David Sirota has this for us today, asking can Joe Biden avoid Obama’s mistakes?
By the end of Obama’s presidency, Democrats held fewer elected offices than at any time since the early 20th century. Trump in 2016 made fraudulent promises to crack down on Wall Street – and he won the White House by flipping disaffected voters in locales that had been particularly hurt by a financial crisis that had never been rectified or reckoned with.
To be sure, Republicans were a powerful and determined opposition to Obama. But Democrats’ capitulations were disasters. They never understood the truism about political capital articulated by Republican strategist Karl Rove: “If you don’t spend it, it’s not like treasure stuck away at a storehouse someplace. It is perishable. It dwindles away.”
With a likely GOP Senate, a prospective Biden administration is certainly in a weaker position than Obama was in 2008 – but there are ways for the new White House to spend political capital on a working class agenda.
There’s an interest take in the Washington Post this morning on the Republican party’s indulgence of Donald Trump refusing to accept the election result. They write:
Only a smattering of Republican senators have acknowledged Biden’s victory, and there has been little coaxing on the part of senior GOP lawmakers to help Trump come to terms with his loss. Some said there is value in ensuring the integrity of this year’s results, while others described a chaotic and scattershot operation that they hoped would eventually push Trump to cooperate in a peaceful transfer of power.
“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” said one senior Republican official. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on 20 January. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”
Read more here: Washington Post – Top Republicans back Trump’s efforts to challenge election resultsUpdated at 13.05 GMT08.25 GMT
In the UK, Downing Street’s congratulatory message to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris from prime minister Boris Johnson for winning the US presidential election contains a hidden message congratulating Donald Trump for winning a second term in office.
The message, posted on Twitter as an image a few hours after the US TV networks called the election for Biden, congratulates the president-elect on his election, and Harris “on her historic achievement”.
But the image, a white-on-black block of text, is more than it seems. A simple colour adjustment reveals a second message hidden in the background.
Above and behind the words “Joe Biden on his election”, the shadow of the words “Trump on” become faintly visible. Where the main message reads “the US is our most important ally and I look forward to working closely together”, the words “second term” appear. And below the words “shared priorities” is the phrase “on the future of this”.
By the way, in the interest of balance, I should point out that Trump campaign senior advisor for strategy Steve Cortes has written an article for the National Pulse outlining the four reasons why he believes last week’s voting shows evidence of widespread voter fraud.
His key points boil down to this:
- The levels of voter turnout “defy reasonable expectations”.
- He doesn’t believe that “a candidate as doddering and lazy as Joe Biden” could out-perform Barack Obama who “boasted rock star appeal”.
- There were too many ballots cast just for Joe Biden without filling out the Senate and House races.
- States haven’t been rejecting enough mail-in ballots compared to historic levels.
I’ve got to be honest with you, if I was trying to lay out this argument, I would not have started with the opening line “The statistical case is, admittedly, circumstantial rather than conclusive”, but that is possibly why Steve is in Trump’s strategy team, and I’m not.
You can do your research and make up your own mind here: National Pulse – Steve Cortes: The statistical case agains Biden’s win