The biggest challenge for liberals is that we don’t understand the difference between passion and practicality. For instance, I have so much passion for presidential candidates such as Kamala “Mommala” Harris, and Pete “the fleet” Buttigieg.
However, in the primary, I am not going with my passion, I am going with the practical one — the old white man in the room, Joe Biden. I know what this sounds like, but if you are a person of color in the United States you may know what I am talking about. When I was a princess before I became a great queen, my grandmother would always say: “Antar, you have to do what you have to do, to do what you want to do.”
Under the Trump administration, the United States of America sits on the precipice of a constitutional Armageddon. I watch CNN and other media outlets pick each democratic candidate apart piece by piece; covering lofty topics like reparations for African Americans, voting while incarcerated, Joe Biden getting too close for comfort, and the Green New Deal. None of this shit is going to happen no matter who the Democratic presidential candidate is — this is pandering 101. It appears that all everyone cares about is a good sound bite or who has the best clap-back, none of which put an extra dime in any of our pockets.
Look, I know as much as anyone what’s been said when news pundits state the word “electability.” It essentially means who is white Midwestern person going to vote for — those that have very little contact with people of color. In a Monmouth poll, a large number of Democratic voters are putting more emphasis on “electability” rather than a candidate’s stance on the issues in the 2020 Presidential election. However, the problem is that the poll didn’t quite define what “electability” actually means. In April 2019, The Washington Post said “Joe Biden begins his presidential campaign with a lead over the crowded Democratic field and a simple message the nation can immediately grasp: ‘I can stop the madness. I can beat Donald Trump.’”
The Biden argument is simple: the way one beats the ultimate outsider (Trump) is by getting the ultimate insider into power. Essentially Biden represents a sense of normalcy, politics as usual. They say electability is in the eye of the beholder and there is not an effective way of measuring what it means. Then again, a CNN poll in April said that Beto O’Rourke, Biden, and Sanders would all beat Trump by six points in a hypothetical election — all white, all cis-gender men, all heterosexual, and all married.
I don’t know about you, but it is clear to me what electability means.