2020 candidate Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) on Sunday criticized Joe Biden’s defensive response to heightened scrutiny on his policies and comments on race.
“Evolved” is the word I think we are all looking for.
Jimmy Carter did.
Obviously Obama knows a lot about Biden that we don’t know about. Biden might mean well but his language around race is decades old.
We can’t afford a caretaker POTUS after Trump. Biden has been wrong on too many issues. We have to do better in 2020 if we want to avoid Cotton/Hawley (like Trump/Pence but competent) in 2024.
Democrats want to win the election, but they also want to make progress on all the topics that have gone underground in the Trump era. We can either play it safe and nominate Biden and not get very far in the directions we want to go, or we can go long and go for broke. I think the apathy we see among the voting public at large might be disguising a tremendous hunger for bold moves. Trump was the first beneficiary of that feeling (with an assist from deplorable quarters), and I’m hoping Booker/Biden/Warren/Buttigieg can ride that wave as well. I just hope we don’t make the mistake of nominating the “millionaires and billionaires guy” (Sanders) or someone overly self-impressed (Beto) or someone kooky (Williamson).
EDT: I meant to write Booker/Harris/Warren/Buttigieg. I got carried away by alliteration.
Considering how much ground people of color have lost due to the mainstreaming of racism under the Trump/Miller Administration and that people of color (especially women) tend to be the lifeblood and energy behind the Democratic Party, Biden really needs to get his campaign in order. I don’t believe he is racist, but his answers so far have been underwhelming and tone-deaf. And using PBO as a shield won’t cut it.
Biden should have seen this coming. He’s got an uphill battle ahead
Booker saw the positive attention Harris got by going after Biden, and he wants to dip his dagger in the blood. Shows his political savvy.
If you are an old white guy trying to explain that you are not a racist, you are losing. Stick a fork in Joe Biden.
Now that they have that out of the way, can any of the upstarts put together a coalition to win this damn thing?
I can never find the H.L. Mencken quote, probably because my lack of Boolean search skills. However, within the past two decades, while I was reading DailyKos, POLITICO, TPM and other political blogs I found interesting and not yet disturbing to read (POLITICO became disturbing), there was a Mencken quote, the gist of which was, “In a Democracy, people eventually find out who you really are.”
This is what is going on with Joe Biden, although before he was VP and the subject of Historical Revisionism as some great Civil Rights and Labor Crusader, I am sure I already knew who he was. It is also going to be true about Corey Booker too, who I happen to think is a self promoting lightweight and kind of weird. So this is going to go on, even in a hugely large Presidential Field like the one we have right now. The game is long. And the land mines abound.
I have to take a little exception to the “Biden wasn’t ready” line. He basically wasn’t allowed to answer. Every time he started explaining his position, Harris talked over him, or more accurately shouted over him. At one point, she actually turned her back to Biden while he was trying to answer. Watch the video of it.
Secondly, Harris is smart enough to know that no matter how much of an asshole she was to Biden, he had to walk on egg shells so the “shame on him for beating up on a woman,” BS couldn’t be leveled against him (not by Harris but by the ham-handed pundits).
It was a planned, practiced and staged act by Harris, and Chuck Turd, and to a lesser degree, Maddow, let her get away with it.
BTW, I don’t bang the drum for Biden. Castro is my guy, followed by Liz, followed by Biden, followed by Harris.
So far in this campaign, it is easier to identify the candidates I don’t like than the ones I like.
And BTW, Booker needs to STFU and sit down. He’s not the guy, he’s not going to be the guy and he’s simply stirring up unnecessary angst in the party. Nothing like eating your own to advance your personal agenda there, Booker.
I don’t know, but somehow I have the feeling that Corey is shooting for a Veep slot…w/r/t the self-promotion, he would have to go from “I” to “he”/“she”
Anyone know when the next debates happen and how people are eliminated? We can’t do this again with 10 each night, a little bit of a circus.
Booker is playing this too hard. The desperate stench of opportunism is all over this attack.
I don’t know who the nominee will be, but I am fairly certain it will not be Bernie, Beto or the love-harnessing book promoter. I am still not sure if there is a strong (enough) candidate in the field.
You know he is running for president, right?
20 is a lot of people to pare down…
w/r/t to my above post as well as this one…
You can be shooting for 20 down to one
Or 20 down to two
That is true. Because the American Media writ large has turned its political coverage into a People Magazine variant of celebrity journalism and a search for cultish stories and symbols. No policy chops. No interest in reading through policy issues. Much easier to stir up shit and let someone like Trump rise to the top of 2016s GOP field.
Biden should know better, bet he does, but he seems slowed, confused. Flumoxed by states rights while trying to build a campaign against T***P is not a good thing. He needs to fix it. Fast.