Clinton adviser says Biden campaign 'doing it all wrong'
By: Nick Robertson (The Hill)
Could George McGovern beat Joe Biden? Voters of a certain vintage understands the implications of that question. But the growing ranks of young and ignorant voters won't understand and that opens the door for any number of possibilities. By the same token, advice from a former Clinton adviser rates as little more than gibberish to the chronologically deficit voter.
Mark Penn's advice to pander to the middle completely ignores that younger voters attempt to pull the middle to them using guilt shaming, gas lighting, and carefully crafted fictionalized history. That's why Hillary's pandering to the middle didn't prove to be a bullet proof strategy. And the electorate that rejected Hillary is eight years older.
Would George McGovern be a rockstar candidate with today's young voter? That possibility cannot be easily dismissed with today's electorate.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
A longtime senior adviser to former President Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hit the Biden campaign over its strategy in a New York Times op-ed Sunday, arguing the president is siding too much with his base and leaving moderates behind.
Mark Penn, who served as an adviser to the Clintons from 1995 to 2008 and now runs the Harris Poll, said focusing on the left wing of the Democratic Party instead of independent voters could cost him in November.
"If Mr. Biden wants to serve another four years, he has to stop being dragged to the left and chart a different course closer to the center that appeals to those voters who favor bipartisan compromises to our core issues, fiscal discipline and a strong America," Penn wrote in the op-ed.
Bipartisanship and fiscal responsibility were the core tenets of Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign, which Penn advised. He said Biden is like a "scared candidate," convinced to appeal to his left-leaning base to ensure turnout instead of focusing on drawing new voters.
"I believe most of the 101,000 'uncommitted' votes that Mr. Biden lost in Michigan will come home in the end because they have nowhere else to go, and the threat Mr. Trump poses will become clearer and scarier in the next six months," he wrote, referring to progressive protest votes in state primaries. "But regardless, there's a much bigger opportunity for Mr. Biden if he looks in the other direction."
The path to victory, Penn argued, is through former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley's moderate Republican base. Biden has repeatedly reached out to Haley voters since she dropped out of the GOP primary, attempting to bridge the gap for Republicans turned off by former President Trump.
"These people are in the moderate center, and many of them could be persuaded to vote for Mr. Biden if he fine-tuned his message to bring them in," he said of Haley voters.
Penn said that Biden should instead reinvent his entire policy platform to more closely match what he believes moderates want by being hard on crime and immigration, doubling down on support for Israel and backing off of key promises toward combating climate change — all recommendations that would align with many conservatives' preferences.
"The 2024 election is a rematch, but Mr. Biden should not assume that he will get the same result as he did in 2020 in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and other battleground states by running the same playbook," he wrote.
Tags
Who is online
478 visitors
You know, Joe Biden is older than atom bombs. Biden is older than Israel. Biden is older than NATO. Biden is older than the United Nations. Biden was elected to the Senate before the end of the Vietnam war. Biden had been a Senator for 20 years when the Soviet Union collapsed; Biden is 50 years older than Ukraine. Biden is 50 years older than the European Union.
Joe Biden is the last gasp of long dead politics. Joe Biden really is going to preside over the end of the United States his generation new. Even the neoliberal politics of Reagan and Clinton are becoming ancient history and irrelevant. The political middle of the 1980s - 90s doesn't exist any longer; we're dying.
The far left has been in total control of Biden's corrupt administration since day one.
It's essentially Obama's third term.
Exactly
Well, it's a botched up Obama third term.
Even the most hard core conservative cannot honestly say Obama screwed up the country as badly as Joe Biden has. Apparently Joe Biden learned nothing as Vice President. Or, maybe, Biden is trying to show us how Obama did it wrong. There's no denying that Biden's term has been a train wreck for the United States both internationally and domestically.
"If Mr. Biden wants to serve another four years, he has to stop being dragged to the left and chart a different course closer to the center that appeals to those voters who favor bipartisan compromises to our core issues, fiscal discipline and a strong America," Penn wrote in the op-ed.
What has to happen for Biden to see this. He was elected because he is not Trump and because he promoted himself as being a moderate, would unite the country, be fiscally responsible and wanted a strong America. Now all he has is he is not trump and disasters on everything he ran on or has touched while kissing the far left of the parties asses.
He's had almost 4 years of insane radical policies. On top of it all, he is failing cognitively. If any other Republican were running against Biden this race would already be over.
Given that, what is the major malfunction that caused the GOP to bypass quality potential nominees and go with a scoundrel?
Only in the opinion of hard-core reactionary right wing extremists.
Biden? There is no credible evidence of that. On the other hand, Trump is obviously totally befuddled and can barely utter a coherent phrase, much less a complete sentence.