Talking Is a Free Action

For some reason (most likely the reason is Nish Kumar), I’ve started watching Pod Save the UK.  I’m a bit of an Anglophile, and, while my main interest in the British is their comedians, I do find their politics a bit fascinating as well.  I’ll admit that, when I first starting getting into it many moons ago, it was primarily so I could understand more British jokes.  But I think it’s sort of morphed into a fascination with someone else’s politics.  When something in the UK is worse than it is here in the US, I can feel relieved that, as bad as it is here, at least we don’t have that problem; when something in the UK is better than here, I can bask in some envy and tell myself that here’s proof that we can do better too; when someting in the UK is about the same, I can commiserate and feel some camaraderie.  It’s a win/win/win.

As you may know, they recently held an election (which they initiated, conducted, and completed in about 3 weeks’ time), and in it the country roundly rejected the Conservative party (often still called the “Tories”), which had held sway for the past 14 years, privatizing things such as public transportation and water treatment to devastating effect, attempting to ship political refugees off to Rwanda, and (perhaps most infamously) engineering Brexit.  The election was even more of a rout for the Tories than predicted, with Labour more than doubling their number of seats, the Liberal Democrats more than sextupling their seats, the Greens quadrupling their seats (which brings them up to a whopping 4, but still), and the Tories plummeting from 372 seats to 121.  With things going so poorly in my own country’s politics, it’s nice to have a bit of vicarious joy in the politics of others.

But—and here’s the reason I bring all this up—in the run-up to their election, Pod Save the UK aired an episode on “tactical voting.” I wasn’t sure WTF this could possibly be, but it seemed quite controversial: many people were saying this was crucial for everyone to do, and others were saying it was a terrible precedent to set.  As I watched the episode, I began to realize that “tactical voting” just meant voting for the person who needs to win in order to get the outcome you want at the national level, rather than just voting for the candidate whose views most aligned with your own.  Of course, in the US, we just call that “voting.”

Hmph.

And so this whole kerfuffle about Biden really puzzles me.  It’s okay for the Democratic party to tell us to just vote for whoever they put up because they’re better than Trump, but it’s not okay for people to question whether or not Biden is the best choice to win against him?  I thought we were voting tactically here.  Perhaps it isn’t practical to replace Biden at this stage of the game, but for people to denigrate anyone who even brings up the topic is pretty ridiculous.  And there’s a lot of that going around these days.  I’m not sure I understand where they’re coming from.  But let me be clear about my viewpoint on the topic.

If you’re saying people should stop questioning Biden and just support him, you sound like those folks at the tail end of the pyramid scheme saying that everyone needs to calm down so that people continue to make their commissions.  Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away.  It’s not like we can just pretend that Biden isn’t old, or that people don’t have serious misgivings about his performance.  I can tell you, for instance, that my father, a staunch Republican for as long as I’ve known him (and undoubtedly long before that), has already said that he will vote for anyone the Democrats put up ... except Biden.  I’m not saying this is a sensible attitude; I’m just saying that’s what he says.  Now, perhaps my father is completely unique among disaffected Republicans.  But I bet he isn’t.

If you’re saying it’s dumb to ask whether Biden can do the difficult job of being President because he’s already doing it, you’re completely missing the point.  It’s utterly irrelvant whether he can do the job or not.  The question is, can he win against Trump?  Personally, I would vote for a turnip running with the campaign slogan “At least I’m not Trump!” ... but that doesn’t mean I want the turnip to run.  Because the turnip can’t win.  Because not everyone is me.  Because not everyone is convinced by the “at least it’s not Trump” argument.  If Biden can’t win, he never gets the chance to do the job, so it makes zero difference whether he’s capable of doing it or not.

If you’re saying that the debate performance doesn’t matter, because we’re not electing the best debater, you’re being deliberately disingenuous.  It’s not just about that one debate (though, admittedly, that was pretty bad).  The appearances since then have ranged from relatively encouraging—like the Chumbawumba speech just days after the debate: when you get knocked down, you get back up again! and then presumably have a whiskey drink, a lager drinnk, etc—to downright terrifying, like the George Stephanopoulos interview where he said that he’d only drop out if God came down and asked him to, and that if he lost he’d still feel okay that he’d done the “goodest job” he could have done.  I mean, if you lose, Joe, you get to go home with your Secret Service detail and live out the rest of your life, and ... not to be harsh, but it’s unlikely to be long enough to really feel the regrets that all the rest of us are gonna have.

Again, I’m not saying the Democrats definitely should replace Biden.  Nor am I saying they definitely should not.  But a meaningful conversation isn’t out of the question.  I dunno; I thought the last time Trump got elected it was going to be disastrous, and it turned out that the man was so incompetent and crazy that he had trouble actually accomplishing the worst things he wanted to do.  But this time we have the whole Project 2025 thing: people much smarter than him (though no less crazy) have laid out a blueprint for how to make all the things work ... even the illegal ones.  Which Trump’s Supreme Court has greased the wheels of pretty nicely by saying that the President can’t be held liable for anything he does.  And, for anyone else in the administration, the President can just issue a pardon.  Done and dusted.

So I think it’s perfectly reasonable to demand that the Democrats put up someone that can actually win against this chilling prospect.  Maybe that’s Biden.  Maybe not.  But at least we can talk about it.