{"id":14472,"date":"2020-05-01T10:28:10","date_gmt":"2020-05-01T17:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=14472"},"modified":"2020-05-01T10:28:12","modified_gmt":"2020-05-01T17:28:12","slug":"joe-biden-needs-an-intervention-an-open-letter-to-dnc-chair-tom-perez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2020\/05\/01\/joe-biden-needs-an-intervention-an-open-letter-to-dnc-chair-tom-perez\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Biden Needs an Intervention: An Open Letter to DNC Chair Tom Perez"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

April 30, 2020 by Common Dreams<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right now, Biden is idling in the cockpit of a political aircraft with one wing.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

by Norman Solomon<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 48 Comments<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Then<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Then US Vice President Joe Biden (L) smiles with former labor secretary Tom Perez, currently the chair of Democratic National Committee, as he arrives to address the Apprenticeship Summit at the White House in Washington, DC, on September 8, 2015. (Photo: Nicholas Kamm \/ AFP via Getty Images)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever our political differences, vast numbers of Democrats and others agree that it\u2019s imperative to defeat Donald Trump. But with scarcely five months to go before the voting starts, Joe Biden is not helping to assemble a broad tactical alliance. Instead, he\u2019s ignoring the wisdom that Jesse Jackson offered<\/a> at the Democratic National Convention in 1988: \u201cIt takes two wings to fly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right now, Biden is idling in the cockpit of a political aircraft with one wing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As chair of the Democratic National Committee at a time when the party\u2019s presumptive nominee for president seems likely to crash and burn, you should be openly working to fix the problem rather than merely proclaiming that Biden is a great candidate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indications are profuse that Biden is proceeding with a business-as-usual campaign while elevating establishment figures. His rhetorical nods toward Bernie Sanders supporters have been notably superficial, while the nitty-gritty of policy is being placed in corporate hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On April 27, The Nation<\/em> summed up<\/a> one of the latest ominous signs: \u201cLarry Summers is a dead albatross around Biden\u2019s neck. Why should we believe Biden\u2019s promises of progressive reforms, when he seeks out the advice of this plutocrat-loving economist?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have often heard you talk about the \u201cnorth star\u201d of party principles. Surely that must involve democracy. Yet the cancellation of the New York presidential primary is a flagrant Machiavellian maneuver by that state\u2019s Democratic Party leadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis means that our campaign will receive no delegates from New York, weakening our ability to fight for a progressive platform and progressive rules at the Democratic convention,\u201d the Sanders campaign pointed out in a statement on April 29. \u201cIt also means our voters are less likely to turn out, which will hurt progressive New York candidates who are still facing primaries.\u201d Using the pandemic as an excuse for the cancellation was clearly bogus, since the entire New York election on June 23 could be conducted by mail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The corrosive ill will created by such machinations\u2014heightening progressives\u2019 distrust of the Democratic Party\u2014will weaken support for the Biden general-election campaign across the country. As the Sanders campaign put it, what Democratic Party power brokers did in New York \u201cis an outrage, an assault on democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But where is your voice to challenge this \u201cassault on democracy\u201d? The corporate cats seem to have your tongue. With silence, you\u2019re an enabler of this travesty. You should firmly declare that New York will be stripped of all its national-convention delegates unless this decision is reversed and the state\u2019s presidential primary is reinstated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A related situation looms in California and some other states, threatening to deny Sanders his statewide allocation of delegates beyond congressional districts. The threat involves undemocratically depriving Sanders of delegates that he\u2014and millions of people who voted for him\u2014are entitled to. But again, your voice is silent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might think it\u2019s all well and good for you to claim a \u201chands off\u201d approach of deferring to decisions by state party leaders. But in mid-March you didn\u2019t hesitate to flatly proclaim<\/a> that Illinois, under a Democratic governor, should go ahead with an in-person presidential primary election, thereby aiding Biden\u2019s momentum to widen his delegate lead over Sanders. To the detriment of public health, you publicly and emphatically sought to influence<\/a> a state decision about a Democratic primary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But now, your enabling silence is conspicuous as hundreds of duly elected Sanders delegates are in jeopardy nationwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As in New York, the bogus pretext in various states is that Sanders is no longer a candidate\u2014even though, when he announced the suspension of his campaign three weeks ago, the senator explicitly stated that \u201cI will stay on the ballot in all remaining states and continue to gather delegates.\u201d And, he added, \u201cwe must continue working to assemble as many delegates as possible at the Democratic convention, where we will be able to exert significant influence over the party platform and other functions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The committees and delegates of the national convention will make key decisions on crucial platform issues, such as healthcare as a human right, student debt, immigration reform, institutional racism, the climate emergency, economic justice and much more. Also on the line are major choices about whether the party will democratize or slam the door on internal reforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a mass email that the DNC sent out last weekend, you declared with ample self-congratulation: \u201cToday, the DNC looks massively different than it did in the wake of the 2016 election. That\u2019s a good thing. In early 2017, we were rudderless. . . . [I]t was obvious we had to rebuild our party from the ground up.\u201d You wrote of \u201crebuilding trust with Democrats across the country\u201d\u2014and asserted \u201cthat is exactly what our new leadership did.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But whatever trust has been rebuilt over the last three years is now being damaged by your refusal, as DNC chair, to speak up for party democracy in the states where it is now under threat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biden is a weak candidate in grave danger of losing a decisive number of progressive votes in the fall. Consider the latest polling data that has just appeared under this USA Today headline: \u201cNearly 1 in 4 Sanders Supporters Not on Board Yet with Voting for Biden<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s what happens when a presidential campaign is all set to fly with one wing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Norman<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Norman Solomon<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is co-founder and national coordinator of\u00a0RootsAction.org<\/a>.\u00a0His books include\u00a0“War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death<\/a>“<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0“Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State<\/a>.”<\/em>\u00a0He is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

April 30, 2020 by Common Dreams Right now, Biden is idling in the cockpit of a political aircraft with one wing. by Norman Solomon  48 Comments Then US Vice President Joe Biden (L) smiles with former labor secretary Tom Perez, currently the chair of Democratic National Committee, as he arrives to… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14472"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14472"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14473,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14472\/revisions\/14473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}