Joe Biden 2020 campaign megathread v2

[JG]

I think people make the mistake of solely attributing Hillary's loss to her and gender and thinking Biden would be better off. A large part of her loss was because her long record in politics where she carried a lot of baggage and scandals. The constant flip flopping over the years on issues she had to evolve on made her look untrustworthy. Candidates with long voting record and decades in office are often the politicians voters hate the most.

Clinton didn't lose entirely because of her sex, but there is no denying that Biden being a male makes him less vulnerable to the inherent biases that some have towards female politicians. I have yet to hear anyone call Biden "untrustworthy" for instance.

Or opportunist. Which is pretty telling considering how much Clinton (and others like Gillibrand) have been attacked for that.

[JG]

https://mobile.twitter.com/GrabienMedia/status/1147103888392249344

What a dumbass.

I thought it had to be a fake at first. How can he be so damn dumb?

[JG]

Biden unveils health care plan: Affordable Care Act 2.0

Democratic front-runner Joe Biden today will unveil a health plan that’s intended to preserve the most popular parts of Obamacare — from Medicaid expansion to protections for patients with pre-existing conditions — and build on them with a new government-run public insurance option.

Biden would also empower Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices, allow the importation of prescription drugs from abroad and extend tax credits to help tens of millions of Americans buy lower-priced health insurance.

Is it much different to HRC's healthcare plan had she won in 2016?

[JG]

Biden heaps praise on GOP in a fundraiser in Massachusetts. Says there are a huge number of great men in GOP who want to do well & he will work with them. He blames Trump for intimidating them & says it is not their fault but Trump who has them on a leash & is causing them to run from all meaningful legislation.

Uncle Joe is beyond repair !

What was these great men's excuse when they blocked everything Obama tried to do in his second term? Biden is delusional.

[JG]

Biden heaps praise on GOP in a fundraiser in Massachusetts. Says there are a huge number of great men in GOP who want to do well & he will work with them. He blames Trump for intimidating them & says it is not their fault but Trump who has them on a leash & is causing them to run from all meaningful legislation.

Uncle Joe is beyond repair !

Does he not remember his own Vice Presidency?

I mean, I wouldn't even be that surprised if he actually didn't.

[JG]

"There are good Republicans" is about that close to being the last straw.

He's not entirely wrong here. While Trump and Mitch are beyond pathetic, it's not that all Republicans are terrible. Joe Biden knows the system and knows that he will achieve more if he reaches out. If elected, I'm sure he can get stuff done with some Republican support on some, not all, issues like infrastructure, drug prices, cancer research and criminal justice. Gun control and healthcare are probably the toughest ones and a reason I disagree with him on the filibuster. If the Democrats win the senate, the filibuster needs to go.

Obama reached out to the Republicans and they deprived him of his constitutional right of nomating a Supreme Court Justice. Why would that be any different with Biden?

[JG]

https://mobile.twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1163978710820610048

Sorry, that man is not fit to be President. He is spewing nonsense. That's not just a slip of the toungue.

[JG]

Problem with Biden is he doesn't inspire anyone, nobody is excited for his candidacy. He tries to compensate with 'electability' but people who aren't inspired by Biden shouldn't rely on hoping he'll inspire other parts of the electorate. Candidates like Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg at least have visions or personalities that garner enthusiasm.

Exactly. Even Hillary had a quite significant group of devoted and excited supporters.

[JG]

Biden clowning it up again

Biden says 40 were shot at Kent State in 1970, when four students were killed

40 were shot at, but only 4 were killed.

Do you know if there's any source for the "40 were shot at" claim?  I've seen it on Twitter but don't know where it's coming from.  13 students were hit with bullets, and the crowd size was in the hundreds, I don't know where one would find that 27 more students were shot at but missed.

Fair, I dont really know what he meant by that. But it was not necessarily false.

But what evidence is there that it’s true?

Yeah, I don't think it's a real number.  I think Biden simply didn't remember the actual number, just that it was somewhere in the double digits, and said a number that felt right.

If he wins the nomination, I hope his campaign will hire you to explain all the soundbites Biden will give to the republicans to use against him.

[JG]

This new ad on healthcare is just magnificent. A very strong message.

https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1166319450909315072

Have you seen his Anderson Cooper interview?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbe3WSVWXeI

They should just play that interview on loop throughout the campaign.  Anyone who thinks Biden is an HP after watching it is a heartless hack.

He's human and has emotions and has a tragic past with heartbreak that he never ever deserved, but that doesn't shield him from criticism or being disliked, so not sure why him going through tragic moments shields him from being disliked.

It doesn't, criticize all day.  I'm specifically talking about those who think Biden is a bad person.

Admittedly this is a more popular sentiment on Twitter than on Atlas.

I'm not talking about Biden specifically, but you can lose your son and be sad about it and still be a bad person.

[JG]

This new ad on healthcare is just magnificent. A very strong message.

https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1166319450909315072

Have you seen his Anderson Cooper interview?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbe3WSVWXeI

They should just play that interview on loop throughout the campaign.  Anyone who thinks Biden is an HP after watching it is a heartless hack.

He's human and has emotions and has a tragic past with heartbreak that he never ever deserved, but that doesn't shield him from criticism or being disliked, so not sure why him going through tragic moments shields him from being disliked.

It doesn't, criticize all day.  I'm specifically talking about those who think Biden is a bad person.

Admittedly this is a more popular sentiment on Twitter than on Atlas.

I'm not talking about Biden specifically, but you can lose your son and be sad about it and still be a bad person.

In what way is Biden a bad person?

I'm not saying Biden is a bad person per say. I'm not sure I feel about him as a person. I do think he would be an awful candidate and president. I just say that is a flawed argument when people say he can't be a bad person because his son died.

[JG]

He was clearly going to say "President Obama" but couldn't remember his name. How anyone can deny that is beyond me. What about "President Obama" was not appropriate in that context? And so much so that he stopped himself and said "my boss?"

This man needs to be examined for Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. This isn't something to play around with. I don't trust whatever his doctors say after Trump was able to write his own statement for a doctor to put out.

I thought it was pretty clear he decided to go with "my boss", as a witty remark, instead of Obama.

How is that witty?

[JG]

https://twitter.com/bpolitics/status/1168953514787258368

Even if it's not- shouldn't "Electable Joe" have this sewn up and be on track to win every state except Vermont? LOL.

Didn't Hillary's campaign made the same argument in 2008 when they started to smell trouble?

[JG]

https://twitter.com/nprpolitics/status/1168935446052843521

[JG]

Biden suffers a burst blood vessel in his left eye during CNN climate town hall:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/bidens-eye-fills-with-blood-during-cnn-climate-town-hall

damn, some of you guys are all like "i hope y'all vote for him in november." i don't think he's going to live till next november

Just wait until November when he catches a cold and starts sneezing on the campaign trail.  Hope his will is up-to-date.

Is some of the Biden criticism over the top? Sure, but your penchant for hand waving every criticism even ones that are fact based and not cynical is interesting. Biden is a human being. A 76 year old one. Concern about his age and ability to do the job is not being pulled from thin air.

It's that people keep taking every single little thing that happens as further evidence that he's on death's door and his brain and sanity are deteriorating.  Or even if they don't believe it, they'll say "it contributes to the narrative", which is just a revamped version of the Clinton "optics" BS.

Is Biden the most agile and healthy candidate?  No.  Do I wish he was 20 years younger?  Yeah I do.  But there's a tradeoff.  Biden's experience, deep knowledge and trustworthiness are a big part of his appeal.  You won't get that from someone in their 40s or 50s.

Just because Biden isn't agile or healthy doesn't mean he's dying or insane, though.  Biden made it through the town hall just fine other than his eye bleeding.  He made it through the debates just fine despite being attacked relentlessly.  He's been doing plenty of events and fundraising aggressively.  He's put out detailed proposals and, unlike certain candidates, seems to be intimately familiar with all the details and reasoning backing those proposals.  He's done some fantastic interviews.  Just the other day he did a 90-minute Q&A.

There's no genuine evidence that his health is actually failing, so people constantly latch onto minor events and either blow them out of proportion or completely misrepresent them.  The eye bleeding thing isn't great but it's just a random event that could just as easily happen to Warren or Trump or Sanders.  Stupid sh*t like him "forgetting Obama's name" is so dramatically misrepresented that it's essentially fake news.

Come up with a real criticism and I'll be fine with it.  But when people keep throwing weak sh*t out there, like that he burst a blood vessel in his eye so he's clearly a weak, dying old man who won't make it to 2024, I'm gonna keep slapping it down.

What about him misrepresenting his record when it comes to the Iraq war? Is that a legitimate criticism? Or ''it's another slip of the toungue, that's not what he meant'' or ''he was actually being facetious''?

[JG]

The existence of "Corn Pop" isn't the question. Biden's telling of the story was utterly unintelligible. He didn't put one single coherent sentence together in that entire clip.

That clip is from several years ago.  It was dug up by an alt-right hack explicitly to trigger the extremely online left.

So if him being less-than-coherent is a signal of senility, then he's been senile for years.  Except we know he hasn't been senile for years because despite him being constantly in the public spotlight, nobody was calling him senile until a few months ago.

Whether or not the cause is senility, I would like the President of the United States to be able to speak coherently in most, if not all situations.

[JG]

One thing I've noticed is that differentiates Joe.

Most of the other candidates have one big policy point, and then relentlessly hammer that point, why it is important, why we need it, why it's better than other policies, etc. without going into any sort of policy detail.

Joe, on the other hand, has a smorgasbord of policies both major and minor.  When I read his campaign platform, it reads like a big old notepad he's been keeping for fifty years of all the things he wishes Congress would have done.  He has so many policies that in these debates he sometimes runs away with himself trying to remember and list them and comes off as scatterbrained.

Let me give you an example.  Every candidate wants to ban private prisons.  But they go about it in different ways.  Here's attorney general and legal expert Kamala Harris's policy platform:

End the use of private prisons.  Less than 10 percent of our prison population is held in private facilities, but it is nevertheless still necessary to end the profit motive that drives these private prisons, as it is inhumane to profit off of imprisonment and allow a system that continues to create incentives that are contrary to the goal of helping people rehabilitate themselves and return to the community. Kamala also believes we must end private detention centers for undocumented immigrants.

I've left the part that's actual policy in black.  The entire rest of it, in red, is just pablum about why private prisons are bad.  That's not policy!

In contrast, here's the exact same section in Joe's platform:

Stop corporations from profiteering off of incarceration. Biden will end the federal government’s use of private prisons, building off an Obama-Biden Administration’s policy rescinded by the Trump Administration. And, he will make clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants. Biden will also make eliminating private prisons and all other methods of profiteering off of incarceration – including diversion programs, commercial bail, and electronic monitoring – a requirement for his new state and local prevention grant program. Finally, Biden will support the passage of legislation to crack down on the practice of private companies charging incarcerated individuals and their families outrageously high fees to make calls.

There is no red.  The entire thing is policy.  It's more policy, with more detail, and specific ways Joe will get it done.

Yeah, Joe may not go on and on with red-meat rhetoric in his speeches and debate answers.  He may not "inspire you" with a long schpiel of red text.  But that's because he's busy figuring out, and explaining, what he'll actually do.  And between the two candidates, if you pick Joe, you're going to see a lot more actual difference in the world.

I mean, that's exactly one of Hillary's weaknesses. She had a load of policies and she was ready to deal with everything under the sun. Unfortunately, it made it hard for her campaign to focus on one message. She was pushing so many different policies at the same time that it gave the impression that she stood for absolutely nothing.