Let’s say you put together a team and you’re running for president. You generally don’t make it that far in politics without some bad stuff happening. Taking some corporate donations here. Maintaining the status quo there. You know, politics.
So, what’s each candidate afraid of? For each candidate, there’s got to be a downside. Something about their politics that doesn’t line up with the image they’re presenting to you. After three debates, maybe it’s worth asking.
Eh, or maybe I’m just being dramatic.
But, really though, here’s a post about each candidate’s dark side. If you’re looking for a close and careful reading of the candidates, try some of my other posts. This one’s more in the spirit of fun. Read on for some (probably only mildly) exaggerated takes on what’s wrong with the candidates. A one-line objection to each.
Joe Biden
No one really wants Biden to win.
Jill Biden recently claimed you’ve got to ‘swallow a little bit‘ and vote for ol’ Joe. She also more or less admitted Biden’s not a top contender on the issues. And that’s really the Biden message, isn’t it? He thinks he’s the only candidate who can beat Trump, or at least he wants you to think that, despite the lack of serious evidence. But take away these issues of electability, and what’s left here? Not much. Just a guy no one really wants to be president.
Cory Booker
He’s a corporate hack.
During his political career, Booker rarely encountered a corporate donor he didn’t love. He voted against reasonable healthcare measures because the pharmaceutical industry didn’t like it. And he supported charter schools because the for-profit education industry loves them. His politics are obviously for sale. Sure, he might reject those donors now, but you don’t think he’s really changed his overall mindset, do you? In just a year? Come on now.
Pete Buttigieg
He’ll paint rainbows on bombs before he kills people with them.
As I’ve written earlier, I think there’s an outside case for calling Boot-Edge-Edge the worst presidential candidate. He’s even more of a technocrat than Warren, with his history with McKinsey and Supreme Court proposal. And he shows an almost over-the-top deference to the war establishment in the US. He does all this to the constant drumbeat of pinkwashing. If there’s one thing he’s afraid of, it’s that the voters figure out too soon he’s a center-right candidate in ‘progressive’ garb.
Julián Castro
He’s a partisan hack.
Castro worked his way up through the Democratic Party apparatus, and he didn’t do it by defending bold new ideas. He was a conventional mayor in San Antonio, operating through the typical partisan networking grind. And at no point has he shown any real skill for building new coalitions or new avenues of power. He’s running on a much better platform these days, but the history shouldn’t give us much confidence. Nor should the fact that he’s already reneged on single-payer. One might think he’d be able to break away from this past as a president, but presidents run into more pressure at that level, not less. It’s not an easy change.
Kirsten Gillibrand
Note: I’ve spared Gillibrand, because she dropped out of the race. I did write about her campaign a bit earlier.
Kamala Harris
There’s no such thing as a ‘progressive prosecutor’.
When court’s in session, Harris is probably locking people up. She has a slogan: Kamala Harris For the People. The basic concept here is a popular, democratic prosecutor leading a political movement, and it’s about as silly as the Three Stooges’ ‘Disorder in the Court‘. Prosecutors don’t lead popular movements for working class people, tenants, and marginalized groups. They put people in jail. And, according to the research, they drive America’s mass incarceration problem. Their institutional role and function in the American system is almost entirely negative. That such a campaign theme wasn’t immediately met with howling laughter is itself an indictment of the state of American politics.
Beto O’Rourke
No one takes him seriously.
We know Beto stands on things. Maybe he also stands for things. It’s hard to tell, because we’re not paying much attention. He thinks he was ‘born to be in it‘, but only about 2% of Americans agree. Where’s Beto?
Tom Steyer
He’s a douchebag.
Actually, Steyer has no real chance at the nomination. And so, he really belongs on the list below all the real candidates. But he’s such a douchebag I wanted to include him up here for the sole purpose of calling him a douchebag. This guy has no business running for president in a serious democratic political system.
Bernie Sanders
He’s not really a socialist.
Sure, Bernie was a socialist. In the 1970s. Lately? His platform doesn’t say much about public ownership of the means of production, aside from certain public utilities. Why is that? Maybe because his politics are social democratic reformism as an endpoint, rather than as a path toward socialism? Quite a few in the Sanders camp want to distinguish him from Warren by asserting that while Warren is just another politician, Sanders is a movement candidate. They’re correct about Warren, but are they correct about Sanders?
Elizabeth Warren
Her plans are too mainstream and somehow still impossible to pass.
If X exists, Warren has a plan for X. That’s the campaign theme, and she’s doing her best to fulfill it. And some of the plans are good. Trouble is, she’s trying to pass them off as radical when they’re mostly extensions of ideas from the Clinton Administration or mainstream liberal economists. And that’s not the biggest problem. Warren’s coalition is a narrow slice of very liberal, relatively wealthy Democrats with little in the way of broader organizing and base-building. That’s pretty much a recipe for not getting anything done as President. If you need a president to make you feel better about the US without actually changing anything, Warren has a plan for that!
Andrew Yang
There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence – a noun, a verb, and UBI.
Yang sets the all-time record for including the most ideas on his website, many of them marginal or just random. But anyone following the campaign knows he’s really a single-issue candidate, and that issue is universal basic income. His plan is little more than a Silicon Valley dystopia.
Michael Bennet, Steve Bullock, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, Wayne Messam, Tim Ryan, Joe Sestak, Marianne Williamson
Who are all these randos? Why are they running for president?
