Carol Burris and I wrote “An Open Letter to Joe Biden,” which was published by Valerie Strauss on her blog “The Answer Sheet” at the Washington Post.
Valerie Strauss begins:
During the Obama administration, public school advocates led by Diane Ravitch opposed the education agenda of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who had embraced standardized testing, charter schools and the Common Core State Standards as the way to improve America’s schools.
Ravitch, an education historian and research professor at New York University, became the titular leader of the grass-roots movement against the privatization of public education in 2010, when she published her best-selling book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” It detailed her conversion from a No Child Left Behind supporter to an opponent.
From 1991 to 1993, Ravitch served as assistant secretary of research and improvement in the Education Department under President George H.W. Bush. She was, too, an early supporter of No Child Left Behind, the chief education initiative of his son, President George W. Bush, which ushered in the high-stakes standardized-testing movement. But when she researched the effects of the measures, she saw that NCLB’s testing requirements had turned classrooms into test prep factories and forced schools to narrow the curriculum to focus on tested subjects.
She changed her long-held views about how to improve schools and for the last decade has been speaking and writing about education reform. She also co-founded and heads the nonprofit Network for Public Education, which links people and groups that advocate to improve public schools and fight school privatization.
Ravitch became a lightning rod for criticism by supporters of President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, which made standardized tests more important than ever. But, at 81 years old, she is still writing and advocating for public schools. Her most recent book was published this year, “Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools.”
The Network for Public Education that she leads opposes charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately managed — seeing them as part of a movement to privatize public education. It published two reports last year about how the federal government wasted millions of dollars on a program aimed at expanding the charter sector.
Charter supporters criticized the reports, but the overall story of waste and abuse in the federal Charter Schools Program helped to prompt Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to promise to end funding for the program when they were both running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Some Democratic legislators in the House also expressed concern about the program after the reports were released.
Joe Biden was Obama’s vice president but was not in the forefront of the administration’s education agenda. He has promised that if elected, he would, among other things, triple the federal funding for high-poverty schools, increase teachers salaries and ban for-profit charter schools. He has also expressed opposition to standardized testing.
In the following open letter to Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Ravitch and Carol Burris write about public education and their reaction to his public comments about school policy, saying they are encouraged.
Burris, a former award-winning principal in New York, is the executive director of the Network for Public Education. Burris has been writing for this blog for years, chronicling the effects of Race to the Top and about charter schools.
Here is the open letter to Biden about education policy, written by Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris:</strong
Dear Vice President Biden,
We write on behalf of the Network for Public Education, the nation’s largest group of volunteers and advocates for public schools in the nation, with more than 350,000 followers spread across all 50 states.
We have strongly opposed the education agenda of Donald Trump. For the first time in the history of the Department of Education, its secretary seems dedicated to the destruction of public schools. From her enthusiastic support of private school vouchers, charter schools, and virtual charter schools, Betsy DeVos has made clear that she believes that schools should be run by private agencies and as entrepreneurial start-ups, not as centers of community life, subject to democratic governance by elected school boards.
Our public schools and their students desperately need a champion. We hope you will be that champion. For two decades, our schools and their teachers have been micromanaged by misguided federal mandates that require states to judge students, teachers, and schools by standardized test scores, as though a test score could ever be the true measure of a child, a teacher or a school.
We know that you know better. At the Public Education Forum in Pittsburgh in December 2019, NPE Board member Denisha Jones asked you whether you would commit to ending standardized testing in public schools. You did not hesitate when you said, “Yes. You are preaching to the choir.”
You continued by saying, “Teaching to a test underestimates and discounts the things that are most important for students to know.” You explained that what is most important is building a child’s confidence and you referred to evaluating teachers by test scores as a “big mistake.”
You are right in your assessment of standardized, high-stakes tests and we appreciate your response. Hold firmly to those beliefs. We understand that federal law must be rewritten to free the schools from their fixation on test scores. We count on you to make that happen, and to put an end to the legacy of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. Billions of dollars have been wasted on testing during these past twenty years. It is time for a fresh vision of what education can be.
Former supporters of President Obama’s Race to the Top program will whisper in your ear to persuade you to double down on failed policies. They will try to convince you that testing is a “civil right.” It is not. In fact, standardized testing has its roots in eugenics — it was used for years as a means by which to shut out immigrants, students of color, and students who live in poverty in order to reserve privilege for affluent students, who more typically excel on standardized tests.
All children deserve a well-resourced public school filled with high-quality educational experiences. All children deserve experienced and well-prepared teachers. All children deserve schools that have counselors, social workers, librarians, and nurses. All children deserve a full curriculum, with science labs and arts programs. When schools become test-prep factories, the civil rights of children to equal education opportunities are denied.
Others will tell you that funding does not matter and that only choice and competition will improve public schools. They are wrong. Research consistently demonstrates that increases in funding make a difference in the educational outcomes of children. But we cannot tinker around the edges and expect to get dramatic results. That is why we fully support your plan to triple Title I funding while giving educators voice in how that money should be best spent.
We are pleased that you support community schools as a pathway for school improvement. During the forum, you said that “Betsy DeVos’s whole notion from charter schools to this [her blame the victim position on sexual harassment on campus] is gone,” if you are elected. We are glad that you endorse district public school improvement instead of embracing the expansion of what has become a competing alternative system whose growth has drained funding from public schools.
Banning for-profit charter schools is not enough. There are only a handful of for-profit charters, and they exist only in Arizona. There are, however, many for-profit charter management companies as well as nonprofit charter management companies whose CEOs enjoy exorbitant salaries, far exceeding the salaries of district school superintendents. These charter chains hide their lavish spending on travel, marketing, advertising, rental payments to related companies, and administrative salaries from community, state and federal taxpayers even as they claim to be public schools.
Although the policies of the states regarding charter schools are beyond your control, the Federal Charter School Program is not. A once modest program intended to spark innovation community-led charter schools is now a program that sends hundreds of millions of dollars each year to corporate charter school chains. Just last month, DeVos gave $72 million to the IDEA charter chain whose chief executive officer hired a private jet on which he was the only passenger to meet DeVos in Florida. That same charter chain received over $175 million from DeVos through the Charter Schools Program in 2017 and 2018.
It is time to eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program, which is no longer needed since billionaire-directed foundations supply ample funding for new charters and charter expansion. We issued two reports last year, demonstrating that the federal Charter Schools Program is riddled with waste and fraud, having spent approximately $1 billion on schools that never opened, or that opened and subsequently closed.
Your public statements encourage us to believe that you do not intend to follow the disastrous education policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. We are hopeful that you will renounce the status quo and bring a fresh vision that supports the work of teachers and public schools.
You will receive no better counsel on public education than you will from your educator wife, Jill Biden. We have no doubt that she will advise you well. It is time to turn the page on failed policies and invest in our nation’s public schools, which enroll nearly 90 percent of all American children.
The future of our nation depends on the success of public schools and their leaders, teachers, and support staff, who even, in this crisis, are working tirelessly to educate our students and keep them fed, well, and safe. Please stand with them and with the more than 50 million children who attend district public schools.
Diane Ravitch
Carol Burris
Thank you for your letter. You and Carol have crafted an articulate account of the current situation with the federal government’s role in public education. As someone who participated in negotiated rule making when Arne Duncan was Secretary of Education, I learned firsthand of the federal government’s efforts to undermine teacher education and public schools. If Biden truly supports public education and repudiates standardized testing, we can begin to reclaim our education system for future generations. I support your position and thank you again for writing him.
“They will try to convince you that testing is a “civil right.” It is not. In fact, standardized testing has its roots in eugenics — it was used for years as a means by which to shut out immigrants, students of color, and students who live in poverty in order to reserve privilege for affluent students, who more typically excel on standardized tests.”
Thank you for being the historian, and thank you for using history to argue a point. Through the use of history, perhaps only through the logic of history, can humanity come to confront its own actions and evaluate them through understanding and logic. An essayist (long forgotten, I recall it from historiography class) once posited that the first thing a tyrant has to do to impose tyranny is to re-write history. Real historians can use history to combat the tendency of the tyrannical in our own society as it tries to go back to a fiction that never existed.
While the fact that the origin of testing in the Eugenics movement does not mean that every person who supports testing is a bigot, it nonetheless underscores the process of manipulating data to obtain goals that are strictly hidden from broader society. Thanks for keeping up the fight.
Well said, Roy. History really matters, especially these days.
Oh, I see, there is a missing closing bracket “>” in Diane’s post above after “</strong”
Beautifully said, Roy, and thank you for this apologia for history and for the warning about the rewriting of it. Orwell, of course, understood the latter as well, having witnessed it with Stalin. Thus Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth in 1984.
Ofc, this is what our current “post truth” President does all the tame, sometimes within a single sentence. He does something egregious, something profoundly hateful and stupid, and then tells us that he didn’t or that the dark deed was enlightenment. Not that he could use vocabulary as sophisticated as “enlightenment.” He would say, I made a perfect call, I did a fantastic job. Incredible.
Yes, fantastic, as in fantasy, incredible, as in not credible.
Bob: it is not just Trump, though I see him as a symptom of the tyrannical impulse in society. That is why getting rid of Trump will not rid society of the increasing tendency to deny truth. The denial of historical truth is far worse than the denial of scientific truth, it seems to me. Of course, that may be because the practice of studying history is a broader topic, including both science and hearsay as a part of its tradition.
Someday Trump will be gone. Maybe in January 2021, if we are wise. Maybe in 2025, if we are dumb.
When he is gone, there will remain the 35-40% of the public who believed he was their savior and believed his daily lies.
That problem remains.
Both really, really bad, Roy. We are seeing right now the results of the denial of science by Trump and the Trumpy governors, but we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. These people are currently setting into motion policies that will result in many, many U.S. deaths. We can open up WHEN we have sufficient testing and contact tracing. Trump needed to use his defense power to mobilize industry big time to produce tests, an online portal for contact tracing, PPE, etc. He didn’t do that. Instead, he took lame-a$$ partial measures and lied about these daily on TV. Because he is completely ignorant of science, as he is of history.
The next time we have a presidential debate, I would like to see the moderators ask the candidates to explain what exponential growth is.
We really have to stop electing ignorant morons to high office. I’ve said this before here. We do a better job of vetting someone to run a neighborhood gas station than we do of vetting the person who will hold the most powerful position in the world.
Exponential growth:
A growth on your ex’s ponent
Replete with Repeat
A history repeat
Is bound to be our curse
The past is just replete
With repetious verse
Repetitious
And so am I
By the way, did WordPress happiness engineers decide that everything looks better in bold?
There is a missing closing bracket “>” in Diane’s post above after “</strong”
Careful. Tennyson might come back from the dead and haunt you.
As usual a great letter supporting the concept of public schools as the only fair way to go in the best interest of students. Public schools have the most qualified teachers who are best able to to take education to it’s future.
With Dr. Jill Biden at his side, I see hope for this future. Wouldn’t it be great if Elizabeth Warren were on the ticket to bolster the need for quality education?
As good as that letter is, there is still no vision for the future. This vision is necessary if we are to “even the playing field” for all students.
“I was full of pride and admiration for my colleagues one day and full of frustration the next, particularly due to the unequal trearment of our children.” – Deborah Meier.
It is my belief that much of this unequal treatment is due to a system of education that was never designed to serve all kids. The purpose of the current system was defined by Thomas Jefferson as “raking a few geniuses from the rubbish.” The geniuses go to college, the rest are thrown into the streets like rubbish. Thus the school to prison pipeline.
Those who do not openly support a new vision for the future, by default are supporting a divisive, racist system that forces the kids who need us the most, into failure.
Thus lends the question we all must answer:
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? As the song of that title says “There are no nuetrals here!”
As usual a great letter supporting the concept of public schools as the only fair way to go in the best interest of students. Public schools have the most qualified teachers who are best able to to take education to it’s future.
With Dr. Jill Biden at his side, I see hope for this future. Wouldn’t it be great if Elizabeth Warren were on the ticket to bolster the need for quality education?
As good as that letter is, there is still no vision for the future. This vision is necessary if we are to “even the playing field” for all students.
“I was full of pride and admiration for my colleagues one day and full of frustration the next, particularly due to the unequal trearment of our children.” – Deborah Meier.
It is my belief that much of this unequal treatment is due to a system of education that was never designed to serve all kids. The purpose of the current system was defined by Thomas Jefferson as “raking a few geniuses from the rubbish.” The geniuses go to college, the rest are thrown into the streets like rubbish. Thus the school to prison pipeline.
Those who do not openly support a new vision for the future, by default are supporting a divisive, racist system that forces the kids who need us the most, into failure.
Thus lends the question we all must answer:
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? As the song of that title says “There are no nuetrals here!”
Wouldn’t it be great if Elizabeth Warren were on the ticket to bolster the need for quality education?
I emphatically agree, Cap!
I bet Biden is looking for someone that will give him a swing state or two. After all, with the present state of split politics, the opinions of much of the country is not important. It is only the states that might go either way that keep political thinkers up at night.
Biden’s Choice
Biden needs a swinger
To garner him some votes
A love machine humdinger
Who floats a lot of boats
I just hope Biden can send a message from the top that public education HAS VALUE. That it should be treated not as something to carelessly and recklessly discard based on an ideological belief that markets will be vastly superior.
Because ed reformers DON’T KNOW that putting public education into a market frame will be “better”. This is an ideological belief. They’re entitled to have this belief but they’re not entitled to recklessly dismantle existing public systems and conduct experiments on 50 million children and families based on it.
Doing that MEANS they don’t value it. One doesn’t cavalierly discard something one values- that’s not how people who value something behave.
You can watch this in action any day of the week in ed reform. I just watched it in Ohio. The ed reform “movement” did a huge expansion of private school vouchers with NO consideration or evaluation of how doing that would affect the 90% of kids in this state who attend public schools. No analysis at all- public schools (and public school students) were treated as completely without value. This experiment WOULD be conducted and if our schools and students got hurt? Oh, well. They were more than willing to throw them under the bus.
If the leaders of public schools hadn’t stepped in and insisted that public school students be considered in these schemes the huge voucher experiment would have proceeded as planned and just damn the consequences. They didn’t care, at all, what happened to our schools and students.
If we blindly continue to follow ed reformers and abolish public schools I KNOW we will live to regret it and we will never, ever get the public systems back. Throwing public schools away is a decision that can’t be reversed. If we privatize we will never take these entities public again. If we’re going to privatize we should at least be aware of what we’re throwing away.
But what will Frank Biden say?
I agree. Joe Biden’s pitch is complicated by the fact that I can go view videos of his brother selling a for-profit charter chain in Pennsylvania.
His brother is a salesperson for the worst for-profit chain in FL, OH and PA. It’s just appalling. He had 5 or 6 business failures before he hit pay dirt selling garbage charter schools to rural Pennsylvania.
If Joe Biden cared what Frank Biden wanted, Joe would not have already clearly expressed that he did not support for-profit charters.
I mean, that isn’t even something that Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris had to inform Biden about. Biden already said he didn’t support for-profit charters. So not sure why you would assume that Biden blatantly lied about that back in 2019 and secretly planned to support for-profit charters because his brother wanted him to.
I don’t hold people accountable for what their siblings do.
That’s because I don’t want to be held accountable for my siblings, two of whom are Trumpsters.
Here’s what else Joe Biden supported: The Bankruptcy bill that prevented students with education loans from filing for bankruptcy, supported the Iraq war, NAFTA, the TPP, The War on Drugs, mass incarceration, etc. That said any Democrat would be a massive improvement.
The choice is Trump or Biden.
I don’t care what Biden supported 10 or 20 years ago.
Trump is unstable, dangerous, stupid, and incompetent. He must go.
I should have made it clear: any Democrat, including Biden, would be a massive improvement over Trump.
Agreed.
One can track how the ed reform “movement” has changed over time, too. They move further and further toward privatization. The whole echo chamber now repeat DeVos’ ideological belief that “public education” has no meaning other “publicly funded”.
That was NOT what was sold to the public. They’ve conducted a kind of bait and switch. They got charters accepted and IMMEDIATELY moved onto lobbying for vouchers. They have now redefined words like “public”. None of them invest in existing public schools and all of them bash public schools. What was an extreme ed reform position 5 years ago (total privatization) is now mainstream.
They don’t even bother to address public school families anymore. Their entire agenda is directed to charter and private school families. They’re so confident in their ideological agenda they don’t even bother to PRETEND to offer some benefit to public school families.
How far would ed reformers have gone if they had revealed to the public at the outset that their goal was to privatize public schools? Not far. So they didn’t bother to reveal it and now we’re all supposed to pretend that’s not what they’re doing.
Here’s what ed reform accomplished in my state (Ohio) this year. They rammed thru a massive private school voucher program. Nothing for public school students at all. 90% of the students and families in this state paid thousands of state employees to return NO value to the existing public schools. And not only are we supposed to continue to pay these people, we’re supposed to hire MORE echo chamber members.
Thank you to Carol Burris and you for your continued efforts to support public education, I sincerely hope public schools can count on Biden to keep the promises he has made to the nation’s public school students during this presidential campaign. Biden’s platform claims he will be “Investing in All Children from Birth, so That Regardless of Their Zip Code, Parents’ Income, Race, or Disability, They Are Prepared to Succeed in Tomorrow’s Economy.” If Biden intends to address inequality by increasing funding to needy schools, it would be a welcome change. If Biden seeks to continue the outsourcing of public education to private companies, which has been proven to exacerbate inequities, it would be contrary to what Biden pledged at one the candidates’ forums. I truly hope Joe Biden can be counted on to keep his word. In this link Biden states his willingness to support public education and reject privatization. https://nationalfile.com/joe-biden-changes-position-on-charter-schools-now-vows-to-get-rid-of-them/
Thank you for the excellent and timely letter and to Valerie Strauss and the Washington Post for publishing it.
I think the next step must be an effort to undo almost all of ESSA altogether, and that step calls for some proposals ASAP. Why?
ESSA is due for reauthorization after the 2020-21 school year. Supporters of the charter industry are putting forth ideas. They want Congress to remove state flexibility (so-called) in ESSA and double down on specific prescriptions. That means tests to measure “academic proficiency and growth” in more subjects, not just math, reading, and science. They also want to keep or expand the per-pupil cost-benefit analyses for every school (in the current law). They like the idea of measuring school productivity like a business, with “equity” in outcomes calculated from comparisons of test scores for subgroups of students, for teachers, for subjects tested and more.
Charter school supporters also want funding for early childhood education, if that prepares students for success in the upper grades. They suggest that every mandate in ESSA needs to be reexamined for the likelihood it can actually apply pressure on state and local education to make “equitable” changes.
Given the very tight timeline for action on revisions to ESSA, you can be sure the lobbyists are at work for the charter industry, for more delivery of instruction online, and for “adaptive testing” at more frequent intervals
I hope that Biden and many more members of Congress will can be persuaded to drop their enchantments with failed policies and the idea that schools must be micromanaged.
See more at https://www.the74million.org/article/its-nearly-time-to-reauthorize-the-every-student-succeeds-act-4-priorities-otherwise-distracted-national-leaders-should-set-to-make-the-k-12-law-stronger/
Excellent, and my fervent thanks to you both.
Oh, this is beautiful! Thank you, Carol, Diane! Heroes.
Thanks Diane and Carol for a great letter in support of our actual real public schools!
If Biden wins we’ll know almost immediately whether we’re getting yet another round of Bush-Obama-Trump ed reform. Watch who he hires. If they come out of the ed reform echo chamber it will be exactly the same.
I could take just about any of Betsy DeVos’ public statements and replace them with Arne Duncan’s and you would be hard pressed to tell the difference. Actually if you just go back to the source (Jeb Bush) you don’t really have to read any other ed reformers- they’re all Jeb Bush.
No matter who you elect in ed reform you get Jeb Bush, which is amusing, since HE hasn’t been elected to anything in decades.
Arne Duncan was terrible. But DeVos is much worse. The opt out movement was gaining steam and Duncan stepped down instead of finishing the last small part of his term. Obama was pro-charter, and his policies were damaging to public schools, but not in the way that DeVos and her policies are as she seems to committed to destroying all public schools.
Arne Duncan was simply a wrong-headed dolt – an example of not very smart white guys like Duncan and Jared Kushner being considered smart and given jobs over far more qualified people because of their connections when their intellect was quite mediocre. Duncan thought billionaire reformers were so wise that he should listen to everything they say. His goal — and Obama’s goal — was not to destroy public schools. Their policies hugely damaged public schools, but that is different to the damage done by those whose policies are specifically designed to hurt public schools with the goal of destroying them altogether.
How can you assume Obama/Biden wanted to help public schools? They did everything to damage them. Supported TFA, supported Rhee, Race to the Top! Obama publicly sided with firing teachers in R.I. who protested against increased work demands without compensation but defended banksters giving themselves millions in bonuses while being bailed out by the public. The Obama/Biden team was no friend of teachers and the working class in general, hence Trump.
This is such an excellent account of all the reasons that Biden should embrace the Network for Public Education position.
Thank you!
One note about the push for standardized tests. The people who have been pushing the idea that children only are as good as their standardized test score have NEVER really believed that. Bill Gates and his billionaire pals in the reform industry sent their kids to private schools that rabidly opposed opting in to the state tests – demonstrating clearly by their deeds that they had no faith those state tests were worth anything.
Remember, Bill Gates’ and other pro-testing billionaires did not spend one penny promoting that students in public schools should take the same exams their private school educated kids took — and they generously supported private schools that refused to force their students to take the very same state tests that the billionaire parents of students in that private school insisted were the only valid way to judge the education of public school students (but not their own privileged students).
It always bothered me that those billionaires never had their bluff called. They didn’t want their own children’s schools to opt in to taking state tests and they did not want public school students to take the same standardized tests that their own privileged private school educated sons and daughters take.
Remember, Bill Gates could have spent his billions to have public school students taking the same tests given to private school students. But he did not, nor did he want his own child’s private school to order their students to take the very state tests that Bill Gates and other billionaires deemed so important in judging a student and his school.
After all, what happens when public school students and private school students take the very same exams, such as the SAT or ACT? What happens when they all take the same AP exams?
What happens is that a good portion (not all) of the private school students are outscored by a not insignificant percentage of less privileged public school students who receive higher SAT or ACT or AP scores than the majority of private school students.
What happens is that the private schools where Bill Gates and other billionaire reformers send their children claim that the AP score cannot measure how brilliantly their own children are taught and they now will no longer be having their students take that exam because a single AP test score simply can’t measure how brilliant their own private school educated children are.
What happens is that those billionaires give large donations to colleges who admit their children while rejecting middle class students with higher SAT/ACT scores. Those billionaires support the colleges when they say that a test score alone and whether it is lower than another applicant is irrelevant because a student — especially one who has had the most privileged private school education money can buy — is clearly more than their standardized test score. And why shouldn’t a billionaire’s child with “good enough” test scores be deemed superior to a middle class applicant with higher standardized test scores?
Billionaires do not believe their own children are only as good as their test scores and are inferior to every student with a higher test score and should be judged as inferior. Nope. Their private schools go through all kinds of contortions to justify why their students should be admitted to the college of their choice even if a higher scoring public school student isn’t. And they suddenly decide that the AP exams that they supported back when the vast majority of students taking them were quite privileged are no longer worthwhile if their students have to be judged against lots of public school students.
The people pushing standardized tests as valid have always been hypocrites. Unfortunately, they never get challenged on their hypocrisy.
When private school students take the same standardized tests as public school students, those tests are never considered a valid measurement of the entirety of a student’s value.
Only when public school students take standardized tests that private school students opt out of does the education reform industry pretend those tests are perfect.
Hypocrites.
I know a candidate Biden is not equal to President-elect Biden(assuming if he beat Trump). And because of that, I have to be very cautiously optimistic about the upcoming election. People working with him are not necessarily public education-friendly. Also, I witnessed some of those who served as his top aides showed true colors, arrogance, playing victim, trashing non-Biden voters, etc., kind of attributions seen in a bunch of education deformers/disrupters peddling for charters & vouchers. And I am not so sure if he is willing to give up his ties with billionaires and hedge-fund managers who are hostile to public education..
Although not the best, Biden is still a better candidate than Trump. His chance to win is unknown. It’s all up to his camp’s ability to figure out how to fix the problems surrounding him and the DNC(and their tagalongs) to prove he’s not another Clinton.
Diane and Carol,
Clear and compelling letter.
Calling attention to the misuse of the “not for profit”” status is important.
The misuse of NP status and the financial advantages it grants is also causing/allowing costs to spiral and resources to be grossly misallocated in hospital systems and academic institutions.
Biden needs to “prove” he’s not another Clinton? Does that mean Bill Clinton or HRC?
Being “another Clinton” would be a 1,000,000 x better than Trump.
Trump is ALSO “not another Clinton”. That appealed to many racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-union, anti-abortion, pro-religious right voters. I don’t think those people will vote for Biden since he is not espousing the ugly views that appeal to those who love Trump for not being another Clinton.
Are there realty intelligent people who need the DNC to “prove” to them that Biden is “not another Clinton” just like Trump is not another Clinton, so they will vote for Biden?
What about if Biden is another Obama? Is that a good thing, or should voters refuse to vote for Biden unless the DNC can prove to them that Biden is different than Obama, just like Trump is?
I supported Bernie Sanders which is why I am completely confident that Bernie is not lying to Americans when he says that it is imperative that Biden defeat Trump for the good of our country.
The only thing that matters is that Biden is not another Trump, McConnell, or Jim Jordan. Biden is not another Republican. Biden is a Democrat and there are plenty of good things that the Democratic party stands for, which is why Bernie and AOC have endorsed him.
HRC managed to lose the election because her aides and DNC made a blow job. They knew she was vulnerable in many respects, not just misogyny but the track of her political record(foreign policy, super predator, animosity with Russia, etc.). Instead, many people chose to attack external factors as Comey, Russia, and Julian Assange(for obtaining and publishing a stolen e-mail on the WikiLeaks)–rather than critically analyzing their problems for the devastating loss. Anger toward first two is understandable, but accusing the third one (Assange) is just going too far (it really makes them look like Republicans who attempted to criminalize journalists for publishing confidential sources about military corruption and torture in Iraq War).
Sure, I don’t want to see a Drunkard Clown in the office for 4 more years. But. he’s still capable of churning out phony lies after lies to coalesce his base by fueling anger. That’s exactly why he was able to capture working-class and rural votes in the 3 states(WI, MI, PA). Biden is far more trustworthy than Trump, but he’s also vulnerable to the scrutiny of his past(should Trump choose to do the same tactics as last time).
I’m not expecting a blow-out, unless more people are getting sick and tired of Trump’s lies and ineptitude in this perilous time of pandemic.