Biden DID beat the socialist. The left needs to stop bellyaching about it.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore. Flickr. License.

Some former Bernie Sanders staffers continue to be irked about Biden's boast on the campaign trail that he is not a socialist, and that during the Democratic primary, he, the moderate, won the argument against Bernie Sanders, the socialist.

In the latest installment of Poutraged Berniebros, comments that made the Berniebros run and fume to The Daily Beast came when on Monday during a Miami townhall, Biden was asked a question about assuaging concerns about authoritarian socialism among Cuban American and Venezuelan American communities. Biden responded by making the truthful statement that he ran against the socialist in the Democratic primary - Bernie Sanders - and won. He continued by pointing to his lifelong career in public service as a mainstream Democrat.

Biden had also sparred with Donald Trump during the debate on Thursday, as Trump sought to associate him with Sanders and his policy, pointing out once again that the debate had been settled in the Democratic primary, and that he defeated the socialist in the race. Trump even exclaimed, presumably out of frustration at being unable to pigeonhole Biden as a socialist, that he'd "lost the left!"

The Daily Beast quotes an anonymous former Sanders staffer aghast at the idea that Biden, saying Biden's continued public opposition to socialism was "foolish and arrogant," adding that it's "absolutely unnecessary" because Republicans would not cease their attempts to paint him as a radical socialist regardless of what Biden says.

This tells you much of what you need to know about why this staffer was part of a campaign team that, despite having all the money and volunteers in the world, crashed and burned. Biden could care less about what the Republicans are going to say about him. His target audience in the Miami town hall was critical constituencies in the largest swing state in the country: Florida. Biden was talking to voters in Florida, not making an appeal to the Trump campaign to lay off the attacks.

The staffer then goes on to say that "none of [Biden's] other opponents in the primary are working as hard as ‘the socialist’ to get him elected," seemingly oblivious to the fact that one of those primary opponents, Kamala Harris, is now Joe Biden's running mate and the Democratic nominee for Vice President.

Cenk Uygur, whose rank homophobia and misogyny cost him an endorsement from Sanders himself in his own Congressional race, at least had the nads to put his name on his baseless claim that leftists are "base" of the Democratic party. The base of the Democratic party are Black women, and they voted in droves for Biden, as if with a mission to keep Bernie Sanders off our ticket and from destroying our party.

Joe Biden's argument to voters has remained remarkably consistent throughout this campaign: from when the Democratic primary began in 2019 to when Biden's chances were assumed dead after big losses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada to when he began to dominate in the primary and secured the nomination to the general election trail. Joe Biden staked out the broad center-left from the early days of the campaign and never abandoned it, no matter how tough it got at times.

Biden's consistency - that he didn't start out on the political extreme of his party in order to win the nomination and then run to the center in a general election battle - is one of the key reasons voters prefer him to the erratic Donald Trump. The other is his ability to actually reject extremism, including on his own side of the political aisle. Biden's policies are progressive but mainstream, ambitious but practical, and seek to lift all boats rather than sow division. This has been Biden's calling card throughout the course of this campaign, and you can bet he is not about to abandon it in the last month of the campaign when polls show him breaking away.

And let's not forget that Bernie Sanders's own case for the Democratic nomination and the presidency rested in large part on his opposition to large swaths of Democratic voters that he and his campaign pejoratively derided as 'the establishment.' No one should doubt that had Bernie Sanders won the nomination, he would continue to make the argument that he beat the establishment and that's why voters should give him the job. Arguments about how he's 'mean' to moderates in the party would be brushed off.

Biden did beat the socialist, and it wasn't close. Biden received 68% of the pledged delegates, and defeated Sanders by a whopping 26 percentage points in the popular vote in this year's Democratic primary. He did so by making the explicit argument to Democratic voters that he is more electable because he's a centrist who cannot be painted a socialist.

The left needs to stop bellyaching about it.




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