Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee for President. Which Joe Biden will we get, the one that took aggressive liberal stands on Gun Control, fighting Apartheid and many Foreign Affairs issues or the one that sandbagged Anita Hill, pushed laws that benefited creditors over consumers and the VP for President Obama’s administration that barely enforced antitrust laws?

Biden’s success has been warmly greeted by the nation’s most prominent neoconservatives, perhaps hoping for another war or two- they have openly boasted about supporting him and the Health Insurance Industry who are bucking a worldwide Coronavirus-related economic downturn to see their stock prices rise dramatically.

Democratic establishment figures and their allies on cable news continue to miss the mark about what this election is about. We can all agree Donald Trump is pretty damn terrible, an uncouth sexual predator, but after the miscalculated and poorly executed Impeachment and the constant screams of Russia, much of the public just assumes anything the Democrats say about Trump on an ethical level is hysteria. They’ve done the impossible – they’ve lobbed legitimate charges at the President and made him MORE POPULAR AND MORE ELECTABLE.

The Democratic establishment seems either shocked that Adam Schiff and Val Demings weren’t up to Alan Dershowitz’s level of legal expertise or in complete utter denial of how badly they bungled the entire process. Trump should be out of office and serving prison time somewhere but the Democrats appear completely incapable of formulating and sustaining an argument for why this is, without tripping over themselves or over-politicizing things.

Candidates have exited the race – one, Elizabeth Warren was a clear victim of the established sexism so ingrained in media coverage and the way political operatives look at the “horse race,” she never had a chance. Others have been hailed as “team players,” or “selfless,” as if cheering for Democrats was akin to cheering on Chelsea FC on the soccer pitch – an increasingly good comparison since both entities are tied to Oligarch-driven funding.

Meanwhile working class white voters in the Midwest, the ONLY demographic that really matters in this election aren’t being talked to by the party or its presumptive nominee. We get lots of analysis about Biden’s ability win African-American votes and white suburban women, Sanders success among young people and Latinos doesn’t seem to matter to analysts (maybe it shouldn’t but neither should Biden’s successes if graded on same scale- Sanders won California. Good for him. Maybe he can run for Mayor of Paris now, because winning California means NOTHING in terms of voters that will decide this election) but little focus on the people who will actually decide whether or not give Donald Trump four more years in office. This is partly because three plus years later many Democrats STILL CANNOT GRASP WHY VOTERS WHO SWITCHED FROM OBAMA TO TRUMP DID SO. HINT, IT WASN’T PUTIN. IT WAS ECONOMIC MESSAGING!

The almost certain Democratic nominee has to this point appeared reluctant to discuss the pocket book issues that fueled the anxiety that led to an exodus of previous Obama voters to Trump. Biden may have been Obama’s VP but he doesn’t seem able to actually replicate his messaging or quite know how to leverage his long record in communicating on issues properly. Moreover, Sanders messaging seems to have ABILITY TO APPEAL TO THIS DEMOGRAPHIC. But when Biden loses the general, the insiders will blame a combination of Sanders supporters and Russian operatives for the defeat.

Biden’s appeal to this point seems to be HE HAS A BETTER CHANCE OF BEATING TRUMP (despite an absence of real evidence to this effect, but when you have the media in your pocket, you don’t need evidence)! Or HE IS NOT A CASTRO-LOVING SOCIALIST! Of course these theories pushed by insiders feeding at the trough and walking away wealthier whether he wins or not. They become even wealthier if Trump wins again because they can whine and carry on and get MSNBC viewers to throw lots of money at whatever PAC they create and “consult” for. As Chris Matthews famously revealed to the world the Democratic Party (which is the class of insiders that run the operation) would be better off with a Trump victory than a Sanders one. This wasn’t idle talk, it was the truth.

Democrats are really good at controlling primaries as we have seen here in Florida. They are equally bad at winning General Elections. The establishment almost always win primaries due to a combination of party conformity, the ability to control the endorsements and efforts of affiliated unions and advocacy groups as well as taking advantage of the expense of actually organizing Florida without party help. (Those who may claim Andrew Gillum ran an insurgent candidacy don’t realize many of the most prominent establishment Democrats backed him and that he really wasn’t a progressive based on his record in Tallahassee until he though connected with the Sanders voter could help him, especially given his extensive ethical baggage. Now he seems to be Sanders biggest critic equating Sanders Castro statements to Trump’s defenses of neo-Nazis. My personal hope is that we never see him run for public office again. If he does and the Democrats support him it will prove the moral bankruptcy of the party is irredeemable and this party is not worth affiliation with.)

Democrats who claim somehow Biden will be well-positioned to win Florida in the General after he routs Sanders in the primary here either don’t remember recent history, don’t look at data, are unaware of how popular Governor DeSantis is or are being deliberately deceptive so they can spend money down here and profit from the ad buys. This is how the Democratic Party of 2020 works.

So we have arrived at this point. It’s Biden’s party – on the surface. But it really is the party of consultants, the professional corporate lobbyist, the Bush-backing gun-touting war-mongering neoconservative, the absolutely shameless snot-nosed political consultant and the TV analyst who doubles as a Democratic operative or whose sources are all the insider class of consultants.

Good luck to us in November, we are going to need it.