Remember Harry Reid’s Warning about Joe Biden

(Harry Reid advised us that Joe Biden had a built-in tendency to surrender to Republicans)

By

David Gottfried 

Harry Reid, a stubborn and stalwart leader of Senate Democrats, is dead.  

As we see Biden cower before the machinations and chutzpah of Joe Manchin and his Republican friends, it is worth remembering what Harry Reid said about Joe Biden.

In the aftermath of a bitter fray with Senate Republicans, Harry Reid advised Obama to never again let Joe Biden represent Democrats in negotiations with Mitch Mc Connel and other Republicans.  

It was 2012.   The Bush tax cuts were set to expire in 2012.   However, Mitch Mc Connel wanted the tax cuts to be extended because, like an addict who robs his family to support his habit, he wanted to rob granny’s Medicare funds so billionaires could throw money around like Saddam Hussein sporting dozens of palaces.  Most Democrats agreed that the tax cuts should not be extended.  

It appeared, at first, that Democrats would successfully stop an extension of the cuts.   Enter Joe Biden, savoir of tight-fisted, miserly Republicanism.  He stuck his ugly mug into the fray.  At first, he  feebly argued with Mc Connel to create the impression of being a Democrat.  After a few pro forma arguments designed to perpetuate the myth that he was somewhat progressive, Biden quickly yielded to Mitch Mc Connel.   And that’s why the idea that Medicare should pay for hearing and dental is seen as an extravagant demand – all our money is given to billionaires and millionaires.    And that’s why Harry Reid told Obama to never let Biden negotiate with the Republicans.

Of course, in his 2020 campaign, Biden marketed himself to the American people as a great negotiator, as someone who got along with guys on the other side of the aisle, as one who adhered to Sam Raburn’s notion that a good legislator knows he must “get along and go along” with his fellow legislators.   Of course, Biden does know how to go along and get along.   He gets along by giving away the store.   A good politician should be able to “bend” at times.  But Biden flops around like impotent, imbecilic silly putty.

Does Biden let Republicans get their  way because he really agrees with Republicans:

a) In 2009, the Left could have taken the steering wheel of American government. At that time, the economy was collapsing, not only because of the depredations of Wall Street and Republican rule by and for the rich but also because of spineless Democrats, like Bill Clinton and his allies, who decided that derivatives of stocks would not be regulated.

(The collapse of the subprime real estate market, which gave us the Great Recession, had been engineered by Goldman Sachs and its deputies in the Treasury Department:   A) Goldman Sachs bought shorts on sub prime realty stocks, in effect betting that the subprime buyers would default B) bankers then inserted punitive clauses in subprime mortgages increasing the possibility that home buyers would default on their mortgage payments, C) millions of buyers defaulted  and D) while millions of Americans lost their jobs and their savings, an elect gang of eminent swindlers were showered with billions.   Goldman Sachs and its confederates were able to do this because Clintonite democrats opposed the regulation of stock derivatives. ) 

In the beginning of 2009, polls showed that a huge majority of Americans, having been jolted to the left by free market savagery, were in favor of the public option  or Medicare for all.   However, Biden convinced Obama to drop the public option.

b) When Mitch Mc Connel threatened to shut down the government, Veep Biden proposed cutting the budget by 4 trillion dollars

c)  Progressives, and supposedly Obama, supported a program known as “card check,” which would have made it easier for workers to unionize.  Biden tried to defeat card check, campaigning for Senators who opposed card check and appointing  John Podesta’s sister, who worked with corporate lobbyists to defeat card check, to a position in the White House.  But of course, the media does not tell you any of this.  Instead, they will tell us that Biden came from Scranton, the embodiment of everything blue collar and working class in the Biden mythology, had a father who had once been briefly out of work, and is therefore as pro union as Jacke Gleason in his sit com “:The Honeymooners.”  (Some of my readers think that I refer to shlocky popular culture too much, but the images of our shlocky popular culture is our culture.  People are not interested in data, ideas or facts.  They grew up on cartoons and situation comedies and they insist that their politics go down as smoothly and sweetly as a glass of chocolate milk.)     

d) Biden’s conservative biases have been consistently expressed since he entered the Senate in January 1973:

i) He was one of only 19 Senators to oppose Hubert Humphrey’s full employment bill.

ii) In opposition to Civil Rights Groups, he advanced, and obtained the enactment of, his Biden-Eagleton amendment, which decreed that HEW (That acronym stood for the now defunct department of Health, Education and Welfare) was prohibited from using any money to facilitate school bussing.

iii)  Also, half the time he opens his mouth, he sounds like a racist hick from “Andy of Mayberry.”   Here are some of his priceless declarations that seem to have leaped out of the mouth of Jefferson Davis: 

a)   “You cannot go into a Dunkin’ Donuts or 7-Eleven unless you have a slight Indian accent”

b)   In praising Obama, he noted that he was an African American who was “articulate and bright and clean.”

c)   To make the case that he could appeal to Southern voters, he boasted that Delaware was a slave state. 

d)   He said that Delaware had fought for the Union  only “because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South,”  

Everybody sounds like a jackass once in a while, but if one has a consistent record of acting like a jackass, we must conclude that one might actually be a jackass.

But don’t take it from me.  Remember his nickname when he was a United States Senator.   According to the New York Times, his fellow senators called him “The Senator from Mastercard.”