I Don't Like Mike

Former New York City mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg
(Reuters/Brian Snyder via Business Insider)

The Democratic primary didn't really need any late entries given the size of the field, but it recently got one, anyway: billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. But, you might ask, why am I writing about a long-shot candidate polling at four percent nationally? I certainly haven't written an entire post on every candidate in the race; what makes Bloomberg special? A few things, in my opinion. For one thing, there's the fact that he's already using his (very substantial) financial resources to promote his candidacy aggressively; for another, there are the potential conflicts of interest that those same financial resources create with regards to the media's coverage of his candidacy; and there's the fact that Bloomberg is a figure with a relatively high profile nationally who has been talked about as a potential presidential candidate for years. But, more than any of that, there is one other reason: that in a Democratic primary field full of lousy candidates, he is far and away the worst candidate, and the fact that he could even think to seek the Democratic nomination for president is an absolutely staggering illustration of the hubris that can come with massive amounts of wealth.

It's almost hard to know where to start. But I suppose we might as well start from the (chronological) beginning. Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City on January 1, 2002, just weeks after the September 11 attacks. He is sure to endlessly tout his "successful" tenure as mayor of the nation's most populous city now that he is running for president; in fact, his tenure was shameful and indefensible in many respects. In the aftermath of 9/11, the NYPD began heavy surveillance targeting the city's Muslim population. According to a lawsuit by the ACLU (among others), the city "mapped more than two hundred and fifty mosques in and near New York State" and "monitored sermons, documented conversations, and compiled lists of people at religious services and meetings...all without prior evidence of wrongdoing," to quote from the New Yorker's article about the surveillance, along with posting video cameras to spy on congregants and collect license plate numbers at some of the fifty-three "mosques of concern" the police had identified.

The surveillance also extended to Muslim student groups. Not only did the police department monitor the websites of such groups at numerous universities, an undercover officer even went with a group of Muslim students from the City College of New York on a whitewater rafting trip, later listing the names of the other attendees in a report, as well as their conversation topics and the number of times they prayed. Turning to the New Yorker article again:

One man, who said that he had been paid up to $1,500 a month to work as a police informant, declared in a sworn statement that he had provided the police with phone numbers from a sign-up sheet listing people who attended Islamic instruction classes, and had been told to spy on a lecture at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, even though the police did not believe the Muslim student group there was doing anything wrong. The man, Shamiur Rahman, also said that he was told to use a strategy called "create and capture[.]"

"I was to pretend to be a devout Muslim and start an inflammatory conversation about jihad or terrorism and then capture the response to send to the NYPD," he said in a legal filing, later adding: "I never saw anyone I spied on do anything illegal, not even littering."

Even as universities expressed concerns over this surveillance, Bloomberg strongly defended it. That defense fits perfectly with his similar defense of another bigoted NYPD policy: stop and frisk, which granted officers broad authority to detain suspected criminals, which, in turn, they used to routinely stop and frisk (hence the name) groups of black and Latino men. The overwhelmingly majority of those stopped and frisked were, unsurprisingly, not guilty of anything. According to data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe, 90% of those the policy impacted were people of color. In 2013, when a federal judge found that stop and frisk had "intentionally and systematically violated the civil rights of tens of thousands of people," Bloomberg responded by saying the ruling was a "dangerous decision made by a judge who I think does not understand how policing works and what is compliant with the US Constitution." While Bloomberg has now issued a transparently politically motivated apology for his support of this policy, he defended it as recently as earlier this year, and his apology has rightly been dismissed by activists.

But really, who could be surprised that Bloomberg would grant carte blanche to the police to tread all over the rights of minority groups? After all, from 2001 to 2007—all of his first term as mayor and part of his second—he was a Republican. And by no means a nominal one at that: beginning in 2002, he began a successful bid to have the 2004 Republican National Convention hosted in New York City. When he addressed that convention, he made sure to vocally throw his support behind incumbent president George W. Bush, praising him "for leading the global war on terrorism."

Not every New Yorker was as delighted as Bloomberg to be hosting the RNC in their predominantly liberal city. But Bloomberg wasn't about to let that get in his way. Starting a year before the convention, the NYPD conducted elaborate surveillance on potential protestors, even when they had no apparent intention to commit a crime (sensing a pattern here yet?). When (overwhelming peaceful) protests did take place against the convention, police arrested over 1,800 and detained hundreds of protestors in unsanitary conditions, some for more than two days. After Bloomberg had been succeeded as mayor by Bill de Blasio, the city announced an $18 million settlement with protestors who had sued because of their mistreatment at the hands of the police. Bloomberg had consistently stood by the NYPD's treatment of the protestors, just as he did with stop and frisk and surveillance of Muslims.

Hostility to (generally liberal or left-wing) protests is sort of a through line of Bloomberg's tenure as mayor, in fact, from his 2003 refusal to grant a permit for a march protesting the illegal US-UK invasion of Iraq (which, incidentally, Bloomberg supported) to his decision to break up the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Zuccotti Park with heavily armed police—a decision, one suspects, that might have had to do with the fact that Bloomberg himself is a former investment banker who felt OWS was too hostile toward one of New York's key industries.

Not at all shockingly, the former investment banker mayor was no great ally of the poor or working class of New York City, either. While Bloomberg's supporters praise him for rebuilding New York and restoring its prosperity, his record on inequality is unimpressive to say the least. New York's public housing system languished under Bloomberg, who left it badly underfunded. The city even stopped checking for lead paint in its public housing apartments, putting tens of thousands of children at risk. In 2011, the city council sued Bloomberg's administration over its new restrictions on who was eligible for city homeless shelters; in 2013, it was forced to override Bloomberg's veto in order to pass a paid sick leave law. When a "living wage" proposal that would have ensured those working on projects funded by one million dollars or more in public subsidies would be paid at least $11.50 an hour (or $10 plus benefits) came across Bloomberg's desk in 2012, he also vetoed it and compared it to a Soviet-style "managed economy." While New York may have succeeded at keeping its poverty rate relatively steady during Bloomberg's tenure (at a time when it was on the rise nationally), 45.9% of the city's residents were still in or near poverty in 2013, the last year of Bloomberg's tenure—and his record plainly shows he was not overly concerned with the well-being of New Yorkers lower down on the economic ladder.

It should also be emphasized that, despite his reputation as some sort of liberal, Bloomberg continued to support Republicans for years after he himself left the GOP. In 2012, he endorsed Scott Brown over Elizabeth Warren in the election for senator from Massachusetts, saying of Warren, "You can question, in my mind, whether she’s God’s gift to regulation, close the banks and get rid of corporate profits, and we’d all bring socialism back, or the USSR." In 2014, he donated a quarter of a million dollars to a Super PAC supporting the completely odious Senator Lindsey Graham. In 2016, he endorsed Republican Senator Pat Toomey over his Democratic opponent; Toomey, who won reelection, went on to vote in line with Donald Trump's wishes 88% of the time, per FiveThirtyEight, including votes for all but one of Trump's cabinet nominations, and, of course, both of his Supreme Court picks. Also in 2016, Bloomberg held a fundraiser for Representative Peter King, an extreme Islamophobe who once baselessly claimed that "80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists" and that "[t]his is an enemy living amongst us," who held a series of McCarthyite hearings to reveal the supposedly pervasive radicalization in American Muslim communities, and who urged Trump to expand surveillance of Muslims as well as heartily endorsing the latter's anti-Muslim travel ban. In 2018, Everytown for Gun Safety, a Bloomberg-founded (and -funded) pro-gun control organization, threw its support behind Republican Brian Fitzpatrick, a congressman from Pennsylvania who, despite his moderate image, voted in favor of the horrific Republican tax plan passed in 2017. The move caused a mass exodus from the group by local activists, who argued Fitzpatrick's Democratic opponent had a stronger gun control platform.

Even when it comes to the issues that Bloomberg's defenders praise him for, his record is often far more mixed than they admit. Bloomberg's environmental advocacy and philanthropy have earned him widespread plaudits, as well as a position at the United Nations as United States Special Envoy for Climate Action. But, while Bloomberg has taken a strong stance against the use of coal, he has been far more forgiving toward other fossil fuels. He has strongly supported fracking, an environmentally destructive technique for the extraction of natural gas, criticizing a statewide fracking ban in New York in 2015. In Climate of Hope, a book he co-authored with a former head of the Sierra Club, he wrote that "it makes sense to frack." In the same book, he notes that he isn't opposed to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline; just as a sidenote one of the already-existing pipelines in the Keystone system recently spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the surrounding North Dakota wetlands.

One of the major environmental organizations that has benefited from Bloomberg's largesse—and now readily goes to bat for him—is the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). The EDF, like Bloomberg, has enthusiastically promoted natural gas as a cleaner replacement for coal, and has received generous support from such noted environmentalists as the Walton family and Goldman Sachs. In 2013, about 70 other environmental groups publicly rebuked the EDF after it became a founding member of the Center for Sustainable Shale Development, along with oil companies like Chevron and Shell. Truly the sort of environmental advocacy group a former investment banker could get behind.

In her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism v. The Climate, author and activist Naomi Klein elaborates further on Bloomberg's environmental hypocrisy:

[W]hile talking a good game about carbon bubbles and stranded assets, Bloomberg has made no discernible attempt to manage his own vast wealth in a manner that reflects these concerns. In fact, he helped set up Willett Advisors, a firm specialising in oil and gas assets, for both his personal and philanthropic holdings. Those gas assets may well have risen in value as a result of his environmental giving – what with, for example, EDF championing natural gas as a replacement for coal. Perhaps there is no connection between his philanthropic priorities and his decision to entrust his fortune to the oil and gas sector. But these investment choices raise uncomfortable questions about his status as a climate hero, as well as his 2014 appointment as a UN special envoy for cities and climate change (questions Bloomberg has not answered, despite my repeated requests).

As for gun control and social issues—two other areas that Bloomberg and his defenders cite to appeal to liberals—it should be enough to briefly return to Bloomberg's support for Republicans. Peter King, for instance, earned a whopping score of three (out of 100) from the pro-LGBT+ rights Human Rights Campaign for his voting record in the 115th Congress and a 0% rating from the pro-choice NARAL. For 2014, the same year in which Bloomberg donated to his Super PAC, Lindsey Graham received an A- rating from the fanatically anti-gun control National Rifle Association. It is a polite understatement to say that with "friends" like Michael Bloomberg, the environment, LGBT+ people, victims of gun violence, and those in need of reproductive healthcare do not need enemies.

Bloomberg, as much as (or perhaps more than) Donald Trump, is an exemplary specimen of America's parasitic and corrupt elite: an obscenely wealthy businessman with undue (and frequently damaging) influence on politics and society, supposedly redeemed by often-dubious acts philanthropy that have mysteriously done little to keep his net worth from increasing over the years. What makes him perhaps more unusual is that he has actually decided to cut out the middleman (the politicians that plutocrats like him use their wealth to influence) and pursue his own career in politics, though this may have seemed more exceptional in the era before the 2016 election.

Bloomberg's bid for the Democratic nomination is almost certainly doomed to failure for a number of reasons, ranging from his poor favorability numbers to his ridiculous plan to skip the early states altogether. Perhaps he plans to use it as a springboard for an independent bid, though the logistics for this appear somewhat dubious. But his relevance goes beyond his own political future, or even his ability to shape the debate in this primary campaign with the help of his vast fortune. In many ways, Bloomberg represents a prototype for what liberalism might look like before long, if the current left-wing insurgency is defeated by the Democratic Party establishment: vocally supportive of "tolerance" and "pluralism" while embracing and defending systemic racism; socially liberal but disturbingly authoritarian; and undisguisedly pro-Wall Street and divorced from any concern about the poor or working class. The newfound love many liberals have for George W. Bush and #Resistance neocons like Bill Kristol and David Frum—and the new hawkishness they display towards Russia—bodes well for Bloomberg's brand of militaristic and pro-police, but outwardly "woke," centrism.

Indeed, one doesn't have to look far within the Democratic Party to find prominent figures with remarkable similarities to Bloomberg, from his fellow former big city mayor Rahm Emanuel, who sucked up to the rich while turning his back on the public sector and sat on evidence of a police murder until forced to release it by a judge, to the governor of Bloomberg's own state, Andrew Cuomo, whose outspoken social liberalism has helped distract from his role in giving the Republicans a working majority in the State Senate.  The next few decades, which will likely be marked by increasing economic inequality, social alienation and potentially influxes of climate refugees, will probably sharpen the conflicts that already exist in society and tend to create greater unrest than we've seen already. This means that the Democratic Party will be forced to make a choice of whose side they're on: the various underprivileged groups who will be the source of much of the unrest, or the established powers in society that will want order restored, violently if necessary. It's not much of a secret which side the Democratic Party's donors, and its leadership, will prefer—and from their standpoint, a Bloombergite form of socially liberal authoritarianism will make good sense. An appeal to the relatively comfortable professional-managerial class in the face of social disquiet, mixed with an emphasis on the rights of LGBT+ people (which, while undeniably important, also conveniently pose no threat to the socioeconomic elite) is perhaps the best way to keep the Democratic Party electorally viable, if it refuses to embrace economic populism.

Bloomberg's presidential bid may appear quixotic and doomed, and it almost certainly is. But his legacy as a politician could remain painfully relevant for many years to come, whether we like it or not.

Why I Don't Miss Obama

Former president Obama at a recent appearance (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune via ChicagoTribune.com)

Nostalgia for Barack Obama's presidency is widespread, and it is powerful. It may be just about the only thing propelling the candidacy of his vice president, Joe Biden—who is still, somehow, leading in most national polling for the 2020 Democratic primary. And a savvy internet user does not have to look far to find a barrage of memes from liberal Facebook pages and the like, reminiscing about the days when we had an intelligent, cool, smart, compassionate, and just flat-out "real" president. It's understandable enough when one looks at Donald Trump—a grotesque, inarticulate lump of flesh—and compares him to his undeniably charismatic (and certainly more competent) predecessor. Indeed, when one looks at the sheer cruelty, corruption and stupidity of the Trump administration, who (aside from the hooting chuds that still support Big Don) could not feel nostalgic for the Obama years?

Me. I can't say I've found myself feeling nostalgic for the Obama era much at all over the past couple years, and that's in spite of the fact that I had thoroughly expected to miss him. In February 2017, I wrote:

I've known for a while I would miss Obama, despite the many, many problems with his presidency. I knew it as soon as it was clear our candidates in 2016 were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton--on the one hand a spectacularly insincere party hack whose idea of a fun time was blowing other countries to smithereens, on the other some sort of roaring, incoherent fascist gorilla that only understood brute force and that "If it won't salute, stomp it" (to borrow Hunter S. Thompson's useful description of the Hammerhead Ethic that I discussed in my last post). Both were worse than Obama in the way they were likely to govern, and neither could quite manage to come off as a real human being, as he could. Whenever she tried, Clinton came off like the worst actor in some made-for-TV movie from twenty years ago, and Trump never pretended to be anything but a living bulldozer, bent only on destroying whatever was in his way, with no qualms about breaking bones or drawing blood. With the American Nightmare that is the Trump administration now going at full force, I can only imagine I'll find myself missing Obama more each day.

So what happened? Did I change my mind about Donald Trump? No, I still basically agree with the description I gave in that excerpt. Did my opinion of Obama worsen? Not really—in the very blog post that paragraph comes from I was strongly critical of him, and those criticisms still stand, but I wouldn't say I've become more critical than I was at the time. What I failed to take into account was a sort of political phenomenon that, at the time, I'd become numb to, but whose absence is particularly striking now that said phenomenon has become impossible. Some might call it complacency, but I'm not sure even that quite covers it. In short it's that liberals, by and large, seemed completely uninterested in acknowledging the failures and outrages of the Obama administration as they happened in real time.

Let's start with immigration policy. There has been widespread, and righteous, outrage—particularly from liberals—about the sheer cruelty of Donald Trump's treatment of migrants at the border, and needless deportations of undocumented immigrants who pose no threat to those around them. But where was that outrage under Obama? There are differences between the immigration policies of the two administrations, certainly, but there was plenty to be angry about before Trump even declared his candidacy for president. In 2014, Obama introduced a policy called "felons, not families," that supposedly emphasized deporting the former group over the latter. But according to the Marshall Project, over 80% of those deported under this policy had no convictions for violent or potentially violent crimes—and over 40% had no criminal convictions at all. Many of the people deported had children with US citizenship.

Despite the attempts of Obama and his supporters to claim that his administration focused on deporting dangerous criminals, there's no shortage of tales of unjust deportation during the Obama years. Take, for instance, Carmen Ortega, a 62-year-old grandmother with Alzheimer's who was ordered deported for possession of a controlled substance. Ultimately, the Obama administration deported around three million people. Over the course of his first few years in office, Trump actually deported fewer people than Obama during the same period of his presidency; the difference remains even if we only consider non-criminal immigrants deported.

And inhumane treatment of detainees didn't start with Trump, either. Human Rights Watch condemned the "[i]ndefinite detention of asylum-seeking mothers and their children" under Obama, noting that it took a "severe psychological toll." To take just one example from its report:

After more than eight months in detention, Melida (her real name), who is afraid to go back to Guatemala after gang members murdered her sister-in-law, has been diagnosed in detention with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), adjustment disorder with anxiety, and a major depressive episode. Her 4-year-old daughter, Estrella, has spent nearly 20 percent of her life behind bars and during that time was hospitalized for acute bronchitis and also suffered from acute pharyngitis, ear aches, fevers, diarrhea, and vomiting. 

So where was the outrage from all the liberals who are now (again, rightfully) horrified at Trump's grotesque treatment of immigrants? Make whatever excuses for Obama himself you want, his administration's record was plainly atrocious in this respect—but I didn't hear many liberals raising their voices about it at the time.

Or how about how Trump's disgusting subservience to Saudi Arabia? That's drawn criticism from liberals, to be certain. But how much better was Obama on that front? Before Trump was there to enable the kingdom's merciless, murderous assault on Yemen, Obama was doing the same. By the final months of Obama's presidency, coalition airstrikes had killed thousands of Yemeni civilians, the Saudis stood accused of violating international law, and the Obama administration had approved over $100 billion in arm sales to Saudi Arabia as well as providing them with crucial military assistance. But I don't remember hearing too many liberals speaking out about it.

Liberals are right, too, to be disturbed by Trump's authoritarian tendencies—but what about Obama's? When it came to light that the dystopian NSA surveillance programs begun under George W. Bush had been not just preserved, but expanded under Obama, there was some outrage from progressives, to be sure. But many liberals seemed more inclined to defend Obama than to condemn him, despite the obvious threat to any notion of privacy or civil liberties the programs posed (and continue to pose under Trump). A 2013 Pew poll found that Democrats had completely reversed their opposition to NSA surveillance under George W. Bush and now supported it by a nearly two-to-one margin.

Trump's liberal critics take him to task for his contempt toward the idea of a free press, but where were they when Obama was busy launching his own assault on the first amendment? James Risen, then a reporter for the New York Times, called Obama "the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation," and not without good reason. Risen himself was threatened with jail time because he refused to violate a basic tenet of journalism and reveal one of his sources to the government. The Obama administration prosecuted more leakers of classified information under the Espionage Act than every previous president combined. The Department of Justice under Eric Holder spied on Associated Press reporters, seizing phone records for their work and personal phone lines as well as the general phone lines for several AP bureaus in what the news agency termed a "serious interference with AP's constitutional rights to gather and report the news." It also named Fox News reporter James Rosen as "at the very least, either...an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator" in an espionage case because he reported on a classified government report leaked to him by a State Department security adviser. The Obama administration had a clear agenda: to intimidate potential whistleblowers and other leakers out of revealing classified information, and in the process to go after the journalists who relied on and protected them. The administration faced sharp criticism from mainstream reporters and news agencies for this behavior, but it mattered little to Obama's liberal admirers.

Liberals are aghast at Trump's anti-Muslim travel ban and his Islamophobia, but here, too, they reveal their selective blindness. Obama radically escalated the use of drone strikes, using unmanned aerial vehicles to repeatedly drop bombs on the Muslim-majority countries of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen—countries the US was not at war with—killing hundreds of civilians. His administration made extensive use of "signature strikes," drone strikes that targeted people who were guilty of engaging "suspicious" behavior—even when the government didn't know the identities of the people it was killing, or whether they posed a threat.  In a 2012 article about Obama's "kill list," the New York Times highlighted the uncertainty involved in this strategy:

[S]ome State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist "signature" were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees "three guys doing jumping jacks," the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.

To take just one example of the "collateral damage" of Obama's drone program: one strike was launched against a wedding procession in Yemen, killing up to 12 civilians according to Human Rights Watch. One year later, the US government had still given no public acknowledgment of the strike or its victims, but had quietly paid over $1 million in compensation. In the name of ostensibly keeping Americans safe from terrorism, the Obama administration showed that it did not believe that people from what his successor would deem "shithole countries" were entitled a presumption of innocence, a fair trial, or any sort of due process; to simply be suspected of one day intending to hurt Americans was sufficient for a summary execution. Where was the liberal outrage then?

In fact, sometimes the Obama administration believed even Americans weren't entitled to due process before they were executed. One of the people Obama placed on the "kill list" was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who had never been charged with a terrorism-related crime. He was killed by a drone strike in September 2011 along with three other people, including Samir Khan, another American citizen. When al-Awlaki's 16-year-old American-born son was killed in a separate drone strike, Obama campaign senior advisor Robert Gibbs said simply that he "should have [had] a far more responsible father[.]"

I assume you've detected the pattern here. But I'll quickly hit on a couple last points for good measure. The same liberals infuriated by Trump's obscene tax giveaway to the wealthy were often less vocal about the generous bank bailouts Obama presided over, or his administration's almost complete failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for the financial crisis they helped create. Horrified by Trump's environmental policies? You should be, but you should have also been horrified when Obama was pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that would have let major corporations sue countries over labor and environmental regulations that "unfairly" interfered with their ability to make a profit; when a draft of the environmental chapter of the deal was leaked, after years of negotiations, the executive director of the Sierra Club said that "[i]f the environment chapter is finalized as written in this leaked document, President Obama’s environmental trade record would be worse than George W. Bush’s."

The point of all this isn't that Obama was a terrible president. Compared to his predecessors (and truly terrible successor), I would say he was pretty middling in most respects. The point isn't even that you should blame him for all of the bad things done under his administration—like I said, you can make whatever excuses for him you want, and I do think that there is a sort of bureaucratic "deep state" that resists democratic accountability and control under every president. But regardless of who you blame for all the things I've mentioned, they're still bad things that should have provoked massive outrage from liberal-minded people. However much (or little) you hold Obama personally responsible for it, people needlessly suffered because of the policies and actions of his administration, and that was something that deserved attention.

But instead of being outraged about the abuses I mentioned, many liberals were more interested in heaping gratuitous praise on Obama, who they continued to hold in very high esteem. In September 2016, towards the very end his presidency, Gallup measured Obama's approval rating among liberal Democrats at 93%. Media outlets like BuzzFeed doted over Obama as if he were a celebrity rather than a president who presided over millions of deportations and hundreds of drone strikes. In early 2016, a Rasmussen Reports poll (which, granted, should be taken with a grain of salt given Rasmussen's obvious bias) found that 60% of Democrats would have given Obama a third term if they could have. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that Obama enjoyed (and still enjoys) a sort of cult of personality among many liberals. If liberals could have adored Obama personally while still vocally protesting when his administration put immigrant children in cages, then all of this hero-worship wouldn't have been so bad; but that wasn't the case. While there were, of course, left-wing and liberal critics of Obama throughout his presidency, they were generally drowned out by the liberal adulation of him on the one hand and the absolutely unhinged right-wing critics (who were much greater in number and got far more attention than their left-wing counterparts) on the other.

That is why I have no nostalgia for the Obama years. While Donald Trump is decidedly worse than Obama in just about every way imaginable, at least people are angry about it. At least we're having a discussion about our cruel immigration system, and about climate change, and about economic inequality, in a way that we weren't under Obama. And at least we now have some kind of authentically left-wing movement that's visible on a national level, represented by newly elected Representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as well as by Bernie Sanders now that he's achieved a newfound prominence. The years between Obama's reelection and the 2016 campaign were frankly the most depressing years, politically speaking, that I can remember. The years since have been at various points horrifying, infuriating, and utterly sickening, but they have always at least felt like some kind of a battle is going on, and that maybe the right side even has a shot at winning. That certainly isn't to say things are better under Trump, but it's hard to feel much nostalgia for a time before the only really encouraging political developments of recent years had even begun.

The purpose of this blog post is certainly not to shame anyone who's become an outspoken critic of Trump after being complacent under Obama. If you're speaking out (and ideally doing more) against the many, many inhumane and destructive acts of the Trump administration, that's great—but if you're prepared to return to complacency when immigrants are mistreated, the climate is endangered and the working class is shafted as long as a Democrat is back in the White House, then you're part of the problem. To return to something like the Obama years is not just inadequate; it's arguably the most tragic way the Trump era could end. It would mean that the one good thing that has come out of the disastrous presidency of Donald Trump—the complete disruption of a broken status quo, and the popular mobilization of liberals and leftists—would be totally squandered. Whether the next president is Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren or even Bernie Sanders, there will undoubtedly be failures, missteps, wrong and even immoral decisions made under their administration. Every critic of Donald Trump should be ready to subject his successor to the protest and criticism from the left that Obama saw so little of.

The Public Option Scam

So far in the Democratic primary campaign, the most common criticism of a single-payer healthcare system, or Medicare for All, seems to be that it deprives recipients of "choice." Because everyone would be put into a single national plan, critics say, those who actually like their already-existing private insurance would be unjustly stripped of the ability to stick with that plan, mercilessly "kicked  off" of it by an intrusive nanny state that would force them onto a less-preferred government plan. But they have a solution: the public option. This is a government-run plan that, unlike in the case of Medicare for All, consumers would have the option to buy into (and, perhaps, automatically be enrolled in if they lack private insurance). This way, these anti-single payer politicians claim, we could have our cake and eat it too: we would be increasing, rather than decreasing, consumer choice and offering those who want government-run healthcare a la Medicare for All the opportunity to have it. Everyone gets what they wants.

It's a superficially persuasive argument, which is perhaps why a single payer Medicare for All plan has apparently been declining in public popularity at the same time that a public option has become a more attractive choice in the eyes of the electorate. One might also fault the two main presidential contenders who support Medicare for All—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—for doing an inadequate job of rebutting this argument. After all, it appeals to both the all-American notions of freedom and personal choice on the one hand and the left/liberal desire to help the unfortunate on the other. What could be better?

The only small problem (hardly a meaningful one in political campaigns) is that the argument is fraudulent. A public option would not carry the same advantages as Medicare for All, and at the expense of letting people keep their beloved private health insurance plans (rather than cruelly forcing them onto a public plan that would have no copays or deductibles and would cover vision and dental care) would keep the American healthcare system overcomplicated, needlessly expensive, and unequal in fundamentally immoral ways.

Let's examine, for example, Pete Buttigieg's clunkily named "Medicare for All Who Want It." As his campaign website promises, "everyone will be able to opt in to an affordable, comprehensive public alternative." Note the word "affordable," i.e., not free. This already presents a contrast with Medicare for All. Under a single payer plan, getting medical care could become the equivalent of driving on a public road or visiting a public library: no need to worry about picking out a plan that will give you the coverage you need at an affordable price, just take advantage of a service that's free at point of use whenever you need it; all you need to do is pay your taxes. Not so under Medicare of All Who Want It, or public option plans in general. As under the current system, the burden would be on consumers to pick the plan—public or private—that they believe is the most affordable given their circumstances.

This is not the only difference. For instance, as Dylan Scott of Vox notes, "The government plan would cover the same essential health benefits as private plans sold under Obamacare, though the details are left vague on what patients would pay out of pocket." This detail stands in contrast to Medicare for All, which, with its lack of copays and deductibles, "almost eliminates [out-of-pocket spending] entirely."

And what of those who are unable to afford private insurance? Buttigieg's website explains as follows:

The plan will automatically enroll individuals in affordable coverage if they are eligible for it, while those eligible for subsidized coverage will have a simple enrollment option. A backstop fund will reimburse health care providers for unpaid care to patients who are uninsured. Individuals who fall through the cracks will be retroactively enrolled in the public option.

So, from the sound of it, those who do not enroll in private insurance (including those who fail to do so for financial reasons) will be "automatically enroll[ed]" in the public option, even "retroactively enrolled" should they "fall through the cracks." Nothing on the website page indicates that private insurance will be made equally as "affordable" as the public plan, meaning that some will, presumably, be forced by their own circumstances to rely on the public option; the sacrosanct ideal of choice will apply only to those who are able to afford private insurance, while those unable to do so will be automatically enrolled in the public alternative (again, going by the sound of it). Details in this regard are scant, however.

Lest I appear to be singling out only Buttigieg's plan, we should also examine another public option-based healthcare proposal. Let's also take Joe Biden's. Biden's own website is only able to promise that his plan would insure "more than an estimated 97% of Americans"—leaving millions uninsured, in other words. The poor and sick will, apparently, be awarded with the "choice" to remain uninsured, with predictable consequences: People's Policy Project Matt Bruenig estimates that, even assuming the uninsured rate does fall to approximately 3% under Biden's healthcare plan, this could still mean the preventable deaths of 125,000 people in the first ten years after the plan's implementation—deaths that could be avoided under a genuinely universal healthcare plan, such as Medicare for All.

Whatever specific, avoidable flaws the Biden and Buttigieg plans may have, the reality is that all public option plans are doomed to run into the same problems. As George Bohmfalk writes in The Charlotte Observer, a public option "will likely become the insurer of last resort to the sickest and oldest among us. The insurance playing field will be anything but level. As deficient as they are, for-profit insurers will cleverly market themselves to the young and healthy, leaving those who use more healthcare to the public option. Its costs will balloon, dooming it to fail, to the delight of for-profit companies." To be sure, as long as private health insurance companies exist and are forced to compete with a public health insurance, they will use their considerable lobbying influence to weaken and undermine said public option. One can imagine the fate of those forced to rely on a public option as it's progressively slashed and weakened by Republicans (and, in all probability, centrist Democrats) in Congress, under pressure of the private health insurance lobby.

A public option also fails to offer the savings that a single payer plan would. Benjamin Studebaker and Nathan J. Robinson elaborate on this point in an article for Current Affairs:

Single payer systems control costs by giving the health service a monopoly on access to patients, preventing providers from exploiting desperate patients for profit. If instead there are a large number of insurance companies, providers can play those insurance companies off each other. Right now, we have a two-tier system, in which the best doctors and hospitals refuse to provide coverage unless your insurer offers them exorbitantly high rents. To support that cost while still making a profit, your insurer has to subject you to higher premiums, higher co-pays, and higher deductibles. Poor Americans with poor-quality insurance are stuck with providers who don’t provide high enough quality care to make these demands. The best providers keep charging ever higher rents, and the gap between the care they offer and the care the poor receive just keeps growing. Poor Americans are now seeing a decline in life expectancy, in part because they cannot afford to buy insurance that would give them access to the best doctors and hospitals. Costs balloon for rich Americans while the quality of care stagnates for the poor. 

The bloat doesn’t just come from providers. Because insurance works on a profit incentive, the insurance companies must extract rents as well. So the patient is paying to ensure not only that their doctor or hospital is highly-compensated, but that the insurance company generates profit too. Each insurance company has its own managers—its own CEO, its own human resources department, and so on. We have to pay all of these people, and because there are so many private insurance companies, there are so many middle managers to pay.

In a time where urgent (and necessarily costly) action is required on climate change, allowing vast sums of money to be wasted on bureaucracy and exorbitantly high rates for medical care is particularly obscene. 

To be sure, Medicare for All would significantly expand federal spending and require new taxes—as did its namesake Medicare, and Social Security before that. Those two government programs, of course, enjoy overwhelming popularity. According to a study from the libertarian Mercatus Institute, Medicare for All would significantly reduce national spending on healthcare, meaning we would pay less in new taxes than we are currently paying in private insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles, etc. Those new taxes, furthermore, could be more fairly distributed than private insurance premiums, which (unlike income and payroll taxes) do not take into account the income of the person paying. The end result is that the vast majority of the population would surely end up saving money as a result of single payer healthcare funded by a progressive tax system, even taking into account whatever new taxes it required. The current system distributes costs in a highly regressive fashion. People in the 50th income percentile—squarely in the "middle class," with an annual income around $48,000—pay a total tax rate of 24.7%; the 400 richest people in the country pay a rate of just 23.1%. But if employee contributions to health insurance plans are treated as another form of taxation, the 50th percentile tax rate jumps to 37.6%, while the rate for the top 400 remains effectively unchanged. This doesn't even take into account out-of-pocket costs.

It should be clear, then, that any attempt to present the public option as a plan that would offer the same benefits as Medicare for All, while preserving "choice," is simply dishonest. Fearmongering against single payer healthcare plans by claiming that they would "kick 149 million people off their current health insurance," as Amy Klobuchar recently did, is something even lower. One can, of course, argue that Medicare for All would be virtually impossible to get through Congress. True, but by all indications a public option plan would run into similar opposition from the health insurance lobby. It is not at all clear how settling for a half-measure before any negotiations have even begun—and a half-measure that is still highly unlikely to make it through Congress, at that—is better than pushing for a plan that is both fair and cost-effective. As Libby Watson wrote for Splinter (RIP):

[A public option plan] would obviously be better than what we have now, since what we have now is lethal, toxic sludge. The questions that matter for politicians and advocates when it comes to choosing between a policy that’s merely better and one that’s actually good is whether the good policy is truly out of reach, and whether the worse policy would prevent reaching a better policy goal. 

As she correctly concludes, a public option would hardly be easier to pass through Congress, and could, if anything, "take[] the wind out of the sails of reform" if passed, making it less likely we would ever have a single-payer plan. 

Healthcare is a complicated matter, and one can hardly fault average Americans who are more attracted to a public option and fail to see, at first blush, why it's necessary to for many millions to be "kicked off" of their private insurance plans. In all likelihood, many haven't devoted the time to learn why a public option is a wildly inadequate alternative, and the debates among the Democratic primary candidates have surely done little to illuminate the subject. As for politicians who run for office proposing public option plans over Medicare for All, and using dishonest arguments to support their position, an altogether different—and far less generous—judgment is in order.

From Tragedy to Farce: Watergate and the Trump-Ukraine Scandal

(Trump photo: Jason Szenes/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock via Deadline. Nixon photo: AP Photo via Politico)

In his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Karl Marx wrote a brief passage that has perhaps become something of a cliché to reference, but which current circumstances demand be quoted:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

When we apply this principle to the current situation with Donald Trump, another unavoidable cliché emerges: the comparison of the Trump-Ukraine scandal to the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon. While it has become trite to analogize scandals, particularly political scandals, to Watergate, the similarities here are too obvious to ignore. In both cases, a president engaged in blatantly corrupt actions to try to give himself a leg up against the opposition party in his bid for reelection; both scandals were compounded by (alleged) attempts to cover up the initial wrongdoing; and both resulted in the opening of an impeachment inquiry into the president (it remains to be seen how far the parallels will go, particularly in this respect).

The first level on which we have progressed from tragedy to farce is obvious. In Watergate, we had a popular president brought down by his cronies' (unnecessary) attempts to sabotage the Democratic party. To use the term first introduced by Aristotle, Nixon's corruption and his paranoia were his hamartia, or tragic flaw. Here we had a very capable president with the potential to go down in history as perhaps one of the greatest of the 20th century—having reestablished relations with China, achieved a détente with the Soviet Union, presided over the (eventual) drawing down of US involvement in the disastrous Vietnam War as well as the establishment of important regulatory agencies such as the EPA and OSHA—instead turned into a national pariah due to his own unforced errors, and those of the people around him. To add insult to injury, there is every reason to think Nixon could have been reelected without any of the "dirty tricks" the Committee to Re-Elect the President resorted to: Nixon was a popular incumbent, and George McGovern (the eventual Democratic nominee, who lost in a landslide to Nixon) might still have gotten the nomination even without the sabotage directed at one-time frontrunner Edmund Muskie. While Nixon was no doubt a gifted politician, his proclivity for dishonesty and playing dirty was consistent through his career—and with Watergate, it finally caught up to him in a fashion that must have seemed, for him and his supporters, reminiscent of the tragic downfall of an Othello or an Oedipus Rex.

While the similarities between "Ukrainegate" and Watergate are obvious, the backdrop of the current scandal is an almost complete inversion of that of its "tragic" predecessor: we now have a president who has never been popular, whose blatant stupidity and ineptitude are so extreme that he has already been ranked as one of the worst to ever hold his office, and whose entire presidency has so far been overshadowed by scandal. There is none of the drama of Watergate because Trump, unlike Nixon, has no public image to tarnish, no popularity to lose, and the details of the Ukraine scandal come as no surprise or shock, in contrast to the details of Nixon's treachery. Appropriately, then, there is little of the suspense there was with Watergate, as Trump has already casually admitted his attempt to persuade the Ukrainian government. When confronted with the situation, the relevant maxim seems to be one recently offered by philosopher Slavoj Žižek, paraphrasing the Marx brothers: "Trump acts and looks like a shamelessly obscene politician, but this should not deceive us – he really is a shamelessly obscene politician."

Just as the "tragedy" of Nixon's predicament is exacerbated by how unnecessary his actions were, the farce here is compounded by the sheer stupidity of Trump's: in an attempt to dig up dirt on a Democratic candidate who seems to perhaps be imploding all on his own, Trump relied not only on his suspicion of Biden's corruption but also his incomprehensible misconception that someone in Ukraine is in possession of one the DNC servers the company CrowdStrike had examined in 2016. The farcicality of it all increases when we actually look at the story of how Hunter Biden, in an apparent act of (legal) corruption all its own, came to sit on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company for apparently no reason other than his relation to then-Vice President Joe Biden—despite having been kicked out of the Navy Reserve for cocaine use earlier the same year, and having little relevant experience.  In contrast to the Nixon saga's evocation of classical or especially Shakespearean tragedies, the Trump-Ukraine story is in some ways reminiscent of the work of the Coen brothers: for instance, the film Burn After Reading, in which a draft of an alcoholic ex-CIA analyst's memoirs ends up in the hands of two dim-witted gym employees, who attempt to sell it to the Russian embassy after they mistake it for sensitive intelligence and the analyst spurns their attempts to extract a reward from him for the memoir's safe return. Just as this cast of oafish characters careens toward disaster through a combination of bad judgment, incompetence and random chance, Trump et al. have perhaps charted their own downfall in a remarkably similar fashion.

But there is another, more important way in which the tragedy-to-farce arc has materialized. The real tragedy of Nixon's presidency—not from the perspective of him or his supporters, to be sure, but from the perspective of any moral person concerned with the general well-being of humanity—is not that his paranoia and corruption caught up with him, or even that he was paranoid and corrupt. Rather, it is that the Watergate scandal has overshadowed the many other, more grievous crimes of the Nixon administration (the bombing of Cambodia, COINTELPRO, the installation of Pinochet in Chile, etc.). Noam Chomsky was correct when he wrote that Watergate is "analogous to the discovery that the directors of Murder, Inc. were also cheating on their income tax. Reprehensible, to be sure, but hardly the main point." The authentic tragedy of the Nixon years is that after continuing the Vietnam War and even expanding it into Cambodia, he was resoundingly reelected over a candidate who was committed to ending the war—and that the public only turned against him over something as comparatively minor as Watergate, because the victim was the Democratic Party rather than a bunch of Indochinese peasants. To add insult to injury, it is the Watergate scandal, rather than the vast number of those killed by Nixon's policies, that is generally remembered as the "black spot" on his legacy.

This same dynamic is replicated in the case of Trump: it wasn't the family separation policy, or the Muslim ban, or the catastrophic environmental policies or any of the other blatantly destructive acts of the Trump administration that led to an impeachment inquiry finally being opened—it was an attempt to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter which, although flagrantly corrupt, is nonetheless almost comically insignificant in the harm it caused when compared to that which resulted from many of Trump's other actions. When the victims are migrant children separated from their parents, or refugees, or transgender people, the Democratic leadership couldn't be moved to open an impeachment inquiry—but only once the victim was Joe Biden were they finally swayed. What makes this aspect of the impeachment farcical rather than tragic (though perhaps it's both) is not that Trump's crimes are so much worse than Nixon's (they aren't) but rather that their corrupt and diabolical nature is so much more flagrant. Only the barest pretense is made by Trump and those around him that his actions are motivated by anything other than cruelty, bigotry and egotism. Yet despite this transparency, we have had to deal with months of Nancy Pelosi dismissing notion of impeachment with arguments that are in themselves farcical—that Trump is "almost self-impeaching," for instance. And now, even after the impeachment dam has broken, Pelosi and the Democratic leadership still want us to have a narrow impeachment inquiry focused on the Ukraine revelations.

This tragedy-to-farce dynamic is reflected in public opinion and treatment of the two presidents: while, pre-Watergate, Nixon had enjoyed a "traditional" relationship with the public (high approval ratings early on that remained at least middling until 1973, being named Gallup's "most admired man" for every year of his first term) and even, as noted, won a landslide reelection (carrying every state but Massachusetts), Trump has been an object of mockery and derision throughout his time in office—not only among "coastal elites" and the media, but among great swaths of the population even in the "heartland" (as a resident of a Midwestern state—one that Trump carried handily in 2016, even—I can personally testify that I have seen Trump mocked and derided by those around me far more than I have seen him defended). Accordingly, while the Watergate scandal marked a sort of collective trauma for much of the public (a "long national nightmare" in the words of Nixon's successor Gerald Ford), the Trump impeachment inquiry has so far appeared to produce far more ridicule on social media (in response to Trump's melodramatic reactions) than trauma of any sort.

We know the resolution of the Watergate scandal: the "tragic" downfall of Nixon and the genuinely tragic overshadowing of Nixon's vastly more grievous crimes in the public memory by Watergate. Can we therefore make any prediction on how the current scandal will play out? Well, from a comic perspective I can think of one perfect sequence of events: that Trump will be impeached by the House just to be inevitably acquitted by the Senate, and then will be defeated in the 2020 election immediately afterward. Were that to happen, Trump would likely be remembered as a disastrous president whose general buffoonery, incompetence and unpopularity—rather than simply any one act of corruption—were his great downfall. The comedy of that, of course, would be that after all is said and done, no lesson is learned and nothing has changed: Trump's public image is no different fundamentally than it was before impeachment, the Ukraine scandal, or even on the day of his inauguration. Obviously, the fact that this is perhaps the best option from a comedic perspective does not make it the likeliest; making any prediction about what will happen is a futile endeavor in a situation as outlandish as this one, just as, in a farce, one never knows what might come next.

So what should we take from this? That we are simply doomed to relive some absurd version of history, whatever we do? In one of Karl Marx's other most famous quotations, he writes:

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. [emphasis in original]

Surely, then, we are not in some sort of Groundhog Day scenario, condemned to repeat the same cycle with no ability to fundamentally alter it. There are, I think, actions that can and should be taken. For Trump's opponents, the right approach is not to try to disrupt the farcical nature of it all—anyone in a farce who tries to proclaim themselves as the "serious person" in the room only makes themselves that much more of a laughingstock—but to lean into it. We should not, as Pelosi and the leadership want, have a "narrow impeachment" designed to take full advantage of the scandal du jour; rather, the impeachment investigation should be made as wide and as public as possible, probing into every conceivable instance of corruption or abuse of power that has happened under Trump: the abuse of migrants, the spending at Trump's properties by federal employees, the enabling of the assault on Yemen, even the stupid Tweets inciting racial hatred and attempting to mislead the public.

The hearings should become a national spectacle, like the Watergate hearings became, but unlike the Watergate hearings they should be spectacle for spectacle's sake. Trump has already been lashing out and digging himself in deeper just at the opening of an inquiry—the goal should be to provoke him as much as possible. Trump has a been a master of farce, making his opponents appear ridiculous in the Republican primary and reducing the country's most sacred rituals into an absurd spectacle that excites his supporters and infuriates his critics. But as soon as he becomes the target of ridicule, he is incapable of responding productively. Every time he tries to strike back, he simply makes himself more clownish. To actually impeach him is to send the case to the senate, where Trump is certain to be acquitted and claim vindication—for this reason, the point of the impeachment inquiry should not be to actually impeach Trump, but only to draw attention to his many wrongdoings and to further enrage him, leading to more wrongdoings which can further be litigated—creating a vicious circle and taking the absurdity of it all to a whole new level.

Obviously, there are objections one could raise to this strategy. One could say that it trivializes and politicizes the impeachment process, for instance. I believe that to make this objection, though, means one fundamentally misunderstands our predicament. The impeachment process is already politicized, first of all because impeachment is a doomed endeavor as noted—not because there are no grounds for Trump's impeachment and removal (as I've made clear, there are many) but because it stands no chance of winning enough Republican support in the senate for the necessary two-thirds supermajority required to convict. The reason the Republicans will not convict Trump is for purely political reasons: because to do so would be to alienate their base, to probably doom their chances in 2020, etc. But also, to only have a narrow focus on Ukraine and the like is just as politicized as what I have proposed, because it implicitly accepts the other wrongdoings of the Trump administration on the grounds that it is not politically worthwhile to prosecute them. As for trivializing, it is far too late to worry about such things: as I have argued, we are in the midst of a political farce, and to refuse to acknowledge this and make the best of it is to make oneself the butt of the joke.

One could also object that to turn the impeachment proceedings into a circus will mean the Democrats are seen as just as clownish as Trump. Perhaps, but so what? Nancy Pelosi and the congressional Democrats are already unpopular, and their public image matters little. The 2020 election will be greatly influenced by the presidential candidate the Democrats put forward and how this person performs against Trump; as long of the public sees Trump as a buffoon, whatever their view of Pelosi and the House Democrats, the Democratic nominee has an opportunity to position themselves as the one who can end the circus and shift the focus back to solving the many real  problems we face.

Of course, Pelosi and the Democratic leadership are highly unlikely to take this route, perhaps because truly examining all of the Trump administration's crimes would force us to confront his administration's continuity with those of his predecessors—including Obama—when it comes to treatment of undocumented immigrants, war crimes in the Middle East and in other respects. It is up to the Left, then, to remain consistent critics not only of Trump but of any impeachment process which fails to emphasize the full scope of his criminality, corruption, and idiocy; if such an investigation requires the Democrats to reckon with their own similarities to Trump, all the better. As long as the impeachment inquiry attempts to be "serious," it can be nothing more than one more piece of the tragicomic spectacle American politics have become—and, paradoxically, only by embracing its place in our political farce and making the most of would it deserve to be taken seriously.

CORRECTION: Previously this post alluded to Trump having relied on a discredited right-wing conspiracy theory; however, evidence I have seen then leaves me less confident that the theory of Biden acting to protect Burisma is completely discredited. I have updated accordingly and apologize for any error. 

Joe Biden Really Is a God-Awful Candidate

Scott Morgan/Reuters via CNBC

I know my last post was also a case against Joe Biden. But I feel entitled to this. That post was my attempt at a rational argument, focusing almost entirely on the "electability" criterion that seems to be bolstering Biden's candidacy. This post is no such thing—no, this one's a spleen-venting session that's for my sake as much as anyone else's. Because, in spite of about a million reasons why Joe Biden should be completely disqualified from even running for president, he is still at the top of the polls. His lead has narrowed significantly, to be sure. And I take solace in the fact that in three of the last five contested presidential primaries, the candidate who was leading at this point was not the eventual nominee. On the whole, I'm cautiously optimistic about the Democratic primary. But I'm also impatient, because Joe Biden isn't just the wrong candidate for this election, or even simply a bad candidate—he is a candidate that, at this point, should be so obviously terrible that he belongs in the single digits, where he stayed the last time he ran for president.

Let's start with the newest reason that Joe Biden should never be president: he seems to be losing his damn mind in front of our eyes. I listed a number of his most recent "gaffes" in my last post, and, well, things haven't gotten any better. At the most recent debate, he accidentally called Bernie Sanders "the president"—the second debate in a row where he's called one of his opponents the president—said that he is (not was) the vice president, and vomited up this incoherent response when asked about school segregation:

Well, they have to deal with the … Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure that we are in a position where—

Look, we talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal of … A raise of getting out of the $60,000 level.

No. 2, make sure that we bring in to the help with the stud—the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need… We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are required—I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them.

Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have three, four, and five-year-olds go to school. School! Not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t know what— They don’t know what quite what to do. Play the radio. Make sure the television—excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night. The phone—make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school—er, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

At one campaign stop, he even seemed to forget Barack Obama's name. In an interview, he pronounced Obama's first name "rap rock." And—although Julián Castro has taken a lot of flak for calling him out on it —he really did appear to forget what he'd said just moments before in the last debate. Here's what he said before the now-infamous moment:

The option I'm proposing is Medicare for all—Medicare for choice. If you want Medicare, if you lose the job from your insurance—from your employer, you automatically can buy into this. 

[...] 

Every single person who is diagnosed with cancer or any other disease can automatically become part of this plan. They will not go bankrupt because of that. They will not go bankrupt because of that. They can join immediately.

[Emphasis added]

And then here he is interrupting Castro's response shortly afterward: "They do not have to buy in. They do not have to buy in." Moreover, Castro was correct about Biden's plan. Even Politifact, which rated Castro's statement "mostly false" for reasons too complex and stupid to get into here, had this to say: "Biden does require those who want Medicare coverage to 'opt in[.]'"

None of these incidents are the signs of a well-functioning mind, and all of them put together should raise major concerns. It is grossly irresponsible not to be asking questions about Joe Biden's state of mind and mental health at this point, and the fact that we can't (or at least shouldn't) put much stock in his mental acuity should be disqualifying already.

However, even if we assume that Biden's mouth is just failing to keep up with his brain and that he is just as mentally sharp as ever—an unwarrantedly generous assumption—he is still an absolutely horrible candidate. For one thing, Biden has a strained, at best, relationship with the truth. For instance, he recently claimed to have opposed the Iraq War before it began, and to have only voted for the resolution authorizing the war in order to "get the Security Council to force inspectors in to see whether there was any nuclear activity going on with Saddam Hussein." This is completely false. Biden was outspokenly supportive of the war both before and after it began, and it was clear at the time that by voting for the resolution he was authorizing Bush to invade Iraq, contra his confused explanation. At the last debate he repeated an at-best-misleading account of his record on Iraq:

I should have never voted to give Bush the authority to go in and do what he said he was going to do. The AUMF was designed, he said, to go in and get the Security Council to vote 15-0 to allow inspectors to go in to determine whether or not anything was being done with chemical weapons or nuclear weapons. And when that happened, he went ahead and went anyway without any of that proof.

I said something that was not meant the way I said it. I said—from that point on—what I was argued against in the beginning, once he started to put the troops in, was that in fact we were doing it the wrong way; there was no plan; we should not be engaged; we didn't have the people with us; we didn't have our—we didn't have allies with us, et cetera.

One could, of course, chalk this up to the possible decline in Biden's mental faculties—but this isn't a new problem for him. Back in 1987, during his first run for president, Biden claimed to have graduated in the top half of his class (he graduated 76th out of 86), received three college degrees (he received one) and gotten a full academic scholarship (he didn't). More weirdly, he plagiarized lines from then-leader of the UK Labour Party Neal Kinnock, including details about Kinnock's family history that didn't actually apply to Biden (unlike Kinnock, Biden was not, as he claimed, the first in his family to go to college, or descended from coal miners). He also repeatedly claimed to have marched during the civil rights movement, even after advisers reminded him that that had never happened. His falsehoods about his role in the Iraq War are entirely in character for him.

But even if we put aside Biden's history of falsehoods, leading up to the present, and his questionable mental state, we have another great reason that he should never be president: his record as a politician is frankly horrifying. Biden ran into trouble earlier this year for talking about his relationship with segregationists early in his political career. The realities are even more disturbing than he let on at the time. We know that Biden devoted a considerable part of his career to limiting desegregation busing—part of why he had such a good working relationship with segregationists. And he was grateful for their support, too: in 1977, Biden thanked James Eastland—an unabashed racist who outspokenly view black people as an "inferior race"—for supporting a piece of anti-busing legislation.

Eastland wasn't the only segregationist Biden had a close relationship with. He also worked with notorious Dixiecrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond, for instance, on a crime bill that, per The Intercept,

increased penalties for drugs, including expanding civil asset forfeiture; created a sentencing commission; and eradicated parole at the federal level... [and] sought to limit access to bail[.]

The bill in question was ultimately vetoed by Ronald Reagan. But, it's worth noting, Biden's relationship with Thurmond went beyond their shared support for horrible pieces of legislation. In 2003, he also eulogized Thurmond—who, for context, had conducted a record-setting filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, never renounced his history as a segregationist, and, as it turns out, fathered a mixed-race child (whom he never publicly acknowledged) with a teenage maid as a young man, and known of this "secret daughter" throughout his career as a vehement segregationist—as a "brave man, who in the end made his choice and moved to the good side."

But let's not pass over that Biden-Thurmond crime bill too quickly. After all, it was just one part of Biden's long and awful record of supporting "tough-on-crime" legislation. To return to the Intercept article:

Biden, who was the ranking Democrat on the committee from 1981 to 1987, and then chaired it until 1995, continued on this trajectory: shaping many of the laws that would...institutionalize a federal drug war. A number of the priorities from the 1982 Biden-Thurmond bill would eventually become law. Biden shaped the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which curtailed access to bail; eliminated parole; created a sentencing commission; expanded civil asset forfeiture; and increased funding for states. Biden helped lead the push for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which lengthened sentences for many offenses, created the infamous 100:1 crack versus cocaine sentencing disparity, and provided new funds for the escalating drug war. Eventually, with his co-sponsorship of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, his long-sought-after drug czar position was created. These and other laws lengthened sentences at the federal level and contributed to an explosion of federal imprisonment — from 24,000 people locked up in 1980 to almost 216,000 in 2013. In short, these laws increased the likelihood that more people would end up in cages and for longer. 

In 1989, Biden criticized President George Bush’s anti-drug efforts as “not tough enough, bold enough or imaginative enough. The president says he wants to wage a war on drugs, but if that’s true, what we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam, not a limited war, fought on the cheap.” Then, in 1994, he pushed through the massive crime bill, which authorized more than $30 billion of spending, largely devoted to expanding state prisons and local police forces. He bragged of his accomplishments in a 1994 report: The “first [national] drug strategy sought a total of $350 million in federal aid to state and local law enforcement, with states matching the federal assistance dollar for dollar. The first drug strategy I offered—in January 1990—called for more than $1 billion in aid to state and local law enforcement—a controversial view at the time.” 

That's right: Joe Biden was actually pushing Republicans to become tougher and more punitive than they already were. And, while high crime rates were certainly an issue, the mass incarceration policies championed by politicians like Biden were of dubious usefulness at best: a study from the Brennan Center for Justice, released in 2015, "concludes that over-harsh criminal justice policies, particularly increased incarceration, which rose even more dramatically over the same period, were not the main drivers of the crime decline [over the past few decades]. In fact, the report finds that increased incarceration has been declining in its effectiveness as a crime control tactic for more than 30 years. Its effect on crime rates since 1990 has been limited, and has been non-existent since 2000."

And now, to top it all off, Biden is running a campaign where—when he's not busy forgetting what year it is—he tries to convince the electorate that progressive measures like Medicare-for-All are bad ("there will be a deductible, in your paycheck" he warned at the last debate, showing he doesn't know what a deductible is) and that instead we should expect the Republican Party, currently the most dangerous organization in human history, to suddenly become a bastion of Reasonable Conservatism once Trump is out of office. And despite his utter lack of useful ideas, complete incompetence as a candidate and horrible history (which I've only highlighted some of the worst parts of), he's still sitting at the top of the polls—hopefully, not for much longer. If he does manage to get the nomination in spite of it all, it will be a sort of sick, miniature version of Donald Trump's victory in 2016: an affirmation that absolutely nothing matters, every principle that we thought applied in the field of politics is void, and Chaos Reigns Supreme. And if it happens, the Democratic Party deserves to be burned to the ground. I don't know at this point if I would vote for Biden over Trump. Four more years of Trump sounds nightmarish, but it will look like a minor case of heartburn compared with what's to come if we don't actually deal with the problems of climate change, inequality and authortarianism, and Joe Biden has absolutely nothing to offer when it comes to any of them. I'm not yet convinced that four (or eight) years of Biden's compromising and ineptitude might not pave the way for some demagogue even more dangerous than Trump.

I haven't even covered all of the major bad things about Joe Biden (Anita Hill, anyone?), but if I haven't made my point already there's no point in carrying on. So, is there anything good I can say about old Uncle Joe? Well, it may just be damning him with faint praise, but he seems like a genuinely well-meaning person—which is more than I can say for a lot of politicians. I wouldn't mind having him as a neighbor, or even a relative—just as a president. To his credit, he was also (unlike the Democrats' last presidential nominee) one of the less hawkish members of the Obama administration, and was right about our intervention in Libya. I don't know that he'd be a worse president than Hillary would have been, it's just that her nomination felt inevitable, and the reasons that Biden is bad seem so much more obvious. But it remains to be seen whether they'll be enough to doom his candidacy.