With "Friends" Like These: Clintonite-Right "Democrats" As the Defenders of Liberal Democracy (UPDATED BELOW)

On 5 Jan., Joe Biden held a big-money fundraiser in Boston and--seemingly forgetting where he was and what he was doing there--told the assembled big-money donors to whom he was prostituting his potential 2nd term of a threat posed by Donald Trump should Trump win the presidency again. "American democracy, I give you my word as a Biden, is at stake."

It's a common theme for Biden and Democrats and unlike a lot of the strictly self-serving rhetoric one gets from politicians, it has the virtue of being true: Trump and the protofascist MAGA movement he presently leads are an open, direct threat to liberal democracy.

With little else to render palatable to the public their continued rule, Clintonite-right Democrats like Biden have been particularly prolific in preaching this point. They may not have any policy solutions or anything else positive to offer Americans but they've set themselves up as the defenders of democracy, against a foe that would, if given the power, end it.

It begs the question: How, in the face of this existential threat to the institution, have these Clintonite Dems, these Defenders of Liberal Democracy, actually defended liberal democracy under Biden's leadership?

One way is by trying to keep competing candidates off the ballot.

In 2020 in Texas, they sued to remove Green party candidates from the ballot in the state's high-profile races. In Wisconsin, they petitioned to exclude the Green party presidential candidate from the state ballot on a ridiculous technicality. They did the same in Pennsylvania. In Montana, they went to the extraordinary lengths of seeking out signatories of a petition that got the Green party on the ballot and leaning on them to recant, eventually convincing several hundred to do so. They then had the Greens removed from the ballot for insufficient signatures.

They repeated that performance in North Carolina in 2022, sending operatives to the homes of petition-signers posing as representatives of the state Board of Elections and of even the Green party and otherwise trying to intimidate the signers into recanting their support of the Greens' petition. In New York, they engineered the removal of all 7 third parties from the gubernatorial ballot. Earlier this year, in March, the Arizona Democratic party filed a lawsuit aimed at blocking No Labels "from being recognized as a political party with the ability to place candidates on the state’s ballot."

In October, the New York Times finally got around to reporting that "powerful allies of President Biden are aggressively working to stop third-party and independent presidential candidacies, fearing that an outside bid could cost Democrats" the 2024 election. This campaign has carried out "a multipronged assault" intended "to starve such efforts of financial and political support"; the Times notes that "Mr. Biden's top aides have blessed the multimillion-dollar offensive..."

Biden himself set out to game the Democratic presidential nomination process to perpetually tilt it in favor of more conservative candidates like himself. Earlier this year at his insistence, Democrats made deep-red South Carolina, which hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 47 years, the first state to vote in the party's presidential primaries.

Biden is profoundly unpopular; his approval rating went into majority-disapproval only a few months into his presidency and has only gotten worse since. In the history of polling, no president with comparable ratings at this point in his presidency has ever been reelected but despite the fact that supermajorities of Americans--including large majorities of Democrats--have been saying since at least July 2022 that they don't want Biden to run again, this Defender of Democracy has insisted on launching a reelection campaign.

That decision--to ignore the public and his own party's base--effectively ended any opportunity for a meaningful party primary, as the party machinery in such situations always closes ranks around the incumbent and most potential rivals will stay away from the race. Had Biden done the right thing and simply announced he wouldn't run again, there would now be a vigorous, ongoing Dem primary contest with a dozen or more candidates, all of whom would have a better chance next year against the Republican nominee (in the head-to-head poling, Biden has been losing to Trump--at present, that likely nominee--for months now). As it stands, Biden, whose campaign slogan is "Finish the Job" yet who hasn't outlined any agenda at all for a 2nd term except being Not Trump, faces only marginal opponents, who are ignored by the corporate press and shut out by the party.[1]

With over 2/3 of Democrats saying they'd prefer someone other than Biden and 8 in 10 Dems saying they want to see Dem primary debates in 2024, the Clintonites running the Democratic party have "defended democracy" by refusing to schedule any. In Florida, a significant swing state, Democrats swindled the other Democratic contenders and effectively engineered the cancellation of the state's Democratic primary; Biden will now get all of the state's delegates without a contest. Democrats in Tennessee, North Carolina and Massachusetts soon did the same, with more likely to follow.

This writer, holding to more radical views, isn't a fan of liberal democracy but it's certainly preferable to many of the alternatives. Infinitely preferable to MAGA protofascism. To the Clintonites, I would say--wishing, all along, that I was pointing out something so obvious it wouldn't need to be this overtly stated--that it isn't possible to "save" liberal democracy by gutting it, and these sorts of antics eviscerate your pose as its defenders and expose you as entirely unserious on this matter.

Americans, however, can't afford to be unserious on this matter. With elected Republicans having largely abandoned liberal democracy while we're getting this nonsense from the Clintonites who run the Democratic party, concern for the fate of liberal democracy is very real. It has no defenders in the upper echelons of either of the major parties, no one at that level making a real case for it, no one offering a progressive reform program responsive to Americans' needs that would shore up support for it and dry up the swamps that undermine that support. Either this state of affairs or the liberal democracy can continue; continuing both is becoming less of an option every day. If it's to survive in any recognizable form, it's genuine defenders must do much better. And soon.

If Biden cared a whit for "American democracy," he wouldn't be warning about the threat to it at an event specifically aimed at selling it out to the highest bidder, he wouldn't be running for reelection and his party wouldn't be trying to eliminate any competition and force a hated incumbent down America's throat. The consequences could be very severe.

--j.

---

[1] There have also been several actions to bar Donald Trump from ballots on the grounds that his participation in--indeed, creation of--an "insurrection" rendered him ineligible to run for president under the 14th Amendment. While these have, to date, been mostly unsuccessful, the Colorado Supreme Court just ruled that Trump be excluded from the state's ballots on those grounds. Democrats have been behind some of these efforts, while others are the work of Trump's Republican and third-party rivals or other actors. Trump is arguably ineligible, but barring him from ballots is problematic both in itself and in how it's done. Lots of legalisms involved, questions of due process, etc. It's a subject on which there can be a wide range of good-faith disagreements, and Ben Burgis, writing in Jacobin, is right to argue that instead of pursuing this course, Democrats should run a better candidate.


UPDATE (9 Jan., 2024) - New Hampshire has held the first-in-the nation primary in presidential elections for over a century. The state is proud of this and, in 1975, codified it into law. Biden's efforts to supplant NH (where he finished in an embarrassing 5th place in 2020) with conservative South Carolina as the first Dem primary state--to stack the primary process to perpetually favor more conservative candidates--stomped all over this and when, in Oct. 2023, NH indicated it would maintain its first-in-the-nation position--the Republicans who control the state legislature won't change the law, nor is it likely Dems would do so if they held the majority--Biden declined to have his name put on the ballot there. On 6 Jan., the DNC's Rules & Bylaws committee fired off a letter to the state Democratic party saying no delegates or alternates from the state's "unofficial" primary would be accepted by the DNC and called on state party leaders to "educate the public that January 23rd [the New Hampshire primary] is a non-binding presidential preference event and is meaningless." This, in turn, led the state Attorney General to send a cease-and-desist notice to the DNC, noting, in the words of the Associated Press,

"the comments amount to an illegal attempt to deter voters from participating in the primary and cited state laws against criminal solicitation and voter suppression. The latter, a felony, makes it illegal to attempt to deter someone from voting based on fraudulent, deceptive or misleading information."

New Hampshire, which Biden has chosen to antagonize in this way, is a swing-state, one Dems have won in the 5 of the last 6 presidential contests and that has 4 electoral college votes. Deep-red South Carolina, for whom Biden is throwing NH overboard, has 9 electoral college votes, and all of those will go to the next Republican candidate.

"The Clintonite Right Is An Unsustainable Trend": An Editorial

It's one of those paradoxical features of American liberal democracy--and one of the signs of its fundamental dysfunction--that progressive reforms supported by the vast majority of the public aren't, for the most part, ever even an option within the American system of government or political system.

The reasons why are several but the biggest, by far, is no secret, even if it is a thing that, weirdly, is rarely even brought up in "mainstream" political discourse: entrenched, well-heeled interests who make a fortune from the status quo oppose those reforms, which threaten to derail their gravy-train, and use the campaign finance system to purchase legislators to kill them.

In the American two-party system--still another of those "systems"--the Republican party is the traditionally conservative party, aligned with The Powers That Be and well-financed by them to go into public office, cut taxes on the well-off, cut regulation of industry and finance, keep wages low, facilitate the transfer of manufacturing out of the U.S. in the name of corporate profit--to make the well-off even more well-off at the expense of everyone else. The Democratic party was once the theoretically progressive opposition that, among other things, aligned with labor, civil rights, civil liberties and other progressive movements and supported reforms that annoyed TPTB by cutting into their profits.

Then, three decades ago came the Clintonite-right,[1] "Democrats" who argued for ditching all of that big reform stuff, enthusiastically embracing the bribery-and-donor-service model of "governance" and moving sharply to the right, following the Republicans in prostituting their allegedly-public offices to those TPTB--largely the same entrenched interests that funded the Republican party--in exchange for long campaign green.

It was an idea that proved lucrative. Capital was delighted and as the dollars rolled in, it caught on. Bill Clinton was elected president as a Democrat. Soon, the Clintonite right, in its various permutations, was running the party apparatus and had assumed hegemonic control over its elected officials at the federal level, a state of affairs that persists to the present.

The only real policy agenda of Clintonite-right politicians is serving their big donors and for decades now, while a seemingly endless raft of problems have arisen that would require vigorous progressive reform to in any way seriously address, the Clintonites' primary role in government has been to hamstring, prevent, attenuate and preclude that increasingly needed reform on behalf of those they regard as their real constituents.

Such an odious way of doing business would, if nakedly stated, find few supporters among the voting public, so Clintonite-right pols have deployed various strategies to make their "program" seem more palatable. They often characterize themselves as "moderates" or "centrists," tags that make them sound pragmatic, intemperate, reasonable, not ideologically rigid, to an American public that appreciates such things. The corporate press--yet another of those problematic "systems"--ubiquitously privilege them with such labels, marginalizing progressives, who are both denied these warm-and-fuzzy descriptors and presented as an opposition to them, and treating Clintonites, in policy disputes, as good-faith actors, rather than simply dirty pols in the pay of industry and finance. Clintonite-right pols use "triangulation" tactics, throwing their own party's base under the bus in order to portray "both sides"--Republicans and progressive Democrats--as "extreme" and position themselves as an artificially-created "sensible center."

This writer has, in various venues, covered many examples of the latter over the years. In the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, Hillary Clinton was faced with a serious challenge from progressive Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and her program consisted of proposing watered-down-to-nothing versions of whatever Sanders has proposed first, then arguing the Sanders originals were too "radical" and completely unrealistic, while hers were more "doable."[2] Sanders would propose raising the minimum wage to $15/hour, Clinton would, a few months later, propose only $12/hour. Sanders crafted a $1 trillion/5 year infrastructure investment plan, then, months later, Clinton would turn up proposing a totally inadequate $275 billion/5 year infrastructure plan. And so on.[3]

How do politicians in the pay of entrenched interests put a positive spin on half-assed, less-than-half-measures cooked up solely to defeat substantive reform without ever addressing the problem that gave rise to the need for reform?

Some Clintonites try to describe them as "incremental change" or "incrementalism." This, they tell progressives, is the first step, how you get to the kind of policies you really want.

In the debate over healthcare during the Obama administration, this was often used as a way to sell the Affordable Care Act. Relentlessly rapacious capital--and government acquiescence to/facilitation of it--has ruined the healthcare system in the U.S.. Progressives were told that passing the ACA was an "incremental" "first step" in getting to single-payer healthcare, the reform that was actually needed, but in reality, the ACA was nothing more than a bad, industry-friendly healthcare plan developed by the Republicans, adopted by Obama and authored by a former executive of the largest health insurance firm in the U.S.. Its central aim was to defeat reform, not be reform; to delay the collapse of healthcare in the U.S. and allow the massive for-profit gravy-train to continue down the tracks a little longer; to further entrench the failed private insurance industry, the exact opposite of single-payer. If its industry-funded Clintonite advocates (or, before them, the Republican advocates of its predecessors) had ever come to genuinely believe it would ever lead to single payer, they would have fought it to their last breaths. It was sort of a giveaway that even as they sought to sweet-talk progressives with that siren song of "incrementalism," they were, out of the other side of their mouths, dismissing single payer as an impossible--and undesirable--fantasy.

As they had with Hillary Clinton's disastrous healthcare effort in the '90s, the Clintonites also hijacked the progressives' language about healthcare as a "human right," slapping it on a policy that didn't recognize healthcare to be anything of the sort. They adopted progressive language about "universal healthcare" and applied it to an "affordable care act" that left millions of Americans with nothing and many millions more with "insurance" so outrageously expensive as to be inaccessible.

More broadly, the ACA is a good illustration of how Clintonite right "reforms" undermine and defeat real reform.

The ACA was theater, a policy that pretended to address the problems of healthcare but without actually doing so, helping blunt any immediate push for reform.

Because the ACA doesn't actually address the problems, made many of them worse and allowed many more to continue, it gives reform itself a bad name. Some people will be much more cynical--and not in the wise, informed way experience imparts--about future pols promising "reform."

It puts on welfare the very for-profit entrenched interests who have nearly driven U.S. healthcare into the ground, subsidizing, among other things, their purchase of legislators, which makes any genuine reform effort in the future much harder.

Politically, the ACA allows unscrupulous Clintonite-right trash like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to continue the grift, pretending as if the profound problems with the ACA can be fixed with some minor tinkering, and facilitates their triangulation against real reform. Both Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 told America that Bernie Sanders wanted to repeal the ACA, Medicare, Medicaid, everything, leaving everyone who relies on those programs with nothing, then try to pass single-payer Medicare For All, whereas they wanted to "build on" the ACA. Sounds easier, less radical. An absolutely disgraceful lie that helps defeat reform so that gravy-train continues. To get through the 2020 Democratic primaries, Biden pitched as an alternative to M4A a "public option," a public-financed insurance program to compete with private insurers.[4] After his election, he never even mentioned it again. It had served its purpose. Americans, meanwhile, remain stuck with a dysfunctional healthcare system that bleeds them dry and that no "reform" any donor-owned Clintonite will ever be allowed to propose could even begin to fix.

As the Biden administration has yet again made plain, Clintonite-right pols can't govern. To get progressive votes in 2020, Biden had advanced a series of moderately progressive reforms, which Democrats bundled into a package called Build Back Better. Over the months BBB was debated, Biden made no real effort to sell it, actively sabotaged its chances in congress then let it die--killed not at the hands of Republicans but at the cookie-jar-encased mitts of Clintonite-right "Democratic" legislators who had been put into office by the Clintonite-right leadership of the Democratic party and congressional caucus. They needed those pols, you see, to defeat progressive contenders.

People notice. Biden's approval numbers went into majority-disapproval only a few months into his presidency and have stayed there, only worsening with time. The complete lack of any real record of accomplishments has put Biden in a bind vis-a-vis his extraordinarily ill-advised reelection effort. The Biden campaign's initial strategy was to pretty straightforwardly gaslight people--to argue that "Bidenomics" had actually been very successful but that, in effect, people have been too stupid to recognize it. That went over just as well as could have been expected and only lasted a few weeks. Biden's social media defenders still insist on pushing the fantasy that Biden has some great record that people just don't acknowledge but the donor-dictated policies Biden has pursued are, for the most part, actively bad/harmful, don't address Americans' problems, don't improve their lives and are largely things no one wanted and about which no one cares. The truth is that his presidency has been a miserable failure, marked by, among other things, sky-high gas prices, out-of-control greedflation, soaring medical debt, unaffordable housing and a major rollback of civil liberties at the hands of a reactionary Supreme Court that mortally threatens every reform effort in the immediate future but which Biden refuses to do anything to fix.

Biden's unpopularity isn't merely a product of presently poor conditions but reflects a public weariness with this sort of "government." While it may sound odd to say this after Clintonites have held hegemony over the Dem party and its elected officials for so long, Clintonite-right pols are not popular and never really have been.[see Appendix below] The fortunes that entrenched interests cough up can pay for lavish campaigns to sell them, give them high name-recognition and drown out and personally destroy the crowdfunded progressive reformers who challenge them, and progressive-minded voters may, in a two-party system give them an edge when the alternative is regressive Republicans, but theirs is a con that can only play out so far. Eventually, worsening conditions and the need to genuinely address them--among other things--will overtake it.

In a politico-economic system geared toward serving the needs of elites, one that, whenever necessary, grinds up everyone else in the process, Clintonite dominance of the Democratic party has unfortunately meant that positive progressive reforms to address those conditions usually aren't even allowed to be part of the national debate within all those problematic "systems." Clintonites join with Republicans and corporate media to smear, belittle and dismiss advocates of sensible, pragmatic progressive reforms similar to those long in place in every other advanced, industrialized nation as wild-eyed radical extremist charlatans peddling fairy-dust and unicorns; the Americas who support--and often very much need--these reforms are told that such policies are laughably unattainable, their advocates "unelectable." The terms of that national debate are thus defined by conservatives, with the only counter-messaging allowed coming from other conservatives. Every cog of the machine moves to ensure that progressive reforms are rarely an issue,[5] progressive reformers never on the ballot in the Fall.

It shouldn't really have to be explained that denying people in need of reform any sane alternative within the political system undermines the system. Why should people have any loyalty to a system that has no loyalty to them, a "democracy" that is entirely unresponsive to their desires and exigencies, a republic that stands, sits and runs only for the gilded toffs who bleed them dry? The kind of alienation, helplessness, hopelessness, anger and desperation this spawns doesn't just spark a healthy interest in more radical alternatives. It breeds apathy and, worse, drives far too many who, though not ideologues, share progressive values and could, if it was ever an option, get behind a program of progressive reform into the arms of the protofascism that is consuming the Republican party, a protofascism that intentionally gears a part of its appeal toward those very people when no one else is trying to talk to them. A protofascism that openly threatens the continued existence of the liberal democracy itself while Clintonite-right dominance of the Democratic party feeds it and undermines the strongest bulwark against it: public belief in and support for the liberal democracy.

While Clintonites make a grand show of warning that if that protofascism ever gains the power to do so, it will end liberal democracy, how seriously they take the threat--vs. how much of this is just a self-serving effort to drive people to vote for bad Clintonite-right "Democrats"--can be judged by their plan for countering it: to just continue throwing up conservative, donor-owned politicians who, as problems pile up and fester, do nothing people want or need, pols who, like Joe Biden, most people actively dislike, and just hope those who show up to vote decide to hate Republicans even more that year. In every election. Forever.[6]

The Clintonite right is an unsustainable trend.

--j.

---

[1] If that narrative, like the one about the use of the campaign finance system, seems simplistic, rest assure, it definitely is. There were always Dems like this. It was, in fact, widely noted at the time that the "New Democrats" were really just a very old breed of right-wing Democrat that had co-existed alongside the then-dominant reformist faction throughout the entirety of the latter portion of the 20th century. The Clinton "era" is just where, owing to a number of factors, they rose to the height of their prominence and became dominant within the party, as much of its elected officials embraced its "ethos." In my defense, this is merely intended as a brief editorial; it sometimes uses broad strokes.

[2] It works the same way against Republicans. Bill Clinton, for example, adopted, as the primary themes of his presidency, the Republicans' major priorities--deregulation, "free trade," tough-on-crime-ism, welfare "reform," deficit-cutting austerity, facilitating wealth concentration, warhawkishness in foreign affairs, etc. Republicans came to be seen as just the party of particularly unpopular "social issues"--anti-choice on abortion, anti-gay, church-state unionism and so on. Right-wing media first became a major force at this time and in reaction to this, precipitating a Republican march to the right (and eventually the far-right) to differentiate themselves. This is where Trumpism really began.

[3] Clinton apparently realized how badly this looked too. When she wrote "What Happened," her godawful book in which she blamed everyone and everything else for her failure to win the 2016 election, she turned the gaslight up to maximum and reversed the order of this, falsely claiming it was she who was introducing ambitious policies, while Sanders followed her around proposing bigger, more extensive "magic abs" versions. This writer corrected this and some other outlandish excerpts from "What Happened" at great length in 2017.

[4] Barack Obama had proposed a "public option" in 2008, then, during the debate over healthcare during his presidency, abandoned it in a backroom deal with industry lobbyists.

[5] Though activists regularly get progressive reforms on the ballot via the referendum process. It's an ongoing mark of the profound failure of the Clintonite right that in states and localities that overwhelmingly vote against Clintonite-right "Democrats," progressive ballot initiatives regularly win by huge margins.

[6] Showing a complete disregard for the principles of liberal democracy, Clintonites also very actively try to shame voters into voting for their favored candidates and blame voters for those candidates' failures whenever one of them loses. Pressuring the candidates to adopt popular policies that would earn them sufficient votes to win is never on the table.



APPENDIX:
Clintonite-Right Election Performance: An Analysis

I've covered most of this in more detail in an earlier piece, "Zombies, Dinosaurs & That Definition of Insanity: Clintonite-Right "Democratic Leadership" & Its Discontents," but for the sake of completion, I'll thumbnail it here.

Americans aren't, for the most part, ideologues but they're quite progressive and among them, progressive values are very deeply ingrained, even in those who would never dream of describing themselves as "progressive" (and who may react with rage if ever so described by others). In a two-party system, the vehicle for expressing discontent with the party in power is always the other party. That is, until one party finds a way to sufficiently endear voters to it, to produce results that convince voters that it deserves their enthusiastic support, that they feel compelled to show up and reelect it again and again. Clintonites can't manage this trick, so elections tend to run, instead, in waves--one party, then the other. Democrats have nominated open Clintonites in 7 of the last 8 presidential contests. Some won, some lost but while nearly all of them faced absolute troglodyte Republican opposition that any strong candidate should have chopped up for bait, none had a dominant win. In 2008, the exception, Barack Obama ran as progressive and the result was a relatively healthy victory, with Democrats riding his coattails to a massive sweep across the U.S.. But Obama then took a hard Clintonite-right turn. He was reelected but with 4 million fewer votes than he'd originally won, and while voters ultimately granted both he and Bill Clinton two terms, Democrats ate huge losses throughout both presidencies. By the time Hillary Clinton's 2016 vanity campaign had played out, the party had been reduced to one of its weakest points in its long history.

And what Democrats lose? The conservative Clintonites. They go into office with the backing of the party leadership in "blue wave" years, when any Dem running for the same seats--including the progressives the party leadership was trying to defeat by backing these Clintonites--would have won, then lose in large number in "red wave" years. Shifts to Republican control of congress are almost always down to large Clintonite-right losses.

The Trump presidency introduced a new dynamic: public revulsion at Trumpism. While Democrats have come to count on Trump as a boogeyman, the evidence that this is a sufficient lever to sustain power is weak. The opposition party always does well in the first midterm elections of a new presidency and Dems did too, gaining 41 seats and control of the House of Representatives in 2018 but Republicans retained control of the Senate. Joe Biden was elected in 2020 as the Not Trump but while gaining de facto control of the Senate (which had a 50/50 split, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker) and retaining control of the House, Dems actually lost 13 House seats. In the 2022 midterms, Dems avoided the sort of epic wipe-out often suffered by the party in the White House in a first midterm but still lost control of the House.

If Dems want to reliably draw enough votes to sustain control, they're going to have to give voters some of the progressive reforms they want--some things to vote for.

The Needle & the Bernie Done 2: Healthcare Too

 In February, I assembled, from a Twitter thread, a piece countering claims by Hillary Clinton's personality cult--still hanging in there after all these years--that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders "stole" the idea of an indexed $15 minimum wage from Clinton and documenting the fact that Sanders was the one who had taken that idea mainstream at a time when most elected officials wouldn't touch it and made it not only a consensus view within the Democratic party but the official position of that party. Clinton never advocated the policy and, in fact, tried, right to the bitter end, to undercut and defeat Sanders' proposal. I addressed some of the Clinton cult's talking-points, "the Clinton Cult Rules":

"One holds that progressive Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is just a blowhard who has never accomplished anything, accompanied by reference to a sparse number of bills Sanders has sponsored in congress that have been passed into law, usually with a dismissive reference to 'naming post-offices.' The attack is often expanded to include other progressive pols. Another is that Sanders 'steals' ideas and tries to take credit for them--also regularly expanded to other progressives."

Because the cult persists, these talking-points do as well, and one version is that Sanders "stole" the idea of single-payer healthcare--Medicare For All. Sometimes, he's said to have "stolen" it from Hillary Clinton, sometimes from "Democrats," sometimes from the late John Conyers, longtime Michigan congressman.

As with so many other such claims, I've addressed this many times on social media. What I'm going to do here, in fact, is mostly made up of my notes from those occasions. Back in 2018, I wrote "A Little History of Healthcare Reform" a brief effort to correct a cultist who insisted that Clinton "was the one who first brought [single payer healthcare] to the national stage" and, more generally, that Clinton was "the first person in America to get the idea of a federal government supported healthcare system to the national stage." Admittedly, low-hanging fruit. Perhaps this one, which will act as a sort of sequel, is as well but these claims continue to circulate. I have some time on my hands today and after encountering the four-quadrillionth reiteration of the cult's claim that Bernie Sanders the Do-Nothing "stole" the idea for universal healthcare ("stole" it from Clinton in today's iteration), I decided I'd make another article of it, collect the relevant facts in a single location for anyone who cares.

The current dust-up began when Sanders offered up some ideas on healthcare reform. Author Joyce Carol Oates, referencing this, tweeted, "A political leader is one who has substantial policies to offer voters; politicians are those who call one another names, promise to punish anyone who disagrees with them, & have no policies to offer." A cultist immediately turned up with the usual nonsense, Oates replied and we're off to the races:

Something that shouldn't really have to be pointed out--but, because we're dealing with Clintonites, must be pointed out--is that there's no intellectual property in public policy. No one ever holds any such property. That anyone even could is an astonishingly silly, uninformed idea. Politics is about proposing a policy then trying to get enough people to agree with it that it can be passed into law. Anyone who wants to see a given policy enacted doesn't, when other people adopt and push for it, angrily make some proprietary claim on it he doesn't have; he is, rather, delighted to see other people adopt and push for it. It means the idea is spreading and is closer to the day it can be enacted. National healthcare programs of the kind being discussed in this article have been around since the 19th century. No one who first proposed them is alive anymore. No one is going to get huffy is the U.S. passes one without naming it after Otto von Bismarck or fill-in-one's-preference.

Now, some history:

When, in 1971, Sanders first ran for governor of Vermont--his first political campaign--he was already advocating single-payer healthcare. In the words of the Bennington Banner (3 Jan., 1972), Sanders "called for a complete system of national healthcare for all citizens."

In that same campaign, Sanders would write a letter to the local Vermont Freeman, Sanders called for "free and excellent medical and dental care for all."

During Sanders' 2nd presidential campaign in 2019, the New York Times described how Sanders threw himself into studying the issue throughout the course of his various campaigns in the '70s. "I believe in socialized medicine," he said in 1976. He continued to advocate the idea after being elected mayor of Burlington in 1981, assembling a task-force to study it.

In 1988, when Jesse Jackson ran for president, Sanders became one of the first prominent politicians to endorse him, citing, as part of his reason for doing so, that Jackson would "move to establish a national health care system which will provide health care as a human right."

In 1990, Sanders was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Less than four months after assuming office, he announced he was working on single-payer legislation. A few weeks later--at a time when Hillary Clinton was still nothing more than the nobody wife of an obscure, corrupt Southern governor--he introduced the National Healthcare and Cost Containment Act. Written by Steffie Woolhandler of Physicians for a National Health Program, who was working on Sanders staff, the bill would have created a single-payer delivery system to be administered by the states.

A year later, Michigan Rep. John Conyers introduced his first single-payer bill, the Health Care for Every American Act of 1992, which seemed to be modeled on the earlier Sanders legislation. This is relevant for a few reasons. Conyers and Sanders would become part of a core group in congress who, for years, advocated single-payer healthcare while getting very little support. It's also the case that Sanders is regularly accused by Clintonites of "stealing" Conyers' idea, though those throwing this around usually refer to Conyers as only "a black man," to get in a race-baiting dig at Sanders without, themselves, giving the actual black man any credit by naming him (something one suspects they wouldn't be able to do anyway). On this policy, Sanders was there first, but the two men didn't consider themselves rivals on the issue; they worked to pass single-payer for years, in a congress that was a wilderness for those supporting such things. Each referred to the other as a friend. When Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign made him a brand-name, Sanders traveled to Conyers' district to use his celebrity to campaign with Conyers for Medicare For All.

Shortly after he was elected president, Bill Clinton appointed his wife to run his task force on healthcare reform--Hillary Clinton's first involvement with the policy, over 20 years after Sanders began advocating single-payer--and Sanders, within days, visited the Clintons to lobby for their support for single-payer. Unsuccessfully, of course.

In March 1993, more than 6 months before the roll-out of Clinton's "Hillarycare" plan, Sanders and Conyers became original co-sponsors of Washington Rep. Jim McDermott's American Health Security Act, a single-payer plan.

Then came Hillarycare.

There are some popular misconceptions about the Clinton plan but maybe the most surprising is that so many believe it was a single-payer plan. This isn't a Clintonite myth, though some Clintonites believe it, and it forms the basis of the false belief by some that Sanders "stole" the policy from Clinton. I've never been able to track it down to an original source, but whatever its origin, it's entirely false. Hillarycare was an industry-friendly "managed competition" plan, similar to things the Republicans had been pitching. As Clinton herself has said, "I never seriously considered a single payer system." Her proposal is also called a "universal healthcare" plan, but while that is how it was marketed, this, too, is false; the plan would have left millions of Americans with nothing. Some Clinton cultists try to attribute to Clinton the broad idea of "universal healthcare" so as to not only give her undeserved credit but bolster a contention that this was an idea Sanders "stole" from her, but the idea of "universal healthcare" long predates the entrance of either Sanders or, especially, Clinton into politics.[*] Social-media Clinton cultists often say Sanders voted against and was even responsible for killing Hillarycare, but--again--that's false. Hillarycare was a bureaucratic nightmare, the effort to pass it a fiasco. It was so bad it died without ever getting to a vote, because none of the four versions of it that were introduced could--in a congress dominated by Democrats--even manage majority support, much less the supermajority required to overcome a filibuster.

Jim McDermott, meanwhile, would reintroduce his single-payer bill in every congress for years, with Sanders and Conyers as co-sponsors--1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005. In the middle of that--in 2003--John Conyers introduced the Expanded and Improved Medicare For All Act, first using that "Medicare For All" label. Bernie Sanders and Jim McDermott were co-sponsors. As with McDermott's legislation, Conyers would reintrodue this bill in every congress; Sanders co-sponsored the 2005 version, the last before he left the House and was elected to the Senate.

In the Senate, Sanders introduced the American Health Security Act of 2009. In 2009 and 2010, he introduced two bills aimed at fostering the development of single-payer plans by the states. In 2011, he teamed up with McDermott to simultaneously introduce a single-payer bill in the House and Senate. In 2013, he introduced it again and authored a prescient op-ed in which he argued the case that "the only long-term solution to America's healthcare crisis is a single-payer national healthcare program."

During his first presidential campaign in 2016, Sanders not only introduced a Medicare For All plan but made it one of his signature issues. Hillary Clinton opposed it, slanderously accusing Sanders of wanting to repeal Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, everything, then try to pass his new plan, at one point infamously screeching like some insane Alex Jones-ite monster about how single payer "will never, ever come to pass!!!"

Hard to believe Clinton lost that election, eh?

While the U.S. is without a Medicare For All system, Sanders' advocacy still tangibly paid off. While the polls that bothered to ask have, for decades, shown broad public support for the policy in theory and there had been longstanding activist base support for it, there was almost no advocacy for it from the highest echelons of either government or corporate media. Sanders changed this. The most recent of Sanders' single-payer bills prior to his 2016 run had managed only one Senate supporter: Sanders himself. John Conyers' plan, the most popular in the House at the time, had only 49 co-sponsors. When, after that race, Sanders introduced single-payer again, it drew the support of 16 senators, a third of the Senate Democratic caucus. In the House, 124 signed on to it, the most in that bill's history. It remains to be seen how many of those legislators are serious about the policy and how many are just opportunistically latching on to the policy to reap the political benefits of appearing to support it--cynicism on that question is advisable--but it's because of Sanders that there are political benefits for appearing to support it.

While most of his Democratic peers in government offer either nothing at all or unsustainable "reforms" aimed solely at staving off actual reform a little longer on behalf of the rapacious donor-class that profits from the status quo and that funds them, Sanders has led the way, pushing progressive reforms into a "mainstream" political culture that shuns them, and on this issue, as he has on so many others, he's managed to move the needle. Americans have an unfortunate habit of trying to put off big reforms until the situation that necessitates them becomes rather grim but when the healthcare future finally arrives, it's going to be something that looks an awful lot like what Bernie Sanders has been pitching for the last five decades.

--j.

---

[*] A good, brief 2021 article by Arthur Tarley in Current Affairs outlines how a Democratic party hegemonically controlled by Clintonite-right Democrats who oppose single-payer have nevertheless adopted most of the language of single-payer (including "universal healthcare" and "healthcare as a right"), effectively turning it into an empty marketing slogan for policies to which it doesn't at all apply.

Voter Blaming vs. Liberal Democracy: An Editorial

Looking over Twitter yesterday, I came across a Twit-snit in which an angry Clintonite was raging against those she characterized as white, self-absorbed, entitled Millennials who failed to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and were threatening not to vote for Joe Biden in 2024. She said these things as part of a rant in which she--herself white--was arguing that the shitty Clintonite-right candidates she favors are entitled to the votes of Millennials who didn't wish to vote for such candidates. In the midst of her tantrum, she characterized declining to vote for candidates who don't represent one's views and/or interests as "throwing a tantrum," said "being able to throwing[sic] a tantrum is white emtitlement[sic]" and other such things. She'd named her account, apparently without irony, "Democracy Rules."

This stuff is, of course, par for the course on Twitter and across social media, literally the sort of thing some quart-low pundit is pushing somewhere every minute of every day, and perhaps it's not even worthy of much attention--stupid gonna stupid--but there is, beneath the frequent and amusing lack of self-awareness in such commentary, something that perhaps is: a complete lack of understanding of, often outright contempt for, the basics of liberal democracy. The casualness and persistence of it and the often weak pushback against it are all symptomatic of why liberal democracy is presently failing and in increasing danger of ending.

A basic civics lesson: In the liberal democracy, political candidates and factions present their respective competing programs to the public. Every candidate for public office has the responsibility of making a good enough case for his own program that he's able to assemble around it a coalition sufficient to overcome his competitors. Among the public, every person weighs these programs then, in a democratic process, votes for whichever he or she prefers. Those who are elected aren't royalty; they're representatives, stand-ins for their constituents in the business of governing, there because it isn't practical to have every person in a large nation vote on every little thing government does.

Pretty basic stuff. The problems of liberal democracy seem almost infinite but for those who believe in it, that's the theory.[1]

Part of why it's now in danger is that to many of those, like "Democracy Rules," who profess their adherence to it and present themselves as its defenders are, in fact, enemies of liberal democracy and in their commentary on public affairs are, in effect, actively inveighing against it.

"Democracy Rules" engages in that perennial elitist favorite, voter-blaming. Favored elites can, by this "logic," never fail; they can only be failed. Everyone on social media has seen this routine: Everything bad that has happened in the world since--yes, this again--2016 is the result of those who failed to vote for Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton isn't responsible for her bad behavior over the years. She isn't responsible for the awful campaign she ran. She isn't responsible for failing to build a sufficient coalition to win the presidency. She isn't responsible for, well, anything. No, it was the voters' fault. "Democracy Rules" attacks Millennials for failing to vote for Clinton (even though most of them did vote for her).[2] Others attack those who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries or those who voted for a 3rd-party candidate or those who sat out the general election. The terminally online Clinton cult despises progressives more than anything in this world and has obsessively targeted them with these attacks every hour of every day for nearly 7 years now. The cult's narrative on this is logically indefensible but as much as the cultists often try to make it look like one, it isn't an effort at a logical analysis; it's just an emotional outburst. A really long one.[3] More importantly, one that--like every other voter-blaming effort--is rooted in the complete abandonment of liberal democratic principles.

Politics is about assembling winning coalitions, and voter-blaming, to the extent that it has any effect at all, merely acts as an obstacle to assembling the next one. Is someone who is blamed, in so outlandishly unfair, unjustifiable and relentless a fashion, for every bad thing that happens more or less likely to want to team up the next time around with those doing the blaming? Bitching about politics is a very democratic thing to do, to be sure, but this particular species of bitching is actively counterproductive. More to the point, it bespeaks a complete ignorance of and/or aggressive indifference toward how the system works, as it doesn't just pointlessly alienate potential allies in a strategically stupid way; it's a very straightforward, in-your-face argument that you aren't entitled to vote (or not vote) as you wish. The elite candidate favored by those like "Democracy Rules" is absolved of any responsibility for doing anything to earn enough votes to win. Those who make their vote conditional on their representatives actually representing their views or interests are, in fact, angrily denounced by the "Democracy Rules" of social media for doing so, as if it was a completely inappropriate practice, rather than a basic democratic one. Progressives are denounced, condemned, damned to Hell in the Dog Days Of Summer for not voting for candidates who offer them absolutely nothing in the way of policies those progressives support. And then the progressives are blamed when a bad, conservative candidate--the one that didn't offer them anything and whom the finger-pointers chose--loses. That's even sweeter when those bad, conservative candidates employed unethical, corrupt tactics in the primaries to take out better, stronger candidates preferred by the progressives.

The "argument" proffered by those like "Democracy Rules" takes several forms. Some say refusing to vote for the candidate they favor makes one responsible for ___ (fill in the blank with bad things that happened after said candidate failed to win or could happen in the future if said candidate fails to win). Others say refusing to vote for the candidate they favor is a product of one's "white privilege," even when those so refusing aren't white and those making the accusation are. Or just "privilege." But when one strips away all the fancy rhetorical packaging, the only real "argument" by those who so casually throw around this language of "privilege" and "entitlement" is simply that a particular candidate is entitled to your vote, regardless of what you may prefer. And--wouldn't you know it?--it's always the candidate favored by those making this "argument"!

Shocking, right?

Fail to acknowledge their "wisdom" in this matter, fail to recognize that the candidate they favor is entitled to your vote, insist on exercising your own criteria and your own judgment and deciding for yourself how you vote or don't vote or, worse yet, don't vote for the candidate they favor, you're said to be "throwing a tantrum." And bringing on ruin.

Our age is seeing the emergence of a protofascist faction whose ultimate program is ending liberal democratic society. This faction is always brandished like a voodoo fetish by the "Democracy Rules" of the world as the reason to vote for Democrats, and there is power in that, but the dominant Clintonite-right faction of elected Democrats is a servant of entrenched capital, unresponsive to people's wants and needs, offers no positive alternative to those left behind or crushed by late-stage capitalism and is as opposed to desperately needed progressive reform as the protofascists themselves. Every person has his own criteria for determining how he will vote. If someone decides that merely keeping The Other Side out of power is sufficient to get his vote, that's his call. But that view isn't something that can be imposed, in an authoritarian manner, on anyone else. People can (and should) discuss and debate what the right call may be, but everyone gets to make that same call for themselves. That's liberal democracy. Demanding to keep the Clintonites in power while demanding nothing of them (and demanding that nothing be demanded of them) while the problems pile up and fester unaddressed is obviously not a sustainable course, and, in fact, the dominance of this faction over the Democratic party, insularly pursuing pro-corporate, pro-finance policies that harm wide swathes of the population, has been a major contributor in the rise of that protofascism, breeding apathy toward, even contempt for, an indifferent system and multiplying those in need of reform while providing them with no sane alternative within the political system.

Liberal democracy is, as a consequence of this sad state of affairs, in mortal jeopardy. Toxic, self-serving messaging aimed at trying to guilt or shame others, many of whom are, themselves, drowning, into continuing, year after year, a demonstrably failed course is throwing it an anvil for a lifeline. For those who genuinely want to save it, here's a course of action: dump the Clintonites in the Sewage-Treatment Plant of History and build a progressive politics that materially improves the lives of the people, draining the swamp from which that protofascism arose.

A lot taller order, but maybe the only one.

That's one opinion in a democracy of many.

--j.

---

[1] This writer is among those who don't believe in it. I can recognize it as vastly superior to many other forms of governance and will even defend it against bad alternatives but my own views are significantly more radical.

[2] The 2016 exit polling showed 56% of 18-24-year-olds voted for Clinton--the largest percentage of any age-group.

[3] As I've so often noted, if one goes down the dismal, dead-end pig-trail that is the voter-blaming premise, it wouldn't lead to Bernie Sanders supporters. What one would find at the end of it, rather, would be those who, in the 2016 primaries, backed Clinton, a weak, loser candidate who was performing poorly against the Republicans relative to her Democratic opponent and who, up against a joke opponent, neveretheless went on to blow the general.

No, Bernie Sanders Isn't Responsible For Louis DeJoy As Postmaster General

Last Summer on Twitter, I took some time to correct yet another of those well-circulated Clinton cult myths I always find myself skewering in spare moments, this one the false claim that Bernie Sanders was responsible for saddling the post office with Donald Trump's awful, corrupt Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. I'm archiving it here because, well, why not?

This started back in July, when a Twitterer asked the question, "Why hasn't the postal service  gotten rid  of Louis DeJoy yet?" A Clintonite troll--one of the regulars--chimed in with a standard recitation of the myth:

"Because only the Postal Board can fire DeJoy, and Bernie Sanders blocked Obama from appointing Postal Board members so that Trump could appoint his own people.

"That's why.

The Postal Service Board of Governors is the body with the power to remove DeJoy--it needs a majority to do so--but that's the only thing the troll got right.

The background on all of this: Barack Obama treated the post office as if it was of no real importance to him. Vacancies on the USPS Board of Governors were left unfilled for years; the board was left in the hands of Republican appointees for the whole of Obama's administration.

In Feb., 2014, the New Republic took Obama to task for this.

When Obama eventually began making nominations, two of his choices--picked by Republican leader Mitch McConnell--were particularly bad. Mickey Barnett had been a lobbyist for the payday loan industry. James Miller was an advocate for postal privatization.

"Because of Mr. Miller’s repeated calls for privatizing the U.S. Postal Service, he has not been regarded as a friend of the postal unions. Mr. Miller has been considered “anti-union” over the years. His prepared statement to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on April 5, 2011 did nothing to change that view"

The postal worker's union objected to these nominees. At their behest, Sen. Bernie Sanders--long the top congressional champion of the post-office--placed a hold on them.

The American Postal Workers Union, in fact, assembled a large and formidable coalition of labor and civil rights groups, including the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, the National Urban League, who opposed confirmation of these appointees. Here's a contemporaneous news story about this coalition from the conservative Washington Examiner.

Republican leader Mitch McConnell then blocked the rest of Obama's nominees.

"Miller's determination was matched by a powerful supporter -- McConnell. In retaliation for Sanders' hold on Miller's nomination, McConnell blocked votes on the three Democratic nominees.

"'McConnell basically said, "if you don't give me James Miller III, I'm not giving you anybody,"' Sauber said. 'And that's what he did.'"

Obama then allowed this situation to continue for years without even trying to fix it. By the time he left office, there was only 1 remaining appointee on the Board of Governors. Trump was able to appoint his own slate, and that slate made Louis DeJoy the Postmaster General.

In order to blame Sanders for DeJoy's ascension--and his continued position--the Clinton cult version of these events erases Mitch McConnell, the details of those bad nominees and that coalition opposed to them and reduces Obama to just a guy who made some appointments that were blocked.

Finally, the Board of Governors serve staggered terms. Even if Obama's appointees had all been approved, the term of the last--David Shapira--would have expired in Dec. 2019. Trump would still have gotten to fill those seats, and we'd still be stuck with DeJoy.

That's the Twitter thread about this. But I'll go ahead and note, here at the end, that as of 20 May, 2022, now-President Joe Biden has appointed the majority of the Board of Governors. DeJoy could have been removed at any point in the last year; he continues as Postmaster General solely because Biden's appointees have kept him on. While, on social media, Clinton cultists continue to blame Bernie Sanders.

--j.

"Re-Elect President Wile E. Coyote," By The Numbers (Updated Below)

In Jacobin, Luke Savage writes, "2024 Is Beginning To Feel A Lot Like 2016."

"[I]t's difficult to understate how shaky Joe Biden’s reelection campaign really looks... Were it not for a global pandemic, there is good reason to believe that Trump would have beaten Biden [in 2020] and secured a second term. And even with a COVID handicap, the latter’s electoral college victory came down to no more than about forty-four thousand votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. If he is indeed the Democratic candidate for president in 2024, the available evidence suggests that Biden will be running the same playbook with fewer advantages and less popularity."

Nothing new there, of course. Biden's presidency has been a major bust. Everyone knows it, even if many partisans are still loath to say it. To anyone who can follow data, has any more-than-rudimentary understanding of politics and who doesn't want a return of rule by Trump's Republican party, a Biden reelection effort seems a very bad idea. Biden is spectacularly unpopular, and that dislike doesn't just threaten to take down his own reelection campaign but will impact every Democratic candidate at every level in the 2024 general election.

Last Summer, one of the dimmer Clintonites over on Twitter wrote,

"And the people who kept telling us [Joe Biden] had no chance are now telling us he needs to step aside. Sigh."

My initial response to this became an ongoing Twitter thread cataloging some rather pertinent polling on this, one that has continued to the present. In February, that thread up to that point was slightly expanded into an appendix to an article on the baleful influence of Clintonite-right dominance of the Democratic party and its elected officials. I'm reproducing and further expanding it here:

12 July, 2022 - The people saying Biden needs to step aside include the overwhelming majority of Democrats; only 26% of Democrats say they want their party to renominate Biden in 2024.

Huge majorities of Dems in every age group don't want their party to renominate Biden, except in the 65+ bracket, where a plurality agrees. Huge majorities at every educational level, a plurality of black voters and a majority of every other racial group don't want him back.

26 July, 2022 - Another poll, same conclusion:

"A new CNN poll finds 75% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters want the party to nominate someone other than President Joe Biden in the 2024 election..."

CNN's poll offers a breakdown on why Dems don't want Biden to run again:

--24% say they want someone else because they don't think Biden can win in 2024.
--32% (the plurality) said they didn't want Biden reelected.
--25% said they prefer Biden as the 2024 nominee.

Exit-polls on the 2022 midterm elections showed that 67% of voters--of all voters--don't want Biden to run in 2024.

15 Nov., 2022 - An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that, in the words of the Hill, "just 35 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents want President Biden to run for second term in 2024."

1 Dec., 2022 - An Economist/YouGov poll of adults found that 56% didn't want Biden to run again, compared to 22% who said they did. This poll featured a sky-high-enough-to-be-very-questionable 22% saying they're "not sure"--a regular unfortunate feature of YouGov polls.

A slight majority of black and Hispanic Americans don't want Biden to run again, while solid majorities of every other demographic group oppose his seeking reelection. 39% of Dems say he should run again with a very unlikely 29% saying they're not sure.

10 Dec., 2022 - A CNBC poll found that a whopping 70% of adult Americans don't want Biden to run again; only 19% said he should. Those who said Biden shouldn't run again include 57% of Democrats and 66% of independents.

There's no breakdown on Dem-leaning independents, which is quite problematic. Dem "leaners"--that is, those who call themselves independent but almost always vote Democratic--are a large and indispensable portion of the Dem coalition. With 66% of "independents"--no breakdown--saying they don't want Biden to run again, it means Biden's standing among Dems is even worse than the above results suggest.

14 Dec., 2022 - A CNN poll asked registered Dems and Dem-leaning indies who they thought the party should nominate in 2024; 40% chose Biden, while 59% said it should be someone else.

5 Feb., 2023 - A Tale of Two News Stories - The first, from ABC News...

"'I have heard from no one within the DNC or other power brokers within the Democratic Party any reservation about Joe Biden,' one of the DNC members said."

...and--simultaneously--the second, an ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that 58% of Dems "support the idea of nominating someone other than Biden... Just 31% said they would support Biden... Sixty-two percent of Americans say they would be 'dissatisfied' or 'angry' if Biden were reelected."

In the same poll, 62% say Biden has achieved little or nothing during his administration. Respondents' views of individual areas of policy yield equally dismal results.

7 Feb., 2023 - An Associated Press/NORC poll finds that 62% of Democrats don't want Biden to run for reelection in 2024 vs. only 37% who do. Overall, 78% of Americans don't want Biden to run again.

The poll understates how little Dems want Biden to run again, as those numbers segregate Dems from Dem-leaning independents, and 88% of unsorted indies don't want Biden to run again.

27 Feb., 2023 - Another new poll, this one a Fox poll of "Democratic primary voters," only 37% of whom want to keep Biden as the nominee.

6 March, 2023 - There appears to have been some sort of major short-circuit in the new Emerson College poll, which just found that 71% of Democrats now want Biden to "carry the party’s banner" in 2024.

"Support for Biden to run for a second term is highest among 18- to 34-year-old Democratic voters." All of these findings are, of course, entirely impossible. Dem opposition to Biden running again has been overwhelming for months and has been strongest among young voters.

There are always outlier polls that turn up from time to time, some of them even extreme ones but this is maybe the most extreme I've ever seen. It isn't credible that every other polling org has gotten this so wrong for so long.

So what's the real story with this poll?

[The problem appeared to be an overreliance on landline phones.]

23 March, 2023 - Meanwhile, as Biden has been making high-profile lunges to the right, his approval continues to plummet. In the new Associated Press-NORC poll, it's 38%, with a fatal 61% saying they disapprove of the job he's doing as president.

30 March, 2023 - This new Monmouth University poll just found that only 25% of Dems/Dem-leaners want Biden to run again in 2024.

The very high "no preference" result is a problematic feature of this poll but here are the results, for what they're worth:

Joe Biden carried New York by a whopping 23 points over Trump in 2020, but in a new Siena College poll of registered Dems in NY, only 43% said they want Biden renominated in 2024; 51% said they want someone else.

8 April, 2023 - Another one for the pile: A new CNN poll asked adults, "Do you think Joe Biden deserves to be re-elected, or not?" A very strongly-worded question; 67% said he doesn't deserve reelection.

CNN doesn't do a breakdown of Dem- and Repub-leaning independents, which, honestly, makes one wonder why they're bothering, but supermajorities of Repubs (96%) and indies (70%) say Biden doesn't deserve reelection, while 68% of Dems say he does. That strong wording at work.

Some details: 57% say they disapprove of the way Biden is handling his job as president, with large majorities--usually supermajorities--disapproving of every one of the 6 general policy areas about which respondents were asked.

Some other eye-catching results: 54% of respondents said Biden doesn't care about people like them, 54% said he isn't "honest and trustworthy," 65% say he doesn't inspire confidence, and 67% said Biden doesn't have "the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president."

The poll asked Dems and Dem-leaners--the correct combo--"Who do you think the Democratic Party should nominate as the party's candidate for president in 2024?"

56% chose "a different candidate," with only 44% going with Biden.

22 April, 2023 - A new Associated Press-NORC poll has found that 73% of Americans--including (again) a majority of Democrats--do not want Biden to run for reelection. AP-NORC fouls up their findings by segregating independents with no effort to break them down into Repub- and Dem-leaners.

Given that an overwhelming 86% of indies don't want another Biden run, those numbers would be much worse if Dem-leaners were included with the Dems.

Also, 56% of respondents said they either probably wouldn't (15%) or definitely wouldn't (41%) vote for Biden if he did run again.


23 April, 2023 - Another day, another poll telling the same story: An NBC News poll finds that 70% of Americans say "Joe Biden should not run for president" in 2024. Only 26% say he should run again.

That large number includes most Dems but NBC segregates Dem-leaning indies from them. 41% of registered voters said they'd probably or definitely vote Biden if he ran, with 47% saying they'd vote Repub. Only 22% of indies say they'd back Biden.

26 April, 2023 - Biden announced his reelection bid. While by any serious, objective measure, Biden has accomplished very little, he says "Let's finish the job."

14 May, 2023 - New ABC News/Washington Post poll: Only 36% of Dems and Dem-leaners want the Dems to renominate Biden for 2024, and 68% of Americans say Biden is too old to run for another term. His approval rating stands at only 36%.

That article notes that, in polling going back to Harry Truman, Biden's approval at the point is his presidency is similar to "Gerald Ford, at 40% approval in May 1975; Jimmy Carter, at  37% in May 1979; and Trump, at 39% in April 2019. None were re-elected."

25 May, 2023 - In a new Quinnipiac poll, 66% of adults say "Joe Biden is too old to effectively serve" another term, including nearly half of Democrats and supermajorities in every age-bracket and every racial category, except black Americans, who are evenly split.

Continuing, 54% of registered voters say they have an unfavorable opinion of Biden, compared to 39% favorable; 58% of adults say they disapprove of his job as president vs. 36% approve; Biden is ranked negatively in all 4 policy categories about which the pollsters asked.

And that's where the Twitter thread currently stands--nearly a year of wretched numbers for Biden. A negative public impression, hardened to diamond. A new CNN poll just asked respondents if a Biden victory in 2024 would be "a disaster for the country, a setback, a step forward, or a triumph for the country."; 66% said it would either be "a disaster" (41%) or "a setback" (26%); only 7% chose "a triumph."

After the fiasco that was the 2016 election, I collected many of my notes from that primary into an article and to pick up from where Luke Savage left the matter in Jacobin, Biden's polling here is very reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's polling from this same point in that cycle. Clinton joined that race in the 2nd week of April, 2015, her polling already showing her more disliked than liked, but Biden's negatives in the corresponding period this year were even higher than hers.[1]

One of the least useful things corporate media have done in covering Biden's grim fortunes is both-sides-ing the story by pointing out that Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, is also very disliked. In early head-to-head polls, Biden sometimes even wins. And sometimes Trump wins. And in neither case are the margins significant.[2] Too many in and overly adhered to the Dem Establishment seem drunk on the thought that while Biden bites, Trump overbites. The notion that Trump's suckage will trump Biden's suckage is another example of pure 2016 thinking.[3]

We all know how that worked out.

None of this means Biden will definitely lose his reelection bid. It's far too soon and there's far too much to come to say that with any confidence. But Biden has always been a weak candidate, and now, diminished by age to a shell of even that, he's a weak and disliked president, which carries a lot more baggage. He spent most of covid-locked-down 2020 in his basement reading, often quite badly, from prepared cue-cards while the weight of a failed presidency did all the work of drowning Trump. He wasn't broadly disliked (he finished 2020 with a net favorable rating) and he won by default. Barely. Tightly-controlled basement-dwelling won't be an option in 2020, Biden's advanced age and cognitive decline won't be so easily swept under the rug, those net favorable days are long gone and that weight of a bad presidency--Biden's approval has been at an unbroken majority-disapprove since 8 months into his presidency--will now be on his back. Unless just trying to lose is the point, throwing such a weak president into any new race is madness. Black-hole-level shade should be directed at Biden for choosing to run again under these circumstances, ensuring the party apparatus will close ranks around him and suck all oxygen (and light) out of any effort to find a good, more electable candidate. By running again, he's only further proven he was unfit to be president in the first place.

Democratic party officialdom is barreling ahead. For all its talk of "protecting democracy" in the face of GOP attacks on it, the party isn't scheduling any Democratic primary debates--part of that "closing ranks" (and while it's true--and always noted by those seeking to brush aside concerns over this) that there isn't really much precedent for primary debates when an incumbent president is running for reelection, it's also the case that, as one of the news articles above noted, there's no precedent for an incumbent president with Biden's numbers winning reelection either. By renominating Biden, Democrats would be absolutely begging for a loss.

Meep- meep.

--j.

---

[1] The comparison isn't precise, as it compares favorability numbers for Clinton to approval numbers for Biden but the two are always closely correlated.

[2] In the 538 database for May to date, Trump defeats Biden in 15 polls and Biden defeats Trump in 14, all but two by single digits, either within or barely outside the polls' margins of error (meaning they're statistical ties or razor-thin wins). In the two, Trump defeated Biden by double digits (11%) in one Harris poll and Biden defeated Trump by double digits (15%) in one Ipsos poll. In eight more polls, Biden and Trump exactly tie, putting the "dead" in "dead evenly."

[3] This also depends on Trump actually becoming the Republican nominee, and while he's by far the most popular candidate in his party, there are many months to go and a million things that could happen in them before that's settled. Presenting it as a foregone conclusion is journalistic malpractice, a way of both burying the lede--which is about Biden, the sitting president--and of manipulating the political process--presenting Trump as if he already has the nomination while he has over half a dozen opponents and it's months before any voting even begins. Team Biden has staked its entire reelection effort on running against Trump and will be in a sorry place indeed if Trump isn't the Repub nominee.

---

UPDATES:

11 June, 2023 - In the words of USA Today, "eight in 10 Democratic primary voters say in a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll they would like to see a series of Democratic debates during the 2024 campaign." Those debates Biden and the DNC are refusing to organize. Those wanting to see primary debates "includes an overwhelming 72% of those supporting President Joe Biden."

17 June, 2023 - A YouGov poll of American adult, asks, "Do you think that Joe Biden is the strongest candidate that Democrats could nominate for president in 2024?" Only 19% say yes. Only 34% of even Dems say yes.

27 June, 2023 - An NBC News poll finds, in the words of NBC News, that "68% of all voters say they have concerns about Biden having the necessary mental and physical health to be president, including 55% who say they have 'major' concerns."

This compares to Oct. 2020, the first NBC News poll on that subject, in which 51% said they had concerns, with 38% having "major" concerns. In that earlier poll, 21% of Dems said they had moderate/major concerns about Biden’s fitness. In this one, it’s up to 43%.

11 July, 2023 - CNN reports on the average of the last 3 Quinnipiac polls shows Biden, along with (unhelpfully) Trump, have very poor favorable ratings, with 24% of respondents saying they don't have a favorable view of either.

At the same time, in an NBC News poll, 45% of registered voters said they'd be open to supporting a 3rd party candidate if Biden and Trump are the nominees next year; 45% of Dems say they'd consider it, compared to only a third of Repubs.

In the event of a Biden/Trump rematch, "a majority of Hispanic voters (58%), young voters ages 18 to 34 (57%), Democrats who backed progressive Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary (55%) and Black voters (52%)" said they'd consider a 3rd party.

29 Aug., 2023 - In an Associated Press/NORC poll, 77% of respondents said Biden is too old to effectively serve another term as president. That includes 69% of Demcrats, 89% of Republicans and 74% of independents.

7 Sept., 2023 - A CNN poll shows that 67% of Democrats and Dem-leaning independents want the party to nominate someone other than Biden in 2024.

Other findings, as reported by CNN: Biden's job approval stands at only 39%; 58% say they have an unfavorable impression of Biden; only 33% describe Biden as someone they're proud to have as president; only 28% say Biden inspires confidence; only 26% say Biden "has the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president" (that's down by 6 points from March, "with those declines driven largely by Democrats and independents"); 73% say they are "seriously concerned that Biden’s age might negatively affect his current level of physical and mental competence"; 76% say Biden's age will negatively affect "his ability to serve out another full term if reelected."

When matched against the Republican contenders, Biden is statistically tied with Trump, Mike Pence, Tim Scott, Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie, with every Repub except DeSantis leading him by 1-2 points (while Biden and DeSantis are dead-tied with 47% each). Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is beating Biden by 6 points--above the margin of error.

17 Sept., 2023 - In a CBS News/YouGov poll, 72% of registered voters say they believe Joe Biden isn't "physically healthy" enough to serve another 4 years as president; 77% say he doesn't have the mental and cognitive health to serve another term. Asked if Biden would finish a 2nd term if reelected, 66% say they either think he would leave office before it was over (44%) or aren't sure he'd finish the term (22%).

Other findings: Trump is ahead of Biden by one point among likely voters in a theoretical 2024 match-up--a statistical tie; 51% of those who say they'd vote for Biden in such a contest say they'd only be voting against Trump, not in favor of Biden. Among registered voters, 64% say a Biden/Trump rematch in 2024 would make them feel "the political system is broken"; only 23% say it would make them feel "the political system is working."

24 Sept., 2023 - An NBC poll shows, "74% of registered voters say they have major concerns (59%) or moderate concerns (15%) that Biden, at age 80, doesn’t have the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term." A whopping 59% of Democratic primary voters say they want a candidate to challenge Biden for the Dem nomination. In a hypothetical Trump-vs.-Biden rematch in 2024, 58% of those who say they'd vote for Biden say they'd just be voting against Trump, while 57% of Trump voters say they'd be voting for Trump, not against Biden.

Other findings: Biden's approval rating among registered voters is at 41% approve and--the important number--56% disapprove. This is the highest disapproval of Biden NBC News polls have yet found (though others have found it even worse). Biden is more disliked than liked among women, Latinos, independents and voters aged 18-34.

In the face of this growing mountain of data, Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks has launched a petition asking Biden to step down and not run for reelection. He's just written an editorial in Newsweek promoting it.

2 Oct., 2023 - A Monmouth University poll finds that 51% of voters say they will "definitely" not vote for Joe Biden in 2024, with another 6% saying "probably not." That's the lede, even if every report on this seems to have buried it. Other findings: A fat 76% say Biden is "too old to serve another term," including 55% of Democrats and 90% of Republicans; 55% of voters "strongly agree" with this. Only 32% of voters say they're "enthusiastic" about Biden becoming the Dem nominee. As has been the damnable trend of late, Monmouth throws in Trump as well, showing he also has bad numbers (though not as bad as Biden's).

7 Oct., 2023 - A Marquette University poll offers a glimpse of the weight Biden's failed administration puts on him. Marquette asked about 8 policy areas, "Do you think Joe Biden or Donald Trump would do a better job handling each of the following issues?"

On the big, important economic issues that always make up the upper strata of "most important issues to you" polling (and that tend to factor so heavily in voters' decisions), it's a one-sided massacre straight down the line. Only on "abortion policy"and "climate change" does Biden hold significant--though, one suspects, shaky--leads.

Marquette also asked, "How well does each of the following phrases describe Joe Biden?" Supermajorities agree that Biden doesn't have a strong record of accomplishments as president, doesn't understand the problems of ordinary people and is too old to be president.

Biden's approval rating in the poll stood at only 39%.

11 Nov., 2023 - Three sets of new polls surveying swing-states show Biden losing to Trump across most of them.

A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll has Trump ahead of Biden in Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and, narrowly, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, with Biden tied with Trump in Michigan and leading Trump only in Nevada.

An Emerson College poll has Trump leading Biden in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and, narrowly, Arizona, while Biden narrowly leads in Michigan and the two are tied in Wisconsin.

A New York Times/Siena poll finds Trump leading Biden in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania, with Biden narrowly ahead in Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, a CNN poll has nothing but more bad news for Biden. Buttressing an Emerson poll from early October, "51% of voters nationwide say there is no chance at all that they would vote for Biden, and just 4% are not currently supporting him but say there is a chance they will." To repeat myself, if that holds, that's Game Over.

Only 25% of respondents say "Biden has the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president"; 58% said Biden isn't "honest and trustworthy"; only 33% said Biden is "someone you are proud to have as president" (those offering the contrary view make up 57% of those 65 years of age or older and supermajorities of every other age-group). Asked if Biden is more part of the problem in dealing with the nation's issues or part of the solution, 61% chose the former; of the 19% who said both Biden and Trump were part of the problem, 46% say they'd vote for Trump, only 34% for Biden. Biden's approval rating in the poll stands at 39% and CNN notes that "Jimmy Carter was the only president with a significantly lower approval rating than Biden" at this point in is presidency--only 7% lower. Carter went on to lose 44 states in 1980.

In an unsurprising finding, "72% of all Americans say things in the country today are going badly." Sounds like an opportunity that could be exploited by a reform-minded politician with his eyes on the presidency. If there was any such thing.

16 Nov., 2023 - A Yahoo/YouGov poll finds that 54% of potential Dem primary voters say they would "like to see another Democrat enter the race to challenge Biden for the 2024 presidential nomination." Only 28% said they wouldn't.

The missing 18% there points to the usual problem with YouGov polls, the fact that they always return sky-high "don't know/unsure" responses--far higher than any other pollster and far higher than is remotely credible.

Whereas every other pollster who has asked has, over a very long period, a majority of Dems saying they'd prefer someone besides Biden be the Dem nominee, YouGov has, of late, been an outlier, showing majorities or pluralities of Dems picking Biden. The current poll shows 46% of Dems preferring Biden vs. 39% someone else, but it has a huge 15% saying "unsure." Caveat emptor.

19 Dec., 2023 - In a move that seems rife with all sorts of dire symbolism, the Biden campaign, earlier this month, rolled out Hillary Clinton--the toxic, all-time-loser herself--as a new surrogate. Clinton immediately utilized her sole talent on Biden's behalf by prostituting Biden's potential 2nd term to huge-money donors at a huge-money fundraiser in her Georgetown home.

Four days later, as if beckoned by this news, a Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll showed Biden is now trailing Trump in all 7 swing-states surveyed.

"Trump [is now] leading Biden in North Carolina by 11 points, Georgia by seven points, Wisconsin by six points, Nevada by five points, Michigan by four points, Arizona by three points and Pennsylvania by one point."

Four days after that, Biden's approval rating hit a new Monmouth poll record low of 34%, with 61% disapproving. More granularly, a majority disapprove of the way Biden has handled all 5 specific policy areas polled.

That same day, the Washington Post reported that Biden was "increasingly frustrated" by his "dismal poll numbers." He "delivered some stern words" to his people:

"His poll numbers were unacceptably low and he wanted to know what his team and his campaign were doing about it."

Moreover,

"For months, the president and first lady Jill Biden have told aides and friends they are frustrated by the president's low approval rating and the polls that show him trailing former president Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination--and in recent weeks, they have grown upset that they are not making more progress."

Biden's presidency has been a miserable failure--his approval numbers have been at permanent majority-disapproval since only a few months after he assumed the presidency. What, exactly, did he think was going to happen if he ran for reelection? What, at this late date, are the aides he greets with these "stern words" supposed to do about this when he--the only one with the power to affect it--has refused, for 3 years to do anything about it? Is his reported exasperation here just a barometer of how profoundly out-of-touch he is? Is his cognitive decline really that severe?

Perhaps Hillary Clinton will help.