Don’t Let The Awful Be The Enemy Of The So So (An Open Letter To Sanders Supporters)

As all of us are coping with Covid 19, we now know who our two Presidential candidates will be come November.

For those on the right, Donald Trump is their man and they are excited to support him again for a second term. For those of us on the left, we have whittled down over twenty candidates to one — Joe Biden. For many of us, myself included, Joe Biden was not our first choice. In fact, according to the polls going into the first caucus/primary in Iowa, Joe Biden was the first choice for less than 25% of Democrats meaning that 75% of us preferred somebody else. But, once the African American community decided to put their full weight behind Joe Biden in South Carolina, most of the centrist candidates dropped out allowing Biden to win almost all of the Super Tuesday States which he then followed up by winning Michigan and Wisconsin after which his only remaining rival, Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race leaving us with Joe Biden.

Let’s be honest, Joe Biden is only a So So Candidate. He is 77 years old, not a dynamic speaker, nobody’s idea of a genius, and prone to tripping on his own words and making stupid gaffs. From a policy perspective while Biden has evolved into the most progressive candidate ever fielded by the Democrats, he is not nearly progressive enough for the supporters of Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, and especially Bernie Sanders whose supporters are truly committed to very progressive policy prescriptions. Biden also has a mixed history of having voted for the Iraq War, treated African American woman Anita Hill very poorly regarding her accusation of sexual harassment during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings, voted for laws that had the impact of high incarceration rates for African Americans, supported the Hyde Amendment limiting the use of Medicaid funds for abortions, advocated trimming Social Security, allowed China into the WTO, and last, but not least, may have used his influence to help his loser son, Hunter. So Joe Biden is a very so so candidate. It’s easy to see why he was not the first choice for the vast majority of us in the Democratic Party.

That said, Joe Biden is above all a very decent human being. He is an honest man who truly wants what is best for the average American. Some have accused him of being in the pocket of Corporate America. I don’t believe that to be true. I do believe he still believes in the capitalistic system that has made America the wealthiest most innovative country on the planet and he has no interest in damaging the system. He recognizes, however, that the system does not distribute its bounty very evenly amongst its citizens and that a system whose gains are highly concentrated at the top needs to use the levers of government to provide adequate safety nets and a hand up for the vast majority of Americans so that they can do more than merely survive in our great economic system, they can thrive. They can get jobs that pay a living wage. Their kids can get a strong grade school education and they can go to college without going bankrupt or saddling their kids with crushing debt. They can accumulate adequate savings to retire in dignity instead of the poverty that most Americans are currently retiring into.

Joe Biden is also not an ego maniac vulgarian liar who believes that he is smarter than all the experts and that the way to cope with those who disagree with him or may not like him is to call them demeaning names and fire off insulting tweets in the middle of the night. As a result, Joe Biden as President will surround himself with people of both high expertise AND moral character. He will not deny the science of climate change that tells us it is critical that we reduce our carbon footprint. He will not prop up the fossil fuel industry. He will not staff the various branches of government with people who are there to serve corporate masters and lobbyists over the interests of the people. We will not see mass resignations of cabinet members or other members of his Administration for ethical lapses. He will not demand people in his administration sign loyalty oaths and non-disclosure agreements. We will not see mass turnover in his senior staff who resign because they can no longer abide being part of a corrupt administration. Joe Biden will not spend his time lying and misleading the American public every day. He will not rant and rave at the media calling them Fake News.

Once in office and assuming the Democrats also retain the House and take control of the Senate giving the boot to Mitch McConnell and a significant number of his lackeys, Joe Biden will set about enacting a very progressive agenda that includes:

• An aggressive anti climate change agenda
• Making public college either free or very affordable
• Forgiving a large percentage of existing student debt
• Expanding Obamacare with a Medicare for All Who Want It Option
• Expanding Social Security benefits
• Bringing balance and equity back to our tax system vs the top 5%
• Bringing critical manufacturing back to the United States
• Restoring our historical alliances with our foreign allies
• Fixing our immigration system
• Fixing our public schools to prepare our kids for the 21st Century

On the other side of the ledger, we have Donald Trump. In my opinion, he has only done two positive things during his Presidency. He was right to confront China and push to adjust the economic relationship we have with them. He was also right to fix our corporate tax system that incented American corporations to leave vast amounts of cash sitting in foreign accounts instead of bringing that capital back to the US. That same bill also brought US corporate tax rates into a more globally competitive framework. Other aspects of that same tax bill, however, went to showering the upper 5% with many undeserved tax breaks while also intentionally hurting citizens of Blue States.

Overall however, I would rate Trump as the worst President in our history. He is fundamentally an egomaniac narcissist of very low integrity. He is consumed by either receiving (or not receiving) the adulation of the American public and media. He lives for the cheers of his supporters at his rallies while he feeds them a stream of consciousness filled with hate, divisiveness, and outright lies. He has sold his supporters a bill of goods that their lives will be meaningfully better if we build a wall on the Mexican border and keep out as many immigrants as possible especially non white ones, fix our trade relationship with China, reduce regulations on corporations allowing them to either pollute the environment or treat their employees as hog feed for their stockholders, and reduce taxes on the upper 5%. Of course, we are or have done all of the preceding and their lives are really no better off in any meaningful way than three years ago. He rates his success by two metrics — the stock market and the unemployment rate. Never mind that his typical supporter doesn’t own any stocks and that their 1% net after inflation raise isn’t going to make up for the 40% gap in their wages that has built up over the last 45 years as the wages of the bottom 80% remained stagnant. He has somehow convinced them that they were doing just great under his regime with their low wage jobs. When he doesn’t receive the adulation of citizens or is called out by the media, he immediately flies into a rage and goes on the attack rather than actually make a fact based rebuttal.

Trump is also fundamentally intellectually lazy believing he doesn’t need to read, knows everything, and is smarter than the experts. As a result, he completely ignored the warnings of epidemiological experts about the threat of Covid 19 believing it was just like the typical annual flu. He wasted two months dismissing the virus until he eventually closed travel from China. But, Trump’s genius lacked the imagination to understand that the epidemic had flown from China to Europe and was coming in the back door infecting thousands of New Yorkers. The rest is history. Over 53,000 dead Americans and many more by the time this is all behind us. And he is proud of himself for what will likely be over 100,000 deaths, multiples of the number of soldiers we have lost in the Iraq and Afghan Wars. Only a man with his ego would regard this as a great achievement.

When we get past the Covid 19 crisis, we will still face the existential threat that is climate change. As Al Gore pointed out, it’s an “inconvenient truth” because to fix it, one has to regulate corporations who emit CO2 such as utilities burning coal or natural gas and those that mine/drill for it. That would, god forbid, reduce their profits and since the stock market is one of his two key metrics, Trump can not risk anything that reduces profits if all it is going to do is save lives. That’s because despite being labeled a populist, he is anything but a populist. He is an elitist and the people he really cares about are wealthy people who dine with him at Mara Lago, not the bottom 95%.

Lastly, Trump is fundamentally corrupt. He has no problem using his office for his personal benefit. The attempt to withhold defense funding to the Ukrainians in exchange for announcing (not actually doing) an investigation into his likely Presidential rival, Joe Biden, for which he earned himself an impeachment trial, is the most blatant abuse of power for his own benefit to ever be attempted by an American President. But for the additional corruption of the Republican Party, he would have been convicted. Trump’s corruption has led him to strictly place loyalists to his corruption at the helm of every government agency. Anyone speaking truth to power, he has replaced with subservient lackeys who will do his bidding. To date he has completely perverted the Justice Department, the EPA, Health and Human Services, The Military, The State Department, and Immigration. He has terminated any Inspector General, the people charged with rooting out corruption, who didn’t help cover up his corruption.

I could fill this post with literally pages of wrongdoing by Trump, its staggering, but you only have so much attention span. In short Trump is just in a word, awful while Joe Biden is just so so. I know many of Sanders supporters were hoping for much more than just so so, but in a choice between so so and awful, we can’t let the Awful be the enemy of the So So. Close your eyes and imagine its the day after Election Day, you didn’t vote and Trump is re-elected. Really try to imagine another four years of Trump. I hope the thought of that is so unacceptable that Mr. So So will look extremely appealing.