A few hours ago Sasha Stone insisted that because I strongly believe that easygoing Joe Biden is the wrong guy to succeed Donald Trump, I’m “part of the dumbfuck brigade.” She’s expanded upon this thought with a Medium piece called “They’re Ratfucking Themselves?” An Imaginary Interview with Richard Nixon from the Great Beyond“.
Uncle Joe is currently the big favorite among Democrats right now for two lame-ass reasons — (a) everyone knows his name, and (b) he’s an amiable symbol of the good enough, relatively stable and non-dramatic administration of Barack Obama. But he’s 20 years past his prime, and if you ask me he’s Walter Mondale or even, good God, Hillary Clinton redux.
From “Does Anyone Actually Want Joe Biden to Be President?“, a 5.17 N.Y. Times opinion piece by Jill Filipovic:
“An electable candidate, the thinking goes, has to be authentic and broadly appealing. But authenticity itself is coded as white and male when it’s defined by white men. This perpetual reading of the white working-class tea leaves (or beer hops?) only makes sense if those voters are actually more influential than all the others. In the Democratic Party, they’re not.
“Just under a third of white men without college degrees said they voted for a Democrat in the 2018 midterms. And Democrats don’t need anywhere near a majority of these men to win. Women vote in larger numbers than men; voters with college and post-graduate degrees turn out in larger shares than those without. These high-turnout groups are the same ones that are trending Democratic. If they’re motivated to turn out to vote, a Democrat will wind up in the White House.
“But what about those Obama-to-Trump swing voters who will reportedly make or break this election, as they did the last one? The Democratic Party shouldn’t leave anyone behind, but working-class white men are declining as a share of the Democratic base, while whites generally are declining as a share of the general population. The entire premise that white men without college degrees are the only possible swing voters is a faulty one.”