Watch out for the No Labels, Joe.
The President Who Cannot Defend Himself is once again being threatened by forces who, it is imagined, will take away votes to which he is supposedly entitled.
The Dems immediately proclaim: Omigod he's a threat to our votes. Pundit Jonathan Chait tells us:
Biden May Face Two Spoiler Candidates in 2024 Cornel West is running and No Labels is getting ready.
Chait tells us:
No Labels revised its criteria, and now says it plans to run a third-party presidential candidate unless Joe Biden is “way, way out ahead” in polls.
That shouldn't be hard, right? All of the nice left-of-center press has been busy for the past two and a half years telling us how enormously good for everything Joe Biden has been, so he should be super-popular, right? Then Chait moves on to discuss Cornel West:
West’s intentions are straightforward. The academic and activist is one of those left-wingers who hates liberals more than anything else. He believes the Democratic Party stands for neoliberalism and warmongering, and does not care whether Biden defeats Trump.
Or maybe it's that Cornel West loves you as a person, Brother Chait, while hating your outsized ego and your lies about his motivation. Though at this point it's easy to imagine a scenario where the situation with Russia and China gets so bad that America prays for a Trump victory against a non-campaigning Joe Biden.
As for No Labels itself, the whole thing seems disappointing on many grounds. Here's one:
No Labels likely to back off third party bid if DeSantis emerges as GOP nominee
So of course No Labels is corporate money. What are they planning to do? Politico's Shia Kapos tells us:
No Labels has been flirting openly with recruiting a moderate superstar like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to lead its ticket. Such a gambit could dramatically scramble the presidential race, and Democrats fear it could siphon votes from their side.
Back in 2022 Joe Manchin wasn't all that popular. And as far as I understand, the one person who thinks Manchin is a "superstar" is Joe Biden. Has it improved since then?
At any rate, the Politico piece gives us one more tidbit about No Labels' plans:
No Labels is also planning an April convention in Dallas — an important decision point for the group’s possible third-party push. Who the GOP nominee will be could be clear as early as Super Tuesday in March. No Labels plans to keep that convention date even if it exits the race altogether.
So I guess we'll know next April. You have to wonder why the No Labels corporate donors are doing this at all, given that an immediate announcement of a candidacy might stand a quicker chance of persuading Joe Biden of his own incompetence -- as a campaigner, a politician, or as a warmonger. Why wait ten months to persuade Joe Biden of what the rest of the world already knows?
Comments
On an intimately related topic:
Briahna Joy Gray asks: "What is the substantive criticism here? Couldn't he just say something on the interview that he disagreed with? Maybe we also disagreed with it. We pushed back on many things that RFK Jr. said in that interview, but is the fact of interviewing people now a crime in and of itself?" To neoliberals like Keith Olbermann, it is. Gray and Soave dared to offer media space to a challenger to the President Who Cannot Defend Himself. Off with their heads!
“The loyal Left cannot act decisively. Their devotion to the system is a built-in kill switch limiting dissent.” - Richard Moser
Learned via
a Convo Couch chat w Cornel West that at some point during covid while being interviewed on The Real News along w Dr Fauci that West heaped praise upon Fauci for his selfless humanitarian work in public health. In his CC interview, West displayed little knowledge of Fauci's and US public health's deep current ties w Big Pharma, and wasn't familiar w RFK Jr's book on Fauci. He said he'd taken 3 vaccine shots, but boldly proclaimed he wouldn't take the 4th (he didn't say why).
Presumably, given how little skepticism he's shown toward public health officialdom, he was in favor of the vaccine mandates. So is the Green Party, whose nomination he will likely get.
This is a big red line for me.
West was also a bit uninformed in discussing Russia, as he kept referring to it as "The Russian Empire." The program host easily got the better of him on the important distinction between empire and superpower status. The US is an empire; superpowers Russia and China are not.
He's not well versed in the two huge covid problems -- mandates and censorship of dissenting voices -- and seems shaky in a vital area of foreign policy. I already have my candidate, but West, overall a good guy, doesn't impress as very deep on the major issues that matter to me and it seems clear he is not running to win anything but the GP nomination.
As I've suggested previously --
-- the public interest is currently served by a proliferation of candidates who are not Joe Biden and who are not Republicans. Joe's strategy is horrible: no debates, damned few media appearances, media blackout for his opponents, fight World War III while screwing Europe, keep the interest rates high, keep turning to the Right, and have everyone point to the Republicans, about whom Joe is doing close to nothing. The top slice of the Democratic Party thinks that all it has to do is sit tight and hide their President in a cave and the Republicans will destroy themselves like they did in 2020. The Republicans have seventeen months to come up with a better strategy than what they did in 2020. I think they can do it.
And do I need to remind everyone that the Republicans would not be where they are today if not for Joe's benefactor Barack Obama, whose proxies bankrupted the DNC while the Republicans won 900+ seats in state legislatures, 13 governor's seats, and all branches of the Federal government.
As for the whole COVID controversy, all of that became water under the bridge once the Delta variant of COVID was replaced by the various Omicrons. Oh, sure, there was plenty of injustice to go around -- but to resolve that and a dozen other injustices you'd have to change America so that justice is no longer a commodity sold to the highest bidder.
As for Cornel West, not too long ago West was going to run as a People's Party candidate when Chris Hedges tapped him on the shoulder and said "don't do that." And he didn't. West is capable of being persuaded. The question is: who will persuade Cornel West? Who will persuade him that he needs to take an informed position on Ukraine, for instance?
“The loyal Left cannot act decisively. Their devotion to the system is a built-in kill switch limiting dissent.” - Richard Moser
As for Covid,
it's important to note where the progressive voices were when our freedoms were being taken and threatened. Apparently the otherwise skeptical CW was on the side of the State; Marianne Williamson probably was similarly situated, both seated safely on the establishment bench. People can make mistakes in good faith of course, but so far I haven't seen where either has come forward to acknowledge the error of their ways. And these two are supposed to be some of the more progressive progressive figures in the land. Some Left we have in this country.
As for your question, apparently fan-guy Chris Hedges is the guy who can persuade West. I might suggest he persuade CW to do a little more homework and thinking on some big issues, beef up in the knowledge dept. Right now, he's so shallow in key areas that he's being out-debated by mere garden variety podcast hosts.
re Biden, given his advanced age and declining mental state, there probably aren't many other options but to run a carefully sheltered Rose Garden campaign while his handlers and the party apparatchiks do the heavy lifting. They are probably counting once again on Joe being favored as not quite as bad an alternative as the opponent, counting on the GOP once again nominating a damaged and besieged Trump who might well be on trial in FL during the fall campaign over the classified docs, among other possible/likely criminal cases.
That plus Joe's 7m vote margin of victory last time vs the Donald probably gives Team Biden lots of confidence that Joe can just phone this one in. We'll see. And we'll also see whether RFK Jr feels compelled to take his candidacy to an indy party for the fall if he is unfairly denied a fair shake in the D primary process.
Not if, *when*. n/t
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
Electoral politics, meh. no matter who you vote for, you
always get John McCain.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --