Please be open to feedback and constructive criticism from others, and consider their suggestions and advice when making decisions or forming opinions.
- Manlobbi
Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy
No. of Recommendations: 0
Has no viable alternatives. Get real. “” Is this our countries future or Joe? Come on man, even Willie Mays new the time had come to retire. 🍿💕”” Gov. Wes Moore made history as Maryland's first black governor, he is only the third African American to ever be elected governor and is currently the only black governor in the entire United States. And wait until you hear about his inspiring background - in 2005 he left a successful investment baking career to re-enlist in the Army and serve as a Captain in Afghanistan. Upon returning from the war, he decided to combat poverty in New York City as head of the Robin Hood Foundation. Gov. Moore said this is just the beginning!”
No. of Recommendations: 0
No. of Recommendations: 4
<Come on man, even Willie Mays new the time had come to retire.>
How old are you? (Obviously very old)
Maybe it's time to take your own advice and hang up the keyboard.
You are embarrassing yourself, Boomer.
100%
No. of Recommendations: 5
Has no viable alternatives. Get real.
No one insists the Democratic party has no viable alternatives.
What most people recognize is that none of the viable alternatives are running.
Displacing Joe Biden as the actual nominee is not an academic thought experiment. For someone to be the nominee instead of Biden, they actually have to run. They have to file paperwork and hire staff and raise money and start telling lots and lots of people that they are running for the 2024 nomination.
None are.
All of the viable alternatives are waiting for 2024, when it is guaranteed that there's an open seat for the nomination and the Presidency, rather than try to take on an incumbent in their own party.
All these posts where you identify someone you think would be a better nominee than Biden? They're not relevant, because those people have chosen not to run. If they choose not to run, they won't be the nominee.
No. of Recommendations: 0
The way to get Joe to retire is to convince party loyalists there are several stronger alternatives. 2/3s of the Dem party get it, you will too by months end, I hope.
No. of Recommendations: 9
The way to get Joe to retire is to convince party loyalists there are several stronger alternatives. 2/3s of the Dem party get it, you will too by months end, I hope.
How does convincing party loyalists that there are stronger alternatives get Joe to retire?
Biden's the gosh-darn President of the United States. He doesn't have to listen to "party loyalists" and step aside if he doesn't want to. Even if he thinks he's going to lose, why does he want to set the last year of his Presidency on fire by becoming a lame duck now?
He also can respond to those party loyalists that even if there exist several stronger alternatives, there is no mechanism to replace him with any specific stronger alternative. If he steps down, you don't get to just swap in "Candidate X." What you get is a free for all, where every potential candidate (stronger or weaker, viable or not) throws their hat in the ring for a last-minute scramble to try to seize a suddenly-open nomination.
The result would be chaos, a bitter internecine fight among all the factions of the party....and the end result would be a nominee that received no more than a plurality of votes, have virtually no financial resources left for the general, and isn't necessarily one of the "stronger" alternatives (Kamala Harris is perhaps the most likely nominee if Biden retires).
Even if there exist stronger alternatives to Biden, there is no way that the Democrats can be in a better position to win 2024 than if Biden remains the candidate. While another person might theoretically have emerged as a stronger candidate than Biden if he had announced he wasn't running for re-election back in January, such a person will inevitably be a much weaker candidate if Biden were announce today that he wasn't running for re-election. Because none of the potential alternatives have been spending the last year doing what they would need to do to run for President, and their isn't time now.
No. of Recommendations: 1
"" Even if there exist stronger alternatives to Biden, there is no way that the Democrats can be in a better position to win 2024 than if Biden remains the candidate."" I take it you aren't a fan of polls? IF the Dems can take trump out, who do you think Biden Harris can beat ? Haley ? DeSantis ? Stay tuned, Biden is going to do the right thing!!
No. of Recommendations: 6
I take it you aren't a fan of polls? IF the Dems can take trump out, who do you think Biden Harris can beat ? Haley ? DeSantis ? Stay tuned, Biden is going to do the right thing!!
It's not a question of whether I think Biden/Harris is likely to beat the GOP candidate. It's whether the alternative is better.
Again, you don't just get to push a magic button and replace Biden with Wes Moore (or someone else). If Biden were to retire, that doesn't make Moore the nominee.
Instead, you just get last-minute chaos in the Democratic primary. If Moore were to enter the race, he would be among a busload of other Democratic candidates: Harris, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Newsome, Booker, Warren, probably Kennedy (again), possibly Whitmer or Garcia, and a host of others. None of which have done anything to prepare for a 2024 primary (except Harris' role as the current running mate). No staff, no fundraising, no airtime reserved in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina, no paperwork filled out, no policy positions or white papers, no debates, no surrogates or endorsements. A dozen or more people, starting from zero with only two months before the first primaries.
Whoever emerges from that process will be weak, unprepared, underfunded, understaffed, under-vetted, all-but-unknown to most of the country, and not have anywhere near enough time to put all of that together. It takes years of preparation to mount a run for President. You can't do it at the last minute.
It's too late, hclasvegas. If Biden had announced he wasn't running back in January, then it's entirely possible that a stronger nominee might have emerged from the primary process. But since it's already freakin' November, it's too late to throw the race open and sort through a dozen or more contenders in a few months.
Biden knows it. The political class knows it. That's why no one is running. It's too late for anyone to step into Biden's place, because the process of replacing him can't be done fast enough to produce a viable candidate.
Albaby
No. of Recommendations: 1
Many of you post like Carville, Axelrod, etc are political lightweights. Get real.
No. of Recommendations: 7
Many of you post like Carville, Axelrod, etc are political lightweights.
No, many of us post like Carville and Axelrod have not said Biden should drop out. Both of them (correctly) point out that Biden has flaws, and they might be more significant than Democrats want to acknowledge. But neither of them has said that the Democrats' response to those flaws should be for Biden to pull out of the race and throw it open to a free-for-all of a dozen or more unprepared candidates.
That's because Carville and Axelrod aren't political lightweights. They know that's a recipe for disaster. But because they're not political lightweights, they know that politics is a process, and not one that's limited to any single race or candidacy - or even the formal channels of races and candidacies at all. Biden stepping out would be a disaster for the Democratic party - being seen as a wise sage speaking truth to power and ultimately getting cred if Biden does lose in 2024, though....well, that can reap benefits for a political operative and/or pundit.
No. of Recommendations: 2
Albaby, how soon you forgot. You think Harris and Biden earned it or Jim Clyburn hand picked the ticket ?
No. of Recommendations: 5
Albaby, how soon you forgot. You think Harris and Biden earned it or Jim Clyburn hand picked the ticket ?
Both.
Politics is a team sport. It's about allies and alliances. It's about building support and reciprocating it. Biden had the good sense to cut that deal with Clyburn; and Clyburn had the political sense to realize that Biden, rather than the other players in the race, was his best choice for the nomination. And Biden yielded the rewards of years and years of actions that built credibility with Clyburn and Clyburn's constituency - there's little chance that Buttigieg or Sanders could have ever been acceptable choices to Clyburn, given the former's newness and the latter's disdain for coalition politics.
Politics is also process. There isn't one person that's in charge of the party. Clyburn was able to exercise the influence that he did because of the shape of the primary calendar. He had the ability to "hand pick" the ticket because the vagaries of both the candidates and the primary calendar led to an enormously consequential South Carolina primary - Biden was behind and needed to make a deal, Sanders wasn't so far out in front that Biden couldn't be elevated, and both Buttigieg and Klobuchar were hobbled enough that they could be pushed out. In other circumstances, Clyburn isn't a kingmaker - he's hardly the most powerful politician in the House Democratic Caucus, let alone in the party altogether. But in that one moment, he had the chance to force the field. But that's a function of the process: if Biden gets hit by a bus on the way to the August DNC convention this year, and you have a thousand Democratic politicians sitting around needing to pick a candidate, Jim Clyburn isn't going to get to make the choice. Heck, if Biden were to drop out tomorrow, Clyburn wouldn't necessarily have that power even this year - there's going to be too many candidates for the field to winnow at South Carolina, rather than a later state.
