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John Fetterman says he'll 'never understand' progressives who refuse to support Joe Biden
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Paying attention to those crucial local elections: Biden and the Democratic Party leadership continually campaigned against progressive candidates in their primaries and publicly and intentionally insist on how important it is to them for the Republican Party to be strong.
So for many who don't support Biden it is about the Democratic Party effort to preserve the conservative coalition with the Manchin-Sinema corporate landscape.
For some it appears Biden and the Democratic Party's core leadership would sooner lose to Republicans than support, let alone champion, the progressive movement. And so they don't feel the need or compulsion to support Biden as a result.
And going further back in time some remember Obama's supermajority and trifecta amounting to very little progressive action whatsoever. So the idea of voting harder i hope of a better majority often rings hollow.
These are factors I would say are being weighed when judging whether Biden deserves support even before a primary.
Yeah, but that Obama super majority in the Senate lasted one year and it was a different time, when Democratic voters and the Democratic party was less liberal than it is now. Hell, compare Biden in his 2008 presidential campaign to his 2020 one. And just look at how much filibuster rules have changed since then.
Anyways, my main point is that you have to remind Biden and Manchin that they need you and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the coalition too and that they're not going to get much done (like immigration reform) with the two "moderate" Republican senators left in the Senate (Collins and Murkowski).
And yeah, sure Biden and Pelosi and all of them (the Democratic Party apparatus) weighed against the progressive candidates in the primaries and still are. It's your job to beat them and show that the bulk of our 50%+1 coalition is behind the progressive rather than the moderate. It means fundraising to fight the corporate donors and volunteering for these campaigns, going from door to door to get people to turn out and vote for the progressive candidate in the primary.
And the reality is that without Manchin, we'd have never gotten KBJ, judicial and executive appointments, the provisions in the infrastructure bill and the inflation reduction act. Did Manchin-Sinema fuck us? Yeah, they did. We could have prevented the rise in childhood poverty we're seeing now if it weren't for those two. People would be a lot more excited for Biden and the Democrats. But it's our job to get a majority that doesn't need those two or those of their ilk in the system we have (and yes, change the system along the way, so that we can have things like popular referendum, etc.).
Those two? Shit, the senate vote in the last Congress to extend the child tax credit was 1-97. Warren didn't vote as a progressive leaving Bernie the lone vote in support. And that was the number one factor in reducing the problem.
It can be hard to maintain support for a one-sided coalition for too long. Eventually people start to break. Their support for Biden becomes just like Biden's support for his own public option plan: disappearing.