Centrist presidential candidates are going to hype their electability, which is cheating of a sort — put any Democrat up against Donald Trump and that Democrat will look electable. And I would rather have any of the Democratic candidates, even Tulsi Gabbard, in the White House than Donald Trump.
So the Trump yardstick is useless. A better way to determine whether I will actively support — not vote for, but actively support — a Democrat is this: Who would I rather see as president, this person or Mr. Ed?
Yeah, I know he’s fictional, and I’m ignoring practical concerns like horseshit on the floors at state dinners. What I mean is that Mr. Ed, as presented in the show’s theme song, eschewed people who “yakety yak and waste the time of day.” Ed, we were assured, only spoke if he had something to say. He was also “always on a steady course,” an important quality in contrast to the erratic Trump.
Bernie Sanders meets my Mr. Ed standard. He ran for president the first time because while everybody else was yakety-yakking, he had something to say. And, as REV points out all the time, he’s been on his steady course for 30 years. By contrast, Joe Biden is famous for letting his mouth outrun his brain, and has had to modify positions on all sorts of things to even pass as a hawkish, law ‘n’ order Democrat. So he fails.