By Norman Solomon

When the Democratic National Committee convenes its winter meeting on Thursday in Philadelphia, a key agenda item will be rubber-stamping Joe Biden’s manipulation of next year’s presidential primaries. There’ll be speeches galore, including one by Biden as a prelude to his expected announcement that he’ll seek a second term. The gathering will exude confidence, at least in public. But if Biden were truly confident that Democratic voters want him to be the 2024 nominee, he wouldn’t have intervened in the DNC’s scheduling of early primaries.

New polling underscores why Biden is so eager to bump New Hampshire from the first-in-the-nation spot that it has held for more than 100 years. In the state, “two-thirds of likely Democratic primary voters don’t want President Joe Biden to seek re-election,” the UNH Survey Center found. “Biden is statistically tied with several 2020 rivals, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, all of whom are more personally popular than Biden among likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire.”

Dismal as Biden’s showing was in the new poll, it was a step up from his actual vote total in New Hampshire’s 2020 primary, when he came in fifth with 8 percent of the vote. No wonder Biden doesn’t want the state to go first and potentially set primary dominoes falling against him.

Keen to reduce the chances of a major primary challenge next year, Biden sent a letter to the DNC in early December insisting on a new schedule — demoting New Hampshire to a second spot, alongside Nevada, while giving the leadoff slot to South Carolina. Democratic Party energy and funds will be squandered in that deep-red state, which is about as likely to give its electoral votes to the 2024 Democratic ticket as Ron DeSantis is likely to donate the money in his campaign coffers to the Movement for Black Lives.

But South Carolina, the state with the lowest rate of unionization in the country, offers the singular virtue of having rescued Biden’s presidential hopes with its 2020 primary. As the Associated Press explained last week, Biden is “seeking to reward South Carolina, where nearly 27 percent of the population is Black, after a decisive win there revived his 2020 presidential campaign following losses it suffered in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.”

The president’s rationalization for putting South Carolina first is diversity. Yet the neighboring purple state of Georgia, which has an activist Democratic base, is more racially diverse — and it’s a crucial swing state, where the party’s general-election prospects would benefit from being the first-in-the-nation presidential primary.

Biden’s intervention has created a long-term political mess for Democrats in New Hampshire, where he’s now less popular than ever due to undermining the state’s first-primary status. Even New Hampshire’s normally compliant Democratic senators and representatives in Congress have been denouncing the move. Biden’s maneuver has boosted the chances that the Democratic ticket will lose the state’s four electoral votes this time around.

But Biden having his way with the Democratic National Committee is a slam dunk because he supplies the ball, hires the referees, owns the nets and controls the concession stands. While cowed DNC members dribble at his behest, substantial concerns will echo outside the range of officials’ whistles.

As a Don’t Run Joe full-page ad in The Hill newspaper pointed out last week (full disclosure: I helped write it), “There are ample indications that having Joe Biden at the top of ballots across the country in autumn 2024 would bring enormous political vulnerabilities for the ticket and for down-ballot races.”

But so far, like the Democrats in Congress, members of the DNC have indicated much more concern about avoiding the ire of the Biden White House than avoiding the probable grim outcome of a Biden ’24 campaign. By the time the DNC adjourns on Saturday, news reports will be filled with on-the-record statements from members lauding Biden’s leadership with next year’s elections on the horizon. Conformity prevails.

But warning signs are profuse. Among the latest are results of a YouGov poll released days ago: “Just 34 percent of Americans describe Biden as honest and trustworthy — a new low for his presidency. That's an 8-point drop from when this question was last asked in December 2022, prior to the public revelation that classified documents had been found in Biden's possession.”

This is the electoral horse that Democrats are supposed to be riding into battle against the extremist Republican Party next year. The national Democratic Party is locked into operating at the whim of a president now believed to be “honest and trustworthy” by only one-third of U.S. adults.

How all this will play out at the DNC meeting is hardly a mystery. Yet many members surely know that Biden is likely to be a weak candidate if he goes ahead with proclaimed plans to run for re-election. The hope is that the GOP will defeat itself as an extremist party in disarray. But it would be irresponsible to gamble on such a scenario by rolling dice loaded with Biden.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy." His next book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," will be published in Spring 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon

Denial at the top of the Democratic Party about Joe Biden’s shaky footing for a re-election run in 2024 became more untenable over the weekend. As the New York Times reported, investigators “seized more than a half-dozen documents, some of them classified, at President Biden’s residence” in Delaware. The newspaper noted that “the remarkable search of a sitting president’s home by federal agents — at the invitation of Mr. Biden’s lawyers — dramatically escalated the legal and political situation for the president.”

Donald Trump’s obstructive refusal to cooperate with the federal investigation into the far more numerous classified documents in his possession stands in sharp contrast with Biden’s apparently full cooperation with the Justice Department. Yet Biden now faces a documents scandal that’s sure to fester for quite a while — the average length of special counsel investigations has been upwards of 900 days — and the impacts on his plans to seek re-election are unclear.

Meanwhile, here’s an assumption so routine that it passes as self-evident among power brokers and corporate-media journalists: Democratic voters are presumed to be mere spectators awaiting Biden’s decision on whether to seek a second term. Hidden in plain sight is a logical question that remains virtually off-limits to raise in standard political discourse: Why not ask them?

What a concept. Biden could actually seek guidance from the Democratic base — the people who regularly turn out to vote for the party’s candidates, give millions of small-dollar donations and do priceless volunteer work in support of campaigns to defeat Republicans.

Biden’s decision on whether to run again should be seen as much more than just a matter of personal prerogative. Rather than treating it as such, Biden could put party and country first by recognizing that the essential Democratic task of defeating the Republican ticket in 2024 will require widespread enthusiasm from grassroots Democrats. Biden would be boosting the chances of beating the GOP by including those Democrats in the decision-making process as he weighs whether to officially declare his candidacy.

But there’s one overarching reason why the Biden White House has no interest in any such idea. The president doesn’t want to ask the question of loyal Democratic voters because he probably wouldn’t like the answer. His stance is clear: It’s my party and I’ll run if I want to.

A glimmer of that attitude showed through during a news conference shortly after the midterm election. Noting that “two-thirds of Americans in exit polls say that they don’t think you should run for re-election,” a reporter asked: “What is your message to them?” Biden’s reply: “Watch me.” Later, CNN and CNBC polls found that nearly 60 percent of Democrats didn’t want Biden to run again. Yet from all indications, he still intends to do just that.

Defying the wishes of most of the party’s voters could be spun as leadership, but a more fitting word is hubris. Whatever the characterization, it runs a serious risk of self-defeat. For instance, only wishful thinking leads to a belief that the Democratic presidential nominee next year can win without a strong turnout from those who represent the party’s bedrock base and its future — the young.

Biden’s “watch me” attitude is especially out of whack in relation to youthful Democratic voters. A New York Times poll last summer found that a stunning 94 percent of them under age 30 said they didn’t want Biden to be the party’s nominee. Such a disconnect spells trouble if Biden does run. Too many young people might heed the “watch me” attitude by declining to volunteer or vote for Biden before he goes down to defeat.

In normal times, a president’s renomination has been his for the taking. But in this case, when most of the party’s supporters don’t want him to run, exercising raw intra-party leverage to get nominated would indicate a high degree of political narcissism. It’s hardly a good look or an auspicious path.

If he runs in 2024, Joe Biden would be the foremost symbol of the status quo — not a good position to be in when faux populism will predictably be the name of the Republican game. In a poll last November, only 21 percent of registered voters told Hart Research that the country was “headed in the right direction” while 72 percent said it was “off on the wrong track.”

For the president, gaining the Democratic nomination next year would likely be much easier than winning the White House for a second time. If Biden is content to become the party’s nominee again while ignoring the majority of Democrats who don’t want him to run, he’ll be boosting the chances that a Republican will get to work in the Oval Office two years from now. To prevent such a catastrophe, grassroots Democrats will need to directly challenge the party elites who seem willing to whistle past the probable graveyard of Biden’s second-term hopes.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy." His next book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," will be published in June 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon

For many months, conventional media wisdom has told us that Joe Biden would be the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump in 2024 because he did it before. The claim was always on shaky ground — after all, Trump was the ultimate symbol of the status quo when he lost in 2020, as Biden would be in next year’s election. That’s hardly auspicious when polling shows that the current electorate believes the country is “off on the wrong track” rather than “headed in the right direction” by a margin of more than a 3-to-1.

But now, the bottom has dropped out of that timeworn spin for Biden in the wake of the discovery of unsecured classified documents under his control, the appointment of a special counsel to investigate and the botched handling of the scandal by the White House.

Yes, Trump’s handling of classified documents was far more egregious in comparison to what we know of Biden’s. But looking ahead, a Biden campaign would be incapable of making any effective criticism of Trump on the issue.

We can already see how having Biden at the top of the ticket would be a serious liability up and down Democratic ballots nationwide. “Awkward” just begins to describe the position that recent developments have put leading Democrats in. An early preview came days ago when Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, appeared on CNN and did the best she — or just about any fellow Democrat — could do under the circumstances.

“Certainly there’s a political problem for all of us as Democrats,” Jayapal acknowledged after being confronted with her tweet from four months ago condemning Trump’s conduct with classified documents, “but I do think that there are significant differences, and I do think it’s important to look at the fact that this president is cooperating completely with the investigation.” Later in the interview, Jayapal said: “So there are significant differences. It doesn’t take away my concern about the overall situation, and I do think we have to continue to look at the facts.”

As more facts emerged over the weekend, the situation worsened for the party currently hitched to Biden’s star. Under the telling headline “Biden Missteps on Secret Papers Create Self-Inflicted Crisis,” Bloomberg reported that “the decision to wait more than two months, until after midterm elections, to disclose the initial discovery of classified documents has fanned criticism of the president’s commitment to transparency that has only grown as Biden and his team stumbled through the subsequent week.”

Expanding on its big-type subhead “Drip of incomplete information suggests attempt at cover-up,” the article added: “Statements by the president, his lawyers, and his spokespeople that omitted key details — including information later revealed in news reports or subsequent statements — intensified the impression that the White House has something to hide. And the steady stream of revelations knocked Republican dysfunction on Capitol Hill out of the headlines while also offering a lifeline to former President Donald Trump, who is under criminal investigation for his own handling of classified documents.”

Even one of the most loyally partisan House Democrats, Adam Schiff of California, felt compelled to say during an ABC News interview on Sunday that “I don’t think we can exclude the possibility” that Biden’s handling of classified documents jeopardized national security. On Monday, after several minutes of defending Biden on NBC, consummate corporate asset Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina said: “It’s no question the reporting of all this undercuts all of our credibility as Democrats when it comes to this kind of an issue.”

Another seasoned Democrat, only willing to be identified as a “former Clinton aide,” presented this analysis of Biden’s political peril in comments to The Hill: “Everyone can say what they want but this weakens him, full stop. This is just one of those things that will stick around and won’t go away.”

What does all this mean for progressives and anyone else who doesn’t want a Republican to win the White House in 2024?

Biden's electoral future should be taken off the national table, so we can proceed with focused discussions of crucial issues on their merits rather than everything being constantly subjected to a political calculus as to the president’s prospects for re-election. This country is facing an ongoing cascade of crises, the Republican Party leaders are a clear and present danger to democracy, and Democrats will need the strongest possible ticket to defeat them. Joe Biden definitely should not be on it.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy." His next book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," will be published in Spring 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen

The current notion of a “moderate Republican” is an oxymoron that helps to move the country rightward. Last week, every one of the GOP’s so-called “moderates” voted to install House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who won with the avid support of Donald Trump and got over the finish line by catering to such fascistic colleagues as Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert. Recent news reports by many outlets — including the Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill, Bloomberg, CNN, NBC, Reuters, HuffPost and countless others — have popularized the idea of “moderate Republicans” in the House. The New York Times reported on “centrist Republicans.” But those “moderates” and “centrists” are actively supporting neofascist leadership.

Notably, Joe Biden made this implausible claim while campaigning in May 2019: “The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.” During his celebratory victory speech in November 2020, Biden bemoaned “the refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another,” proclaimed that the American people “want us to cooperate” and pledged “that’s the choice I’ll make.”

Later, as president, Biden came to a point when – in a ballyhooed speech last September — he offered some acknowledgment of ongoing Republican extremism, saying: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. Now, I want to be very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans. But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.”

But as with routine media coverage, Biden does not acknowledge that every Republican now in the House is functionally a “MAGA Republican.” Claiming otherwise — calling some of them “moderate Republicans” — is like saying that someone who drives a getaway car during an armed robbery isn’t a criminal. Those who aid and abet right-wing extremism are part of the march toward fascism.

If a handful of — by some accounts a half-dozen, by others as many as 20 — House Republicans are “moderates,” then such media framing normalizes and legitimizes their tacit teamwork with the likes of Trump and ultra-right Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene that made McCarthy the speaker. In the process, the slickly evasive language makes possible the continual slippage of public reference points ever-further to the right.

So, during last week’s multiple ballots that concluded with McCarthy’s win, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska was portrayed in the news as a “moderate Republican” who talked of seeking Democratic votes to help elect McCarthy and of possibly working with Democrats to find a “moderate” GOP speaker. Bacon labeled the anti-McCarthy holdouts “cowboys” and “the Taliban.”

But if Bacon is a “moderate Republican,” it’s odd that he would help lead a rally before the 2020 election with MAGA firebrand and Students for Trump leader Charlie Kirk, which ended with a yell from Bacon: “Making America great again!” Or that he voted both times against impeaching President Trump, including after the Jan. 6 Capitol assault. Or that he cosponsors the extreme Life at Conception Act. Or that he has questioned climate science: “I don’t think we know for certain how much of climate change is being caused by normal cyclical changes in weather versus human causes.”

Looking ahead, you can bet that after years of being touted as “Republican moderates” in Congress, a few will be trotted out in prime time at the 2024 Republican National Convention to assure the nation that the party’s nominee — whether Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or some other extremist candidate — is a great fit for the presidency. The impacts of such deception will owe a lot to the frequent media coverage that distinguishes between the most dangerously unhinged Republican politicians who dominate the House and the “moderate” ones who make that domination possible.

Applying adjectives like “moderate” to congressional Republicans is much worse than merely bad word choices. Our language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,” George Orwell wrote, “but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” And dangerous ones.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy." His next book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," will be published in Spring 2023 by The New Press.

     Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

By Norman Solomon

With 2023 underway, Democrats in office are still dodging the key fact that most of their party’s voters don’t want President Biden to run for re-election. Among prominent Democratic politicians, deference is routine while genuine enthusiasm is sparse. Many of the endorsements sound rote. Late last month, retiring senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont came up with this gem: “I want him to do whatever he wants. If he does, I’ll support him.”

Joe Biden keeps saying he intends to be the Democratic nominee in 2024. Whether he will be is an open question — and progressives should strive to answer it with a firm No. The next presidential election will be exceedingly grim if all the Democratic Party can offer as an alternative to the neofascist Republican Party is an incumbent who has so often served corporate power and consistently serves the military-industrial complex.

The Biden administration has taken some significant antitrust steps to limit rampant monopolization. But overall realities are continuing to widen vast economic inequalities that are grist for the spinning mill of pseudo-populist GOP demagogues. Meanwhile, President Biden rarely conveys a sense of urgency or fervent discontent with present-day social conditions. Instead, he routinely comes off as “status-quo Joe.”

For the future well-being of so many millions of people, and for the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party in 2024, representing the status quo invites cascading disasters. A few months ago, Bernie Sanders summed up this way: “The most important economic and political issues facing this country are the extraordinary levels of income and wealth inequality, the rapidly growing concentration of ownership, the long-term decline of the American middle class and the evolution of this country into oligarchy.”

Interviewed days ago, Sanders said: “It pains me very, very much that we’re seeing more and more working-class people voting Republican. Politically, that is a disaster, and Democrats have to recognize that serious problem and address it.”

But President Biden doesn’t seem to recognize the serious problem, and he fails to address it.

During the last two years, domestic policy possibilities have been curbed by Biden’s frequent and notable refusals to use the power of the presidency for progress. He did not issue many of the potential executive orders that could have moved the country forward despite Senate logjams. At the same time, “bully pulpit” advocacy for workers’ rights, voter rights, economic justice, climate action and much more has been muted or nonexistent.

Biden seems unable or unwilling to articulate a social-justice approach to such issues. As for the continuing upward spike in Pentagon largesse while giving human needs short shrift, Biden was full of praise for the record-breaking, beyond-bloated $858 billion military spending bill that he signed in late December.

While corporate media’s reporters and pundits are much more inclined to critique his age than his policies, what makes Biden most problematic for so many voters is his antiquated political approach. Running for a second term would inevitably cast Biden as a defender of current conditions — in an era when personifying current conditions is a heavy albatross that weighs against electoral success.

A Hart Research poll of registered voters in November found that only 21 percent said the country was “headed in the right direction” while 72 percent said it was “off on the wrong track.” As the preeminent symbol of the way things are, Biden is all set to be a vulnerable standard-bearer in a country where nearly three-quarters of the electorate say they don’t like the nation’s current path.

But for now anyway, no progressive Democrat in Congress is willing to get into major trouble with the Biden White House by saying he shouldn’t run, let alone by indicating a willingness to challenge him in the early 2024 primaries. Meanwhile, one recent poll after another showed that nearly 60 percent of Democrats don’t want Biden to run again. A New York Times poll last summer found that a stunning 94 percent of Democrats under 30 years old would prefer a different nominee.

Although leaning favorably toward Biden overall, mass-media coverage has occasionally supplied the kind of candor that Democratic officeholders have refused to provide on the record. “The party’s relief over holding the Senate and minimizing House losses in the midterms has gradually given way to collective angst about what it means if Biden runs again,” NBC News reported days before Christmas.

Conformist support from elected Democrats for another Biden campaign reflects a shortage of authentic representation on Capitol Hill. The gap is gaping, for instance, between leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the constituency — the progressive base — they claim to represent. In late November, CPC chair Pramila Jayapal highlighted the gap when she went out of her way to proclaim that “I believe he should run for another term and finish this agenda we laid out.”

Is such leadership representing progressives to the establishment or the other way around?

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy." His next book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," will be published in Spring 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen

These days, conventional media wisdom says that President Biden will have a smooth path to renomination if he wants it.

Don’t be so sure.

Fifty-five years ago, pundits scoffed when a Democratic senator announced that he was running against incumbent Lyndon Johnson for their party’s presidential nomination. Eugene McCarthy launched his campaign to challenge Johnson’s continual escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Joe Biden’s public approval rating is now at 42 percent, virtually identical to what it was for President Johnson when the McCarthy campaign began in November 1967. A few months later, on March 12, 1968, McCarthy received 42 percent of the votes — a stunning result, just 7 percent behind Johnson — in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary. Senator Robert Kennedy jumped into the race four days later. And two weeks after that, Johnson shocked the country by declaring that he would not seek re-election.

It would be nice to hear from Biden the kind of statement that Johnson made: “I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office — the presidency of your country.” But Biden has said in recent weeks that he intends to run again.

Spinners aligned with the White House are careful to detour around the notable shortage of enthusiasm for Biden among the Democratic electorate. New polling found that 57 percent of Democrats don’t want him to be the party’s nominee.

So far, no Democrat in Congress has shown any interest in entering primaries against Biden. Yet a progressive challenger could launch a principled campaign to constructively give Biden a run for his corporate money in early primary states — raising vital questions about crucial policies along the way.

Skeptics might point out that, unlike when McCarthy received strong support from antiwar citizens, now there is no single overriding issue like the Vietnam War. But there is a class war (by any other name) going on with great intensity in the United States — and a wide range of Americans are feeling the countless dire consequences of inordinate corporate power and worsening economic inequality.

Of course, Biden does not want to face a primary rival who could clearly illuminate such issues. In the absence of a credible opponent, the president would be able to skate through primaries without needing to face cogent critiques of his administration’s record on an array of chronic problems — including corporate price-gouging, skyrocketing costs of housing, voter suppression, and a bloated military budget that soaks up roughly half of all federal discretionary spending.

Given the enormity of the crises facing the United States and the world, measures that Biden has proposed are often akin to calling for garden hoses to put out roaring wildfires. Being far better than Republicans in Congress is a high jump over very low standards, while simply blaming Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema is more like scapegoating than explaining.

Whether in the realms of the predatory healthcare system or the exploitive treatment of workers by huge corporations or the ever-increasing stranglehold of big tech companies or many other ills, Biden has often accepted or worsened destructive priorities while rejecting remedies that would improve people’s lives instead of boost corporate profits.

“Our ideas are way more popular than Joe Biden is,” a progressive Democratic member of the New Hampshire legislature says in a TV ad that will begin to air throughout the state this week. A young voter says “Joe Biden representing the status quo in 2024 simply won't cut it.” Another New Hampshire voter warns in the ad (which was produced by our colleagues in the Don’t Run Joe campaign), “We can't afford to risk the White House for a Republican who could defeat status-quo Joe.”

But where is a prominent progressive Democrat willing to challenge status-quo Joe in the primaries? Political courage appears to be in short supply among self-identified progressives on Capitol Hill, who so far have done nothing to help get Biden out of the way and clear a path for bolder leadership. It will be up to grassroots activists to get the job done.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy." His next book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," will be published in Spring 2023 by The New Press.

     Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

By Norman Solomon

Joe Biden has directed the Democratic National Committee to reduce the danger that progressives might effectively challenge him in the 2024 presidential primaries. That’s a key goal of his instructions to the DNC last week, when Biden insisted on dislodging New Hampshire — the longtime first-in-the-nation primary state where he received just 8 percent of the vote and finished fifth in the 2020 Democratic primary. No wonder Biden wants to replace New Hampshire with South Carolina, where he was the big primary winner.

The White House and mainstream journalists have echoed each other to assert that Biden would face no serious challenge to renomination if he runs again. But his blatant intrusion into the DNC’s process for setting the primary calendar is a sign of anxiety about potential obstacles to winning renomination.

Unlike all other states under consideration for early primaries, South Carolina is not a battleground state. Everyone knows that the Democratic ticket won’t come close to winning in deep-red South Carolina in 2024. But that state — which Biden obviously sees as vital to his renomination — has a party apparatus dominated by Biden’s powerful corporatist ally, Congressman James Clyburn.

The Biden plan to reorder the 2024 schedule “includes a subtle but effective ploy to minimize the chances that he’d face a left-wing challenger in the primaries if the 80-year-old president, as expected, seeks a second term,” centrist Walter Shapiro wrote approvingly in The New Republic. “More than that, Biden has created a template beyond 2024 to lessen the odds that future versions of Bernie Sanders will get liftoff in the early Democratic primaries.”

But serious public discussion from candidates with a range of outlooks is badly needed in the process of selecting the presidential nominee. From health care, extreme economic inequality, labor rights and racial justice to military spending, foreign policy and the climate emergency, voters in Democratic primaries need to hear crucial issues debated.

The current prevailing attitudes are retrograde. While Democratic politicians and pundits weigh in on whether Joe Biden should run for president again, his party’s voters are presumed to be little more than spectators. But the decision on whether Biden will be the nominee in 2024 shouldn’t be his alone. A party that has been emphasizing the importance of democracy should not be so eager to short-circuit it in the presidential nominating process.

Very few congressional Democrats have been willing to publicly depart from the party line that Biden would be a fine standard-bearer. The few dissenting voices among them are usually furtive. The New York Times reported after the midterm election that a House Democrat — speaking “on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the White House” — said that “Biden’s numbers were ‘a huge drag’ on Democratic candidates, who won in spite of the president not thanks to him.”

Fears of antagonizing the White House have sealed Democratic officeholders inside a bubble that carries them away from the party’s grassroots base. This fall began with most Democratic voters not wanting Biden to be the party’s nominee next time. Even amid post-midterms euphoria among Democrats, they are now evenly split on the question. But Democrats on Capitol Hill and other party leaders remain frozen in place, rarely casting any doubt on the wisdom of renominating this president.

The disconnect from the party’s base is in sync with a refusal to acknowledge the facts indicating that Biden at the top of the ticket would be an albatross around the necks of Democratic candidates in 2024. While voters are evenly divided between the two major parties, Biden’s public-approval deficit has exceeded 10 percent almost all of this year. Nine out of 10 young adults – a key cohort for Democratic prospects — don’t want him to run for re-election. In midterm exit polling, two-thirds of voters said they didn’t want Biden to run. Yet, when asked about those survey results, the president fell back on "watch me" bravado.

We’re told that smoke-filled rooms are a thing of the past in national politics. But when a president wants to run for re-election, the anticipated mode is not much better. Looking ahead, the only way to inject participatory democracy into the Democrats’ nominating process for 2024 is to insist that the nomination should be earned with the party’s voters, not bestowed from on high.

If President Biden decides to seek the Democratic nomination, as now seems likely, credible primary challengers could enliven an otherwise stultifying process, making it robust instead of a bust. The corrosive effects of stagnated assumptions should be held up to disinfecting sunlight. New ideas should be discussed rather than suppressed.

Conventional wisdom insists that a president has the divine political right to be the party’s nominee for a second term. But a president is not a party’s king, and he has no automatic right to renomination.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy." His next book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," will be published in Spring 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon

Images of passing the torch can be stirring.

President John Kennedy reached heights of inaugural oratory when he declared that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” Three decades later, when Bill Clinton won the presidency, a Newsweek headline proclaimed “THE TORCH PASSES.” The article underneath glorified “a film clip that made its way into a widely seen campaign ad: a beaming, 16-year-old Bill Clinton on a sun-drenched White House lawn, shaking the hand of his and his generation’s idol, John F. Kennedy.”

Weeks later, when Time magazine named Clinton “Man of the Year,” its cover story carried the headline “THE TORCH IS PASSED.”

The Clinton presidency went on to carry the torch for corporate-friendly measures. The NAFTA trade pact destroyed many well-paying union jobs; “welfare reform” harmed poor women and their families; a landmark crime law fueled mass incarceration; Wall Street deregulation led to the financial meltdown of 2007-2008.

Now, the top of the Democratic Party is passing torches on Capitol Hill. When Nancy Pelosi announced two weeks ago that she will no longer lead House Democrats, she said: “The hour has come for a new generation to lead.” But in what direction?

Pelosi quickly endorsed Rep. Hakeem Jeffries to replace her as leader. NBC News offered the common media frame: “Pelosi made history as the first female speaker of the House, while Jeffries, the current Democratic Caucus chairman, would become the first Black leader of a congressional caucus and highest-ranking Black lawmaker on Capitol Hill.”

You can count on much of the mass media to shower the 52-year-old Jeffries with accolades, largely supplied by fellow Democrats. But, overall, a closer look reveals a problematic record.

Early on, before becoming a New York state legislator, Jeffries worked for years as a corporate lawyer. In Congress – while he has taken a few progressive positions like cosponsoring Medicare for All and voting to cut 10 percent of the military budget – his emphasis has been in sync with the party establishment.

“I’m a Black progressive Democrat concerned with addressing racial and social and economic injustice with the fierce urgency of now,” Jeffries told The Atlantic in August 2021. But during the same interview, Jeffries added: “There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism.” (Ironically, Jeffries was echoing the “fierce urgency of now” phrase from Martin Luther King Jr., who was a democratic socialist.)

Jeffries likes to jab leftward. In 2016, he called Bernie Sanders a “gun-loving socialist with zero foreign-policy experience.” A 2018 profile in The Economist – titled “High Hopes for Hakeem Jeffries” – concluded that he “is nearly as moderate as a safe-seat Democrat gets.” The article pointed out: "Though he supports the principle of universal healthcare coverage, he speaks of ‘the importance of market forces and getting things done in a responsible fashion.’ Quoting Ronald Reagan approvingly, he suggests this means promoting a flourishing private sector outside the ‘legitimate functions’ of government."

Congressman Jeffries takes umbrage at negative press portrayals to such an extent that his office tries to quash critical assessments. When I wrote in a HuffPost piece in January 2019 that “Jeffries has been more attentive to serving corporate power than the interests of voters in his Brooklyn district,” the response was swift and angry. Jeffries’s communications director and senior advisor at the time, Michael Hardaway, fired off emails to HuffPost, claiming that my characterization was “factually inaccurate and easily disproven.” Despite the escalating fulminations, the HuffPost editor explained that he saw “no reason to correct or update the piece.” 

Jeffries has not been a sponsor of the Green New Deal (which Pelosi famously denigrated in 2019: “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”). He also has not cosponsored the Green New Deal for Cities Act.

During the latest election cycle, Jeffries joined forces with one of the most corporate and vitriolic anti-progressive Democrats in the House, Josh Gottheimer, to form Team Blue PAC. Its priority – to protect the party’s incumbents against Squad-like primary challengers – was summed up last winter in a Rolling Stone headline over an article about Jeffries’s initiative: “Top House Democrat Unveils Plan to Beat Back Progressive Rebellion.”

Last year, The American Prospect reported, Jeffries was conspicuously absent from efforts to support public housing in his home city. “When all [other] New York City House Democrats sent a letter to Pelosi urging her to protect all $80 billion for public housing in the BBB [Build Back Better bill], Jeffries was the only member not to sign that missive, especially surprising given that New York Dems are known to act as a bloc.”

Jeffries is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the magazine noted, but that affiliation should not be taken at face value: “Jeffries is a mute member of the CPC, the largest caucus in the party, but has recently chosen to ally himself with its more conservative factions. And while the party’s moderate wing has moved left on everything from foreign policy to social welfare, Jeffries has not moved with it.”

In fact, Hakeem Jeffries is thoroughly corporate, As The Intercept reported four years ago, after he won a close race against Rep. Barbara Lee to become chair of the House Democratic Caucus, “Jeffries is heavily backed by big money and corporate PACs. Less than 2 percent of his fundraising comes from small donors, who contribute less than $200, according to Federal Election Commission records.”

While in his fourth term, “Jeffries was the leading congressional recipient of hedge fund money in 2020,” The American Prospect reported last year. “He banked $1.1 million from the financial sector, real estate interests, and insurance industry in the 2019–2020 cycle. Everyone from JPMorgan Chase to Goldman Sachs to Blackstone contributed. Zimmer Partners, a hedge fund, is one of Jeffries’s top donors in 2021. From the outset, he has governed with those interests at heart. While Democrats were reconsidering their coziness with Wall Street, he broke ranks to vote with the financial services world, including on a high-profile measure literally written by Citigroup lobbyists in 2013 that killed the Dodd-Frank ‘swaps push-out’ rule, allowing banks to engage in risky trades backed by a potential taxpayer-funded bailout.”

Thirty years younger than the outgoing speaker, Jeffries is a fitting symbol of media eagerness to herald generational change for Democrats in Congress. But investigative journalist Alexander Sammon has provided an apt sum-up: “Barely in his fifties, Jeffries is young numerically, but aligned with an older mode of Democratic politics, and has repeatedly distanced himself from the younger crop of Democrats that is almost categorically more progressive (and more popular). He’s made a reputation for himself as the party’s future by becoming a foremost representative of its past.”

When a torch passes, we might be glad to “meet the new boss.” But we should discard illusions. That way, hopefully, we don’t get fooled again.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy." His next book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," will be published in Spring 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon

No amount of post-election puffery about Joe Biden can change a key political reality: His approval ratings are far below the public’s positivity toward the Democratic Party. Overall, the Democrats who won the midterm elections did so despite Biden, not because of him. He’s a drag on the party, a boon to Republicans, and — if he runs again — he’d be a weak candidate against the GOP nominee in the 2024 presidential campaign.

While the electorate is evenly split between the two parties, there’s no such close division about Biden. NBC reported its exit poll on Tuesday “found that two-thirds of voters (68 percent) do not want Biden to run for president again in 2024.”

This is nothing new. Biden’s low public-approval ratings have been longstanding. A chart showing chronic disapproval now has him at a dozen points underwater — 53 percent “disapprove” and only 41 percent “approve.” The gap between approval of Biden and of his party underscores what a leaden weight he is on Democratic electoral prospects.

As for how he’s apt to govern next year, Biden has offered a willingness to compromise with the right-wing Republican leadership. A New York Times headline after his Wednesday afternoon news conference summed up: “Biden Promises Bipartisanship After a Red Wave ‘Didn’t Happen.’”

But “bipartisanship” is exactly what we don’t need, in the face of extremist Republican demagogues who are determined to keep dragging the goal posts — and the country — further rightward.

In contrast to the current fad of adulation for Biden in much of corporate media, Politico offered this sober assessment of his impacts on the midterms: “It’s hard to argue that Democrats over-performed on Tuesday because of Biden rather than in spite of him. His approval rating, hovering around 41 percent, is dismal — and has been all year. He’ll turn 80 this month, and earlier this year, a majority of Democrats polled said they’d prefer someone else to be the party’s nominee.”

The article added: “But one thing Biden did have going for him was the calendar, and the reluctance of Democrats to do anything that might hurt him — and, by extension, the party — ahead of the midterms. That imperative is gone now. And though no prominent Democrat is likely to run a serious campaign against Biden, there will be increasing pressure on him, especially from the left, to step aside.”

It will be crucial to boost that pressure in the months ahead, which is why I’m glad to be part of the Don’t Run Joe organizing team. On Wednesday, the campaign launched digital ads reaching Democratic voters in New Hampshire with the message that “we need strong leadership to defeat Republicans in 2024.” And, while beating the fascistic GOP will be absolutely necessary, moving ahead with vital progressive policies will also be of paramount importance.

In New Hampshire, which has long hosted the nation’s first presidential primary, Democratic State Representative Sherry Frost said this on Wednesday: “I am eager to support a candidate who understands the fatal dysfunction in our economy and is willing to hold the ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations to their obligations to the rest of us, who is going to actively champion meaningful civil rights and voting protections, and who will spearhead a shift away from the military-industrial complex and oligarchy and toward a culture that works for the most vulnerable of us first. I am not confident that Biden is that candidate, and while I appreciate his rescuing us from another Trump term, I believe we need someone else to champion the big and systemic changes we need to continue to strive toward our more perfect union.”

What does all this mean for people who want to defeat Republicans in 2024 and to advance truly progressive agendas? Joe Biden should not be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. If he runs for re-election — representing the status quo — the outcome would likely be disastrous. Grassroots activism will be essential to create better alternatives.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy." His next book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," will be published in Spring 2023 by The New Press.

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

When Ralph Nader appeared on “Democracy Now!” last week, a key moment came as he responded to the final question from host Amy Goodman: “You have campaigned as an independent and a Green throughout your political life. You ran for president four times. Why now throw in your lot with the Democrats?”

“Well, this is clearly the most dangerous political movement since the Civil War, the GOP under the corporate fascist Trump’s thumb,” Nader replied. “He spread a whole breed of many Trumpsters who are getting far too much publicity compared to their opponents. Everything we fought for, Amy, for over 50 years, is at stake here. They’re ready to do everything but tear seatbelts out of cars. They want to let Wall Street lie, cheat and steal with impunity. They want to make sure the corporate crime wave continues to roll across America against workers and consumers and the elderly and children.”

Nader added: “So this is an order of magnitude we have never seen before.”

In the week ahead, the crucial question is whether the Republican Party will be successful in capturing Congress. A Republican takeover of the House and Senate would be a huge step forward for fascistic politics.

Nader summarized the Republican threat to democracy: “We have never seen a party literally trying to repress the vote, miscount the vote, purge the vote, intimidate precinct worker volunteers and steal elections. They have actually basically said, ‘Any election we lose is because it has been stolen from us.’ That is the word of a dictatorship party.”

The interview with Nader, reaching many thousands of progressive voters around the United States, could have impact on tight races. The battle for control of the Senate is notably down to the wire in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Candor requires acknowledging that Democratic candidates for Congress are mostly an uninspiring lot from progressive vantage points. At the same time, they represent the only means available right now to halt the march of Republican demagogues into congressional control.

Ralph Nader’s influence among some progressive voters could tip the balance. In some contests, the margins of victory could be just a few votes per precinct.

Disappointing — and sometimes infuriating — as the current Congress has been, the absence of Republican control has made possible the enactment of some very valuable legislation into law. Any such progress would come to a screeching halt if Republicans run Congress, as Nader pointed out while calling for Democrats to “compare and contrast life under the authoritarian bigoted corporate-indentured GOP with life under the Democrats.”

For example, Nader said, “20 or 25 million people will get a raise to $15 minimum wage under the Democrats. The GOP is against that. The assault on children by the GOP is absolutely stunning, from not using available Medicaid funds to insure them, to exposing them to hazardous pesticides and denying paid family leave and sick leave. The GOP is against that. The $300 a month child tax credit to 58 million children in our country, cutting child poverty by a third, was suspended because of GOP opposition in January.”

Nader was crystal clear: “Your choice in 2022, compare the Democrats and GOP, and the GOP is against every one of these, whether it’s minimum wage, strengthening gun safety laws, taxing the wealthiest firms and the super-rich, guaranteeing freedom and equality for women, ending the dark money in campaigns, providing Medicare for all, raising frozen Social Security benefits, restoring voter rights, funding childcare and sick leave, fighting climate violence with renewable energy, reducing skyrocketing drug prices and increasing funding to prosecute corporate crooks. All of those are opposed by the GOP.”

There are profound differences between the two major parties. Ralph Nader is offering crucial wisdom at this historic moment.

     Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of “War Made Easy.” His next book, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,” will be published by The New Press in Spring 2023. He is the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.