Last Tuesday was Super Tuesday in America for the Democrats. If you don’t know what Super Tuesday is, it’s the night a lot of states declare who their delegates will for vote for to be the Democratic nominee for President. 14 states declared their results last night and Joe Biden won 9 of them. From the opening defeats at Iowa and Hampshire, he now has a narrow lead over Bernie Sanders to complete a remarkable comeback. The race is not suddenly a foregone conclusion though and Sanders still has a strong chance of winning the nomination. To win the nomination, a candidate needs 1,991 delegates to vote for them at the Democratic National Convention. Biden currently has 402 while Sanders has 314, so there is still a long way to go for all the candidates still in the running.
That’s not the concern though. In 2016, the Democrats chose a candidate who for too many voters outside of the Democratic Party had to far too much baggage to be truly trustworthy in the Oval Office. That sounds ridiculous now but that was how the campaign developed. The question became about the candidates’ ethics rather than their policies. Hillary had been around for too long and had too much gone on around her for many rational people to vote for her. Hillary also didn’t run a unifying campaign. She made promises to every minority or category, saying she would put them first. Trump promised to put America first, to make America great again. Take away the lecherous, litigious, racist orange scarecrow away and those wouldn’t be the worst campaign slogans ever thought up. It’s also quite an attractive message.
Four years on however, and the attractive message has revealed itself to be what every non-Trump supporter in the world thought it to be. A bottle of snake oil. Trump has not made America great again. I would argue that they haven’t actually moved at all from when he took office, mainly because none of his campaign promises have been fulfilled. The Affordable Healthcare Act has not been repealed and replaced, it hasn’t even been repealed. Trump’s snap decision to ban transgender individuals from serving in any capacity in the military has been roundly ignored, he was only able to push through as a presidential executive order. And even then, it was blocked by the courts multiple times before he was finally able to get a version of it through.
And as for his ‘beautiful Trump wall’? Well four years, a national emergency and a government shutdown later and it still doesn’t exist. It isn’t even close to existing. They’ve reinforced bits of pre-existing border fences, but this mythical 90-foot-high wall made steel? Nope. Not a thing. Not to mention he has been formally investigated by a special prosecutor for his campaign’s possible links to Russia; they were only spared from criminal charges on that occasion by their own incompetence when they were offered what seems like explicit support from a foreign power to influence an election. He’s also been forever impeached over a potential abuse of power, withholding aid to Ukraine unless the government investigated the son of one of his biggest political rivals. The fact that he was acquitted in the Senate is irrelevant to me because a) the US Senate is not a court of law, it’s a legislative body and b) the Senate Republicans voted to have a trial with no witnesses. If you’re so sure that the President is not guilty of what he’s been accused of, surely you would want to be to testify under oath to that fact.
The huge problem the Democrats had last time around was that the candidate they chose for President was too divisive, even among the party and its supporters. Many people who were supporters of Bernie Sanders declared it was ‘Bernie or nothing’. That can’t happen this time around. Whether Biden wins the nomination or Sanders, the Democrats have to make sure that they get their vote out, to their own support, yes, but also to those who were not convinced by Clinton. If they do that, they can win and return some much normalcy and dignity to the office of President of the United States of America.
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