16 reasons to vote for Biden (without mentioning Trump)
I posted this on someone else’s FB feed, but I’ll put it here too. Here’s 16 reasons that I support Biden that don’t include my utter contempt for everything Trump represents.
Joe Biden has actually accomplished quite a bit in his political career, and some of the things he has accomplished in the past are directly relevant to what he will need to accomplish in the next four years (such as his role in getting the ACA passed as a model for expanding healthcare coverage for US citizens and his role in the economic recovery under the Obama administration). He has demonstrated a sincere ability to acknowledge and learn from his mistakes, including expressing regret over his role in passing harsher sentencing laws which have led to more mass incarceration (and his position at the time was supported by a broad bipartisan coalition because of hysteria over the ‘crack epidemic’).
Going forward, there are even more good reasons to vote for Joe Biden including, but not limited to:
1) He has promised to follow scientific guidance on dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. He has said that expanded testing will be a top priority in his administration.
2) Biden is a believer in good institutions in the US government, including bipartisan ones. He will work to restore and strengthen parts of the government vandalized over the past four years.
3) Biden has stated support for adding a public option to the ACA. This is a great intermediate step which can show how viable even more ambitious healthcare provision for the US could be. It’s not what progressives really want, but it is a move in the right direction and may demonstrate whether or not Medicare-for-all style coverage is viable (it is, as it’s what every other advanced democratic country has in the world — something like what we have here in Australia). Also note he picked Harris as his running mate, and she DID support Medicare for All in 2017.
4) He has the most ambitious plan for moving the US toward sustainable energy that any candidate for US president has ever had. It’s not the Green New Deal, and it doesn’t include a ban on fracking (no matter what his critics say), which turns off many supporters, but just ending fossil fuel subsidies alone will help shift the price points and allow the natural market drive toward renewables (which are now cheaper than fossil fuel) to go forward. Will it end the fossil fuel industries? Probably not, but it will get out of the way of the shift in the energy industry which DC has been blocking because of massive subsidies to fossil fuel companies (because of corporate campaign donations). He also supports a return to the Paris Climate accord.
5) He actually understands foreign policy and has great experience in the area. He is committed to NATO, relations with the EU, standing up to Russia, Turkey, North Korea, and other dictators, and rebuilding our international alliances.
6) He will surround himself with actual experts and people with experience. It’s boring, and we will not have the constant excitement of a president making policy on Twitter in spite of what his own advisors are saying, but maybe boring is okay.
7) Biden has almost universal union support because he has a record of working to support blue collar and service workers. Just about the only unions that don’t support him are police unions.
8) Although Biden is Catholic and personally opposes abortion, he has long said that a woman should choose whether she has an abortion, not the government. He does not support using government to impose his own religious beliefs or morality.
9) In the entire eight years of the Obama-Biden administration, not a single senior official was indicted.
10) He has put forward serious plans for police reform and racial equality that, although moderate, are supported by people who care deeply about these issues.
11) The guy can take criticism and learn from it. People who criticized during the primaries are part of his team now. I see this as a sign he is not vindictive and willing to change and build broader coalitions for good policies.
12) Tax policy: Biden is calling for higher taxes on the highest income families, especially the top 1% of earners who have benefitted disproportionately from recent tax cuts. He will try to get the wealthy to pay a (more) fair share of taxes.
13) Biden has publicly committed to a higher minimum wage of $15/hour.
14) Biden has committed to strengthening public programs that support the poor, such as food stamps.
15) Campaign finance reforms and voting rights renewal. Biden has what look like good plans to start limiting money in campaigns and strengthening voting rights protections that have been eroding and are threatened in many states.
16) Biden has said he will reinstate protections for ‘dreamers’ and provide a plan for allowing people who have been in the US undocumented for many years to apply for citizenship. This used to be a bipartisan policy, under Reagan and the two Bushes, but it now is treated like a radical proposal. It’s not. These people pay taxes, and many were born in the US or came to the US long ago when they were young.
I could actually go on, but these are just 16 of the reasons that, although he was not my first choice in the primary (Warren and Sanders), my support for Biden is unqualified. Yes, he’s business as usual with a progressive edge, and I’d prefer a real progressive with stronger view of how to pursue greater justice and equality of opportunity, but he’s a damn good candidate, even better than I had hoped when he secured the nomination.
He seems to get better the more he is campaigning too, learning even from the people he defeated in the primary. Unlike most Democratic candidates who veer to the right when they secure the nomination, Biden has done the opposite, recognizing that the times call for a real progressive vision to fight the pandemic, racial injustice, economic inequity, and the erosion of democracy we see in the US.
