Felix The Cat carried a bag. It was a bag full of tricks. Joe Biden? His bag is empty.
Last week, he announced that Senator Kamala Harris would be his running mate (he's the presumed Democratic Party presidential nomination). And with that announcement, all the interest in his campaign vanished.
Since Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race for the nomination back in April, even a Biden-friendly press has been unable to find anything interesting about Joe so the coverage has instead focused on who he might choose?
Eeny meeny miny moe . . . now where will the camera go?
Joe's done nothing for months.
Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins pointed out last week, "I put out a statement on Monday because I'm really getting mad at Joe Biden. You know, we know Trump gave up on covid, tens of thousands of people are dying, Trump is a loser. But where is Joe Biden? He lives within commuter distance to the White House. He could convene them [the press] for a news conferences to pound away at Trump for what we need to suppress the virus: test, trace and quarantine program. And, while he's at it, he could defend the postal office. He could talk about the need for mail-in ballots. He could talk about the need for $600 supplement for unemployed people who lost their benefit this week. And, instead, he's AWOL and Trump is dominating the airwaves with his stupid press conferences."
He could talk about mail-in ballots, yes, but wouldn't that just expose what a hypocrite he actually was? As Katie Halper (JACOBIN) noted last March:
Donald Trump is the single individual in US society most responsible for spreading dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 in the midst of a global pandemic. Anyone who echoes him, or his administration’s entreaties to not take going out in public too seriously, is engaging in public endangerment. Anyone who actively encourages people to gather in mass, and in close proximity, is doing so at a mass scale.
So why, in contravention of Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines and health experts’ urgings, did the DNC and Joe Biden’s campaign do just that at immense scale earlier this month, as major cities were already closing public spaces? And why have media that have deservedly taken Trump and his administration to task for their fatal failures not done the same with Democratic leadership?
If a senior adviser to President Donald Trump falsely claimed on national television that the CDC had declared that it was safe to vote in person, despite its actual recommendation to the contrary, the adviser and the president would be rightly condemned by much of corporate media as, at best, incompetent and ignorant, and, at worst, dishonest and reckless in encouraging people to put their lives at risk.
And if poll workers had contracted COVID-19 at locations which violated CDC recommendations, the adviser and the president would be rightly blamed for exposing them to the virus.
Yet after the CDC on March 15 advised the public to cancel all gatherings of more than fifty people, a senior adviser to Joe Biden, the current frontrunning Democratic presidential candidate, went on CNN and claimed the CDC had deemed in-person voting safe. And not a single major media outlet reported on it.
Nor did they report on the actual dangerous conditions at multiple primary voting sites, and the exposure of trusting citizens to the coronavirus that the adviser’s reckless advice had encouraged. And it wasn’t just one irresponsible adviser that put people at risk: DNC chair Tom Perez made misleading statements, downplayed the dangers and exaggerated the preparedness of voting sites, and criticized and threatened states which wanted to postpone their primaries. The Biden campaign as well as the DNC put politics over people, exposing countless voters to a fatal virus.
We now know that at least two poll workers at locations described as safe by Perez and the Biden campaign have contracted COVID-19. It’s unknown how many more poll workers, voters, and the people they came into contact with will also contract the virus.
Senior Biden campaign adviser Symone Sanders made the dishonest statements during a post-debate interview on Sunday night, March 15. This was hours after the CDC released a statement (3/15/20) that advised canceling all gatherings of fifty or more people. The CDC advisory was mentioned at the very beginning of the debate, and also during Anderson Cooper’s post-debate interview with Bernie Sanders.
Joe can't call out anyone who doesn't support mail-in ballots too loudly because of his own past actions.
Senator Kamala Harris slammed Donald Trump last week. C.I. offered an analysis which included the following:
And how does that play out with an electorate that's concerned about a number of issues -- including the pandemic?
Are people going to want to change horses mid-stream?
If the person looks capable, maybe.
But Joe doesn't look capable. He's hidden himself away. He's had one proposal and then another -- he was talking in June about an executive order needed by a president to make masks a mandate and this week he changed it to letting the governors decide and issue. He's done nothing to lead and, yes, he is supposed to be the leader. He's not just the presumed nominee, he's a man who spent decades in the US Senate and then went on to be vice president for two terms. Supposedly, he's spent his entire adult life training for this moment.
And what he's shown isn't impressive at all.
Kamala's attacking Donald Trump. Repeatedly now. For the coronavirus. It should be attack and move on. The longer she repeats the attack, the more people wonder why Joe has had so little to say and when she starts talking about the early days of this pandemic?
Joe Biden and his campaign said it was safe to vote -- deaths proved that wrong. Joe was all go out and vote for me. It's safe.
It wasn't. Joe's history on the pandemic is not a strong one.
And when Kamala hits Donald Trump on this issue, it not only brings up Joe's own bad behavior, it also makes people think, "Wait, for months and months, it's been patty-cakes and now Kamala's going after Trump?" Meaning, "Where's Joe Biden been with the hard hitting criticism?"
Joe's history is not a strong one. He's done so little. America deserves better. So much better.