“Biden and his backers need to face the facts. It may still be unclear which Democrat is best positioned to beat Donald Trump, but we know one thing: The answer is not Joe Biden.”
You can also spare me the centrist Pete Buttigieg platform, which strikes me as capitulation from top to bottom. But that’s another discussion for another time.
Joe Biden: An Anti-Endorsement at The Nation
His long record of poor judgment and cozying up to bankers makes him the wrong candidate to take on Donald Trump.
In recent weeks we at The Nation, like many other progressives, have come under increasing pressure to choose between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. We’re going to resist that pressure to endorse—for now. Not just because we find much to admire in both candidates’ programs and in the way both have conducted their campaigns (especially their rejection of corporate cash and wealthy funders in favor of small donors) but also because we continue to believe the presence of both candidates on the ballot widens the left lane in our politics, exposing the broadest possible public to Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and measures to rein in corporate power.
We also believe vigorous public debate is the best way for the strongest progressive platform to reach and be embraced by a majority of voters. Progressives may not agree with centrist Democrats like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, but engaging with and answering their criticisms now is essential—not merely to win in 2020 but also to build public pressure on a Congress whose members have proved reluctant to defy their corporate benefactors.
Yet that very debate has been stifled by the continuing candidacy of a man whose chief rationale for running—that he alone can defeat Donald Trump—has become increasingly threadbare. Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden offers the promise of picking up where the Obama administration left off: a restoration of business as usual for the K Street lobbyists and Wall Street speculators whose prosperity the 2008 financial crisis did little to disturb. Indeed, as Joseph N. DiStefano reports in this issue, the man posing as “middle-class Joe” has built his career and his family’s wealth on an eagerness to serve not the many Americans crushed by credit card debt but the very banks whose hands are around their throats.
The candidate who insists Medicare for All is too expensive for Americans is also the candidate who, like Clinton, endorsed NAFTA, China’s admission to the World Trade Organization, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership—all of which have savaged US manufacturing and workers. Clinton’s record cost her the industrial heartland (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan) and, with it, the election …
