Category: Elections (Page 8 of 17)

Liberals and progressives rejoiced as Barack Obama won in 2008. They preferred Obama from the start of the primaries, and he trounced John McCain in the general election. Finally, they’d get all the things they wanted: universal health insurance, card-check for unions, an end to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the closing of detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay, a full review of NAFTA and switch to fair trade policies, and an indexing of the minimum wage to inflation.

Oops. Obama, of course, got none of these things done. Some of them he even could’ve done on his own without Congress. In turn, liberals and progressives offered excuse after excuse for Obama’s shift to the right. And then they campaigned for Obama again as they declared 2012 to be the ‘most important election of our lifetimes.’

Now the same liberals and progressives say they’ll hold Joe Biden accountable if he wins. They think they can push Biden to adopt policies well to Obama’s left. Will they?

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Joe Biden’s supporters point to his winning strategy: attracting older voters and moderates to the Democratic Party while trying to minimize losses among younger voters who often don’t vote anyway. Biden mostly ignores higher-income progressives, who don’t have anywhere else to turn and will therefore stay in line and vote a straight Democratic ticket.

And it’s working rather nicely for Biden. He’s way ahead in the polls and will likely defeat Trump handily. But I think a closer look at the evidence shows two ways to beat Trump. Biden took one path.

I’m more interested in the other.

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