Democratic Party's 2020 presidential candidate debates — a diversionary mess of squabbling cats?

© 2019 Peter Free

 

02 July 2019

 

 

Coherent messaging . . .

 

. . . is something that Democrats cannot seem to get their donkey-dopey heads around.

 

Politico's Tim Alberta reasonably observed that:

 

 

First impressions are everything in politics.

 

[W]hat America was introduced to this week . . . was a [Democratic] party searching not only for a leader but for an identity, for a vision, for a coherent argument about how voters would benefit from a change in leadership.

 

Some confusion is inevitable when 20 candidates, many of them unfamiliar to a national audience, are allotted five to seven minutes to explain why they are qualified to lead the free world. Yet the perception in the eyes of the political class—and the feeling on the ground was something closer to chaos.

 

[A] record number of candidates talked over one another, contorted themselves ideologically, evaded straightforward questions and traded insults both implicit and explicit.

 

The danger is that there is no dominant political force; that . . . an obtrusively large collection of candidates will be emboldened to keep fighting . . . feeding the perception of a party in turmoil and easing the president’s fight for reelection.

 

© 2019 Tim Alberta, Unhappy with Their 2016 Coronation, the Democrats Start a 2020 Circus, Politico (30 June 2019)

 

 

Why is this confusing incoherence allowed to be so?

 

Glen Ford came up with the right answer to that.

 

After all, money is everything in American politics:

 

 

With 24 Democrats running for president and most of them lying about their plans for the nation and the world, the current US electoral arena may seem chaotic.

 

But the fog clears dramatically if one understands that the corporate duopoly is designed to systematically narrow the electoral choices available to the populace so that, at end of the process, the rule of Capital remains secure.

 

In such an arrangement, majorities never get what they want -- which is the evil genius of the system.

 

© 2019 Glen Ford, The Ruling Class Will Not Tolerate the Sanders-Led Assault on Austerity, Black Agenda Report (20 June 2019)

 

 

How does this candidate field-dilution work?

 

Think about it.

 

How difficult do you think that it would be to persuade the average egotistical, legally grift-prone politician to believe that he and she are destined to become America's savior?

 

Sprinkle a little money here.

 

A little there.

 

And voila — you've got the public's desire (for a little more of the Rich Man's Stolen Pie) bottled up among a message-confusing panel of 24 mostly wannabe looters.

 

With the outcome of this shouting-cat mob, predictably likely to favor the supposedly "more electable" — equally narcissistic, but more malleable — plutocrat-coddlers among them.

 

Say like, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and so on.

 

From the Oligarchy's perspective, why waste hundreds of years of (already invested) laissez-faire propaganda?

 

 

The moral? — Ours is not a democratic society

 

It is not difficult to control emotionally labile sheep.

 

Recall, too, that Democrats have long constituted the Phony Opposition Party. Their camouflaging identity politics constitute a Plutocrat-useful diversion from even more massive societal problems.

 

Ergo, the utility of Kamala Harris's feminine, Establishment-favoring "brown-ness".