Coop Scoop: It's Biden Time Again

It is what it is. But it's all we've got.

April 27, 2023

By Marc Cooper

I read the news today, oh boy. 

It’s all about how old Joe Biden is and how 70% of Americans don’t want him to run again, how he’s on the bottom end of a favorability poll.

The entirety of the Twitter Left is in one this one (along with the GOP).  I mean, we’ve got Krsytal Ball and Jimmy Dore and all the other self-appointed tribunes of the people furiously tweeting how criminal it is that Democrats don’t have better choices, that voters don’t have better choices.

My reaction:

I am in favor of choices, so long as they exist.

Yeah. It would be better if Joe Biden were 15 years younger.

I would also prefer that he be from a political party that was not so enmeshed with the rich and powerful.

I wish that Biden would be a committed democratic socialist.

It would be better if the House was governed by a Red-Green alliance of progressive and multiple parties.

It would be good if 70% or even 35% of the electorate identified as anti-capitalist.

And it would be even better if the AFL-CIO all of a sudden decided to adopt the program of the IWW.

It would also would have been nice if all those true radicals who are bitching today about Biden had actually spent the last number of years building a better and viable alternative. (Yes, yes, There’s Bernie. I totally supported him. News flash: he apparently was not viable, sorry. And if by some chance he had gotten the nomination and if he had beaten Trump, imagine what a sorry isolated state Bernie would be in because there is not a socialist mass movement and there is not a progressive congress that could and would buoy him).

But…

As none of that exists in any form whatsoever.  And given that none of the above will come to pass before November 2024,

I will be voting for Joe Biden. Without hesitation or guilt.

That’s because, in fact, there is a choice.  It might not be the ideal one. Maybe not even a very good one. Yet, the choice exists and it could not be a more important one.

The only seriously opposition to Biden, like it or not, is that of virtual Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump.

You can tell yourself all the stories you want about your moral or political purity or about how the Establishment has to be challenged. Yada yada yada. Put a lid on it. I know all the arguments because a younger version of myself used to make them every four years. I can probably formulate those arguments better than you. So don’t bore me. 

Doesn’t matter what you tell yourself because the single stark reality is that elections are zero sum deals.  If you don’t vote for Joe Biden, you will effectively be voting for Donald Trump.  These are not choices that we as average citizens have much say over (unless we join with millions of others in the sort of concerted activism that is not happening in any case).

These are choices that are imposed upon us by a system that cares very little about our welfare. Which means we have to care twice as hard as we are on our own.

I don’t care if Biden is 103. The more salient point is that the Republican Party is now an anti-democratic vehicle of obstruction, minority rule, and ultimately autocratic rule.  Its operatives and electeds have immediately snapped into obedient place to once again defend their Dear Demented Leader who now faces criminal prosecution.  That’s the GOP.  Don’t vote for Biden and you only help the GOP seize more power. 

Our presidential system confers tremendous power and discretion to the individual president and it certainly makes a difference who is sitting in the Oval Office.  But only to a limited degree.  Those who say they vote for the candidate, not the party, are on a fool’s errand.  Depending on which candidate you choose, he or she comes into the presidency without about 4500 other appointees and operatives from his or her political party and together they make policy.

It’s pretty simple, unless you overthink it and make it complicated.  The act of voting takes about one minute.  If that is the sum total of your political activity, or if you narrowly define your politics simply as the last guy you voted for, well, then, to quote Logan Roy, you are not serious people.  Voting in this system as it currently exists is a civic obligation, an act of self-defense and one of solidarity with others because you will push the button not for your dream candidate, but rather for who among those offered is closest to your principles…even if that candidate is a stinker.

In 2002, when Jacques Chirac was faced in a run off for the French presidency by extremist Marie Le Pen, French leftists came out to vote for Chirac literally outfitted in performative hazmat suits.

The only folks who have entered the Democratic primary have no chance of winning the nomination and if they did, zero possibility of defeating Donald Trump.  Their only concrete role will be to distract, divert and disrupt – at the worst possible moment in history.

Bobby Kennedy Jr. is an erratic element who, to the disgust of his entire family, has become a virulent anti-vaxxer and has written a book calling for Dr. Fauci to be jailed.  Marianne Williamson is now the perennial candidate on the soft grift…her new age mumbo jumbo is exactly that and she exists as a candidate only for those blithely ignorant liberals who believe they are morally superior because they are voting for the “peace and love lady” (who mostly just wants to sell more books and be invited for more paid talks).

I admit that over the years I have often laughed when an election nears and Democrats start jumping up and down saying it will be the most important vote in history.   Usually not. 

This time, yes.  A solid yes. For the 72 years I have been alive I have never seen the democratic fabric of our society so mortally threatened.  I don’t need to go down the list of threats here.  If you don’t already know what I am referring to than you are a REALLY NOT SERIOUS person and none of this matters to you.

In the end, if you want better politics, you better go out and make them. Until then, choose wisely among the less than perfect goods offered you. Any time you cringe thinking about Biden’s age, simply remember who he is running against: another very old man who just happens to be an aspiring fascist. +

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