B-I-D-E-N Doesn’t Spell OBAMA

I’m frustrated by the notion that the way to show loyalty to Barack Obama in 2020 is to back his 2008 running mate.

I was an Obama supporter, which doesn’t mean that I back everything he did while in office. While he pushed for and accomplished some positive, progressive measures: health care, LGBT rights, some checks on corporate greed, not only didn’t he go as far as I’d have liked, he didn’t go nearly so far as he himself would have liked.

I was very frustrated at his inability to bring in gun controls, I abhor the huge increase in drone warfare, and I sure wish he’d found another way to turn around the economy after its disastrous implosion in 2008 than to give or loan billions of dollars to the very corporations that caused it. But I recognize that he was even more frustrated than I was, by the organized resistance to change that he encountered in Washington.

Which is why I find it so ridiculous that supporting Joe Biden – a “middle-of-the-road” candidate, if there ever was one – is so often equated with ‘loyalty’ to Obama.

Biden speaks of Obamacare almost as a legacy that needs to be protected. But we mustn’t forget that Obamacare isn’t what Obama wanted at all; it is merely the best compromise he could find – a barely minimal beginning of an overhaul of a corrupted and ineffective health care system. Obama very much wanted a single-payer system, much closer to what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are calling for, than the system that exists now.

Loyalty in politics shouldn’t mean dusting off policies and platforms from more than a decade ago, and holding them as sacred because of what they represented when they were new. That’s the same kind of reactionary ignorance that has conservatives insisting that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to the original intent of its framers in the 18^th Century, rather than by reasonable, philosophical extrapolations. (NO – the 2^nd Amendment does NOT suggest that gun ownership should be completely unchecked by concerns for public safety).

I will surely support Joe Biden if he emerges as the Democratic Party Presidential candidate to oppose Trump. But I hope that the party is bolder and more forward thinking than that.  I believe that the US badly needs leaders who will address global warming, foreign policy and economic inequality in bold ways that challenge the status quo. For now, I’m hoping that Sanders or Warren will succeed.

The notion that Black Americans are mostly falling in line behind Joe, as a standard-bearer of all that Barack represents really irks me. I don’t see it that way at all. And I hope that ALL voters will look and think more deeply than that. Of course, when I look at the idiocy that prevails at the right end of the political spectrum, where so many seemingly intelligent voters abandon truth and integrity in their continued defense of the nightmare that is Trump, I despair.

The old maxim seems to be true: that people get the leaders they deserve.