The Public Option Scam

So far in the Democratic primary campaign, the most common criticism of a single-payer healthcare system, or Medicare for All, seems to be that it deprives recipients of "choice." Because everyone would be put into a single national plan, critics say, those who actually like their already-existing private insurance would be unjustly stripped of the ability to stick with that plan, mercilessly "kicked  off" of it by an intrusive nanny state that would force them onto a less-preferred government plan. But they have a solution: the public option. This is a government-run plan that, unlike in the case of Medicare for All, consumers would have the option to buy into (and, perhaps, automatically be enrolled in if they lack private insurance). This way, these anti-single payer politicians claim, we could have our cake and eat it too: we would be increasing, rather than decreasing, consumer choice and offering those who want government-run healthcare a la Medicare for All the opportunity to have it. Everyone gets what they wants.

It's a superficially persuasive argument, which is perhaps why a single payer Medicare for All plan has apparently been declining in public popularity at the same time that a public option has become a more attractive choice in the eyes of the electorate. One might also fault the two main presidential contenders who support Medicare for All—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—for doing an inadequate job of rebutting this argument. After all, it appeals to both the all-American notions of freedom and personal choice on the one hand and the left/liberal desire to help the unfortunate on the other. What could be better?

The only small problem (hardly a meaningful one in political campaigns) is that the argument is fraudulent. A public option would not carry the same advantages as Medicare for All, and at the expense of letting people keep their beloved private health insurance plans (rather than cruelly forcing them onto a public plan that would have no copays or deductibles and would cover vision and dental care) would keep the American healthcare system overcomplicated, needlessly expensive, and unequal in fundamentally immoral ways.

Let's examine, for example, Pete Buttigieg's clunkily named "Medicare for All Who Want It." As his campaign website promises, "everyone will be able to opt in to an affordable, comprehensive public alternative." Note the word "affordable," i.e., not free. This already presents a contrast with Medicare for All. Under a single payer plan, getting medical care could become the equivalent of driving on a public road or visiting a public library: no need to worry about picking out a plan that will give you the coverage you need at an affordable price, just take advantage of a service that's free at point of use whenever you need it; all you need to do is pay your taxes. Not so under Medicare of All Who Want It, or public option plans in general. As under the current system, the burden would be on consumers to pick the plan—public or private—that they believe is the most affordable given their circumstances.

This is not the only difference. For instance, as Dylan Scott of Vox notes, "The government plan would cover the same essential health benefits as private plans sold under Obamacare, though the details are left vague on what patients would pay out of pocket." This detail stands in contrast to Medicare for All, which, with its lack of copays and deductibles, "almost eliminates [out-of-pocket spending] entirely."

And what of those who are unable to afford private insurance? Buttigieg's website explains as follows:

The plan will automatically enroll individuals in affordable coverage if they are eligible for it, while those eligible for subsidized coverage will have a simple enrollment option. A backstop fund will reimburse health care providers for unpaid care to patients who are uninsured. Individuals who fall through the cracks will be retroactively enrolled in the public option.

So, from the sound of it, those who do not enroll in private insurance (including those who fail to do so for financial reasons) will be "automatically enroll[ed]" in the public option, even "retroactively enrolled" should they "fall through the cracks." Nothing on the website page indicates that private insurance will be made equally as "affordable" as the public plan, meaning that some will, presumably, be forced by their own circumstances to rely on the public option; the sacrosanct ideal of choice will apply only to those who are able to afford private insurance, while those unable to do so will be automatically enrolled in the public alternative (again, going by the sound of it). Details in this regard are scant, however.

Lest I appear to be singling out only Buttigieg's plan, we should also examine another public option-based healthcare proposal. Let's also take Joe Biden's. Biden's own website is only able to promise that his plan would insure "more than an estimated 97% of Americans"—leaving millions uninsured, in other words. The poor and sick will, apparently, be awarded with the "choice" to remain uninsured, with predictable consequences: People's Policy Project Matt Bruenig estimates that, even assuming the uninsured rate does fall to approximately 3% under Biden's healthcare plan, this could still mean the preventable deaths of 125,000 people in the first ten years after the plan's implementation—deaths that could be avoided under a genuinely universal healthcare plan, such as Medicare for All.

Whatever specific, avoidable flaws the Biden and Buttigieg plans may have, the reality is that all public option plans are doomed to run into the same problems. As George Bohmfalk writes in The Charlotte Observer, a public option "will likely become the insurer of last resort to the sickest and oldest among us. The insurance playing field will be anything but level. As deficient as they are, for-profit insurers will cleverly market themselves to the young and healthy, leaving those who use more healthcare to the public option. Its costs will balloon, dooming it to fail, to the delight of for-profit companies." To be sure, as long as private health insurance companies exist and are forced to compete with a public health insurance, they will use their considerable lobbying influence to weaken and undermine said public option. One can imagine the fate of those forced to rely on a public option as it's progressively slashed and weakened by Republicans (and, in all probability, centrist Democrats) in Congress, under pressure of the private health insurance lobby.

A public option also fails to offer the savings that a single payer plan would. Benjamin Studebaker and Nathan J. Robinson elaborate on this point in an article for Current Affairs:

Single payer systems control costs by giving the health service a monopoly on access to patients, preventing providers from exploiting desperate patients for profit. If instead there are a large number of insurance companies, providers can play those insurance companies off each other. Right now, we have a two-tier system, in which the best doctors and hospitals refuse to provide coverage unless your insurer offers them exorbitantly high rents. To support that cost while still making a profit, your insurer has to subject you to higher premiums, higher co-pays, and higher deductibles. Poor Americans with poor-quality insurance are stuck with providers who don’t provide high enough quality care to make these demands. The best providers keep charging ever higher rents, and the gap between the care they offer and the care the poor receive just keeps growing. Poor Americans are now seeing a decline in life expectancy, in part because they cannot afford to buy insurance that would give them access to the best doctors and hospitals. Costs balloon for rich Americans while the quality of care stagnates for the poor. 

The bloat doesn’t just come from providers. Because insurance works on a profit incentive, the insurance companies must extract rents as well. So the patient is paying to ensure not only that their doctor or hospital is highly-compensated, but that the insurance company generates profit too. Each insurance company has its own managers—its own CEO, its own human resources department, and so on. We have to pay all of these people, and because there are so many private insurance companies, there are so many middle managers to pay.

In a time where urgent (and necessarily costly) action is required on climate change, allowing vast sums of money to be wasted on bureaucracy and exorbitantly high rates for medical care is particularly obscene. 

To be sure, Medicare for All would significantly expand federal spending and require new taxes—as did its namesake Medicare, and Social Security before that. Those two government programs, of course, enjoy overwhelming popularity. According to a study from the libertarian Mercatus Institute, Medicare for All would significantly reduce national spending on healthcare, meaning we would pay less in new taxes than we are currently paying in private insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles, etc. Those new taxes, furthermore, could be more fairly distributed than private insurance premiums, which (unlike income and payroll taxes) do not take into account the income of the person paying. The end result is that the vast majority of the population would surely end up saving money as a result of single payer healthcare funded by a progressive tax system, even taking into account whatever new taxes it required. The current system distributes costs in a highly regressive fashion. People in the 50th income percentile—squarely in the "middle class," with an annual income around $48,000—pay a total tax rate of 24.7%; the 400 richest people in the country pay a rate of just 23.1%. But if employee contributions to health insurance plans are treated as another form of taxation, the 50th percentile tax rate jumps to 37.6%, while the rate for the top 400 remains effectively unchanged. This doesn't even take into account out-of-pocket costs.

It should be clear, then, that any attempt to present the public option as a plan that would offer the same benefits as Medicare for All, while preserving "choice," is simply dishonest. Fearmongering against single payer healthcare plans by claiming that they would "kick 149 million people off their current health insurance," as Amy Klobuchar recently did, is something even lower. One can, of course, argue that Medicare for All would be virtually impossible to get through Congress. True, but by all indications a public option plan would run into similar opposition from the health insurance lobby. It is not at all clear how settling for a half-measure before any negotiations have even begun—and a half-measure that is still highly unlikely to make it through Congress, at that—is better than pushing for a plan that is both fair and cost-effective. As Libby Watson wrote for Splinter (RIP):

[A public option plan] would obviously be better than what we have now, since what we have now is lethal, toxic sludge. The questions that matter for politicians and advocates when it comes to choosing between a policy that’s merely better and one that’s actually good is whether the good policy is truly out of reach, and whether the worse policy would prevent reaching a better policy goal. 

As she correctly concludes, a public option would hardly be easier to pass through Congress, and could, if anything, "take[] the wind out of the sails of reform" if passed, making it less likely we would ever have a single-payer plan. 

Healthcare is a complicated matter, and one can hardly fault average Americans who are more attracted to a public option and fail to see, at first blush, why it's necessary to for many millions to be "kicked off" of their private insurance plans. In all likelihood, many haven't devoted the time to learn why a public option is a wildly inadequate alternative, and the debates among the Democratic primary candidates have surely done little to illuminate the subject. As for politicians who run for office proposing public option plans over Medicare for All, and using dishonest arguments to support their position, an altogether different—and far less generous—judgment is in order.

From Tragedy to Farce: Watergate and the Trump-Ukraine Scandal

(Trump photo: Jason Szenes/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock via Deadline. Nixon photo: AP Photo via Politico)

In his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Karl Marx wrote a brief passage that has perhaps become something of a cliché to reference, but which current circumstances demand be quoted:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

When we apply this principle to the current situation with Donald Trump, another unavoidable cliché emerges: the comparison of the Trump-Ukraine scandal to the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon. While it has become trite to analogize scandals, particularly political scandals, to Watergate, the similarities here are too obvious to ignore. In both cases, a president engaged in blatantly corrupt actions to try to give himself a leg up against the opposition party in his bid for reelection; both scandals were compounded by (alleged) attempts to cover up the initial wrongdoing; and both resulted in the opening of an impeachment inquiry into the president (it remains to be seen how far the parallels will go, particularly in this respect).

The first level on which we have progressed from tragedy to farce is obvious. In Watergate, we had a popular president brought down by his cronies' (unnecessary) attempts to sabotage the Democratic party. To use the term first introduced by Aristotle, Nixon's corruption and his paranoia were his hamartia, or tragic flaw. Here we had a very capable president with the potential to go down in history as perhaps one of the greatest of the 20th century—having reestablished relations with China, achieved a détente with the Soviet Union, presided over the (eventual) drawing down of US involvement in the disastrous Vietnam War as well as the establishment of important regulatory agencies such as the EPA and OSHA—instead turned into a national pariah due to his own unforced errors, and those of the people around him. To add insult to injury, there is every reason to think Nixon could have been reelected without any of the "dirty tricks" the Committee to Re-Elect the President resorted to: Nixon was a popular incumbent, and George McGovern (the eventual Democratic nominee, who lost in a landslide to Nixon) might still have gotten the nomination even without the sabotage directed at one-time frontrunner Edmund Muskie. While Nixon was no doubt a gifted politician, his proclivity for dishonesty and playing dirty was consistent through his career—and with Watergate, it finally caught up to him in a fashion that must have seemed, for him and his supporters, reminiscent of the tragic downfall of an Othello or an Oedipus Rex.

While the similarities between "Ukrainegate" and Watergate are obvious, the backdrop of the current scandal is an almost complete inversion of that of its "tragic" predecessor: we now have a president who has never been popular, whose blatant stupidity and ineptitude are so extreme that he has already been ranked as one of the worst to ever hold his office, and whose entire presidency has so far been overshadowed by scandal. There is none of the drama of Watergate because Trump, unlike Nixon, has no public image to tarnish, no popularity to lose, and the details of the Ukraine scandal come as no surprise or shock, in contrast to the details of Nixon's treachery. Appropriately, then, there is little of the suspense there was with Watergate, as Trump has already casually admitted his attempt to persuade the Ukrainian government. When confronted with the situation, the relevant maxim seems to be one recently offered by philosopher Slavoj Žižek, paraphrasing the Marx brothers: "Trump acts and looks like a shamelessly obscene politician, but this should not deceive us – he really is a shamelessly obscene politician."

Just as the "tragedy" of Nixon's predicament is exacerbated by how unnecessary his actions were, the farce here is compounded by the sheer stupidity of Trump's: in an attempt to dig up dirt on a Democratic candidate who seems to perhaps be imploding all on his own, Trump relied not only on his suspicion of Biden's corruption but also his incomprehensible misconception that someone in Ukraine is in possession of one the DNC servers the company CrowdStrike had examined in 2016. The farcicality of it all increases when we actually look at the story of how Hunter Biden, in an apparent act of (legal) corruption all its own, came to sit on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company for apparently no reason other than his relation to then-Vice President Joe Biden—despite having been kicked out of the Navy Reserve for cocaine use earlier the same year, and having little relevant experience.  In contrast to the Nixon saga's evocation of classical or especially Shakespearean tragedies, the Trump-Ukraine story is in some ways reminiscent of the work of the Coen brothers: for instance, the film Burn After Reading, in which a draft of an alcoholic ex-CIA analyst's memoirs ends up in the hands of two dim-witted gym employees, who attempt to sell it to the Russian embassy after they mistake it for sensitive intelligence and the analyst spurns their attempts to extract a reward from him for the memoir's safe return. Just as this cast of oafish characters careens toward disaster through a combination of bad judgment, incompetence and random chance, Trump et al. have perhaps charted their own downfall in a remarkably similar fashion.

But there is another, more important way in which the tragedy-to-farce arc has materialized. The real tragedy of Nixon's presidency—not from the perspective of him or his supporters, to be sure, but from the perspective of any moral person concerned with the general well-being of humanity—is not that his paranoia and corruption caught up with him, or even that he was paranoid and corrupt. Rather, it is that the Watergate scandal has overshadowed the many other, more grievous crimes of the Nixon administration (the bombing of Cambodia, COINTELPRO, the installation of Pinochet in Chile, etc.). Noam Chomsky was correct when he wrote that Watergate is "analogous to the discovery that the directors of Murder, Inc. were also cheating on their income tax. Reprehensible, to be sure, but hardly the main point." The authentic tragedy of the Nixon years is that after continuing the Vietnam War and even expanding it into Cambodia, he was resoundingly reelected over a candidate who was committed to ending the war—and that the public only turned against him over something as comparatively minor as Watergate, because the victim was the Democratic Party rather than a bunch of Indochinese peasants. To add insult to injury, it is the Watergate scandal, rather than the vast number of those killed by Nixon's policies, that is generally remembered as the "black spot" on his legacy.

This same dynamic is replicated in the case of Trump: it wasn't the family separation policy, or the Muslim ban, or the catastrophic environmental policies or any of the other blatantly destructive acts of the Trump administration that led to an impeachment inquiry finally being opened—it was an attempt to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter which, although flagrantly corrupt, is nonetheless almost comically insignificant in the harm it caused when compared to that which resulted from many of Trump's other actions. When the victims are migrant children separated from their parents, or refugees, or transgender people, the Democratic leadership couldn't be moved to open an impeachment inquiry—but only once the victim was Joe Biden were they finally swayed. What makes this aspect of the impeachment farcical rather than tragic (though perhaps it's both) is not that Trump's crimes are so much worse than Nixon's (they aren't) but rather that their corrupt and diabolical nature is so much more flagrant. Only the barest pretense is made by Trump and those around him that his actions are motivated by anything other than cruelty, bigotry and egotism. Yet despite this transparency, we have had to deal with months of Nancy Pelosi dismissing notion of impeachment with arguments that are in themselves farcical—that Trump is "almost self-impeaching," for instance. And now, even after the impeachment dam has broken, Pelosi and the Democratic leadership still want us to have a narrow impeachment inquiry focused on the Ukraine revelations.

This tragedy-to-farce dynamic is reflected in public opinion and treatment of the two presidents: while, pre-Watergate, Nixon had enjoyed a "traditional" relationship with the public (high approval ratings early on that remained at least middling until 1973, being named Gallup's "most admired man" for every year of his first term) and even, as noted, won a landslide reelection (carrying every state but Massachusetts), Trump has been an object of mockery and derision throughout his time in office—not only among "coastal elites" and the media, but among great swaths of the population even in the "heartland" (as a resident of a Midwestern state—one that Trump carried handily in 2016, even—I can personally testify that I have seen Trump mocked and derided by those around me far more than I have seen him defended). Accordingly, while the Watergate scandal marked a sort of collective trauma for much of the public (a "long national nightmare" in the words of Nixon's successor Gerald Ford), the Trump impeachment inquiry has so far appeared to produce far more ridicule on social media (in response to Trump's melodramatic reactions) than trauma of any sort.

We know the resolution of the Watergate scandal: the "tragic" downfall of Nixon and the genuinely tragic overshadowing of Nixon's vastly more grievous crimes in the public memory by Watergate. Can we therefore make any prediction on how the current scandal will play out? Well, from a comic perspective I can think of one perfect sequence of events: that Trump will be impeached by the House just to be inevitably acquitted by the Senate, and then will be defeated in the 2020 election immediately afterward. Were that to happen, Trump would likely be remembered as a disastrous president whose general buffoonery, incompetence and unpopularity—rather than simply any one act of corruption—were his great downfall. The comedy of that, of course, would be that after all is said and done, no lesson is learned and nothing has changed: Trump's public image is no different fundamentally than it was before impeachment, the Ukraine scandal, or even on the day of his inauguration. Obviously, the fact that this is perhaps the best option from a comedic perspective does not make it the likeliest; making any prediction about what will happen is a futile endeavor in a situation as outlandish as this one, just as, in a farce, one never knows what might come next.

So what should we take from this? That we are simply doomed to relive some absurd version of history, whatever we do? In one of Karl Marx's other most famous quotations, he writes:

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. [emphasis in original]

Surely, then, we are not in some sort of Groundhog Day scenario, condemned to repeat the same cycle with no ability to fundamentally alter it. There are, I think, actions that can and should be taken. For Trump's opponents, the right approach is not to try to disrupt the farcical nature of it all—anyone in a farce who tries to proclaim themselves as the "serious person" in the room only makes themselves that much more of a laughingstock—but to lean into it. We should not, as Pelosi and the leadership want, have a "narrow impeachment" designed to take full advantage of the scandal du jour; rather, the impeachment investigation should be made as wide and as public as possible, probing into every conceivable instance of corruption or abuse of power that has happened under Trump: the abuse of migrants, the spending at Trump's properties by federal employees, the enabling of the assault on Yemen, even the stupid Tweets inciting racial hatred and attempting to mislead the public.

The hearings should become a national spectacle, like the Watergate hearings became, but unlike the Watergate hearings they should be spectacle for spectacle's sake. Trump has already been lashing out and digging himself in deeper just at the opening of an inquiry—the goal should be to provoke him as much as possible. Trump has a been a master of farce, making his opponents appear ridiculous in the Republican primary and reducing the country's most sacred rituals into an absurd spectacle that excites his supporters and infuriates his critics. But as soon as he becomes the target of ridicule, he is incapable of responding productively. Every time he tries to strike back, he simply makes himself more clownish. To actually impeach him is to send the case to the senate, where Trump is certain to be acquitted and claim vindication—for this reason, the point of the impeachment inquiry should not be to actually impeach Trump, but only to draw attention to his many wrongdoings and to further enrage him, leading to more wrongdoings which can further be litigated—creating a vicious circle and taking the absurdity of it all to a whole new level.

Obviously, there are objections one could raise to this strategy. One could say that it trivializes and politicizes the impeachment process, for instance. I believe that to make this objection, though, means one fundamentally misunderstands our predicament. The impeachment process is already politicized, first of all because impeachment is a doomed endeavor as noted—not because there are no grounds for Trump's impeachment and removal (as I've made clear, there are many) but because it stands no chance of winning enough Republican support in the senate for the necessary two-thirds supermajority required to convict. The reason the Republicans will not convict Trump is for purely political reasons: because to do so would be to alienate their base, to probably doom their chances in 2020, etc. But also, to only have a narrow focus on Ukraine and the like is just as politicized as what I have proposed, because it implicitly accepts the other wrongdoings of the Trump administration on the grounds that it is not politically worthwhile to prosecute them. As for trivializing, it is far too late to worry about such things: as I have argued, we are in the midst of a political farce, and to refuse to acknowledge this and make the best of it is to make oneself the butt of the joke.

One could also object that to turn the impeachment proceedings into a circus will mean the Democrats are seen as just as clownish as Trump. Perhaps, but so what? Nancy Pelosi and the congressional Democrats are already unpopular, and their public image matters little. The 2020 election will be greatly influenced by the presidential candidate the Democrats put forward and how this person performs against Trump; as long of the public sees Trump as a buffoon, whatever their view of Pelosi and the House Democrats, the Democratic nominee has an opportunity to position themselves as the one who can end the circus and shift the focus back to solving the many real  problems we face.

Of course, Pelosi and the Democratic leadership are highly unlikely to take this route, perhaps because truly examining all of the Trump administration's crimes would force us to confront his administration's continuity with those of his predecessors—including Obama—when it comes to treatment of undocumented immigrants, war crimes in the Middle East and in other respects. It is up to the Left, then, to remain consistent critics not only of Trump but of any impeachment process which fails to emphasize the full scope of his criminality, corruption, and idiocy; if such an investigation requires the Democrats to reckon with their own similarities to Trump, all the better. As long as the impeachment inquiry attempts to be "serious," it can be nothing more than one more piece of the tragicomic spectacle American politics have become—and, paradoxically, only by embracing its place in our political farce and making the most of would it deserve to be taken seriously.

CORRECTION: Previously this post alluded to Trump having relied on a discredited right-wing conspiracy theory; however, evidence I have seen then leaves me less confident that the theory of Biden acting to protect Burisma is completely discredited. I have updated accordingly and apologize for any error. 

Joe Biden Really Is a God-Awful Candidate

Scott Morgan/Reuters via CNBC

I know my last post was also a case against Joe Biden. But I feel entitled to this. That post was my attempt at a rational argument, focusing almost entirely on the "electability" criterion that seems to be bolstering Biden's candidacy. This post is no such thing—no, this one's a spleen-venting session that's for my sake as much as anyone else's. Because, in spite of about a million reasons why Joe Biden should be completely disqualified from even running for president, he is still at the top of the polls. His lead has narrowed significantly, to be sure. And I take solace in the fact that in three of the last five contested presidential primaries, the candidate who was leading at this point was not the eventual nominee. On the whole, I'm cautiously optimistic about the Democratic primary. But I'm also impatient, because Joe Biden isn't just the wrong candidate for this election, or even simply a bad candidate—he is a candidate that, at this point, should be so obviously terrible that he belongs in the single digits, where he stayed the last time he ran for president.

Let's start with the newest reason that Joe Biden should never be president: he seems to be losing his damn mind in front of our eyes. I listed a number of his most recent "gaffes" in my last post, and, well, things haven't gotten any better. At the most recent debate, he accidentally called Bernie Sanders "the president"—the second debate in a row where he's called one of his opponents the president—said that he is (not was) the vice president, and vomited up this incoherent response when asked about school segregation:

Well, they have to deal with the … Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure that we are in a position where—

Look, we talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal of … A raise of getting out of the $60,000 level.

No. 2, make sure that we bring in to the help with the stud—the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need… We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are required—I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them.

Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have three, four, and five-year-olds go to school. School! Not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t know what— They don’t know what quite what to do. Play the radio. Make sure the television—excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night. The phone—make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school—er, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

At one campaign stop, he even seemed to forget Barack Obama's name. In an interview, he pronounced Obama's first name "rap rock." And—although Julián Castro has taken a lot of flak for calling him out on it —he really did appear to forget what he'd said just moments before in the last debate. Here's what he said before the now-infamous moment:

The option I'm proposing is Medicare for all—Medicare for choice. If you want Medicare, if you lose the job from your insurance—from your employer, you automatically can buy into this. 

[...] 

Every single person who is diagnosed with cancer or any other disease can automatically become part of this plan. They will not go bankrupt because of that. They will not go bankrupt because of that. They can join immediately.

[Emphasis added]

And then here he is interrupting Castro's response shortly afterward: "They do not have to buy in. They do not have to buy in." Moreover, Castro was correct about Biden's plan. Even Politifact, which rated Castro's statement "mostly false" for reasons too complex and stupid to get into here, had this to say: "Biden does require those who want Medicare coverage to 'opt in[.]'"

None of these incidents are the signs of a well-functioning mind, and all of them put together should raise major concerns. It is grossly irresponsible not to be asking questions about Joe Biden's state of mind and mental health at this point, and the fact that we can't (or at least shouldn't) put much stock in his mental acuity should be disqualifying already.

However, even if we assume that Biden's mouth is just failing to keep up with his brain and that he is just as mentally sharp as ever—an unwarrantedly generous assumption—he is still an absolutely horrible candidate. For one thing, Biden has a strained, at best, relationship with the truth. For instance, he recently claimed to have opposed the Iraq War before it began, and to have only voted for the resolution authorizing the war in order to "get the Security Council to force inspectors in to see whether there was any nuclear activity going on with Saddam Hussein." This is completely false. Biden was outspokenly supportive of the war both before and after it began, and it was clear at the time that by voting for the resolution he was authorizing Bush to invade Iraq, contra his confused explanation. At the last debate he repeated an at-best-misleading account of his record on Iraq:

I should have never voted to give Bush the authority to go in and do what he said he was going to do. The AUMF was designed, he said, to go in and get the Security Council to vote 15-0 to allow inspectors to go in to determine whether or not anything was being done with chemical weapons or nuclear weapons. And when that happened, he went ahead and went anyway without any of that proof.

I said something that was not meant the way I said it. I said—from that point on—what I was argued against in the beginning, once he started to put the troops in, was that in fact we were doing it the wrong way; there was no plan; we should not be engaged; we didn't have the people with us; we didn't have our—we didn't have allies with us, et cetera.

One could, of course, chalk this up to the possible decline in Biden's mental faculties—but this isn't a new problem for him. Back in 1987, during his first run for president, Biden claimed to have graduated in the top half of his class (he graduated 76th out of 86), received three college degrees (he received one) and gotten a full academic scholarship (he didn't). More weirdly, he plagiarized lines from then-leader of the UK Labour Party Neal Kinnock, including details about Kinnock's family history that didn't actually apply to Biden (unlike Kinnock, Biden was not, as he claimed, the first in his family to go to college, or descended from coal miners). He also repeatedly claimed to have marched during the civil rights movement, even after advisers reminded him that that had never happened. His falsehoods about his role in the Iraq War are entirely in character for him.

But even if we put aside Biden's history of falsehoods, leading up to the present, and his questionable mental state, we have another great reason that he should never be president: his record as a politician is frankly horrifying. Biden ran into trouble earlier this year for talking about his relationship with segregationists early in his political career. The realities are even more disturbing than he let on at the time. We know that Biden devoted a considerable part of his career to limiting desegregation busing—part of why he had such a good working relationship with segregationists. And he was grateful for their support, too: in 1977, Biden thanked James Eastland—an unabashed racist who outspokenly view black people as an "inferior race"—for supporting a piece of anti-busing legislation.

Eastland wasn't the only segregationist Biden had a close relationship with. He also worked with notorious Dixiecrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond, for instance, on a crime bill that, per The Intercept,

increased penalties for drugs, including expanding civil asset forfeiture; created a sentencing commission; and eradicated parole at the federal level... [and] sought to limit access to bail[.]

The bill in question was ultimately vetoed by Ronald Reagan. But, it's worth noting, Biden's relationship with Thurmond went beyond their shared support for horrible pieces of legislation. In 2003, he also eulogized Thurmond—who, for context, had conducted a record-setting filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, never renounced his history as a segregationist, and, as it turns out, fathered a mixed-race child (whom he never publicly acknowledged) with a teenage maid as a young man, and known of this "secret daughter" throughout his career as a vehement segregationist—as a "brave man, who in the end made his choice and moved to the good side."

But let's not pass over that Biden-Thurmond crime bill too quickly. After all, it was just one part of Biden's long and awful record of supporting "tough-on-crime" legislation. To return to the Intercept article:

Biden, who was the ranking Democrat on the committee from 1981 to 1987, and then chaired it until 1995, continued on this trajectory: shaping many of the laws that would...institutionalize a federal drug war. A number of the priorities from the 1982 Biden-Thurmond bill would eventually become law. Biden shaped the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which curtailed access to bail; eliminated parole; created a sentencing commission; expanded civil asset forfeiture; and increased funding for states. Biden helped lead the push for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which lengthened sentences for many offenses, created the infamous 100:1 crack versus cocaine sentencing disparity, and provided new funds for the escalating drug war. Eventually, with his co-sponsorship of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, his long-sought-after drug czar position was created. These and other laws lengthened sentences at the federal level and contributed to an explosion of federal imprisonment — from 24,000 people locked up in 1980 to almost 216,000 in 2013. In short, these laws increased the likelihood that more people would end up in cages and for longer. 

In 1989, Biden criticized President George Bush’s anti-drug efforts as “not tough enough, bold enough or imaginative enough. The president says he wants to wage a war on drugs, but if that’s true, what we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam, not a limited war, fought on the cheap.” Then, in 1994, he pushed through the massive crime bill, which authorized more than $30 billion of spending, largely devoted to expanding state prisons and local police forces. He bragged of his accomplishments in a 1994 report: The “first [national] drug strategy sought a total of $350 million in federal aid to state and local law enforcement, with states matching the federal assistance dollar for dollar. The first drug strategy I offered—in January 1990—called for more than $1 billion in aid to state and local law enforcement—a controversial view at the time.” 

That's right: Joe Biden was actually pushing Republicans to become tougher and more punitive than they already were. And, while high crime rates were certainly an issue, the mass incarceration policies championed by politicians like Biden were of dubious usefulness at best: a study from the Brennan Center for Justice, released in 2015, "concludes that over-harsh criminal justice policies, particularly increased incarceration, which rose even more dramatically over the same period, were not the main drivers of the crime decline [over the past few decades]. In fact, the report finds that increased incarceration has been declining in its effectiveness as a crime control tactic for more than 30 years. Its effect on crime rates since 1990 has been limited, and has been non-existent since 2000."

And now, to top it all off, Biden is running a campaign where—when he's not busy forgetting what year it is—he tries to convince the electorate that progressive measures like Medicare-for-All are bad ("there will be a deductible, in your paycheck" he warned at the last debate, showing he doesn't know what a deductible is) and that instead we should expect the Republican Party, currently the most dangerous organization in human history, to suddenly become a bastion of Reasonable Conservatism once Trump is out of office. And despite his utter lack of useful ideas, complete incompetence as a candidate and horrible history (which I've only highlighted some of the worst parts of), he's still sitting at the top of the polls—hopefully, not for much longer. If he does manage to get the nomination in spite of it all, it will be a sort of sick, miniature version of Donald Trump's victory in 2016: an affirmation that absolutely nothing matters, every principle that we thought applied in the field of politics is void, and Chaos Reigns Supreme. And if it happens, the Democratic Party deserves to be burned to the ground. I don't know at this point if I would vote for Biden over Trump. Four more years of Trump sounds nightmarish, but it will look like a minor case of heartburn compared with what's to come if we don't actually deal with the problems of climate change, inequality and authortarianism, and Joe Biden has absolutely nothing to offer when it comes to any of them. I'm not yet convinced that four (or eight) years of Biden's compromising and ineptitude might not pave the way for some demagogue even more dangerous than Trump.

I haven't even covered all of the major bad things about Joe Biden (Anita Hill, anyone?), but if I haven't made my point already there's no point in carrying on. So, is there anything good I can say about old Uncle Joe? Well, it may just be damning him with faint praise, but he seems like a genuinely well-meaning person—which is more than I can say for a lot of politicians. I wouldn't mind having him as a neighbor, or even a relative—just as a president. To his credit, he was also (unlike the Democrats' last presidential nominee) one of the less hawkish members of the Obama administration, and was right about our intervention in Libya. I don't know that he'd be a worse president than Hillary would have been, it's just that her nomination felt inevitable, and the reasons that Biden is bad seem so much more obvious. But it remains to be seen whether they'll be enough to doom his candidacy.

Is Biden Really the Most Electable Candidate?

Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images via Business Insider)

Joe Biden does not have a whole lot going for him at the moment. He's long been gaffe-prone, and doesn't seem to have gotten better with age. The first debate saw him get brutally dragged by Kamala Harris. While he performed better in the second, he was out-shined by a number of other candidates, Elizabeth Warren being perhaps the prominent. Barack Obama has yet to endorse him, despite Biden's incessant attempts to glide along on Obama's lasting popularity. He does not have have a whole lot of new and exciting ideas, as Warren and Bernie Sanders do, nor would he make any sort of inspiring first were he elected president (unlike many of his opponents). However, he does have one big, important thing going for him: electability.

According to a recent Economist/YouGov poll, 65% of Democrats think Biden would probably win against Trump in the general election—the highest number for any candidate. And according to another recent poll (this one from Reuters/Ipsos), 36% of Democrats are just looking for someone who will beat Trump. Those two numbers undoubtedly have a lot to do with Biden's continued (albeit narrowed) lead in the polls for the Democratic primary. Conventional wisdom would, indeed, dictate that Biden is the most "electable" candidate, being a moderate who can boast a lot of experience in government, including eight years as vice president under a reasonably popular president. But anyone who still trusts conventional wisdom at this point has a case of amnesia that's worse than the guy in Memento. So is Biden really the most electable option we have? Personally, I don't think so.

Granted, Biden is doing well in head-to-head polls against Donald Trump. But we're still very early in the campaign. Through much of the summer of 2015, Hillary Clinton was consistently pulling a double-digit lead over Trump, and we know how that panned out. We have a long campaign ahead of us, and a great deal could change between now and Election Day 2020. Trying to guess which candidate is the most electable is a crap shoot at best, as the last presidential election painfully demonstrated—but if we must do so, we need to consider a lot more than just what the polls are saying right now.

One obvious thing to consider is Biden's propensity for "gaffes"—a term that's no doubt too generous for some of his recent unforced errors. Let's review just the times he's misspoken or gotten confused over the past few weeks:

• In his closing statement at the second debate, he asked viewers to "go to Joe 30330." He later stated that he had accidentally said his own name, Joe, instead of the word "text."
• He referred to former British Prime Minister Theresa May as Margaret Thatcher (for the second time this year)
• He told a crowd of people that "we choose truth over facts"
• He said that "poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids"
• He twice said that, as vice president, he met with survivors of the Parkland shooting—which happened over a year after left office

To reiterate, these are just his slip-ups from the past few weeks. Now, it may seem petty or unfair to focus on this sort of thing, and it may feel simplistic to argue that Biden's gaffes make him less electable. To that, I would respond by simply pointing to one of the most infamous phrases to come out of the 2016 campaign: "basket of deplorables." This was an unfortunate turn of phrase from Hillary Clinton, describing a group of Trump supporters (those who are openly racist, sexist, Islamophobic, etc.). It's very hard to actually dispute the point she was making (which I say as no great fan of Hillary Clinton): a lot of Trump's support comes from genuinely disgusting people with horrible views. But Clinton's poor choice of words had serious consequences. Diane Hessan, who was tasked by the Clinton campaign with following undecided voters, later wrote that "[a]ll hell broke loose" after the "deplorables" remark and that it marked "the one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice." In her book What Happened, Clinton herself would write that the remark had been a "political gift" to Donald Trump. Of course, Clinton may still have lost even if she'd never used that wording, or tried to make the point she was making. But the point is, gaffes absolutely matter. And at this point, you would be hard-pressed to find a major candidate that seems more likely than Biden to hand Donald Trump another "political gift" by saying something unfortunate.

That's not the only reason to question to question Biden's electability. Another undoubtedly important factor in the 2020 election will be the youth vote. In 2018, the percentage of 18- to 29-year-olds who voted surged significantly from previous midterm elections and "almost certainly helped the Democratic Party take control of the House of Representatives," according to an analysis from The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). The ability to turn out younger voters will undeniably be important for the Democratic candidate in 2020, so it makes sense to take a look at what younger voters favor politically. For starters, a Harvard Institute of Politics poll found that a solid plurality of young voters support Bernie Sanders, probably the most left-wing candidate, for the Democratic nomination. And this result is not surprising if we look at the policy preferences of younger voters. A separate Harvard IOP poll from last year found commanding majorities of 18- to 29-year-olds are in favor of a federal jobs guarantee, free college and single-payer healthcare. Among young "likely voters," 53% favor democratic socialism while only 48% support capitalism. 

Trump's unpopularity among young voters will obviously help whichever Democrat gets the nomination, but that doesn't mean that youth turnout will be the same no matter what. These numbers suggest that Bernie Sanders, or at least Elizabeth Warren, is the sort of candidate that can turn out the youth vote, because these are the candidates that line up with the majority of younger adults politically. On the other hand, Joe Biden—unlike most young voters—is outspokenly against single-payer healthcare, is decidedly not a socialist of any sort, and has mocked the the idea that millennials have it tough, responding: "Give me a break. No, no, I have no empathy for it. Give me a break." It's obvious that Biden will do the Democrats no favors with young voters if he's the nominee. 

We should also address Biden's vulnerability with black voters. Granted, Biden remains the top-polling choice among black voters for the time being, but there's reason for concern nonetheless. In this very campaign, Biden has touted his close working relationship with segregationists in the past—and when criticized for doing so by Cory Booker, said that Booker should apologize to him for daring to criticize what Biden had said. Biden played an important role in turning liberals against desegregation busing and has had a long, prominent history in supporting tough-on-crime laws that were often promoted by appealing to racist fears and resulted in disproportionately harsh treatment of black Americans—a history he has recently defended. Should Biden be the nominee, Trump's campaign is likely to highlight these facts to try to lower turnout among black voters, and it could work. Certainly, most black people aren't about to embrace Donald Trump just because of Biden's troubling past—but many could end up sitting out the election, as happened in 2016. Biden's current popularity among black voters is certainly part of the reason he's polling so well against Trump; in a recent Fox News poll, for instance, 84% of black voters said they would support Joe Biden over Donald Trump—a higher percentage than said they would support Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris in their hypothetical match-ups against the incumbent. But if Biden's current popularity among black voters begins to fade, so will his advantage against Trump—and given his poor record on race-related issues and his propensity for gaffes, it's a possibility worth considering. His support among black primary voters softened considerably after his first debate performance, when Kamala Harris took him on over his opposition to desegregation busing; it would be naive to assume that something similar couldn't happen again.

While it's not directly related to electability, I think we additionally must take the issue of Biden's mental state seriously. He has been making a great deal of missteps lately—so many that his political allies have started to float the idea of changing his schedule and reduce his opportunities for "gaffes." Combined with his age (if elected, Biden would turn 80 before his first term was even halfway over), this begins to raise some real questions. To be fair, Bernie Sanders is a year older than Biden, so I can hardly oppose Biden based on his age alone. But Sanders still seems sharp in a way that Biden decidedly doesn't. When we're choosing who should become one of the most powerful people on the planet, it's probably better to be safe than sorry.

So, if not Biden, who should those voters whose number one priority is to defeat Trump support in the Democratic primary? Well, for one thing, I question how much emphasis we really need to place on choosing the most "electable" candidate in 2020. Donald Trump has been a consistently unpopular president, and there are reasons to suspect that the economy might soon be in a recession, further dampening his odds of reelection. In 2016, Trump was only able to narrowly win against a highly unpopular and frequently inept Democrat (and even then, he lost the popular vote). While it's understandable to emphasize the importance of defeating Trump, it would be awfully short-sighted to focus on just choosing the most electable candidate when it's likely that Trump will be facing an uphill battle for reelection no matter who the Democrats nominate.

But for those still desperate to find someone who can beat Trump, my answer to the question "whom should I support?" is the same as my answer to anyone else: Bernie Sanders. Sanders has often polled as well, or nearly as well, in head-to-heads against Trump as Biden has, and I don't think he has the same vulnerabilities. A ticket headed by Sanders would be practically guaranteed to turn out young voters in droves and, contrary to the notion that he would alienate swing voters, a recent poll showed Sanders narrowly ahead of Trump in Texas. Americans are simply not afraid of socialism in the way they once were, and policies like a $15 minimum wage and higher taxes on the wealthy are broadly popular. 

In the end, though, I really would urge people to decide their candidate based on policy over "electability." I think just about any of the top Democratic candidates could beat Trump—but none of them are guaranteed to, either. In the last election, Democrats chose the supposedly far-more-electable Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, while Republicans chose the unelectable Donald Trump over the various more electable options (Bush, Rubio, etc.)—and Republicans came out of the election with the presidency, both houses of Congress, and a stronger position than they'd had in decades. But even if you do insist on making electability your top priority, Joe Biden is not the person you're looking for.

These Debates Suck

The candidates at the July 30 debate (AP/Paul Sancya via KCCI)

I have watched all four nights of the Democratic debates so far, and what has been most striking to me is not any particular candidate's performance, but rather the simple truth that these debates have so far been terrible. I don't mean that as a commentary on the candidates' performances (though, to be sure, some of them have been terrible, too) but in terms of the very setup of each debate: the lineups, the questions, the rules, the amount of time each candidate has ended up getting—they have all absolutely sucked. That didn't keep me from getting some kind of twisted enjoyment out of watching the candidates butt heads and try (sometimes successfully) to destroy each other in front of an audience of millions. But as a means of actually informing the viewer or trying to let each candidate argue for their vision? They've been pretty dismal. Some of the reasons these first two debates (or four debates, depending on how you want to look at it) have been so bad are specific to them; but other reasons hold true more generally, and will also be true of the remaining debates.

Let's start with the reasons specific to these first debates. First of all, the lineups. It is unbelievable that after two debates that took up a total of four nights, we have yet to see Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders together on one stage. They were the three top-polling candidates before the first debate and the three top-polling candidates by the time the second debate rolled around as well. Yet, despite the fact that there have been ten candidates onstage each night, we have so far not been able to have these three candidates together in the same place at the same time for either debate. This is frankly ridiculous. My opinion from early on has been that the debates should simply be broken up by polling numbers: the first night, the ten highest-polling candidates should debate; the second night, the eleventh through twentieth highest-polling candidates should debate (or vice versa—the order of the nights isn't the point).

But wait, isn't that unfair? Doesn't it deprive the lower-polling candidates of the same opportunity as the higher-polling ones? Maybe, but who cares? If you're polling in eleventh place at this point in the race, you're probably not going to be the nominee. I realize that polling this far out isn't especially reliable, but we're talking about candidates eleventh place and lower, which is to say, polling at around 1% or less. Plus, in the last election cycle the Republicans broke their debates up by polling and that didn't seem to deprive the lower-tier candidates of their chance; everyone said Carly Fiorina won the "kiddie table" debate and she was suddenly talked about as a serious contender, and even allowed to appear with the high-polling candidates at the next debate. Then she petered out because people weren't actually that interested in her, which was why she was polling so low to begin with.

It's much more valuable for us to have the leading candidates—the ones who are already attracting the most support—square off so we can see the similarities and differences between their policies and ideas. The fact that the most recent debate had neither Warren nor Sanders on the same stage as Biden is a huge loss. Few, if any, of the candidates Biden shared a stage with have visions that contrast as strongly with his, and there was no one to forcefully take him on over Medicare for All in the same way Sanders or Warren could have. How about instead of obsessing over what's fair to low-polling candidates who are embarking on personal vanity projects, we consider what's fair to the people watching these debates? Schadenfreude aside, no one wanted to watch Sanders and Warren spend half their night dragging a political nobody like John Delaney.

Second, and specific to the most recent debate: CNN is so awful. The questions at their debate(s) sounded like they'd been written by someone from the National Review. Here's an example: "Senator Warren, you want to make it U.S. policy that the U.S. will never use a nuclear weapon unless another country uses one first. Now, President Obama reportedly considered that policy, but ultimately decided against it. Why should the U.S. tie its own hands with that policy?" Yes, why do you want the United States to "tie its own hands" by saying that it won't start a nuclear war? And no, this isn't just some sort of devil's advocate type phrasing; the questions were consistently slanted in the same direction. Here's another example:

Senator Sanders, President Trump has argued that the United States cannot continue to be the, quote, "policeman of the world." You said the exact same thing on a debate stage in 2016. If voters are hearing the same message from you and President Trump on the issue of military intervention, how should they expect that you will be any different from him?

A few questions later, in contrast, we get this:

Congressman [Ryan], you've said that you would not meet with North Korea dictator Kim Jong-un unless you were at least close to a deal. Now, Senator Klobuchar says that she would, quote, "always be willing to meet with leaders to discuss policies." Is that view wrong?

Note that there's no loaded phrasing here: no "why would you limit your efforts at diplomacy by refusing to meet with the leader of another country?" or "why single out Kim-Jong Un when presidents meet with autocratic rulers all the time?" Just a perfectly nondescript "It that view wrong?" It's a consistent pattern.

Also consistent were the attempts to stir up some reality show-style drama by personalizing every remark. For example:

And previously you have said, when asked about your primary opponents, quote, "A lot of people are making promises, and I'm not going to make promises just to get elected." Who on this stage is making promises just to get elected?

Who are you talking about? Who's fearmongering?

Who's offering a false choice here?

In the last debate, [Elizabeth Warren] said the politicians who are not supporting Medicare for All simply lack the will to fight for it. You do not support Medicare for All. Is Senator Warren correct? Do you just not lack [sic] the will to fight for it?

These are blatant attempts to incite squabbling between candidates, and in no way do they actually have any value in terms of highlighting the candidates' policy differences. Who Amy Klobuchar thinks is making false promises, who Beto O'Rourke believes is offering a false choice, and who Bill de Blasio is implicitly accusing of fearmongering are really not relevant questions. What the candidates believe each others' motivations to be should not be of great interest to voters, who are perfectly able to make up their own minds about what each candidate's motivations are—and the idea that candidates need to spell out who they're attacking with jibes like these is just insulting to the viewers' intelligence. If the candidates want to go after each other (and they often do) let them, but don't try to provoke pointless bickering about their opinions of one another.

This same inclination to provoke as much conflict as possible makes itself obvious when we look at who the moderators allowed to speak. John Delaney—who is, again, a political nobody polling at about 1% —got called on, by my count, at least eleven times, not counting opening or closing statements. The moderators were eager to bring him into the conversation not because he's in any way relevant (he isn't) but because they knew he would clash with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (not shocking, given his net worth is in the tens of millions).

So those are the issues specific to the debates we've had so far. But thankfully not every debate will be hosted by CNN, and so far only nine candidates have qualified to take part in the next debate (which is scheduled for mid-September)—meaning we may finally have our three frontrunners onstage together. Unfortunately, though, the problems go much deeper than that.

For one thing, while CNN's questions were perhaps especially egregious, they're not exactly a sharp deviation from the norm. For instance, the second night of the first debate (which was not hosted by CNN) kicked off with this question: "will taxes go up for the middle class in a Sanders administration? And if so, how do you sell that to voters?" This might not seem unfair, but notice that the converse isn't asked of candidates who oppose free college and Medicare for All: "Why do you want the middle class to keep paying more for healthcare and college than many would pay if Medicare for All and free college tuition were adopted?" Even taking into account new taxes, these policies would generally save less-wealthy people money, compared to the alternative—which is why they're being proposed in the first place. Another question that has yet to be asked of candidates who support a public option rather than single-payer health insurance: "Won't your program create a two-tiered system, where the poorest and sickest are forced to rely on the public option, making it more vulnerable to spending cuts given that wealthier people won't have to depend on it and have no reason to defend it?"

Another gem from the first debate (this time from the first night): "who is the [greatest] geopolitical threat to the United States?" Right, because the country that spends by far the most on its military and operates a massive global empire in which it acts with almost complete impunity should really be concerned about external geopolitical threats. There was no question asked that night about the very real threat the United States poses to Yemen, for instance, given its complicity in the mass slaughter that's been going on there for years, but thankfully we found time to ask questions about which group or country the candidates think might someday potentially harm the United States in some manner.

This sort of thing is not an oversight, but rather a product of the ideological framework in which the mainstream media operates. Not surprisingly, corporate-owned media outlets that rely on advertising revenue are not that eager to highlight the injustices of the "free market" system—or to challenge the idea of the United States government's fundamentally benevolent role in the world, given that corporate and state power are deeply intertwined in American society. I'm not suggesting some kind of conspiracy but rather an issue of the culture that exists inside the institutions of the Free Press. Anyone who wants to better understand what I mean would do well to read some of Noam Chomsky (and his occasional co-writer Edward Herman)'s critiques of the media—critiques which perhaps especially apply here.

This bias, as Herman and Chomsky would note, manifests itself in even subtler and more fundamental ways. Just look at the rules of the debates. Typically, candidates are given one minute to respond and even shorter amounts of time for follow-ups and clarifications. The very nature of a setup like this implicitly favors the status quo. Think about it: if someone says something completely outside of the mainstream—for instance, "the United States is the greatest threat to world peace today" (a view held by a plurality of people across 65 nations, according to one poll)—they will have an extremely small amount of time to justify a statement that may strike viewers as completely insane just because of how different it is from what they're used to hearing. Imagine going back a few centuries and trying to present a persuasive argument for women's suffrage, or racial equality, or LGBTQ+ rights, in a single minute. Or, to expand our examples outside of politics, imagine if Galileo had been given one minute to explain that the Earth revolves around the sun, or Charles Darwin to explain his theory of evolution, or Albert Einstein to explain his theory of relativity. Sometimes it's even worse: for the question I quoted above about the greatest geopolitical threat to the United States, Chuck Todd asked for a "one-word answer." Thankfully, public consciousness has shifted enough that one could answer "climate change" and not be seen as a lunatic or a naive hippie, but if someone had given an answer that was at all out of the ordinary, they would have had no opportunity to even justify it (unless they bent the rules as some candidates naturally did—but even then their explanation would have to be about one sentence long). The world is a complicated place, and politics are no exception to that rule, but from the way the debates are set up one might think each issue is roughly as complicated as cooking a pack of ramen noodles.

Rather than simply harping on the problems with modern political debates though, let us take a look at some examples that contrast with them. Let's start out with probably the most famous set of debates in American history: the Lincoln-Douglas debates. These debates, of course, played a major role in elevating Abraham Lincoln's profile and allowing him to ultimately become the 16th president of the United States, a role that it's generally agreed he handled pretty well. The structure for these debates is remarkably different from anything we see in political debates today. In each of the seven debates, one candidate spoke for a full hour, followed by the other candidate speaking for ninety minutes and then back to the first for a final 30 minute-long response. During their speeches the candidates were not peppered by questions from the moderators, but were rather allowed to present their arguments directly. Furthermore, the central issue throughout all of the debates was slavery and its expansion which, it's fair to say, was indeed the most pressing issue at the time. This issue was thus given a very and extensive discussion, unlike any of the issues in today's political debates.

Or, let's take a more modern example from outside electoral politics: the debate this year between Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson, about Marxism, capitalism and happiness. To be clear, I don't view either of these men as necessarily intellectual titans. I think Peterson is a right-wing charlatan who traffics in misogyny other forms of bigotry, and that Žižek, while interesting and certainly capable of making good points, usually offers up gratuitously tortuous and complex analyses that are perhaps best treated as entertainment rather than as having any great practical value (as entertainment, though, they have my strong recommendation). But nonetheless, the example is worth looking at. Each speaker was given 30 minutes for an opening statement, 10 minutes to respond to the other's opening statement, and then about 45 minutes was allotted for answering questions from the moderator and the audience (though ultimately Žižek and Peterson ended up largely talking among themselves in lieu of answering questions). As a consequence, there was a real interchange of ideas here. Even if you'd had no familiarity with either of these people before the debate, you would have gained a real idea of what each one believes, and the debate saw the two genuinely respond to each others' arguments, find areas of agreement, examine their disagreements and make their cases in detail. You might find everything that either one of them said to be completely useless and vapid, but nonetheless as a viewer you got the opportunity to really try to understand both men and what they believe. If you didn't find the debate enlightening at all, you could only blame the debaters themselves, not the format or the moderator or anyone or anything else.

Indeed, in both of these examples, the point is not what was said, but what could be said; there is certainly something morally obscene about two white men debating slavery, and to even have a debate over the institution of slavery to begin with rightly seems monstrous to us now. But the debates did permit each candidate to make their arguments as well as they could and ultimately helped Lincoln become president, eventually resulting in the abolition of slavery. The Žižek-Peterson debate may leave you completely unimpressed with both participants, but it at least offers you the opportunity to truly hear them out in their own words before you make that judgment. Regardless of the content in both cases, the format did allow for a serious and detailed discussion.

The format for the Democratic debates (and modern political debates in general), on the contrary, doesn't do this and isn't designed to. Sure, it's intended to highlight the differences between the candidates, but it doesn't offer any serious insight into where those differences really come from, or any sort of thoughtful examination of the biggest issues humanity faces. Rather, it's political theater: it's an opportunity for each candidate to spit out their pre-packaged talking points (they all have them) and then engage in battles of one-upmanship with their competitors. Say what you will about Andrew Yang (and I'm no great fan of his), but he hit on this point pretty succinctly in his closing statement at the most recent debate:

Instead of talking about automation and our future...we're up here with makeup on our faces and our rehearsed attack lines, playing roles in this reality TV show.  It's one reason why we elected a reality TV star as our president.

Of course, the format of Lincoln-Douglas debates, or any other format that's designed for two speakers, could hardly accommodate 10 candidates—and yes, it would be hard to have any sort of very in-depth discussion between that many people while making sure everyone had a chance to be heard. But I do think there's a great deal of room for improvement.

Not that it matters much, but here's my tentative proposal for the Democratic primary debates: first of all, limit each debate to one topic. Particularly important and complex topics (like climate change) could have more than one debate devoted to them. There are 12 debates planned, so it doesn't seem absurd to think we could make this work and perhaps have a few "miscellaneous" debates thrown in where a variety of issues will be addressed. That way, something resembling an in-depth discussion on each issue is at least remotely possible.

Secondly, as long as there are ten candidates per debate night, give each candidate five minutes for an opening statement, then (in randomized order) give them five more minutes to respond to each others' opening statements, bringing us to 100 minutes of debate time. After that, have, say 30 minutes to an hour where candidates are allowed to ask each other questions and/or respond to questions from viewers (obviously this means the network hosting the debate would likely be able to cherry-pick which questions, but at least there might be time for more thoughtful discussions). As more candidates drop out and the number of debate participants gets smaller, more time can be allotted for each candidate's opening and response statements.

I don't think that this would elevate the debates to some plane of great intellectual discussion. A lot of candidates would still say stupid things and rely on talking points, but it would offer a greater opportunity for viewers to get some idea of who's relying on talking points and who has some actual vision and sincerity. Granted, we would have to put up with hearing minor candidates talk for two uninterrupted stretches of five minutes, which could be kind of dull, but at least the major candidates would have that same opportunity.

Of course, this plan, or any other that's likely to have a similar effect, will not be adopted, for the reasons mentioned above. I offer it up simply to make the point that these debates really could be better. The point of this blog post, though, is not entirely just cathartic griping. I want to leave my readers with a warning: do not let yourself be sucked into these things. Don't let debate performances (emphasis on "performances") decide your vote for you. And if you think the debates so far have not been very enlightening or inspiring, know that that's probably not going to get too much better, but that the reasons for it go beyond this particular batch of candidates, whatever you think of them. In short: don't be fooled.

Update: This post has been changed to accurately reflect the number of candidates that have so far qualified for the next debate. 

A New Low, or Just Another Week for Donald Trump?

Trump at his Greenville, N.C. rally, where the crowd called for the deportation of Ilhan Omar. (Madeline Gray/Bloomberg)

Everyone already knows about the Tweets, and probably the press conference and the rally too at this point, so I won't waste any time rehashing the grisly details. And if you've somehow avoided it all, allow me to say that I envy the degree of insulation you have from the nightmare that passes as American politics. Your mental health is probably the better for it, even though ignorance of current events is not a luxury many of us can afford in the long run. So what is there to say about it all? It speaks for itself. But on the other hand, who can stay silent in times like these?

You will see—and probably already have seen—people say that this was a New Low for the president, his most racist moment yet, truly a record-setting show of depravity, even for the grotesque swamp creature infesting the White House. I am not so sure. Perhaps our collective national memory has shrunk over the past few years—shrunk so drastically that we have little more than an awareness of the present and a vague sense that something must have happened to get us here. Is telling a few women of color to go "home" really such a shocking new twist or escalation for the man who proposed banning all Muslims from entering the country? Or who still maintains the Central Park Five should be in prison? Or who explicitly said a judge's Hispanic descent should disqualify him from ruling on a case? To call him a racist is just to state what's long been obvious, and to do so in the mildest form possible. He has the soul of a Nazi and the wits of a hammerhead shark. He is defective on every level as a human—moral, intellectual, spiritual, emotional. To call him evil is almost to give him too much credit; in the jungle, the concept of evil has no place, and Trump operates by the laws of the jungle. He is a big, dumb beast, barely able to form a sentence or a coherent thought, constantly on the prowl for something small and vulnerable to pounce on and rip to shreds. He has no concept of truth or falsehood, good or evil, right or wrong—his only concern is what satisfies his appetites. In a sane society he would have been locked up a long time ago or banished to the wilderness of Siberia.

Our halfwit commander-in-chief is not the most worrisome part of this whole thing, in any case. To paraphrase Edward Everett Hale, he is only one, and even his daddy's fortune could only carry him so far. No, the infection runs both deeper and wider than its ugliest, most prominent boil, as we have known for some time. The real horror of the recent geek show is just how deep and how wide it really goes. Lindsey Graham, the vile little tapeworm who once pretended to care about Trump's racism, followed Master's lead by piling on and slandering "The Squad" as a bunch of antisemitic communists who hate America. Yes, if there's one lesson to take from the past few years it's to hold onto your political grudges: I never forgave this nasty little bitch for his deranged militarism, even as he posed as some kind of Principled Conservative who was Truly Shocked by Trump's racism. And I was right. Between the two of them I'll the dumb ape-man over the worm any day of the week.

Few of Lindsey's esteemed colleagues have performed any better than he did. Mitch McConnell, Trump's loyal accomplice and a bloodless mutant who's devoted his life to harming others, quickly rushed to defend Trump's honor as soon as the accusations of racism started up, and has now said he thinks "The President is on to something" with his slurs against the four Congresswomen. When House Democrats brought forth a resolution to condemn the Tweets that Trump had shat out for the world to see, it won the votes of just four Republicans, along with Justin Amash, who recently (and rightly) abandoned his former political party.

And who can be surprised? The party that chose as its patron saint a senile Apartheid-supporter can only go so long before it comes out and embraces explicit white nationalism. The racism in the modern conservative movement goes back far before most people would like to admit, from the attacks on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement in William F. Buckley's vile rag the National Review through Richard Nixon, who publicly ran on "law and order" and privately mused about the necessity of aborting mixed-race pregnancies, onto Reagan's anti-welfare race-baiting and Bush Sr.'s Willie Horton ad, finally achieving its sickening climax with Donald Trump. Today's Republican Party is a party of racism, rapists and reactionaries, and it's been a long time coming. 

And when The Thing From the White House held one of his deranged rallies and provoked chants of "send her back" at the mention of Ilhan Omar—chants which he has now pathetically said he disagreed with and tried to stop, despite showing no signs of discomfort in the moment—the conservative voices that spoke out in condemnation were no less loathsome than those who had defended Trump's tweets. Arch-shithead Ben Shapiro bleated that the chants were "Vile," then immediately followed it up by affirming that "Omar is awful. She is a radical anti-Semite with terrible views" before limply concluding that she shouldn't be deported for those "terrible views." His disgusting minion Ryan Saavedra also lamely objected that the chants were "not good" while affirming that he's "one of her harshest critics." These nematodes and their ilk have maliciously smeared the country's first black Muslim congresswoman as an antisemite for her (valid) criticisms of Israel, relying on racism and Islamophobia to help the medicine go down. Now that their cynical efforts have borne fruit, they want to wash their hands of it like some modern-day Pontius Pilate. Fuck them and fuck their toothless disavowals of what they helped give birth to. If anything happens to Omar, the blame is at their feet as much as it is at Trump's. 

But these weasels do have one thing right, which is that the chants are the most disturbing aspect of this all—though for reasons they fail to comprehend. The swine-faced reprobates demanding the exile of their political opponents show that the sick, monstrous side of the American soul is still alive and kicking. These are the spiritual progeny of moral bottom-feeders throughout American history: of slaveholders who decided to break away from the Union and form their own White Man's Republic, and settled for terrorizing the newly freed black Americans after their stupid plan went sideways; of the Klansmen who ruled the South through brute force and routinely murdered anyone with the "wrong" skin color; of the soulless jackals who screamed and hurled insults at the first black children to attend integrated schools. Even to call them Nazis obscures the fact they're as American as apple pie and weekly school shootings. Yes, for all the things Trump's statements were, they were decidedly not un-American—a term that's frankly bullshit no matter who uses it or how they use it. 

And the old truism about the body dying after the head's cut off hardly applies here. Donald Trump has played his role in energizing and mobilizing these termites, but they were there long before he came along and they won't disappear just because he leaves the presidency, regardless of when that happens. These people are a long-term problem, and they have to be defeated—by any means necessary, to borrow a phrase from another black Muslim they would have wanted deported. Every attempt at unity or compromise with this sort of scum has only served as a setback for the country, whether it took the form of attempts to accommodate them before the Civil War, the end of Reconstruction that gave them unbridled reign over the Jim Crow South, or the tacit liberal acceptance of de facto segregation. The only hope for permanent change is a final, crushing defeat for these savages—which may be made easier by the fact that they're disproportionately old and often look like they're on the road to an inevitable heart attack. 

Since I started writing this post, it seems that Trump has been continually doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on his original remarks. There are certainly those who will try to spin this as some devious ploy to make "The Squad" into the face of the Democratic Party by forcing the party leadership to defend them. That sort of analysis is like looking for some sort of cunning rationale behind the actions of a rabid dog. There is no brilliant (or even average) political strategizing going on here—just an angry gorilla slamming his fists into anything that he doesn't like. It's far too early to say with any certainty whether Trump will win in 2020, but if he does it won't be because he ingeniously goaded the Democrats into going too far left, it will be his ability to turn out the chuds I mentioned above, simply because he is one of them. 

Having mentioned the Democratic Party leadership I might as well acknowledge their typically sordid role in attacking and belittling the four Congresswomen in question, but I think I've talked enough about their motives elsewhere and I'm not inclined to spill any more bile for this blog post given how it currently stands. The note that I'll close on is just that the problem at hand goes far beyond Trump and it's nothing short of delusional to think it will go away once he does—something that Joe Biden and the other appeasers in the Democratic field would do well to acknowledge, and the rest of us would do equally well to keep in mind when deciding who to vote for.