Biden's campaign admits that they're full of sh**t

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

But I thought the moderate Republican voters were all for protecting big banks! Isn't that how Trump's keeping support rallied behind him? /s

The former Senator for the credit card state is probably not going to support policy as bad as this across the board, but progressives in Congress are going to have to prepare to push the envelope on all sorts of issues.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Aside from the postal service and Federal Reserve bank accounts items, the article doesn’t mention any specific banking-financial related policies that they are disavowing. Hopefully he appoints pro-consumer and pro-worker people instead of banking and corporate folks.

It walked back commitment to the Unity Task Force policies en masse, claiming they were merely recommendations to Biden's campaign as opposed to, you know, compromises specifically made by his team for his acceptance.

Gregory Meeks and several lobbyists have recently been arguing that the revolving door must remain for the sake of diversity. Suggesting there are almost no minorities capable of being administrative officials outside of Wall Street is racist nonsense, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that line trotted out in defence of various ghouls in due course.

None of this bodes well for January. That is when I would have expected the abandonment of reforms to begin.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Invocations of the primaries/"Won't change my [2020] vote, so irrelevant" are missing the point: if Biden is giving up on this now (and the out-of-hand dismissal of anonymous sources is interesting given the general reactions here to the Trump disparaging soldiers story), he's going to give up on even more in January. That doesn't mean people shouldn't vote for him in November, but beyond a certain point, diminishing efforts to produce incremental progress merely offset the rate of decline. If inequity continues to rise, there will be more room for another right-wing populist and they are unlikely to be as incompetent as Trump. The less prepared Biden is to follow his own promises, the less his almost inevitably more popular agenda will matter come election day 2024.

Of course it's imperative to beat Trump, but giving up on reforms is only laying the foundations for Hawley 2024.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Invocations of the primaries/"Won't change my [2020] vote, so irrelevant" are missing the point: if Biden is giving up on this now (and the out-of-hand dismissal of anonymous sources is interesting given the general reactions here to the Trump disparaging soldiers story), he's going to give up on even more in January. That doesn't mean people shouldn't vote for him in November, but beyond a certain point, diminishing efforts to produce incremental progress merely offset the rate of decline. If inequity continues to rise, there will be more room for another right-wing populist and they are unlikely to be as incompetent as Trump. The less prepared Biden is to follow his own promises, the less his almost inevitably more popular agenda will matter come election day 2024.

Of course it's imperative to beat Trump, but giving up on reforms is only laying the foundations for Hawley 2024.

Right, Biden isn't going to prioritize USPS banking so that's a slippery slope to him abandoning his entire platform.

It's not definite, but that he is buckling to pressure from elites this early indicates weakness. This kind of compromise with unelected powerbrokers, as opposed to elected Republicans, typically happens either in the primaries or once office has been assumed and elites actually mobilise to halt progress (as we saw with Obamacare).

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Invocations of the primaries/"Won't change my [2020] vote, so irrelevant" are missing the point: if Biden is giving up on this now (and the out-of-hand dismissal of anonymous sources is interesting given the general reactions here to the Trump disparaging soldiers story), he's going to give up on even more in January. That doesn't mean people shouldn't vote for him in November, but beyond a certain point, diminishing efforts to produce incremental progress merely offset the rate of decline. If inequity continues to rise, there will be more room for another right-wing populist and they are unlikely to be as incompetent as Trump. The less prepared Biden is to follow his own promises, the less his almost inevitably more popular agenda will matter come election day 2024.

Of course it's imperative to beat Trump, but giving up on reforms is only laying the foundations for Hawley 2024.

President Sanders is far more likely to lead to President Hawley than a President Biden is

Based on what? Biden is going to fire up the Republican base just as much, if not more, because it is not banking reform that animates them - this should be obvious after Obama and HRC (if not after seeing the Republicans get worse after Clinton and Gore). That he describes himself as a "moderate" in the meantime signals weakness to a fair proportion of them and encourages them to pick someone they believe in (more likely than not to be a firebreather). Biden is still committed to DACA by executive order, reversing title IX changes (even the good ones) and probably will preside over an administration enacting all sorts of performative crap that alienates lifelong Democrats. If he doesn't even attempt an incremental economic agenda -  the one thing keeping many of those voters in his camp this time - all he has is fear that the Republican would be worse and, as we're seeing with Trump, "Things have gotten worse, but the opposition is even worse," isn't usually a strong message for an incumbent. Letting the Gilded Age deepen will also lead to people valuing civic virtues less and so becoming more open, in general, to a reactionary approach.

Arguably, the closest US precedent we have is ancient history in political terms, so I'd take the following with a bucket of salt either way, but FDR led to a long period of Democratic rule followed by Eisenhower, one of the best Republican presidents of the 20th and 21st centuries.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

I will absolutely vote for Biden in November (even though my state is beyond safe for him) even if he says many things that disappoint me between now and then.

If Biden wins the election, however, all criticism is fair game. I'm not expecting him to govern like Sanders or Warren, but if he can't at least move things a bit in the right direction and makes no effort beyond platitudes to address income inequality, the affordability of higher education and health care (among many other things), climate change, criminal justice reform, or our immigration system, and basically just protects the status quo, he'll get an earful from me, and I will reassess whether or not I should continue considering myself a Democrat in 2024 and beyond. People are suffering in this country, and while Republicans have made no secret of the fact that they don't care, I'm running out of patience for Democrats saying that they care and not backing that up with their actions.

The issue is that there's nothing in it for him because no matter what he does he will still get the exact same criticism, with the exact same ferocity, from the left.

Biden's has moved his rhetoric substantially to the left, brought a lot of Sanders and Warren people on board, and adopted many of their most popular proposals, and he gets zero credit for it and we still have people saying "as soon as he becomes president we're going to attack him and force him to do what we want."

Why should he continue any sort of appeasement strategy with you guys any more than he's already done?  Clearly a lot of lefty folks were persuadable since this doesn't feel like Clinton again.  But the continent on the far left continues to say the exact same things about him that they said about Clinton.  There's no way to win other than to transform into Bernie Sanders.

He should pursue his own agenda not as an "appeasement strategy" but to maintain his personal integrity and that of the political process (and also because it's good policy, or so he claims).

Action is a lot more persuasive than words and a lot of the discontent in this thread is coming from people who will or would be voting for Biden in 2020 in the hope that their low expectations are wrong (within the wider populace, this group is much less likely to do so for a member of the incumbent party if it's already disappointed, so will be harder to hold onto if Biden abandons all ambition). A number of those who won't be voting for him in 2020 might even be winnable in 2024 should he pleasantly surprise them, as has been true for previous presidents who surpassed expectations in certain communities.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

What are you talking about?  McGrath wasn't coronated, she almost lost the damn primary.

The McGrath primary was the case of the state Dem establishment (supporting Booker) clashing with the national Dem establishment (backing McGrath). McGrath narrowly won.

Correct. And Booker would have likely won if McGrift hadn't been popular when the mail in voting started. A year with normal primarily physical voting, we wouldn't have to put up with her BS again.

It made sense for them to endorse McGrath early. She was practically running unopposed for months.

That was a case for recruiting someone else, especially after her team actively moved to push a much better candidate who was exploring a bid out of the race (Matt Jones). This behaviour should not have been rewarded.

[TiltsAreUnderrated]

Fair enough. I'll admit I was wrong in the case of McGrath. But the way the party united around Hickenlooper was absolutely revolting and shameful.

Huh? The endorsement of Hickenlooper makes more sense than any establishment support for McGrath. You can make the case that he’s been a lackluster candidate, but why is it “revolting and shameful” or surprising for the party to endorse a twice elected governor with widespread name recognition over a candidate who basically loses every race he runs in?

For lots of reasons, but perhaps most importantly because the ethics issue was live at the time he was recruited and it turns out he had no better solution than not showing up in court. Recruitment 101 would have involved asking him about how he'd deal with that and and politely withdrawing if he had no plan better than this one.