Even before former Vice President Joe Biden’s video announcing his candidacy for the Democratic Party 2020 presidential nomination hit YouTube on Thursday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political action group Justice Democrats weighed in on it. It posted a comparison between Biden’s past votes and the “Democrats’ Future”:
Joe Biden’s past votes: FOR Iraq war; FOR Bankruptcy Reform Act; FOR Mass Incarceration; AGAINST School Desegregation; AGAINST: Marriage Equality
Versus
Democrats’ Future: FOR Medicare for All; FOR Green New Deal; FOR Free College; REJECTING Corporate Money; ENDING Mass Incarceration and Deportation.
This was followed by a tweet from Grace Segers, a political reporter with CBS News:
We can’t let a so-called “centrist” like Biden divide the Democratic Party and turn it into the party of ‘No, we can’t.’
The old guard of the Democratic Party failed to stop Trump, and they can’t be counted on to lead the fight against his divide-and-conquer politics today. The party needs new leadership with a bold vision capable of energizing voters in the Democratic base who stayed home in 2016.
Joe Biden stands in near complete opposition to where the center of energy is in the Democratic Party today. Democrats are increasingly uniting around progressive populist policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, free college, rejecting corporate money and ending mass incarceration and deportation. We don’t need someone who voted for the Iraq War, for mass incarceration, and for the Bankruptcy Reform Act while voting against gay marriage, reproductive rights and school desegregation.
What’s making Segers, AOC, and her Justice Democrats nervous is that Biden not only immediately jumped out to an eight-point lead over President Trump in early polling, but held onto a commanding lead over every other Democrat candidate.
It was AOC who told Fox News on April 15 that Biden “does not particularly animate [me] right now. I can understand why people would be excited by that, this idea that we can go back to the good old days with Obama, with Obama’s vice president. There’s an emotional element to that, but I don’t want to go back. I want to go forward.”
Biden’s polling numbers seem impervious to the long train of charges by a number of women who have accused him of inappropriate touching, kissing, fondling, or smelling, providing video footage of his creepy tactics. They seem impervious to claims of his shady involvement, along with his son Hunter, with Ukraine. Hunter, it will be remembered, took a lucrative job with a major Ukrainian energy company, but when it became the target of a corruption probe there, the senior Biden used his influence to have the prosecutor fired.
They also seem impervious to Biden’s long history of supporting (and voting for while in the Senate) far-left positions. While in the Senate from 1972 to 2008, he earned a Freedom Index (FI) rating by the John Birch Society of just 18 out of 100, identical to the rating earned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Biden earned that rating the easy way: by ignoring and violating his oath of office in order to support far-left positions. For example, Biden received a 91-percent rating from the National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest labor union, for opposing merit pay for teachers and a voucher system that would have allowed parents to redirect part of their tax dollars away from public schools.
Biden opposed all bills seeking to open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas development. He continues to support abortion despite claiming to be a Roman Catholic. Five times he voted in favor of bills that would prohibit partial-birth abortions.
Biden was given a failing grade of “F” from the National Rifle Association for his consistent anti-gun positions, including removing protections from gun makers from being subjected to potentially crippling lawsuits.
On immigration, Biden was a reliable vote for any scheme that would have allowed illegals entry and citizenship into the country. In 2007 he even voted against a bill to prohibit illegal aliens convicted of serious crimes — aggravated felonies, domestic violence, stalking, violation of protection orders, crimes against children, illegal purchase or sale of firearms — from gaining legal citizenship status.
But all of this doesn’t matter to the New Democrat Party. Biden is too “centrist” for the far Left, which tells much about people such as AOC, as well as Bernie Sanders, whom AOC favors in the upcoming election.
In his attempt to stay ahead of the pack of left-wing politicians baying at his heels, Biden is more than likely to adopt their radical agenda. Without any moral or constitutional foundations, Biden will soon begin to look like all the others running against Trump.
This bodes well for the president in his reelection efforts. As “Bonchie” noted at RedState.com: “To be honest, I love these people. They are a gift to the Republican Party … the majority of the country do not support their radical “Democratic Socialist” agenda. In the meantime, they are dragging the Democratic Party further and further left into its demise…. It’s ironic in the sense that [based on early polling] Biden could probably walk to victory in 2020 because of his broad appeal to independents. But his own party will insist [that] he embraces intersectional insanity and identity politics.”
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, writing primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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