Icarus wrote:
Would you prefer and even older Bernie Sanders? You had to have known at least up to last week that it was going to be either Sanders or Biden. And did you actually mean to say you'd hope Biden dies?
It seems to me that Biden's stranglehold on the minority vote would put him in a better position to defeat Trump.
Yes, for the good of the country, it's ideal either that Biden dies or retires shortly after winning the Presidency. The office should be filled by someone capable of holding it.
Sanders is also very old and it also would be far from ideal for a person on the cusp of 80 who recently had a heart attack and refuses to divulge his medical records to be President. On the plus side, he still has his wits about him and I at least wouldn't worry about his capacity to be the head of a campaign. Biden so far has been an astonishingly bad candidate who was bailed out at the last moment by a rush of cable media coverage. That isn't going to happen in Nov. 2020.
There were lots of perfectly acceptable candidates for Democrats to pick from. That the top 2 vote getters are too old for the job is an indictment of the party. Or, rather, an indictment of the the voting power of boomers.
I don't like Biden's political history, particularly his war on drugs, and his campaign of "nothing is wrong with Republicans, but Trump" is alarmingly, dangerously wrong. Sanders on the other hand is surrounded by some pretty toxic leftists. But I'm not talking about their politics here. Just their basic capacity to be President for 4 years and run as an incumbent.
And since the GOP smear machine had already put all their eggs in the "Sanders is a Socialist" basket, Biden would be more appealing to those moderates and independents who've been conditioned to fear that.
This part is wrong. The GOP was starting to focus on that because they thought Sanders was the frontrunner. We'll be back to Ukraine, Biden's fitness for office, etc. now that the tables have turned. Once the primary is over, the media will start obsessively covering whatever Republicans want them to cover to prove how fair and balanced they are. Voters - the ones who can be persuaded - are fickle creatures who think what cable news tells them to think. Maybe he wins, maybe he doesn't. Individual candidate differences don't matter a ton. But his is a pathetic outcome of a primary that saw a bunch of perfectly capable people throw their hat in the ring.