For my younger audience, note that the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign was driven by the message: It's the Economy, Stupid! (internally only).
So...
Super Tuesday results are coming in and I see three things:
1) Being unjustly targeted by Trump is turning out to be a very good thing for Joe Biden.
2) Being a candidate with long coattails to help Senate races is a good thing for Joe Biden.
3) Being a better candidate for President is useless now that we know the silly 'merican republic can somehow lurch along for three-plus years with a knob that is exponentially more DOOFUS than POTUS in charge of the executive branch (not unlike some big-ass U.S. corporations I have had the misadventure of working for, I might add).
There are something like a hundred amazingly progressive pieces of legislation the Democratic Party controlled House of Representatives has passed (least of which, Impeachment of Preznit Donald J. Trump) that the Rethuglican Senate Majority Leader fucker (and I use that term graciously) Mitch McConnell, palpateenishly relishes stonewalling in his chamber. I have a friend who is a very very smart and very very good man, thinking very very hard about urban ecology and doing very very good things with this knowledge to help society not collapse.
He is an American who today lives in Portland, OR, and was in Montreal for a year, and will soon return for good (hopefully) if no asteroids destroy us on or about the 29th of April, 2020.
While I have incredibly good instincts about Canadian politics at times, my take on the shit south of this border is way wobblier, which was proven in 2018 when I sadly told my friend that I predicted BOTH houses of Congress would surely turn to the control of the Dems (huzzahs all around)!
Not so, he thought, knowing far better than I the peccadilloes of the individual races and their respective states where they were being fought. I was struck by his sadness about the matter. It came from a man with a heart that cares deeply about far more than his own kin, who understood the bigger picture, and the SCOTUS appointments, and the many other federal judge appointments, that would all hinge upon the control of the United States Senate. There have been many. The good people at wikipedia have made a comprehensive list. These judges make a myriad of judgments, and you can be damned sure they aren't going to come down on the side of the people who don't pull the Rethuglicans' strings (very, very, rich people, of course, and no others).
I have since learned that something like 70% of Senate power is in the hands of voters from rural areas, due to the two Senators per state allocation, coupled with extremely high population differences between individual states. I feel this may have made sense in 1776, when 13 states came together to form a union, as they put it. But in contemporary USA, it creates a huge imbalance of influence; unlike us in Canada, where our Senate is an upper body with much less say-so on matters that matter. I daresay our Canadian parliamentary system has better built-in bulwarks (imperfect, I admit) against such oligarchical control manifesting itself.
What we lack is a federation that can protect provinces from despotic premieres like Ford in Ontario, Kenney in Alberta, and Legault here in Québec, from fucking us over, since the provinces control so much more of what affects our daily existence, such as Health, Education, and Natural Resources. But that is a topic for another day.
Back to my point: Elizabeth Warren, in an earlier USA, would be a gobsmackingly perfect and unbeatable candidate, looking at her knowledge, policies and political talents. But when it's the Senate, Stupid, a guy like Joe Biden - who has been a Senator for a bazillion years, and who presided over it as Vice-President for eight of the last eleven years - is your obvious man if your Big Strategy is to wrest control of that most powerful chamber from the Rethuglicans.
Democracy is what brought this about. The best of all imperfect modes of government. May they actually have an honest election come November. This Canadian is doubtful, and morosely so.
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