Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
I could buy the argument that the centrist posture in the convention is designed purely as a tactical move, and does not compromise Biden's platform, which on paper is more liberal than any other recent years. I don't think it's a particularly good argument (have you seen the Democratic leadership's actions in recent years?), or that it's a particularly good tactic (we no longer live in an age where independents/undecideds are kingmakers because there are so few of these in the polarized politics era) but I'll grant that it's a possibility.
Optics aside, my sense - and the convention is just another data point - is that if Biden gets elected, Democrats will lead the revisionist process that will immediately point to the last four years as an aberration, and not as a natural consequence of various political and policy decisions they and the Republicans have taken over the years. In the name of bipartisanship and unity, they will offer Republicans a way to save face from their misguided choices these last four years - while not getting any meaningful conservative support for their actual policies. They will want to show that the US is back to normal, whereas the reasonable approach would be to question why they got to this place. For Christ's sake, they introduced John McCain as this honorable politician who could do bipartisan deals, forgetting that he chose Sarah Palin as his VP candidate, thereby introducing the contemporary template for Trumpism.
This is probably accurate.
Being a good winner and not lining people up and putting them against the wall and pulling the trigger is probably the best way to go about making the country governable again. Presently, the federal government is barely functioning.
It reminds me of when Obama basically set aside the Bush administration’s torture program. If anyone in here was around back then, it was probably the thing I hated most about Bush/Cheney and often wrote fairly ballistic posts on the subject.
However, from a governing viewpoint, maybe what Obama did was the expedient thing to do, at least from where he was sitting. I found it very disappointing. But I’m not trying to govern a stunningly diverse country of 320m people. We aren’t 10m socially cohesive Danes living on a Penninsula in the North Sea.
It’s a difficult thing. From where you and I sit, of course I want heads on a platter, especially on the Russia collusion and children-in-cages. But the country also needs to function.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. But I’d also look at a split within the GOP. The Trumpers will go with him, and who will be left?