by Meshawn Maddock
Michigan Democrats might think they put an end to the socialist uprising in their party. They’re wrong. Bernie Sanders’s crushing defeat in his first head-to-head match-up with Joe Biden was hardly a triumph of the moderates.
Joe Biden is a career politician. He just began his sixth decade in Washington politics. The man has, at one time or another, espoused almost every policy position and ideological leaning imaginable. In the 1970s, he did his best impression of a segregationist Dixiecrat. In the 1990s, he was playing the role of a Nixonian “tough-on-crime” Republican. In a particularly bizarre turn in the 1980s, he decided he was actually British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, appropriating his Welsh counterpart’s life story on the campaign trail.
For most of the past 12 years, Joe Biden adopted his most successful political persona: the guy who stood next to Barack Obama and smiled.
He reinvented himself again for the 2020 campaign, shedding his Obama-era look in favor of the radicalism that’s now so in vogue in the Democrat Party. Biden, an inveterate follower, simply shifted from emulating Barack Obama to mimicking Bernie Sanders.
Indeed, Biden’s first order of business in setting up his 2020 campaign was to hire some of the same “progressives” who helped Bernie give Hillary Clinton a run for her money in 2016. These people will make sure that Biden sticks to his socialist guns even after dispatching with Sanders.
As tough as it may be for some Democrats to believe, President Donald Trump is going to be the only option this November for voters who prefer common-sense, middle-of-the-road policies.
Take health care, for example. Americans generally want to keep their private insurance, ensure basic coverage for the uninsured, and protect individuals with pre-existing conditions. Joe Biden would like you to believe that’s his plan, but it isn’t. It’s Donald Trump’s.
Bernie Sanders is infamously advocating for a “Medicare for All” plan that would make private insurance illegal and force everybody onto a one-size-fits-all government plan that would inevitably result in longer lines, worse health outcomes, and lower-quality care. Biden has desperately sought to draw distinctions between his healthcare plan and “Medicare for All,” but his approach is really just a more roundabout way of getting to socialized medicine.
The same is true of immigration. Biden had to engage in some emergency damage control after appearing to raise his hand in support of Sanders’s proposal to “decriminalize” illegal immigration – a proposal that even Obama’s former Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, called “tantamount to declaring publicly that we have open borders.”
In a hypothetical Biden administration, the “Abolish ICE” crowd would hold sway, not the moderates running the border today, who are pursuing policies much closer to those that Obama pursued before open borders became a litmus test for the Democratic Party’s activist class.
Bernie Sanders won’t win the Democrat presidential nomination, but the Party will still have a carbon copy of the Vermont radical for a candidate. If you really want to vote for a reasoned, sensible, middle-of-the-road candidate, there’s only one choice this November: President Donald J. Trump.
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Meshawn Maddock was a Michigan delegate for Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. She is also the Co-founder of Michigan Trump Republicans and the wife of Michigan State Representative Matt Maddock
Photos by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
I hope left-wing radicalism is not lost. Biden is really Republicn-lite. If he wins the nomination, there will be no difference between him and Trump except for Biden’s party label. Biden may think he can win by taking the leftwing base of the Democrat party for granted. That is not a sure thing! Many Sanders supporters might decide to either stay home on election or–in some cases-even vote for Trump as they did four years ago. The “deep-state” Democrats (a.k.a.–Centrists/Moderates) have squandered so much of their credibility without making any honest effort to win it back from the leftist and liberal base. The so-called centrist trouble goes all the way back to even 1950 when the Korean War would end up backfiring on the Democrats in Eisenhower’s landslide. 1952 was only a taste of what the Democrats would get in 1980 and after.