Biden is the Nominee, But Sanders Must Continue Fighting
Sanders can make Biden a stronger November candidate, and keep left ideas alive going forward.
Sanders can make Biden a stronger November candidate, and keep left ideas alive going forward.
Joe Biden won Michigan yesterday and, make no mistake, that was the only state primary that mattered. Yes, Bernie Sanders won Washington and North Dakota. Yes, Sanders is less than 200 delegates behind Biden, which would seem to be within striking distance. But Michigan sealed it for Biden.
I don’t say this easily. I remain a Sanders supporter who had Elizabeth Warren as a close second and no one else (maybe Julian Castro) very high on my list. I also remain concerned that Biden brings a long list of vulnerabilities to the general election — vulnerabilities the Republicans can be counted on to exploit. (Sanders has his list, as well, so please don’t turn this into a Biden-Bernie dust up. That’s not what this is about.)
But Biden is now the presumptive nominee and all of us who want to see Donald Trump removed from office need to understand this. We need to shore up his weak spots and get him into fighting shape for what will be a bruising general election. That means preparing him for the inevitable attacks from Trump and the Republicans, but also forcing Biden to clarify his policy positions, to have him do more than preach civility and a return to normalcy.
My take — which admittedly is far from expert — is that this requires a continued Sanders candidacy, but one that redirects its energies away from seeking the nomination to ensuring that the issues Sanders touts, and which Democratic voters seem to support, do not get buried. That means staying in this race but toning down his attacks on the party establishment and narrowing his argument to four main issues: health care as a human right, free college and tuition forgiveness, a living wage, and a reset on American foreign policy. These are not small asks, and we would be foolish to assume that the Democrats will just hand over the party platform to Sanders on them. At the same time, the party has no reason to consider these issues if Sanders drops out now, which is why he needs to maintain some pressure and leverage for the foreseeable future.
This will anger the Biden supporters. They will make the claim that Bernie is selfish, that he is damaging the Biden brand and will imperil Biden’s chances in November. They will point to 2016, misrepresenting what happened and ignoring the actual history of contested primaries, the broad disdain for Hillary Clinton (which was both personal and sexist) among the public, and the depth of the grievances that existed out in the hinterlands.
But it is necessary. Biden already has signaled a move right. On Monday, he had this exchange with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC:
“Nancy Pelosi gets a version of it through the House of Representatives. It comes to your desk. Do you veto it?” MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell asked Biden during an interview Monday night.
“I would veto anything that delays providing the security and the certainty of health care being available now,” Biden responded. “If they got that through in by some miracle or there’s an epiphany that occurred and some miracle occurred that said, ‘OK, it’s passed,’ then you got to look at the cost.
Biden added: “I want to know, how did they find $35 trillion? What is that doing? Is it going to significantly raise taxes on the middle class, which it will? What’s going to happen?”
Biden’s campaign came out after the show and walked it back, saying — inexplicably — that Biden did not use the word “veto” when he obviously did, and emphasizing the need to move toward universal coverage.
This exchange demonstrates the impact that Sanders can have going forward. Forget whether this was a gaffe or a reminder of Biden’s pro-corporate past. Sanders’ ceaseless support for Medicare for All — along with the commitments of Warren and several other former candidates — influenced this exchange in two basic ways:
It is unlikely that O’Donnell asks the question were Sanders not in the race and garnering support. We’re Sanders to drop out now, Medicare for All disappears from view for the foreseeable future.
The Biden campaign’s response after the fact, unlike his actual answer, was carefully framed to show support for universal coverage while dismissing the hypothetical altogether. That reframing is important, because it indicates that the campaign, if not the candidate, is sensitive to the left position on Medicare for All.
I’m not sure the question was fair — hypotheticals ignore so much context — but the answer and the immediate response from the campaign are important. Biden’s natural political instincts are to move to the center. His legislative history is far from progressive, and a number of his votes (the bankruptcy bill, the Iraq War, the crime bill) will be used by Trump in November to hammer Biden from the left in an effort to tamp down turnout. Democrats may find this notion absurd, that someone like Trump could outmaneuver a Democrat by moving left on selected issues. But that’s what he did to Clinton in 2016 — in particular, on trade, which Trump used to great effect in the Midwest.
I already can see Trump ads attacking Biden for his bankruptcy vote. And I can see Trump running ads on immigration that use video clips of Biden essentially supporting the Trump hardline, which also was the Democratic line for years.
Combatting this will require a more contrite Biden — rather than getting defensive, he needs to explain his evolution on these issues — and a Biden who has been forced to solidify his own left flank, who shows an openness, if not support, for many of the ideas that Sanders has raised and that polling says are at least moderately popular with Democrats and independents, especially in the handful of states that will determine the outcome of November’s election.
Remember, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes and 2 percentage points, but was crushed in the Electoral College (abolish the Electoral College), losing three states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) the Democrats had not lost since 1988, and seven states total (Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, and Ohio) that Obama had won four years earlier.
But winning the White House and taking control of Congress are only part of the battle here. The other part is governing. Biden, if left to his own devises, will do little more than return to the status quo ante, which helped create the conditions that first gave us the Gingrich Congress and then George W. Bush and the Iraq War. Trump, when set against this history, is not so much an outlier as the natural outgrowth of political dysfunction.
Obama did what he could, but he was temperamentally ill-equipped to make the bigger and more radical changes we need to create a more humane union. The Affordable Care Act was a positive step and would have had a greater positive impact had the court not stepped in, but it was far from perfect and still left millions without insurance. His approaches to immigration (balancing an upgrade in status with an aggressive ramping up of deportations and border security), the Middle East (which was handled on a case-by-case basis, but amounted to a muddle), the budget (a too-small stimulus, cuts to SNAP and other social safety net programs in exchange for passage) can at-best be described as half-measures or failed compromises.
Biden talks about his ability to reach across the aisle, which might be a useful tool at another time. The Republicans have no interest in compromise. This is a prescription for continued inertia, which will boomerang back onto Biden, who will be blamed, and the cycle will continue.
Obama managed to break the cycle only after he acknowledged the pressure he felt from left activists on race, immigration, the environment, which caused him to stop seeking Republican approval that was not forthcoming and instead used the power of his office. This may not have been sustainable, as we know now, but it was the only avenue offered — and it appears to have been an avenue he took only with urging from his left.
Sanders and his movement — we’ll see if this is really a movement of ideas, which is Sanders’ obvious goal, or just a cult of personality, which I think is a fair description of at least a portion of the Sanders base — can apply this pressure to Biden from the left during the campaign and then afterward, once Biden is sworn in and gets to work.