A useful skill indeed as almost everyone is smarter than Biden. People think he was normal until the dementia but he was dumb as a bag of hammers even in what passes for his prime. He is hardly alone in being dumb yet powerful, I met Dan Quayle when he was inexplicably running for President and he was one of the stupidest people I have ever met.
Dan Quayle also had experience with my physical awkwardness! I inadvertently gave him a bone crusher handshake. I still remember the look on his face as he limped away nursing his hand. I feel even worse about that than I do about letting Biden use me against that prof.
I like how you have a life history of mogging various presidential candidates. If this was caveman times then I bet we'd be so impressed that we'd elect YOU president!
It started when I was nine years old. We were visiting the US Capitol, and it was very crowded in the Rotunda. I turned around, looking for a way out, and accidentally headbutted some guy in the chest. He collected himself, said “Excuse me,” and scurried off. My mother exclaimed “That was Scoop Jackson!” (That is, Henry M Jackson, senior senator from the state of Washington and perennial hope of the war-hawk faction of the Democratic Party.) I should have known then and there that I ought to avoid US Senators.
I remained stunned at how many people interpret Biden's 2020 victory as a sign he was a better politician than Hillary simply because she lost four years earlier. Hillary was not a good politician, but she was clearly better than Biden. He won and she lost, not because of any difference in political skill favoring Joe, but because the electoral contexts were so very different.
I do. I don’t think he’s that bright and he’s a terrible person but as much as I hate to admit it his rhetoric and lies is what the Democratic base liked to hear.
If Democrats liked to hear Biden's rhetoric so much, why didn't they support him in 1988 or 2008? Or even in the beginning of the 2020 primaries?
Biden was leading in both Iowa and New Hampshire polls in mid-2019, but he steadily lost support in both those states as the year progressed and then ended up a distant fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. He then got swamped by Bernie in Nevada, barely beating Buttigieg.
Only South Carolina and then COVID saved his candidacy.
The Democrats really need a good public autopsy of that primary season to clear the air (and the corrupt old farts who also rigged 2023-4), even more than flushing out the Biden WH cabal.
After 2016 deep state went around hat in hand to everyone who mattered making promises to rig 2020. It wasn't just Pfizer, Facebook also went out of the way with their half a billion scheme to register additional voters in heavily democrat counties of swing states. Then there were IC members who all assured Hunter Biden laptop was a fake. And, and, and. The whole cathedral mobilized.
What happened 2024 was that big tech came away disappointed because the promises were not upheld - they were treated for suckers by the Biden admin. So the tech support collapsed...
Neither 2016 nor 2020 nor 2024 had to do with the quality of Hillary, Joe or Kamala
Trump's vote total in 2020 went up in all 50 states. That has never come close to happening before to any president who failed to win re-election. The closest was Grover Cleveland in 1884, and even he couldn't advance on his vote total from four years before in a handful of the 38 states at the time.
In most cases, a sitting president who fails to win re-election loses votes in nearly every state in the union. Hoover lost votes in all 48 states in 1932. George H.W. Bush in all 50 states in 1992. Jimmy Carter lost votes in 46 out of 50 states in 1980.
So the difference to me is not that Trump was fired, but that Democrats were motivated in 2020 in a way they were not in 2016. And a lot of that had to do with the overconfidence Democrats had four years earlier because they just assumed Trump could not win.
Biden was better at not being hated than Hillary. Even as First Lady, there were people who absolutely hated her -and that just increased as her career went on. Lots of people didn't like Biden, but it wasn't until he was president that people had any strong dislike towards him.
Jake Tapper is getting to the bottom of it. Shockingly, Tapper is benefiting from the covering up of Biden dementia and the uncovering of it. The chutzpah of that man!
I agree that Hillary is a much easier politician to hate than Biden, but the failure to arouse strong passions in partisans doesn't necessarily make for a better politician, as both Trump and Nixon could tell you.
Yeah, in 2020 we were in the middle of holocaust. I assume most people voted against that. I wouldn't swear to it, as I stopped following the news in 2018, but based on social media I'm pretty sure that was it.
I have called him Foghorn Leghorn since I first saw him pontificating about the end of the Vietnam War. What a moron. I think he actually played the role of demented old man better than anything in his first 50 years pretending to be a wise politician.
If you see Promise Me, Dad, on a bargain books shelf, I suggest reading at least a little bit of it. Even with the ghostwriter filter, Biden comes across as extremely self-centered.
He went to a crap law school and practiced ShitLaw and a property management side hustle for 4 years before wowing the good people of Delaware into electing him as Senator. Why God why.
Busing was a very big deal in suburban Wilmington in the early 70s, and he was against it. How a US Senator could help keep downtown blacks out of their school districts and their kids out of black schools didn't seem to matter.
Busing was a big issue in the early 70s. No whites in suburban Wilmington and New Castle County wanted to be bused into Wilmington or have Wilmington's blacks bused out to the suburbs. I wonder how Biden worked from being a foe of busing to being effectively neutral.
Delaware has great jobs for top flight corporate attorneys because so many firms are incorporated in Delaware: you get paid like a Manhattan lawyer but your cost of living in the country club suburbs is about half as much.
Delaware's politics has swung left since the 1990s. Probably the biggest reason is that Delaware went from 80 % white in 1980 to 62 % white today. The late Pete Dupont served two terms as governor in the 80s and was a rather conservative governor. He couldn't get elected today.
I got to sit with Biden in a small group setting in 2015 in DC when he was VP. He basically talked the entire time, 95% about his political career, said nothing of substance except (paraphrasing from memory), “the country is getting more diverse, which is a strength, I think” but in a more cautious tone than I expected, and then made a few gaffes about how our generation (late 20s at the time) would “make cancer terminal, not curable” and “invent computer chips processing a thousand or a million bytes per second”. Then, swear to God, one of his aides / agents said “the President needs you in the Situation Room in 10 minutes” to which he replied, with a big grin showing off his massively fake whitened teeth, “Tell him 20”, before shaking everyone’s hand, posing for a photo, and taking off.
Sounds like the old starlet trick at the Beverly Hills Hotel: while you are sunning in a bikini next to the pool, bribe the receptionist to fake phone calls: "Miss Velma Vavoom, please take a call from Mr. Hitchcock."
How DID a prickly, rather insecure and not terribly bright guy like Biden have the ultimate arc in American politics? Obviously a big foot in the door is the US Senate, where you can be from the DC exurb of Delaware and your vote still counts as much as Chuck Schumer's. But there's some other force multiplier attached to being a Senator. A lot of really unpleasant, unpopular people seem to make it in and hang on for multiple terms. John McCain was incredibly unpopular and graceless. Lindsey Graham is effeminate and weird. Then there's the wooden, really strange and almost buffoonish Al Gore. Nerdy Joe Lieberman somehow beat the smart, affable Lowell Weicker and stayed on until 2012 when his poll numbers cratered and he moved to New York.
I would guess that the job of being a senator attracts people with big egos who like talking and especially having others hear them talk. Having got there, they tend to relate to and like those among their 99 fellows who share the same traits as them.
“A vain, speech-mouthing, speech-reporting Guild,
One Benefit-Club for mutual flattery”—Coleridge
(Obama was a senator for less than one term before running and lacked the same kind of big obnoxious personality so didn’t seem to be as well-liked among senators.)
Obama was extraordinarily disciplined at leaving behind no paper trail at all, and he had a private roadmap for a quick rise to the presidency at least since college. In Illinois, he made many friends among Republican state senators and frequently voted "present" on controversial issues. He hid his radicalism well, all the way to the White House.
That’s a really interesting point. Let’s consider Senator Fetterman. How in the actual f*** did a middle school gym teacher get elected to the US Senate?
It's pretty depressing. I think smart charismatic people are really turned off by electoral politics and who can blame them. No more Eisenhowers or Pat Moynihans or Adlai Stevensons.
I'm not sure they're even in the federal bureaucracy anymore, which should be the dream job for a smart sophisticated personality from an upper class background, like John Malkovich's character in Burn After Reading (Princeton, functional alcoholic, old money brownstone and Mercedes Benz SL, failing marriage to a wealthy pediatrician).
Are there any senior federal bureaucrats on this thread who can reassure me the guys like Osbourne Cox are still out there?
My wife was a biologist for the Environmental Protection Agency until she retired after we had our first child in 1996. She would be making about $160,000 a year today if she continued working for the EPA, a pretty handsome salary. Government pays its workforce well. There's a reason that many of the most affluent counties in America are within the Washington Metropolitan area- Washington DC, Montgomery County, Arlington County, The City of Alexandria, Fairfax County and Loudoun County.
Fetterman whole blue-collar-town revival thing, and his working class style, had made him a state political celebrity for a long time, and he was also Lieutenant Governor when he ran for Senate, not a small town Mayor.
McCain ticked off a large part of the Republican Party and Democratic voters rewarded him. As for Graham, he is a closet case and the South Carolina has the most dysfunctional Republican Party in America. Why are South Carolina Republican politicians so crazy? Nancy Mace is stone cold crazy and likely to lose her House seat in 2026.
I've always thought it would be pretty easy to rig a primary election. Hardly anybody shows up and you can pay people to run against you and split the opposition vote. Then in the general you sit back and let the rural precincts carry you if you're a Republican and the urban precincts if you're a Democrat. Easy peasy.
I think it's crazy because of Graham's long tenure in the shadow of Strom Thurmond before him. The tv series House of Cards captured this well. You have to factor in the deep poverty of Southern states like SC, Alabama, and Mississippi. Within the state, politicians are dealing with poverty affecting large percentages of blacks and whites in similar ways -- and frankly a lot less day-to-day racial separation than in preening New England or Chicago or California. Yet in DC, all that matters is boxing these states in as unchanging symbols of segregation. No wonder voting is sort of schizophrenic, as voters struggle with lived reality versus national image.
The whole Thurmond charade was silly. He was certainly senile his last fifteen years as Senator.
Compared to most European countries, America's poorest per capita state, Mississippi, is not all that steeped in deep poverty. Mississippi's per capita GDP of $53,000 is similar to that of Portugal $50,000, Spain $57,000, Italy $63,000, Britain $64,000, France $66,000, Czechia $59,000, Slovakia $47,000, Latvia $45,000, Greece $45,000, Poland $55,000, Lithuania $57,000 and Estonia $50,000. Mississippi's per capita GDP would be higher but for its very large economically unassimilated black population. Stoop agricultural labor is no longer needed.
> How DID a prickly, rather insecure and not terribly bright guy like Biden have the ultimate arc in American politics? Obviously a big foot in the door is the US Senate <
The Senate is indeed "a big foot in the door". But Biden didn't win the nomination nor the Presidency from the Senate.
Biden won because
a) he was an acceptable choice for the rich Wall Street (heavily Jewish) guys who did not want to see a more class-conflict style progressive like Sanders or Warren.
b) he was Obama's VP which was sufficient to make him the "black candidate" and allowed him to break through in South Carolina
Biden's attempts to win from the Senate--at much more reasonable ages--were complete debacles, went nowhere. He had no appeal. But he was a boring white guy "centrist" whom Obama thought would be reassuring to whites and particularly white men. So he was handed the VP job. That was his critical foot in the door.
~~
This pattern btw isn't that odd. Lots of Senators fancy themselves as President. But the direct from the Senate candidates haven't fared particularly well. A whole host try every go round and most wash out before even getting close to the nomination. During my life I count Kennedy, Goldwater, McGovern, Dole, Kerry, McCain, Obama and only Kennedy and Obama seal the win. Governor--Stevenson, Carter, Reagan, Dukakis, Clinton, Bush--seems like a better path to actually win the Presidency.
If you are a Senator want to be President--i.e. if you are a Senator--then your best bet is to get picked as Vice President--and ideally have the President die (Truman, Johnson). But even if the President refuses to accommodate you by dying, you at least have a really good shot at getting the nomination later and can maybe bring it home Nixon (very close/win), Humprey (very close), Mondale (not close), Bush (win), Gore (very, very, very close), Biden (win), Harris (close).
I've always found Whitehouse to be the weirdest guy in the Senate. Maybe it's just me. Graham is a good example of how older non-out gays are actually treated in small towns in the South. Stay in your lane; walk the social conservative walk as we do; we all know; we're not going to be rude and talk about it. He has begun to move closer to Trumpian populism of a certain stripe.
South Carolina is like what Georgia would be like without powerhouse Atlanta.
Ironically Biden’s lower-than-average for a politician IQ is what lifted him from being a Democrat also-ran to presidential material. His brashness and inarticulacy helped the average person who feels less smart than they’d like to be relate to him.
I'd guess that Joe Biden is the most stupid president since Warren Harding. But at least the flawed Harding was a pretty nice guy and accepted that he was no great intellect. He was in his element playing cards with his cronies. Harding was a much better president than Biden, that's for sure.
The younger Joe Biden has the distinction of being the only Democrat to not only sit through an entire Jan Helfeld interview; he came back for more.
(Jan Helfeld is a hardcore Objectivist who sets up interviews with politicians and then attempts to challenge their fundamental worldview via Socratic dialog. The results are often hilarious, such as his interview with Pete Stark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjbPZAMked0 . The Biden interviews, on the other hand, look like something on PBS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HcJJE2Sp28 .)
I wonder how Biden must have felt when he was Obama's vice president. Spending all day hanging around a guy who's smarter, more handsome, and more popular than you. Imagine the chip on his shoulder. Then Obama tells him to drop out in 2024, give up his dream. "I had two terms but you'll get one. We all know it's the best you can do." Like yeah that'll work.
Certainly, Biden knew a lot more about Washington and Congresscritters (despite all those Amtrak trips) than BO. I'm sure he didn't like having his advice be ignored.
Sometimes Biden would say something objectively interesting, like claiming his Uncle Ambrose was eaten by New Guinea cannibals. But, still, Trump gets more traction talking about what he saw on TV last night.
Biden's biggest legacy, which is more of a negative than a positive, is that it took him 32 years to get elected president. Therefore, every pretender will think that they will always have a chance. I can only imagine with the Democratic field will look like in 2028; I would think that my senior senator will run again even though he cowardly dropped out the last time he tried
Biden pretty much fell into the presidency. Remember how badly he was beaten in the first few primaries. Even Amy Klobachur clobbered him. But James Clyburn coronated Biden in the South Carolina primary and the Democratic elite jumped on board the Biden train.
I think that once the black candidate, Kamala Harris, did so poorly, the black elite politicians decided to go for the candidate most willing to kiss their *ss. So they decided on Biden. He's always willing. Sanders was Jewish and more his own man.
A useful skill indeed as almost everyone is smarter than Biden. People think he was normal until the dementia but he was dumb as a bag of hammers even in what passes for his prime. He is hardly alone in being dumb yet powerful, I met Dan Quayle when he was inexplicably running for President and he was one of the stupidest people I have ever met.
Dan Quayle also had experience with my physical awkwardness! I inadvertently gave him a bone crusher handshake. I still remember the look on his face as he limped away nursing his hand. I feel even worse about that than I do about letting Biden use me against that prof.
Alpha.
I like how you have a life history of mogging various presidential candidates. If this was caveman times then I bet we'd be so impressed that we'd elect YOU president!
It started when I was nine years old. We were visiting the US Capitol, and it was very crowded in the Rotunda. I turned around, looking for a way out, and accidentally headbutted some guy in the chest. He collected himself, said “Excuse me,” and scurried off. My mother exclaimed “That was Scoop Jackson!” (That is, Henry M Jackson, senior senator from the state of Washington and perennial hope of the war-hawk faction of the Democratic Party.) I should have known then and there that I ought to avoid US Senators.
Dan Quayle might be stupid but he's allegedly a rather good golfer.
I don't doubt that at all. He might not be able to spell "golf" however.
Golfe?
He's Midwestern. It would be gulf.
I remained stunned at how many people interpret Biden's 2020 victory as a sign he was a better politician than Hillary simply because she lost four years earlier. Hillary was not a good politician, but she was clearly better than Biden. He won and she lost, not because of any difference in political skill favoring Joe, but because the electoral contexts were so very different.
Dude, 81 BAZILLION votes! Biden is the most charismatic politician in US history!
Honestly Hillary probably would have made a decent president. She was the last of the Normals. I suspect we're only gonna get weirdos from now on.
I do. I don’t think he’s that bright and he’s a terrible person but as much as I hate to admit it his rhetoric and lies is what the Democratic base liked to hear.
If Democrats liked to hear Biden's rhetoric so much, why didn't they support him in 1988 or 2008? Or even in the beginning of the 2020 primaries?
Biden was leading in both Iowa and New Hampshire polls in mid-2019, but he steadily lost support in both those states as the year progressed and then ended up a distant fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. He then got swamped by Bernie in Nevada, barely beating Buttigieg.
Only South Carolina and then COVID saved his candidacy.
The Democrats really need a good public autopsy of that primary season to clear the air (and the corrupt old farts who also rigged 2023-4), even more than flushing out the Biden WH cabal.
After 2016 deep state went around hat in hand to everyone who mattered making promises to rig 2020. It wasn't just Pfizer, Facebook also went out of the way with their half a billion scheme to register additional voters in heavily democrat counties of swing states. Then there were IC members who all assured Hunter Biden laptop was a fake. And, and, and. The whole cathedral mobilized.
What happened 2024 was that big tech came away disappointed because the promises were not upheld - they were treated for suckers by the Biden admin. So the tech support collapsed...
Neither 2016 nor 2020 nor 2024 had to do with the quality of Hillary, Joe or Kamala
Biden didn't so much win in 2020 as Trump was fired in 2020.
Yes. The entire Biden campaign was, simply: Not Trump. Nothing else.
Trump's vote total in 2020 went up in all 50 states. That has never come close to happening before to any president who failed to win re-election. The closest was Grover Cleveland in 1884, and even he couldn't advance on his vote total from four years before in a handful of the 38 states at the time.
In most cases, a sitting president who fails to win re-election loses votes in nearly every state in the union. Hoover lost votes in all 48 states in 1932. George H.W. Bush in all 50 states in 1992. Jimmy Carter lost votes in 46 out of 50 states in 1980.
So the difference to me is not that Trump was fired, but that Democrats were motivated in 2020 in a way they were not in 2016. And a lot of that had to do with the overconfidence Democrats had four years earlier because they just assumed Trump could not win.
Excellent points and thanks for providing them. Democrats were highly motivated in 2020 due to their visceral hatred of Trump.
Biden was better at not being hated than Hillary. Even as First Lady, there were people who absolutely hated her -and that just increased as her career went on. Lots of people didn't like Biden, but it wasn't until he was president that people had any strong dislike towards him.
Jake Tapper is getting to the bottom of it. Shockingly, Tapper is benefiting from the covering up of Biden dementia and the uncovering of it. The chutzpah of that man!
He is almost heroic in his obtuseness. He is the journalist who wore no clothes.
I agree that Hillary is a much easier politician to hate than Biden, but the failure to arouse strong passions in partisans doesn't necessarily make for a better politician, as both Trump and Nixon could tell you.
Yeah, in 2020 we were in the middle of holocaust. I assume most people voted against that. I wouldn't swear to it, as I stopped following the news in 2018, but based on social media I'm pretty sure that was it.
I have called him Foghorn Leghorn since I first saw him pontificating about the end of the Vietnam War. What a moron. I think he actually played the role of demented old man better than anything in his first 50 years pretending to be a wise politician.
"Look at me when I'm talkin' to ya, boy"
The only problem, it takes an old bird like to remember Foghorn. Great character.
I covered Biden in the 1988 Iowa caucuses. He was a jerk.
If you see Promise Me, Dad, on a bargain books shelf, I suggest reading at least a little bit of it. Even with the ghostwriter filter, Biden comes across as extremely self-centered.
He was always out for whatever he could grab.
He has a knack for capturing the moment: "We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death..."
I remember he asked extremely long questions at Judiciary Committee hearings. Was he trying to show off or just confuse the witness/nominee?
He went to a crap law school and practiced ShitLaw and a property management side hustle for 4 years before wowing the good people of Delaware into electing him as Senator. Why God why.
Busing was a very big deal in suburban Wilmington in the early 70s, and he was against it. How a US Senator could help keep downtown blacks out of their school districts and their kids out of black schools didn't seem to matter.
Busing was a big issue in the early 70s. No whites in suburban Wilmington and New Castle County wanted to be bused into Wilmington or have Wilmington's blacks bused out to the suburbs. I wonder how Biden worked from being a foe of busing to being effectively neutral.
Delaware has great jobs for top flight corporate attorneys because so many firms are incorporated in Delaware: you get paid like a Manhattan lawyer but your cost of living in the country club suburbs is about half as much.
Biden wasn't that kind of attorney, though.
Delaware's politics has swung left since the 1990s. Probably the biggest reason is that Delaware went from 80 % white in 1980 to 62 % white today. The late Pete Dupont served two terms as governor in the 80s and was a rather conservative governor. He couldn't get elected today.
I got to sit with Biden in a small group setting in 2015 in DC when he was VP. He basically talked the entire time, 95% about his political career, said nothing of substance except (paraphrasing from memory), “the country is getting more diverse, which is a strength, I think” but in a more cautious tone than I expected, and then made a few gaffes about how our generation (late 20s at the time) would “make cancer terminal, not curable” and “invent computer chips processing a thousand or a million bytes per second”. Then, swear to God, one of his aides / agents said “the President needs you in the Situation Room in 10 minutes” to which he replied, with a big grin showing off his massively fake whitened teeth, “Tell him 20”, before shaking everyone’s hand, posing for a photo, and taking off.
Sounds like he asked the aide to say that and it was a big lie.
The old used car salesman tactic. "My boss will be real mad... but hell, I'll let it slide this time."
Sounds like the old starlet trick at the Beverly Hills Hotel: while you are sunning in a bikini next to the pool, bribe the receptionist to fake phone calls: "Miss Velma Vavoom, please take a call from Mr. Hitchcock."
"a million bytes per second" inconceivable!!!!
The Situation Room just meant he was supposed to meet with Michael Sorrentino.
How DID a prickly, rather insecure and not terribly bright guy like Biden have the ultimate arc in American politics? Obviously a big foot in the door is the US Senate, where you can be from the DC exurb of Delaware and your vote still counts as much as Chuck Schumer's. But there's some other force multiplier attached to being a Senator. A lot of really unpleasant, unpopular people seem to make it in and hang on for multiple terms. John McCain was incredibly unpopular and graceless. Lindsey Graham is effeminate and weird. Then there's the wooden, really strange and almost buffoonish Al Gore. Nerdy Joe Lieberman somehow beat the smart, affable Lowell Weicker and stayed on until 2012 when his poll numbers cratered and he moved to New York.
I would guess that the job of being a senator attracts people with big egos who like talking and especially having others hear them talk. Having got there, they tend to relate to and like those among their 99 fellows who share the same traits as them.
“A vain, speech-mouthing, speech-reporting Guild,
One Benefit-Club for mutual flattery”—Coleridge
(Obama was a senator for less than one term before running and lacked the same kind of big obnoxious personality so didn’t seem to be as well-liked among senators.)
How much of being a senator is about money in contrast to a representative?
Obama was extraordinarily disciplined at leaving behind no paper trail at all, and he had a private roadmap for a quick rise to the presidency at least since college. In Illinois, he made many friends among Republican state senators and frequently voted "present" on controversial issues. He hid his radicalism well, all the way to the White House.
That’s a really interesting point. Let’s consider Senator Fetterman. How in the actual f*** did a middle school gym teacher get elected to the US Senate?
It's pretty depressing. I think smart charismatic people are really turned off by electoral politics and who can blame them. No more Eisenhowers or Pat Moynihans or Adlai Stevensons.
I'm not sure they're even in the federal bureaucracy anymore, which should be the dream job for a smart sophisticated personality from an upper class background, like John Malkovich's character in Burn After Reading (Princeton, functional alcoholic, old money brownstone and Mercedes Benz SL, failing marriage to a wealthy pediatrician).
Are there any senior federal bureaucrats on this thread who can reassure me the guys like Osbourne Cox are still out there?
Civil Service does not pay enough. DC is famous for being a town where the pay does not match the job.
My wife was a biologist for the Environmental Protection Agency until she retired after we had our first child in 1996. She would be making about $160,000 a year today if she continued working for the EPA, a pretty handsome salary. Government pays its workforce well. There's a reason that many of the most affluent counties in America are within the Washington Metropolitan area- Washington DC, Montgomery County, Arlington County, The City of Alexandria, Fairfax County and Loudoun County.
I still turn to Moynihan at least once a month. Since college. He's the last prominent intellectual public servant, I think.
Then I got to graduate school and was pleasantly pleased to see him on three syllabi for classes I was taking in the first semester.
To denounce him. Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding ... indeed.
Fetterman was mayor of the dump town of Braddock.
Braddock, PA. Population: 1,721. From there to the Senate in one jump. Astonishing.
He's Pennsylvania media catnip. It's a weird state, politically.
Fetterman whole blue-collar-town revival thing, and his working class style, had made him a state political celebrity for a long time, and he was also Lieutenant Governor when he ran for Senate, not a small town Mayor.
McCain ticked off a large part of the Republican Party and Democratic voters rewarded him. As for Graham, he is a closet case and the South Carolina has the most dysfunctional Republican Party in America. Why are South Carolina Republican politicians so crazy? Nancy Mace is stone cold crazy and likely to lose her House seat in 2026.
I've always thought it would be pretty easy to rig a primary election. Hardly anybody shows up and you can pay people to run against you and split the opposition vote. Then in the general you sit back and let the rural precincts carry you if you're a Republican and the urban precincts if you're a Democrat. Easy peasy.
Thanks- did not realize that
It's a theory. Don't know it for a fact but seems plausible
I think it's crazy because of Graham's long tenure in the shadow of Strom Thurmond before him. The tv series House of Cards captured this well. You have to factor in the deep poverty of Southern states like SC, Alabama, and Mississippi. Within the state, politicians are dealing with poverty affecting large percentages of blacks and whites in similar ways -- and frankly a lot less day-to-day racial separation than in preening New England or Chicago or California. Yet in DC, all that matters is boxing these states in as unchanging symbols of segregation. No wonder voting is sort of schizophrenic, as voters struggle with lived reality versus national image.
The whole Thurmond charade was silly. He was certainly senile his last fifteen years as Senator.
Compared to most European countries, America's poorest per capita state, Mississippi, is not all that steeped in deep poverty. Mississippi's per capita GDP of $53,000 is similar to that of Portugal $50,000, Spain $57,000, Italy $63,000, Britain $64,000, France $66,000, Czechia $59,000, Slovakia $47,000, Latvia $45,000, Greece $45,000, Poland $55,000, Lithuania $57,000 and Estonia $50,000. Mississippi's per capita GDP would be higher but for its very large economically unassimilated black population. Stoop agricultural labor is no longer needed.
I am only referring to American political optics.
> How DID a prickly, rather insecure and not terribly bright guy like Biden have the ultimate arc in American politics? Obviously a big foot in the door is the US Senate <
The Senate is indeed "a big foot in the door". But Biden didn't win the nomination nor the Presidency from the Senate.
Biden won because
a) he was an acceptable choice for the rich Wall Street (heavily Jewish) guys who did not want to see a more class-conflict style progressive like Sanders or Warren.
b) he was Obama's VP which was sufficient to make him the "black candidate" and allowed him to break through in South Carolina
Biden's attempts to win from the Senate--at much more reasonable ages--were complete debacles, went nowhere. He had no appeal. But he was a boring white guy "centrist" whom Obama thought would be reassuring to whites and particularly white men. So he was handed the VP job. That was his critical foot in the door.
~~
This pattern btw isn't that odd. Lots of Senators fancy themselves as President. But the direct from the Senate candidates haven't fared particularly well. A whole host try every go round and most wash out before even getting close to the nomination. During my life I count Kennedy, Goldwater, McGovern, Dole, Kerry, McCain, Obama and only Kennedy and Obama seal the win. Governor--Stevenson, Carter, Reagan, Dukakis, Clinton, Bush--seems like a better path to actually win the Presidency.
If you are a Senator want to be President--i.e. if you are a Senator--then your best bet is to get picked as Vice President--and ideally have the President die (Truman, Johnson). But even if the President refuses to accommodate you by dying, you at least have a really good shot at getting the nomination later and can maybe bring it home Nixon (very close/win), Humprey (very close), Mondale (not close), Bush (win), Gore (very, very, very close), Biden (win), Harris (close).
Senators strike me as nerds and governors strike me as jocks, basically. American voters prefer jocks for president.
Don't forget Senator Whitehouse.
I hope Vance gets the same boost.
Ha.
I've always found Whitehouse to be the weirdest guy in the Senate. Maybe it's just me. Graham is a good example of how older non-out gays are actually treated in small towns in the South. Stay in your lane; walk the social conservative walk as we do; we all know; we're not going to be rude and talk about it. He has begun to move closer to Trumpian populism of a certain stripe.
South Carolina is like what Georgia would be like without powerhouse Atlanta.
Ironically Biden’s lower-than-average for a politician IQ is what lifted him from being a Democrat also-ran to presidential material. His brashness and inarticulacy helped the average person who feels less smart than they’d like to be relate to him.
Average voter: "Hey, Scranton Joe's as stupid as me."
I'd guess that Joe Biden is the most stupid president since Warren Harding. But at least the flawed Harding was a pretty nice guy and accepted that he was no great intellect. He was in his element playing cards with his cronies. Harding was a much better president than Biden, that's for sure.
Cramer’s WHAT IT TAKES, about the last dull, vanilla election, where Dick Gephardt seems colorful, is a farking maaaaaasterpiece!
The younger Joe Biden has the distinction of being the only Democrat to not only sit through an entire Jan Helfeld interview; he came back for more.
(Jan Helfeld is a hardcore Objectivist who sets up interviews with politicians and then attempts to challenge their fundamental worldview via Socratic dialog. The results are often hilarious, such as his interview with Pete Stark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjbPZAMked0 . The Biden interviews, on the other hand, look like something on PBS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HcJJE2Sp28 .)
I wonder how Biden must have felt when he was Obama's vice president. Spending all day hanging around a guy who's smarter, more handsome, and more popular than you. Imagine the chip on his shoulder. Then Obama tells him to drop out in 2024, give up his dream. "I had two terms but you'll get one. We all know it's the best you can do." Like yeah that'll work.
Seems to me that Biden is the ultimate Dunning Krueger candidate. I doubt he thought Obama was smarter than him.
Certainly, Biden knew a lot more about Washington and Congresscritters (despite all those Amtrak trips) than BO. I'm sure he didn't like having his advice be ignored.
Sometimes Biden would say something objectively interesting, like claiming his Uncle Ambrose was eaten by New Guinea cannibals. But, still, Trump gets more traction talking about what he saw on TV last night.
Biden's biggest legacy, which is more of a negative than a positive, is that it took him 32 years to get elected president. Therefore, every pretender will think that they will always have a chance. I can only imagine with the Democratic field will look like in 2028; I would think that my senior senator will run again even though he cowardly dropped out the last time he tried
Biden pretty much fell into the presidency. Remember how badly he was beaten in the first few primaries. Even Amy Klobachur clobbered him. But James Clyburn coronated Biden in the South Carolina primary and the Democratic elite jumped on board the Biden train.
I'd like to know what leverage they used to get the other not-Bernies out of the race.
I think that once the black candidate, Kamala Harris, did so poorly, the black elite politicians decided to go for the candidate most willing to kiss their *ss. So they decided on Biden. He's always willing. Sanders was Jewish and more his own man.
Standing under the shoulders of giants