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presidential primary
If Biden Runs in 2024, Who—If Anyone—Will Represent Progressives?
For the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party in 2024, representing the status quo invites cascading disasters
Jan 05, 2023
With 2023 underway, Democrats in office are still dodging the key fact that most of their party’s voters don’t want President Biden to run for re-election. Among prominent Democratic politicians, deference is routine while genuine enthusiasm is sparse. Many of the endorsements sound rote. Late last month, retiring senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont came up with this gem: “I want him to do whatever he wants. If he does, I’ll support him.”
Joe Biden keeps saying he intends to be the Democratic nominee in 2024. Whether he will be is an open question—and progressives should strive to answer it with a firm No. The next presidential election will be exceedingly grim if all the Democratic Party can offer as an alternative to the neofascist Republican Party is an incumbent who has so often served corporate power and consistently serves the military-industrial complex.
The Biden administration has taken some significant antitrust steps to limit rampant monopolization. But overall realities are continuing to widen vast economic inequalities that are grist for the spinning mill of pseudo-populist GOP demagogues. Meanwhile, President Biden rarely conveys a sense of urgency or fervent discontent with present-day social conditions. Instead, he routinely comes off as “status-quo Joe.”
For the future well-being of so many millions of people, and for the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party in 2024, representing the status quo invites cascading disasters. A few months ago, Bernie Sanders summed up this way: “The most important economic and political issues facing this country are the extraordinary levels of income and wealth inequality, the rapidly growing concentration of ownership, the long-term decline of the American middle class and the evolution of this country into oligarchy.”
Interviewed days ago, Sanders said: “It pains me very, very much that we’re seeing more and more working-class people voting Republican. Politically, that is a disaster, and Democrats have to recognize that serious problem and address it.”
But President Biden doesn’t seem to recognize the serious problem, and he fails to address it.
During the last two years, domestic policy possibilities have been curbed by Biden’s frequent and notable refusals to use the power of the presidency for progress. He did not issue many of the potential executive orders that could have moved the country forward despite Senate logjams. At the same time, “bully pulpit” advocacy for workers’ rights, voter rights, economic justice, climate action and much more has been muted or nonexistent.
Biden seems unable or unwilling to articulate a social-justice approach to such issues. As for the continuing upward spike in Pentagon largesse while giving human needs short shrift, Biden was full of praise for the record-breaking, beyond-bloated $858 billion military spending bill that he signed in late December.
While corporate media’s reporters and pundits are much more inclined to critique his age than his policies, what makes Biden most problematic for so many voters is his antiquated political approach. Running for a second term would inevitably cast Biden as a defender of current conditions—in an era when personifying current conditions is a heavy albatross that weighs against electoral success.
A Hart Research poll of registered voters in November found that only 21 percent said the country was “headed in the right direction” while 72 percent said it was “off on the wrong track.” As the preeminent symbol of the way things are, Biden is all set to be a vulnerable standard-bearer in a country where nearly three-quarters of the electorate say they don’t like the nation’s current path.
But for now anyway, no progressive Democrat in Congress is willing to get into major trouble with the Biden White House by saying he shouldn’t run, let alone by indicating a willingness to challenge him in the early 2024 primaries. Meanwhile, one recent poll after another showed that nearly 60 percent of Democrats don’t want Biden to run again. A New York Times poll last summer found that a stunning 94 percent of Democrats under 30 years old would prefer a different nominee.
Although leaning favorably toward Biden overall, mass-media coverage has occasionally supplied the kind of candor that Democratic officeholders have refused to provide on the record. “The party’s relief over holding the Senate and minimizing House losses in the midterms has gradually given way to collective angst about what it means if Biden runs again,” NBC News reported days before Christmas.
Conformist support from elected Democrats for another Biden campaign reflects a shortage of authentic representation on Capitol Hill. The gap is gaping, for instance, between leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the constituency—the progressive base—they claim to represent. In late November, CPC chair Pramila Jayapal highlighted the gap when she went out of her way to proclaim that “I believe he should run for another term and finish this agenda we laid out.”
Is such leadership representing progressives to the establishment or the other way around?Keep ReadingShow Less
'New Hampshire Rebellion' Kicks Off Fight Against Money in Politics
Democracy advocates trek across state for campaign finance reform
Jan 11, 2014
Staging what they have dubbed "the New Hampshire Rebellion," a group lead by Harvard intellectual and activist Lawrence Lessig set out for a 185 mile journey across the "live free or die" state on Saturday, calling attention to what they see as one of the most important issues in U.S. politics today--the dire need for campaign finance reform.
"On Saturday, we begin a walk across the state of New Hampshire, to launch a campaign to bring about an end to the system of corruption that we believe infects DC. This is the New Hampshire Rebellion," states Lessig in a recent op-ed.
The march will pay homage to a similar attempt by famed activist Dorris Haddock, or "Granny D," who, fifteen years ago at the age of 88, marched across the United States from Los Angeles to Washington DC with a sign reading "Campaign Finance Reform" across her chest.
"Haddock is credited with helping to galvanize public will around the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act," Al Jazeera America reports, "which was signed into law in 2002." However, two months after Haddock passed away at the age of 100, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of big donors, and the politicians who use them, in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, "which undid many of the limits put in place on campaign finance and heralded a new era in unprecedented spending by special interests and corporations."
Lessig said he expects over 100 people to join him along the way as they stop in over a dozen towns over the course of two weeks. The group will hold events and public discussions centered around the issues of big money in politics--and how to cleanse such influence from the democratic process.
Citing the importance of New Hampshire in U.S. presidential elections, being the site of the first presidential primary, the goal of the walk will be to convince voters to pressure candidates on the issue of campaign finance reform.
"Along the way, we will recruit everyone we can to do one thing: We want them to ask every presidential candidate at every event between now and January 2016, this one question: 'How will YOU end the system of corruption in DC?'" Lessig writes.
Lessig continues:
A system of corruption, not particular crimes. Our focus is not Rod Blagojevich; it is the system of campaign funding in which fundraising is key, and the funders represent the tiniest fraction of the 1%. That system, we believe, corrupts this democracy. (We, and 71% of Americans according to a recent poll.) And until that system changes, no sensible reform on the right or the left is possible. Politicians may continue to play this fundraising game. We believe that New Hampshire can change it.
As this question gets asked, we will record the responses. Literally. And post them. And through allied campaigns, we will put pressure on the candidates to surface this issue -- and if we're lucky -- make it central to their campaigns.
The walk begins in Dixville Notch, NH, the place the first 2016 presidential ballots will be cast and will end in Nashua, NH, on the day Granny D was born.
The activists embark Saturday January 11th, exactly one year after the the suicide of internet activist Aaron Swartz, a close friend and colleague of Lessig's.
"I wanted to find a way to mark this day," Lessig writes. "I wanted to feel it, as physically painful as it was emotionally painful one year ago, and every moment since. So I am marking it with the cause that he convinced me to take up seven years ago and which I am certain he wanted to make his legacy too."
Lessig is asking anyone who can to join the walk and sign an online petition to pressure candidates to take on the issue.
Lessig talks about the New Hampshire Rebellion:
Lawrence Lessig talks about the New Hampshire Rebellion (Animated)Prof. Lawrence Lessig, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and founder of the Rootstrikers, ...
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