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There is a Reason Joe Biden Looks Confused
Joe Biden was first elected to the U.S. Senate nearly 50 years ago, at the age of 29, in 1972. That was the year that George McGovern managed to lose 49 states to Richard Nixon. Biden has been a Democrat politician for a long time. He spent nearly 40 of his years in the Senate serving with fellow Democrat Robert Byrd, a former KKK recruiter who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Democrat party has changed over Biden’s 50 years in the Senate. I’m not sure that Biden and many of the other old-time Democrats fully comprehend what has happened to their party.
Biden seems to take the Bob Dole / Hillary Clinton view of the presidential primary: “Vote for me. It’s my turn.” That approach worked out poorly for Dole and Clinton, and it seems to be working out even worse for Biden. There are many reasons for this, but one of them would appear to be that there is some internal debate about who is really in charge of that lovable, zany political “organization” which apparently can’t even count the votes in their own internal primaries. If Biden is anticipating an orderly transition of power, he’s not paying attention. Which is entirely possible.
The Democrat party started as an organization to centralize and control power at the expense of various minority groups, and has evolved into an organization which organizes various minority groups in an effort to centralize and control power. Democrats tell blacks, gays, women, and others that they are oppressed minorities, and that their only hope of achieving any political clout whatsoever in such a hostile environment is to vote Democrat: “Support us, help us get elected, and you get a seat at the table of power.”
This approach has some merit, but it is proving increasingly difficult for the Biden / Schumer / Pelosi / Clinton types to maintain control over such divergent groups who all have different goals, which are often at odds with one another. Biden helped create this organization. And now it won’t support him. He must find this disconcerting.
AOC is raising funds and developing a political organization within, but completely separate from, the Democrat party. Blacks are starting to wonder what they’ve gotten in return for 50 years of devoted support of Democrats. Antifa socialist thugs are making the Democrat party look like a bunch of socialist thugs. There are so many subgroups in the Democrat party vying for position that it’s become hard to define the Democrat party’s position on, well, on anything. Every Democrat party subgroup has a leader, all of whom hate Republicans and middle-class Americans even more than they hate each other.
You think the 2020 Democrat presidential primary is crazy? Just wait 10-20 years. It’s hard to imagine where this is going.
But it’s not going toward Joe Biden. He’ll still be running for president, as long as he’s still breathing. And he’ll still be wandering around Iowa livestock sales and New Hampshire diners looking like he can’t remember where he put his car keys. He looks confused because he is confused. This is not Biden’s Democrat party. Which is fine by me.
I don’t like the new Democrat party much more than the old one. But at least the party that Biden knows is no more. That’s good.
But I’m not sure how much better the new version is. That’s an incredible statement, considering how horrifying the Democrat party once was. But the new one is nasty and dangerous as well. In its own ways.
There are a lot of things which confuse Joe Biden. When it comes to the modern Democrat party, I’m sympathetic to his confusion. This really is getting crazy. But it’s his own dang fault. He helped build an organization based on hate and jealousy, to destroy his opponents. And then he found it hard to control. That’s too bad, Joe.
I suspect that Clarence Thomas is enjoying this.
Published in General
To my perception Reagan did not get weak support. GHW Bush was a weak challenger who hardly threatened Reagan. Reagan had lost in the previous primary as the cheif challenger. In Republican circles, that usually signals he’s the next in line. It was so with Dole, McCain, and Romney.
Reagan was a threat to the GOPe of his time. In 1976, they were so afraid of him that he had to name Richard Schweiker for VP nominee. In 1980, Bush was the Establishment choice. His worst mistake. He probably would have preferred Jack Kemp.
https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-election-of-1980
As the campaign developed, Reagan’s most serious opposition came from Bush, who won support from moderate Republicans worried that Reagan’s conservatism might alienate the broader electorate. Bush won victories in the Iowa caucuses and in the Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Michigan primaries, but it quickly became evident that Reagan could not be stopped. The contest between Reagan and Bush was sometimes tense, with Bush declaring that his opponent would have to practice “voodoo economics” in order to increase federal revenue by lowering taxes. In a debate in Nashua, N.H., personal animosity between Bush and Reagan erupted in public.
Also
By the time the Republican nominating convention began in Detroit, the only real suspense surrounded the identity of Reagan’s choice as his running mate. Would Reagan extend an olive branch to the party’s moderates by asking one of their own to join him on the ticket? Or would he strive for ideological “purity”? The first clue came in one of the more bizarre episodes of recent U.S. political history, when Reagan flirted with the idea of choosing former president Gerald R. Ford, whose moderate credentials were considered sound. As the complexities of having a former president in the second spot became evident, however, Reagan turned to Bush.
They feared and hated Reagan. But, like with Trump, they learned to appreciate success.
The media of the day was actually more invested in the early primaries of trying to revive Ted Kennedy’s challenge to Carter than they were of trying to aid the Wall Street types in the Republican Party at propping up Bush following his win in Iowa. So Reagan’s challenge in the New Hampshire debate both galvanized his supporters and really didn’t get any media push-back (and even on primary day, conventional wisdom was his campaign was in disarray because he had just fired John Sears as manager and replaced him with William Casey).
Its an ingenious ploy to try and grab the AARP voting bloc.
A little research suggests that this is a garbled line from the classic, John Ford-John Wayne Cavalry Western, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), which Biden is just old enough to have seen during its original release but which, in any case, was shown on TV constantly during his younger days.
In that film, the narrator uses the somewhat anachronistic, World War II phrase, “dog-faced soldiers” to refer to the cavalrymen for whom young ladies would wear that yellow ribbon. These cavalrymen were more often called “pony soldiers”, so you can see where “dog-faced pony soldiers” came from.
Of course, given today’s Democratic Party, Biden would probably rather be accused of senility, than of having anything positive to say about the U.S. Cavalry of the Indian Wars; which, to progressives, is the equivalent of the Waffen S.S.
I did not realize that until the last half of the last century, most Mexican Americans identified themselves as white and resisted being classified as minority status.
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-invention-of-hispanics/
The post war Democrat party had rock solid support from the black community, labor, single women, suburban married women and to the extent that they actually participated in politics, youth. Republicans were not conservatives in those days, but more like their counterparts with constituency appeal – the party of men, evangelicals and the wealthy. Modern Democrats can thank the Kennedy’s for the loyalty of black America. (Prior to JFK, Democrats were most associated with the Jim Crow south.) Women were wooed by LBJ’s war on poverty and subsequent reflexive anti-war passivism. Cemented support for abortion ensured that some female support will never falter.
But Reagan and Buckley changed the Republican party. They showed Republicans that they were not just a collection of constituencies; they were a party with an underlying conservatism, an adherance to founding principles, a party of not just constituencies, but of thought. And at that point the Republicans gained an advantage.
The Democrat party reacted by lurching in the opposite direction; since Republicans had claimed conservatism there was no where else to go but left. As much as the Democrats talk about values and the founders, the leftism they push is antithetical to our founding principles of a limited federal government and individual liberty. Plus, socialism has a horrible, murderous, repressive track record. They desperately try to maintain their old constituencies, but cracks are forming. Democrat politics have not led to the success of Black America. Women are not quite so committted to abortion as Democrats think. And a strong America does not mean a belligerant America, but a safe America, and this is evident to many suburban soccer moms.
The Democrats are sitting, teetering, on the wall, about to fall. No horses or men will be able to put them back together.
The Democrats, especially the northeastern academic intellectuals, also self-lurched left in the 1966-68 period with zero input from Republicans thanks to the Kennedy family’s desire to regain power. The New Left activists were already in place by ’66, and it was Bobby, and then Teddy that took up their anti-Vietnam War cause (with Bobby hip-checking Eugene McCarthy aside to do it) because they saw that as an opening to take out LBJ, who they saw as the unrightful occupant of ‘their’ White House.
Had JFK and Bobby lived, it’s arguable you would have ended up with a far more moderate Kennedy family, because instead of the ones joining with the angry progressives to storm the castle in 1968, they would have been the ones defending the status quo and their brother’s legacy against the New Left radicals (it’s also why you retroactively have claims made by family supporters in order to maintain consistency that, despite Kennedy putting the first troops in Vietnam, he would have withdrawn by 1964).
The Clintons controlled the DNC starting in 1993.
The Clinton Foundation started in 2001.
Hillary became senator in 2000.
She became Sec State in 2009 after Obama won in 2008.
Blame the Clintons and Obama for the mess they have created.
I think it was Teddy White who noted that Kennedy called Martin Luther King in jail. Nixon wanted to but was discouraged by his campaign staff.
This romantic narrative is largely false.
Vincent Hutchings, a political scientist who studies voter patterns at the University of Michigan, says the first major shift in black party affiliation away from the Republican Party happened during the Depression. …
“The data suggests that even as late as 1960, only about two-thirds of African-Americans were identified with the Democratic Party,” he says.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/07/14/331298996/why-did-black-voters-flee-the-republican-party-in-the-1960s
That is, by 1960 two-thirds of blacks were already identifying with the Democratic Party.
Tentatively, I would say that during the Depression the Democrats bypassed the existing leaders in the black community, who were Republicans, by selecting their own community leaders, and giving them money to spread around.
The NPR article, above, suggests that it was the disastrous candidacy of Barry Goldwater, with its opposition to civil rights legislation, that performed the coup de grace. Also, why should anybody join a party that, at the time, seemed headed for extinction.
I would see Joe Biden stumbling and bumbling on the stump and think, “Why doesn’t his family put a stop to this?” …. They’re all getting rich off him is why they don’t put a stop to this!
What’s Joe Biden actually believe in anyway? I really don’t know.
I heard he’s a pretty good hunter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/once-the-poorest-senator-middle-class-joe-biden-has-reaped-millions-in-income-since-leaving-the-vice-presidency/2019/06/25/931458a8-938d-11e9-b570-6416efdc0803_story.html
That Joe Biden should be president.
I guess that answers the question about what Joe Biden believes in …
Middle-class Joe was also famous for taking Amtrak. Of course, when you or I take Amtrak, if we’re late, they don’t hold the train for us!
Well, maybe they don’t for you.
That he would beat on Trump like a beating on a drum. I think that is not happening…lol.