Joe Biden’s Bet That 2016 Didn’t Change Everything

The Atlantic ^ | May 19, 2019 | Edward-Isaac Dovere

[2ndDivisionVet]

PHILADELPHIA—If the new rules of politics post-2016 were to hold up, the official launch rally Joe Biden held here on Saturday would mean that he is in trouble: The crowd wasn’t huge, was largely white and older, and, for the most part, only really got into it when he mentioned Barack Obama or Donald Trump.

Yet Biden’s high-and-getting-higher poll numbers, the early fundraising success that has surprised even his own aides, and the enthusiastic responses I heard from supporters who came out on a hot afternoon to see him don’t show a candidate in much trouble at all. Biden’s campaign is a bet: that in the four years since Trump launched his campaign, the country hasn’t changed, the Democratic Party hasn’t changed, and politics hasn’t changed.

If any of Biden’s competitors believed the same thing, they wouldn’t be planning killer schedules in Iowa, New Hampshire, and beyond, giving up vacations and time with their family to meet with donors and activists and to have reporters constantly shove microphones in their face. Trump and Bernie Sanders were the breakout candidates of the last presidential election, but unlike most of the other people running, Biden and his aides haven’t adjusted to that reality—because they don’t accept that it is reality.

Biden’s message is very Trump-aware: “If you’d asked me a few years ago if our democracy was at stake, I would have smiled and laughed a little bit,” the former vice president said on Saturday. “No more: The threat to this nation, to our democracy, is real, it’s clear, and it’s present.”

[Liz]

Maybe joe can take a trip to "hum city" the place where his son Hunter got his colon stimulated.......
before the (cough) "colonic specialist" did some emergency work on his penis.

[a fool in paradise]

Maybe Big Al Gore Junior will return to the DNC convention. He is still married to Tipper by the way.

[ManHunter]

Joe Biden addresses an enthusiastic crowd of almost 200 supporters...

[redangus]

Actually over the course of his career he has been right on a lot of things. The problem is, being a familial democrat, i.e., born into it, he has often said something smart and then voted and supported the stupid party line. He’s not an ideological leftist, he is a Roosevelt democrat. Eastern, ethnic, Catholic old line politician. My dad was an Irish, Boston bred, Catholic who voted democrat his whole life. He was pro life, believed in a strong defense, supported the war in Viet Nam, didn’t like all those ‘foreigners’ coming into the country and was a strong law and order guy, but he voted democrat because that’s what Irish Catholics did and besides the GOP was the party of the oligarchs.

[Colonelbuzzsaw]

Creepy-Sleepy Joe is like General Sherman when he said on his march through Georgia: We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it!