There is a Metaphor in Here

🚨 SYMONE SANDERS FROM OUTSIDE 🚨 pic.twitter.com/5zLMp28pwl

— The Recount (@therecount) March 4, 2020

If you watch the above video of Symone Sanders just up and hauling off a protester while Jill Biden guards her husband, I feel like that says an awful lot about work in this Democratic primary. Biden was protected and promoted this evening in large part by Black and women voters. For all that anyone might want to ding his campaign turnabout on the donor class or elites or the establishment, the fact is--working class people, and marginalized people, and all kinds of people actually in fact voted for him. You can't take away from that by mislabeling his support.

Here's what they want: to beat Trump because he's actually, actively harmful to them. Biden's successes this evening come from the hopes of lots of people for a government that recognizes them, and it wasn't brought about by money. It was brought about by people believing in the network of goodwill he got from the people who said they would stand with him, because they knew what he stands for. And when I see anyone denigrating that as if the people who stood in line and took the time out of their day to make their vote were somehow dazzled into it by some nefarious fuckery--shit, I don't have to agree with it to acknowledge it for what it is. These people believe he can beat Trump. They believe he has the coalition.

Having a team matters. Being a part of a big thing, matters. It might not be a revolution, but it is not nothing.

But before I get into anything to do with these results (which aren't all in yet) can I vent on the subject of Elizabeth Warren?



I could easily vote for either Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden. The ideological divide to me isn't insurmountable. It doesn't occur to me that the VP of the president who worked to get us the ACA really, genuinely, wants people to die from lack of health care access (as some of the Twitter red rose brigade want to claim) and I can sort through the awkward decisions the Sanders campaign makes and the yet more awkward pronouncements of Sanders superfans to support the man and his policies in general. I genuinely believed though, that adding up the full ledger of positive qualities: attitude of campaigning; thorough, detailed policies; the high caliber of the people who I know supported her, that Elizabeth Warren would have made the superior, actual, functioning president. She is articulate, a team-builder, an educator, a mentor, person who has run an absolutely respectable campaign--

But I guess the electorate isn't taking a chance on another highly-competent blonde lady, because a highly-competent blonde lady only won the popular vote the last time out. After watching Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar all have to fold, knowing what extremely qualified badasses they actually are, seeing Senator Warren fucking ether Bloomberg like a kamikaze in debate and get this paltry voting result makes me want to holler. She is a phenomenon.

And she is a phenomenon the voters don't want. And I don't know how to not chalk that up to gender, because no other thing stands out to me as being as relevant to her lack of support.

Is there anyway, come a Democratic Senate majority, that she can be majority leader? Because that would make me ridiculously happy and strike a note of fear in all the correct people. Because here is the other thing I'm concerned about--

I think the Bloomberg insurrection might have been effectively quelled (he's in the re-thinking process, and after the money he's spent, he ought to be), but the main issue for any progressive agenda gong forward has got to be having the congressional votes. A liberal agenda needs a Democratic Senate. If the people are out there wondering if Sanders has coattails or anchors, this is another factor that should boost Biden.

Because it takes acts of congress to get a lot of the stuff progressives want done, actually done. And it takes progressives voting to flip the senate to get that happening. And I worry that a candidate that relies on younger and more progressive voters, who aren't actually the most reliable voters, getting the numbers needed and going into their first term and then losing the midterms. Because the base didn't understand what mattered.

The 2020 election isn't about one person getting into the White House and beating Trump. We truly need significant structural change. The first thing a Democratic president should even work on is liberalizing voting by ensuring access (creating a quota of voting places per mile/capita, I guess, to eliminate the privilege of voting-location privilege and ensure equality of access) and making election day a mandatory national holiday, and increasing the franchise through stuff like motor-voter or maybe automatic upon 18 registration. With guaranteed acceptable in all 50 states and assorted territories ID issued. We need to tilt the tables away from states that have gerrymandered and set up assorted flavors of Jim Crow. We need to codify understandable and verifiable ballots where voters have a guarantee that the vote they submit is the vote that got registered. I truly think starting right there would be a game changer for getting the rest of any possible progressive agenda through.

I recognize that even if I don't like what the folks who have voted have collectively decided, it is, and was, their decision to make, and I can't do a thing about it. And if the nominee is Joe Biden, I know he has a great heart and is surrounded by competent and effective people.

I don't need to be ecstatic. I can have my grievances. But I will still be satisfied so long as we work towards fucking up Trump's/the GOP's shit.