Biden should have stayed home
His Cold War rhetoric did nothing to contribute to COP26 or to salvage a Democratic victory at home.
Nothin’ from nothin’…
My sense of where Virginia voters were at vis-a-vis Biden and the Democrats can be summed up in the words of the great Billy Preston.
Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin' if you wanna be with me
I tried to tell ‘em…
In my post on Monday, I warned Democrats that If Joe Biden's only purpose in attending COP26 was rallying his Cold War alliance against China, he might as well stay home. Obviously, that warning and those of others fell on deaf ears.
While the President was in Glasgow, clumsily chastising China’s Pres. XI for not personally attending the conference, Democrats back home in Virginia were being pummeled at the hands of a Trump-lite Republican using (of all things) Critical Race Theory as a racist dog whistle to mobilize mainly white suburban parents.
It’s doubtful that Biden’s talking smack to Xi got even a single vote for Terry McCauliffe or New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. Biden didn’t stand together with McCauliffe in the days leading up to the election in VA, a state he won big in 2020, mainly because he was never asked to — for obvious reasons. Biden’s approval ratings are lower than snake poop.
And why are they so low? Because he hasn’t been able to deliver the goods around economic, family support, or environmental issues, while capitulating totally to the whims of reactionary West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. Democrats also appear unwilling or unable to fight to protect voting rights. Their political cowardice is a recipe for disaster in ‘22 and beyond.
Quotable:
“The blame game is not something the US should be really playing right now given we have so much work to do ourselves.” — Christy Goldfuss, an environment adviser to Barack Obama and now a policy expert at the Center for American Progress.
Aside from China-bashing, it’s not clear what, if anything, Biden accomplished during his waking hours at COP26. While rich nations’ failure to meet their goals for providing climate financing to developing countries has earned wide rebuke, Biden came to Europe without any congressional assurances that any of that would change.
While thousands of COP26 protesters chanted “NO MORE BLAH, BLAH, BLAH! from across the river, some good things did emerge early on in the conference.
More than 100 countries pledged to slash methane emissions and 110 world leaders promised to end deforestation by 2030. But the climate crisis demands more than piecemeal promises. The real nuts-and-bolts negotiations over climate change will take place only after Biden and the other attending heads of state are long gone from Scotland.
Saving the planet from man-made global warming and the ravages of the Covid pandemic depends largely on U.S.-China collaboration. The people and countries of the world depend on it and demand it. But Biden seems unalterably set on the path of cold-war escalation, likely leading to hot war. It’s a course that can only bring more global human suffering and destruction and more defeats for Democrats in years to come.
Congratulations to my old friend & brilliant sociologist Elijah Anderson who was just awarded the 2021 Stockholm Prize, considered the most prestigious in the field of criminology. Dr. Anderson is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale.
City leaders and educators could benefit greatly from a dialogue with him and familiarization with his pioneering studies on the “code of the streets” in Chicago and Philadelphia.
SUBSCRIBE
If you like my newsletter and would like to receive it each morning in your mailbox, hit the SUBSCRIBE button and join the Edu/Pol community either as a free or paid subscriber. Your paid sub costs $7/month and will help keep Edu/Pol going. Thanks in advance. —M.K.