I'll start this off the way I started my "All The Way With LBJ Redux" post by saying that I'm 68-years-old and I'll be voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in seven months, but if I were much younger, I might not be. This time, rather than thinking about my memories of 1968 and 1972, I'm thinking about the election of 1980 and The Kennedy Problem. It's also a mea culpa about my own votes as a 24-year-old during the 1980 elections.
This year's Kennedy in the presidential race seems like he's so far out that his anti-vaccination and other conspiracy theories might draw more voters from the QAnon fringe that from the left-wing malcontents, but most of the money his campaign is getting is from the MAGA camp, so they are certainly betting that most of his voters will be taken from Biden. I live in a lefty/hippie environment and I'm already seeing RFK, Jr., bumper stickers and yard signs. Even more than sixty years after J.F.K.'s assassination, you never know what the magic of the Kennedy family name will do. One could argue that it also did incalculable damage in 1980, the last time that an incumbent Democratic President was defeated.
For those who weren't around in 1980, it's important to remember that the murders of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 and 1968 didn't seem like history or the distant past. They still stung. Their surviving brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, occupied J.F.K.'s Senate seat and carried more than a little bit of the family legacy with him wherever he went. He was also much more conventionally liberal on many issues than the middle-of-the-road Georgia Democrat in the White House, Jimmy Carter. I voted for Ted Kennedy in the New York primary on March 25, when it was still a race and Teddy was still leading Jimmy in many national polls. But, although Kennedy won more delegates in some big blue states like New York and California, by June 3, Carter had won 1,948 delegates to Kennedy's 1,215, and only 1,666 were needed to win the nomination. This is when, of course, most candidates would have conceded to reality. Two months later, Ted was still not conceding; in August he was calling for an open convention in which delegates would not be bound on the first ballot. It wasn't until everyone was at the convention at Madison Square Garden on August 11, when the delegates voted to uphold the voting rules, that he finally agreed to concede. Then, on August 12, he gave one of the great political speeches in American political history, "The Dream Shall Never Die" speech. It was about traditional liberal values. It was about him. It was a speech worthy of his late brothers. And it mentioned the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, once in the half hour he was on stage: "I congratulate President Carter on his victory here. I am confident that the Democratic party will reunite on the basis of Democratic principles, and that together we will march towards a Democratic victory in 1980." It wasn't even an unequivocal endorsement. I watched Ted's speech with awe and when the convention ended, I was not a Jimmy Carter supporter.
Enter John Anderson, a name that is fading from the collective memory [and from my memory too, so give me a few minutes while I do some research and try to figure out why the f*ck I voted for him in the general election]. He was more liberal than Carter on issues like abortion and guns and gas taxes while being more conservative on fiscal issues. He was a straight-talking independent Republican who had a lot of support on college campuses and from Hollywood liberals like Paul Newman (who had been a prominent Eugene McCarthy supporter in 1968 and had been at the March on Washington in 1963 and the first Earth Day in 1970).
But, looking back, I think the main reason that I didn't vote for Jimmy Carter was because of the remaining loyalty to Ted Kennedy and the fact that Ted didn't throw his full weight behind the Democratic nominee at the convention or on the campaign trail.
And we ended up with Ronald F*cking Reagan as our president for the next eight years.
I don't want any 24-year-old voters looking back when they're 68 to say, "Maybe we wouldn't have become the Russian Province of Trumpistan if I had voted for Joe Biden rather than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in 2024."
Today's Washington, D.C., march captured on CNN, 1/13/2024
Those of us who lived through and participated in the anti-[Vietnam]war movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s know that this anti[Gaza]-war movement of 2023-24 will have an effect on the 2024 election, at least at the margins. Joe Biden, who was a politically-aware young adult finishing law school in 1968 when L.B.J. dropped out of the presidential race a little more than seven months before the election, should know this better than most.
Joe Biden needs to take this movement, which immediately brought thousands of students out on college campuses in October and hundreds of thousands of people of all ages to the streets of Washington, D.C., in November, December, and today, as seriously as Johnson took the demonstrators protesting "Johnson's war." For many of these protestors, the bombing of Gaza's civilians is as much "Biden's War" and the product of U.S. foreign policy and weapons as it is the fault of Benjamin Netanyahu.
The people in this march today -- these people and organizations posting on Twitter/X about the #March4Gaza today -- will not be voting for Donald J. Trump in November, but a significant number of them won't be voting for Joe Biden either. He certainly can't take young voters for granted in this cycle.
NOW: We've brought Biden's atrocities to his front lawn.
Watch a time lapse video showing the enormous size of the historic National #March4Gaza! Organizers estimate that 400,000 attended
Initiated by the American Muslim Task Force for Palestine with ANSWER as National Partner, the action demanded: end the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza! pic.twitter.com/1fxevLzn3r
I'll start this off by coming clean and saying that I'm 68-years-old and I'll be voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in less than eleven months (or for whichever Democrat is running against Donald Trump or another Republican next November), but if I were 18 years old, I might not be.
We look back at Lyndon Baines Johnson now and many of us see the lasting legacy of his presidency in the triumph of Great Society programs, when Medicare was passed and when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally codified many of the demands of the Civil Rights movement. In 1968, however, there was nothing on many young people's minds but his role as the face of the Vietnam War. I was a young teen and the voting age was still 21 at the time, but I would have voted for anyone other than the president presiding over that war. I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I walk through neighborhoods where the stickers on lampposts are about the killing that is currently happening in Gaza -- killing that is being fueled by U.S. weapons that are being tied to possible war crimes. There are a lot of young voters who aren't as concerned as older voters with Biden victories like the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, the $1.9 trillion in Covid relief, the confirmation of a large and very diverse crop new Federal judges, or falling unemployment, or a falling rate of inflation, or even avoiding the recession that was being almost uniformly predicted for the last three years. I can say that, for me, none of those domestic issues would have mattered until I was married with a child in the depths of the Reagan/Bush era.
In today's New York Times, the headline "In Campus Protests Over Gaza, Echoes of Outcry Over Vietnam" appeared and it only confirms what I've been seeing and fearing about young voters. Gaza will be an overriding issue for some of them, and I don't blame them; if I were fifty years younger, I would be them. Will college protesters and others who are horrified by what they see from Gaza on television and social media shift their votes from Biden to Trump in large numbers? Of course not. But they might stay home or vote for Cornell West or RFK, Jr., or Jill Stein. And us old folks can't tell them they're throwing away their votes. Don't we remember that young people are smarter than their elders? I certainly couldn't have been told that I was throwing away my support when -- as a 16-year-old non-voting anti-war protester -- I was 100% behind Bejamin Spock of the People's Party over the too-moderate-for-me George McGovern.
In these days when pundits like to act as if the major party nominees have already been confirmed nine months before the party conventions, it's hard to remember how late in the process LBJ bowed out of the 1968 contest. 1968 was a year of shocks, from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy [Sr.], through Russian tanks in Prague, general strikes in France, and violent cops on the streets of Chicago, but before all those events came a routine presidential address about the Vietnam War on March 31, 1968, in which Johnson talked in some detail about his plans for peace in Vietnam for forty minutes and then ended by saying, "With America's sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office — the presidency of this country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." This was on a Sunday night in prime time during a time when presidential addresses pre-empted all broadcast networks and when all we had were broadcast networks; tens of millions of Americans got this same surprise announcement at the same time from a president who had won in a record landslide in 1964.
So, it's not a sure thing that we are predestined to a Biden v. Trump rematch in 2024, but if we are, the oldest major-party candidate of all time* can't take the support of young voters for granted.
____________
*Speaking of candidates' ages and in trying to put myself into the shoes of young anti-war activists, I do remember myself as a watcher of politics thinking that Lyndon Johnson was ancient; he was only 59 in the video above.
I hope President Joe Biden's first remarks as President of the United States [in an hour from now] nod toward the speech of President Gerald Ford delivered on August 9, 1974:
"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule."
Within forty minutes of posting my poll, the #SoreLoserInChief emerged from a temporary Twitter timeout and eliminated the first choice, which was, of course, no surprise:
I'm sure that I'm not the only one who missed seeing Joe Biden's speech on the Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, battlefield yesterday. It was easy for the media and voters to be distracted by the steroid-fueled tweetstorm from the recently-dehospitalized White House resident trying to divide us further with strings of short all-caps tweets while Biden was speaking about bringing us together (without mentioning his opponent's name).
I did miss the speech when it was being delivered live on a Tuesday during a work week, but the beauty of the internet is that I can watch it now -- and so can you, if you have 22 free minutes. You don't need my commentary; just watch it.
Last week was a heavy news week. OK, that's an understatement. There was a figurative open firehose of political news blasted at us all week long, and there's no indication that the pressurized flood of information overload will lessen between now and the election taking place in thirty days.
However, among the stories that need to be remembered are the actions of the #TrumpCrimeFamily at Tuesday's first (and possibly only) Biden/Trump Debate in Cleveland, Ohio. Anyone who was watching on television saw Trump's third wife, adult kids, spouses, and Junior's girlfriend, walk into the hall as a group, wearing masks, and saw them remove their masks in unison as soon as they sat down, breaking the rules of the Cleveland Clinic and the Commission on Presidential Debates that were being followed by everyone else inside and outside the hall. We were all told by masked television reporters that the only exceptions to this ironclad rule would be Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and the debate moderator Chris Wallace. The family obviously couldn't claim ignorance (even though ignorance runs in the family).
What we didn't see on live TV was the following video of a Cleveland Clinic employee offering the Trump team masks after they sat down. They declined.
Since then, we also found out that members of the Trump family, campaign team, and White House staff on the trip openly disobeyed a mask mandate at the InterContinental Suites Hotel Cleveland in advance of the debate. "ABC News spotted Eric and Lara Trump, White House adviser and the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien -- who has since tested positive for COVID-19 -- walking around the hotel lobby without masks."
The "Law And Order" campaign obviously only believes that laws apply to other people.
In coming debates (if there are any) the Commission has strengthened their rules to address those who have shown that they never honor "honor systems," stating that “Those who don’t comply will be escorted out.” That would be fun to see, but the real punishment for not wearing a mask should be administered by the laws of karma.
I love Joe Biden, and I'm obviously going to vote for him and Kamala Harris exactly one month from now on November 3rd, but Joe does have a linguistic glitch that has figuratively driven me crazy at times, his constant use and misuse of the word 'literally.' (Full disclosure: I spent part of my early working years copyediting and checking the copyediting of books and I have a number of grammatical pet peeves, of which this is only one.)
First some video examples of Joe using his favorite word:
Now here is the perfect lesson in a single sentence to help Joe remember the difference, based on the largest events currently dominating the news: I don't literally want to see Trump buried because of COVID-19, but I figuratively want to see Trump buried under the largest landslide in American history.
And will we only find out the details years after this November's election?
One of the most shocking conversations I had in the days after the election of November 2016 took place over a lunch with two African-American co-workers, one male and one female, both in their forties. I spoke (ranted?) about my horror of the new White House resident planning to move in on January 20, 2017, and both of them told me that they had not voted, even though they were registered and had voted in 2008 and 2012. When I asked why, the short answer was that "Hillary Clinton would be just as bad as Trump" and "her emails" were somehow proof that she was just as dishonest as Trump. Neither one of them was a heavy consumer of television news or a reader of the New York Times (our local paper), but they were both watchers of popular entertainment (including the Apprentice shows) and active on social media. As more and more has come out about targeted Russian propaganda aimed at American Blacks through Facebook (as addressed in the following 2019 video from Senator Kamala Harris), I have to believe that some of their attitudes about Hillary came from that blizzard of lies, even though we were not living in one of the swing states that Trump's Campaign Manager Manafort had told the Russians to target.
Today’s bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia confirms what I talked about back in August 2018: Russians targeted Black voters and attempted to suppress Black voter turnout. pic.twitter.com/8tjDdy0t4o
With only 41 days until the election, what lies are currently being told to Black voters (and other key groups) about vice-presidential candidate @KamalaHarris in targeted social-media posts? What lies are being told about @JoeBiden to suppress voter turnout in 2020?
Are the current California (and Oregon and Washington) wildfires due to exploding trees and leaves?
Or are they being worsened by a climate arsonist in the White House?
POLL: Which is a more likely root cause of the record-setting wildfires currently spreading across all the western United States? The #ClimateChange addressed in @JoeBiden's speech today or the #ExplodingTrees that you-know-who talked about?
— True Blue Liberal - #BidenHarris2020 (@TrueBlueLiberal) September 14, 2020
POLL: When the White House Correspondents' Dinner reconvenes next year with a president who has a sense of humor, who should provide the comedy entertainment, @RandyRainbow, @sarahcpr, or someone else?
Please vote in the following poll in the next three days. If you thought someone other than Harris, Warren, Castro, or Biden won the two nights of debates on that crowded stage, please tell us why in the comments here and on Twitter.
POLL: Who was the biggest winner of the last two nights of debates? Sorry, Twitter only allows four spaces, so include your winner in the comments if s/he is not in the choices below.
— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) June 28, 2019
Following the rules of The Kristol Oracle, his confirmation that Joe Biden was going to announce his presidential candidacy today was exactly the opposite; it was advance warning that Joe would be leaving the establishment-Democrat field free for Hillary Clinton to play in by herself.
Since @BillKristol is demonstrably wrong about everything, Hillary can breathe a sigh of relief about any Biden bid. https://t.co/lxrhicMlDo
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
--The Proverbs never appear in one place in Gravity's Rainbow, so these are collected from pages 237, 241, 251, 262,and 292
If I hear that he has started quoting Proverb 1, I'll turn TrueBlueLiberal.Org into a full-time dedicated Ready For Joe 2016 website.
Did you get dressed in the dark? Or in the bathroom of the bar around the corner?
If either President Obama or Vice President Biden had arrived at tonight's State of the Union speech without the mandatory Stars'n'Stripes jewelry on the lapels of their dark suits, the Right would be screaming with outrage and asking for longer form birth certificates to prove our President wasn't actually born in Kenya.
But a right-winger like Speaker John Boehner can appear with no patriotic hardware on his lapel because no one on the Left gives a fuck. But I figured I'd post this picture from a few minutes ago and mention it anyway, just because of the hypocrisy of the thing.
[I know this seems out of order between Parts One and Three, but this Part Two of my Joe Biden For Vice President campaign was originally posted on May 27th. It wasn't there when I wanted to look at it today after getting my text message from Barack. This afternoon (August 23) Barack and Joe will be making their first joint appearance as running mates!]
Bob Herbert has a great column in today's New York Times, "Roads, High and Low," which begins with these words:
"On Friday morning, Joe Biden gave us an example of a leading national politician exhibiting decency and class. Later in the day, Hillary Clinton gave us an example of something else."
No, Joe Biden wasn't again pointing out the "bullshit" and "marlarkey" underlying the President's latest utterance (at least not in those exact terms), but he was continuing to stay on the attack against the Bush/McCain foreign policy: "The idea that they are competent to continue to conduct our foreign policy, to make us more secure and make Israel secure, is preposterous. ... Every single thing they’ve touched has been a near-disaster." These statements, coming from the Democratic Senator with the most universally-recognized foreign policy credentials will carry even more weight if he is on the ticket in the fall. Picking the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his ticket will also reinforce Barack Obama's "Team of Rivals" theme of picking the best and picking (where appropriate) his adversaries for the nomination (John Edwards for Attorney General, anyone?). Picking Biden will also address the "experience" question at least as well as Richard "Dick" Cheney's selection answered the question about young Doubleyou's lack of "gravitas" in 2000. Biden not only has 28 years more service in the Senate than the Junior Senator from New York who is constantly of speaking of her experience, but he has 14 more years in the Senate than the presumptive Republican nominee (even though Joe Biden is 6 years younger than McCain, and only 5 years older than Clinton).
Biden may not be the best choice for all the crass ticket-balancing political reasons that have given us such great nominees as Dan Quayle and Joe Lieberman in recent years, but he's definitely worth some serious consideration (and, for what it's worth, he's my front runner).
Evading national security, says Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), would be a disastrous mistake. "The only way we lose this election is not to engage this issue head-on," Biden said during an interview in his Capitol office the day after Obama clinched the nomination. Democrats, Biden said, should be "proactive" and not "play defense on foreign affairs" because "the case against McCain and Bush on national security is so overwhelming. . . . It should be an essential part of the case for the Democratic nominee."
I visited with Biden because he should be at the top of any list of vice presidential picks for Obama. Why Biden? In part because of where he took our discussion: Few Democrats know more about foreign policy, and few would so relish the fight against McCain on international affairs. Few are better placed to argue that withdrawal from Iraq will strengthen rather than weaken the United States.
The worst thing in a running mate is the fear of muddying his or her image in political combat. Biden would be a happy warrior.
According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!
