 Well, we all knew that this day was coming sooner or later, and it is officially here. Former Vice President Joe Biden has officially jumped into the 2020 race, and we've got quite a bit to talk about, but before we get to that, this is his announcement video. Charlottesville, Virginia is home to the author of one of the great documents in human history. We know it by heart. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. We've heard it so often, it's almost a cliche, but it's who we are. We haven't always lived up to these ideals. Jefferson himself didn't, but we have never before walked away from them. Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years. It was there on August of 2017, we saw clansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open. Their crazed faces, illuminated by torches, veins bulging and burying the fangs of racism, chanting the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the 30s, and they were met by a courageous group of Americans in a violent clash ensued, and a brave young woman lost her life. And that's when we heard the words of the President of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation. He said there were, quote, some very fine people on both sides, very fine people on both sides, but those words, the President of the United States, assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime. I wrote at the time that we're in the battle for the soul of this nation. Well, that's even more true today. We are in the battle for the soul of this nation. I believe history will look back on four years of this President, and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen. The core values of this nation are standing in the world, are very democracy. Everything that has made America America is at stake. That's why today I'm announcing my candidacy for President of the United States. Folks America is an idea, an idea that's stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant. It gives hope to the most desperate people on earth. It guarantees that everyone is treated with dignity and gives hate no safe harbor. It instills in every person in this country the belief that no matter where you start in life, there's nothing you can achieve if you work at it. That's what we believe, and above all else, that's what's at stake in this election. We can't forget what happened in Charlottesville. Even more important, we have to remember who we are. So I'll be honest, that wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but nonetheless, I still feel as if he doesn't acknowledge that to truly be competitive against Donald Trump, you have to do more than just be anti-Trump, so as you probably noticed, there wasn't a single policy position in that video. Not one. Now, I think it was well produced. I think that the music was probably on point and may have helped the video resonate with people because it invokes that emotional response, but we've been reiterating this as progressives. You can't just be anti-Trump. You can't because that's exactly what Hillary Clinton did. You have to lay out a different vision, and he talks about how, you know, we are in the battle for the soul of this nation, and he's kind of alluding to the fact that we have a president that is openly fascistic. So I understand that it's important to call that out, but at the same time, Joe Biden's neoliberal policies is exactly what bred the desperation that led to the state that we're currently in. Because of his policies, because of his milk toast, neoliberal centrism, the country got desperate and they elected someone as loony as Donald Trump, and that's exactly what happens. When you deprive people of basic necessities, they start to get desperate, they become susceptible to radicalization, and then they may opt for someone who's a monster who's openly fascistic like Donald Trump. So if you truly want to combat what we see now, you've got to have an alternate vision, and Joe Biden just doesn't have that. Now, to his credit, there is issues that he alludes to supporting on his website, but it's not very specific. So for example, he mentions health, quote, insurance as a right, which I don't really even know what that is supposed to mean, because health insurance isn't the goal. Health care is the goal, but he says that health insurance is a right nonetheless. And he states that he's in support of expanding the Affordable Care Act vaguely, but doesn't get any more specific than that. He wants to guarantee American skills and education, but nothing more on that. He talks about workers having bargaining power, but doesn't say what he'd do specifically to empower and protect the unions. And really, there's nothing new there. It doesn't feel like he wants to take the country in a new direction, and that's because he very explicitly is creating the strategy that is not about taking the country in a new direction. He's basically saying, I want to be President Obama's third term. And I'm not joking about that, because as Thomas Beaumont and Julie Pace report, Joe Biden is finalizing the framework for a White House campaign that would cast him as an extension of Barack Obama's presidency and political movement. He's betting that the majority of Democratic voters are eager to return to the style and substance of that era, and that they'll view him as the best option to lead the way back. The former vice president has begun testing the approach as he nears an expected campaign launch. Later this month, this was obviously written before he announced, after remarks at a recent labor union event, Biden said he was proud to be an Obama-Biden Democrat, coining a term that his advisors define as pragmatic and progressive, and a bridge between the working class White voters who have long had an affinity for Biden and the younger, more diverse voters who backed Obama in historic numbers. Biden's strategy will test whether anyone other than Obama can recreate the coalition that delivered him to the White House twice, but it was something Hillary Clinton was unable to do in 2016, and it will thrust the 44th president's legacy into the center of the 2020 campaign. I just don't think this is a valid strategy, because we saw it play out. We already have a test. Hillary Clinton tried to campaign as an extension of Obama, and she lost. Let me tell you this. As someone who voted for Obama twice, the second time obviously a little bit more reluctant than the first, I am not enthusiastic about a third Obama term. I'm not looking to see Obama replicated by Joe Biden or even Obama himself. What I'm looking for is a new direction, because the trajectory that we are on is not working out so well for a lot of Americans. The economy may have started to recover after 2008, however, for working class Americans, it hasn't been very great for them. Most Americans, or at least half, make less than $30,000 per year. They don't have enough to cover the cost of a $400 emergency, so just staying the course that we were on when Obama was president is not enough, and it really demonstrates that Joe Biden is so out of touch that he doesn't get that. And we all know he's doing these fundraisers with wealthy donors, a Comcast lobbyist, so he doesn't understand that you can't craft a message that is tailored to working class voters if you don't actually talk to working class voters. Talking with elites and oligarchs isn't going to help you understand what we need, but he doesn't get that. Now, on top of that, basically he's been on the wrong side of every single issue throughout the course of his career, because as this tweet explains, he opposes single payer currently. He opposes cannabis legalization. He supports the death penalty. He wrote the 1994 crime bill. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. He voted for NAFTA, the Iraq War, the Patriot Act. He voted to make it harder to eliminate student debt at the behest of Wall Street. So you've got to understand, there are all these issues that are going to come up. They will be discussed throughout the duration of the primary process. And on top of that, he needs to explain why he performed the way he did when he was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Anita Hill testimony. It was awful. And on top of that, we recently learned that his past is a little darker than we thought, because, quote, it was more than four decades ago as a battle raged across the country and in Congress over sending white students to majority black schools and black students to majority white schools, often far away from their own neighborhoods. Biden forcefully opposed the government's role in trying to integrate schools, saying he favored desegregation, but believed busing did not achieve equal opportunity. In a series of never before published letters from Biden, which were reviewed by CNN, the strength of his opposition to busing comes into sharper focus, particularly how he followed the lead and sought support from some of the Senate's most fervent segregationists. So for someone who has one been on the wrong side, basically, reliably of every single issue who is fighting to protect the status quo that hasn't been working, which is why people opted for Trump in the first place, which is why there were a lot of precincts that previously voter Obama, but then flipped to Trump. For him to say, you know, let's do a third term of Obama, it demonstrates that he is painfully out of touch. And I don't really have to convince you how out of touch he is because every time he opens his mouth, he pisses off more people, you know, he talked down to millennials. And right after he was accused of inappropriately touching numerous women, he brushed it off by joking about it. I mean, this is someone who is so far removed from the needs of the Democratic Party's base that I just don't see. I can't fathom how he'd be successful. Now, of course, there's the argument, Mike, he's pulling ahead, even if Bernie in some polls. But what I really think that is derivative of it is just the mere fact that people view the Obama era as an era of stability, as an era that was scandal free. Now, that's not necessarily the reality. But when you juxtapose Obama's legacy with Trump, of course, Obama is preferable. So people think of Biden as the good old days with Obama. But I think that the more he speaks, they'll be reminded that this is someone who is out of touch, who's clueless, who's been the establishment for decades and is not going to give us what we need. And in the event we get more neoliberalism, that he'd inevitably give us some, you know, incremental policy advances, then I can only anticipate that in four years or eight years down the line, we'd get someone worse than Donald Trump, a president, Ted Nuget or a president, Louis Gohmert. Because that wouldn't surprise me. So Joe Biden is not the right person for this day and age. And I hope that other people can see that. But, you know, we'll see. That's why as progressives, we've got to make the case for Bernie Sanders because if we want to save the country and stop the radicalization that led to Donald Trump, then we have to have someone who is the antithesis of Trumpism and that, of course, is Bernie Sanders.