beshear on the ticket but I don't think that's going to work out.
More like he went down flailing wildly. Biden tried a lot of things that were never going to get through the supreme court. He did a lot, mostly ineffectively because he didn't deal with the real problems.
The supreme court and extremism.
His proposition was to go back to business as normal, but things have fundamentally changed.
biden is literally the most pro labor, pro union, and pro worker in recent history which is why the online slacktivist twitter left hates him (and why the media was so desperate to drive him out).
the most pro labor, pro union, and pro worker in recent history
Even if this were true, then he's all that and still not even on the left side of centre, what the fuck does that tell you (it tells me that at the very least you don't understand what political left actually looks like, but the epitome of maintaining the capitalist status quo isn't it)..