Interesting story about a key moment in Joe Biden's political career when he pulled out of the Democratic Primary in 1987. I've always heard the story told that it was his speech plagiarizing Neil Kinnock that knocked him out. But it's more complicated.... npr.org/2019/12/26/791…
Biden did not have the bandwidth to deal with the Kinnock story because he was chairing the Judiciary Committee that was about to hold hearings for the Bork nomination--a nomination that Biden helped squash. The long-term ramifications of this outcome were enormous.
Bork was a far-right ideologue. Putting him on the court would have been disastrous for civil rights, abortion, etc. After Bork was rejected, Reagan chose Anthony Kennedy...still a conservative, but far more moderate. He was the deciding vote in Obergefell, for example.
This touches on a point I've been a broken record about. Presidential politics matter, but politics is about SO MUCH MORE than just who is in the White House. Decisions get made in Congress and in the courts that have huge impacts on our lives, and we ignore that at our peril.
The far right judges who Trump is appointing with reckless abandon these days are a product of a 50+ year history of conservative mobilization and institution building. In the 1960s far right activists started playing the long game and we see its fruits today in the GOP.
They built think tanks, set up media outlets, created organizations like the Federalist Society, established outreach programs to college students, stocked library and high school English class shelves with free Ayn Rand novels, funded "study groups" for legislators, etc, etc.
Sure, these folks groomed figures like Goldwater and Reagan to serve as galvanizing public spokespeople for their ideology and Reagan is clearly a consequential historical figure...but he's nothing (and his legacy is meaningless) without all of the institutional force behind him.
Building a progressive coalition with as much power to change the world as the conservative movement has had can not be the work of one Presidential candidate or one generation of inspiring first-year legislators.
It will be a heavy lift and will require compromise across a diverse coalition of people. It will require bold visionaries who can stake out an inspiring vision of the future. And it will require backroom dealers who can work out the nuts and bolts of legislation and whip votes.
