Who Won Again?
Given all that the world has been through in 2020…and we’re barely halfway through it…I find myself forgetting at times how it all started. Seems quaint now to recall that 2020 began with the countdown to the Iowa Caucuses, then just a month away…the counting meltdown that occurred on caucus night…a wild February where the headline was that Bernie Sanders might be unstoppable…and then everyone else not named Joe Biden folded their tents before Super Tuesday in a “Stop Bernie” movement.
And it did stop Bernie…putting Joe as the presumptive nominee, and therefore the presumptive winner.
But who actually won? Sure seems like Bernie Sanders, given the platform Biden is now running on.
Forget the Biden of past decades…for that matter, forget the Biden who got into the race a year ago…the Biden who will be the nominee is running squarely on Sanders platform. Talk about getting the last laugh…Sanders doesn’t have to worry about running a campaign, yet the guy who beat him has adopted virtually all his ideas. Bernie’s proud of that, as you hear during interviews.
I’m not sure how the logic works here. The guy who won is essentially abandoning his beliefs, which admittedly had been shifting from the time he got into the race…despite the fact that he beat the people whose ideas he’s now adopting. It’s one thing to try to smooth things over with a vanquished opponent’s supporters by going along with an item here or there, to create the big tent…but this is moving out of the tent and into an RV.
Sadly, politics these days is too often a personality contest, regardless of positions and platforms. But they are tremendously important, and this election needs to be about ideas and not simply what we think someone’s public persona is. And for those who only care about winning…helping someone get power is only a good idea if they will carry out policies you want…so you might want to know what they stand for…once they decide, of course.
