Former Vice President Joe Biden (shown, right), who has said he’s the Democrat with the best chance of beating Donald Trump in 2020, shouldn’t count on being the Democrat who gets the chance to beat Donald Trump in 2020.
Nearly three dozen Democratic strategist and consultants told McClatchy News Service that Biden has a good chance of losing because the party is captive to socialist radicals and angry minorities who don’t much care for another old white guy at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Whether that would include crackpot socialist Bernie Sanders is unknown. But it certainly does include the Democratic establishmentarian from Delaware.
Party Is Young, Radical, and Non-White
Of course, McClatchy didn’t say it that way. And neither did the 31 Democrats to whom the news service spoke. But that’s the message.
Strikingly, these conversations yielded a similar view: The Democratic political community is more broadly and deeply pessimistic about Biden’s potential candidacy than is commonly known. While these strategists said they respect Biden, they cited significant disadvantages for his campaign — from the increasingly liberal and non-white Democratic electorate to policy baggage from his years in the Senate and a field of rivals that includes new, fresh-faced candidates.
Thus, though Biden is widely admired and respected, he isn’t the man for a radicalized party increasingly controlled by identity politics.
Norm Sterzenbach, a former executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party, told McClatchy the party is moving away from white old-timers. “This last election cycle, we’ve seen a whole new level of energy that has emerged through a lot of fresh faces, and the party has moved in that direction and wants to hear new ideas and different messages,” he told the news service.
Another top operative explained that “The folks I’ve talked to are a little taken aback” by a possible Biden run. “No one quite understands where it’s coming from.”
That’s because the party has moved so far left that even someone tight as a tick with the radical Barack Hussein Obama isn’t far enough left. And, again, he’s the white skunk at the garden party.
“Let’s be honest: He’s an older white guy,” Democratic strategist Jim Cauley of Kentucky told McClatchy. “Does he connect with the base?”
As well, McClatchy reported, “Biden’s vulnerabilities are myriad, strategists say, and rooted in both his record as a public official and his performance as a candidate.”
Biden’s sins include supporting tough crime legislation that led to “mass incarceration” of blacks, and supposedly mistreating Anita Hill when she tried to torpedo the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. Neither will radicals such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) want a candidate willing to compromise with the GOP.
And Biden’s “well-known penchant for gaffes, once seen by many rank-and-file Democrats as endearing, will take on a new context amid the harsh scrutiny of a presidential campaign.”
That aside, one strategist, Morgan Jackson, told McClatchy that beating The Donald requires a candidate “who can turn out the largest proportion of African-Americans, of Hispanics, of white women under 40, of college students. That’s how you combat Trump’s turnout machine on non-college educated whites, who are going to turn out in record numbers.”
Harris the One?
Jackson might be thinking of a younger candidate such as Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who made the extra effort to depict herself as young and hip by admitting she’s partial to the Wacky Tabacky.
Speaking on a radio program this morning, Harris (shown, left) explained that she favors legalizing Giggle Weed. “Half my family’s from Jamaica,” she laughed when the host asked about it. “Are you kidding me?”
Harris has partaken of the Devil’s Lettuce herself, she confessed, “and I did inhale.”
Thus did the Washington Examiner ask whether she was “getting stoned while serving as an anti-pot prosecutor?”
Reported the Examiner, as “California’s attorney general, she also allowed the federal government to crack down on legal medicinal dispensaries. She refused to join other states’ efforts to remove marijuana from the Drug Enforcement Administration’s list of most dangerous substances, leading the marijuana lobby to back a pro-pot Republican candidate during her re-election.”
And “Harris increased convictions of drug dealers from 56 percent to 74 percent within just three years while she was a district attorney. Harris also tightened loopholes in bail and drug programs, resulting in more prison time for drug offenders.”
That raises a question for party potheads: Can Harris be trusted, or is she merely angling for the Bong Vote?
Photo: AP Images
