No Honeymoon for Biden - Jeff Cohen

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No Honeymoon for Biden is telling progressives you have to learn the lessons of history. Previous Democratic administrations have not delivered on promises made, and there should be maximum pressure put on Biden right away, says Jeff Cohen of RootsAction.org on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay.

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay, and welcome to theAnalysis.news.

The online activist organization Roots Action is dedicated, they say, to galvanizing people who are committed to economic fairness, equal rights for all civil liberties, environmental protection, and defunding endless wars. They've grown to hundreds of thousands of members who sign petitions and advocate for progressive change. Their latest campaign is "No Honeymoon for President Biden". Here's a video they recently launched.

Excerpt from Roots Action video.

Various speakers: There must be no honeymoon for Joe Biden. There must be no honeymoon for Joe Biden. Joe Biden, there's no honeymoon. No honeymoon. There must be no honeymoon for Joe Biden because starting on day one, you and I and everybody else have got to mobilize and organize and put maximum pressure on the Biden administration. We should have learned a lesson from the Obama-Biden years believing that they were going to be under a lot of pressure. So we should back off. It was the worst possible thing that we could have ever done.

Now joining us is the co-founder of Roots Action, Jeff Cohen. He's a media critic, a columnist, a documentary filmmaker, retired journalism professor, and he founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986. For years he was a regular pundit on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and he's also the author of the book Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. Thanks for joining us, Jeff.

Jeff Cohen

Nice to be with you.

Paul Jay

So Jeff, talk about why this slogan about No Honeymoon for President Biden, and then what does it mean?

Jeff Cohen

Well, what we have done is looked at modern Democratic Party history. And you had Bill Clinton got into office in 1992. He wins the election. The Democrats have the Senate and the House. Instead of delivering for working-class people, middle-class people, and the poor what we get from Clinton is vacillation, hesitation, corporatism, NAFTA - the North American Free Trade Agreement - which warmed the hearts of corporations and disoriented environmentalists and labor activists. Jump forward to President Obama.

He wins what in modern terms was something of a landslide in November 2008. He's got a Democratic Senate, a Democratic House. There's hesitation. There's vacillation. There's a bailout of Wall Street, but not a bailout of Main Street through a foreclosure freeze that would have saved middle-class and working-class people's homes. And, of course, the foreclosure year of 2009 disproportionately hit Latino and Black households. So again, both times, the Democrats, two years after taking the White House, the Senate, and the House, lose the Senate and the House, the Republicans come storming back because of the vacillation, the hesitation, the corporatism of first President Clinton, and then President Obama.

So No Honeymoon for Biden is telling progressives you have to learn the lessons of history. We worked our asses off to defeat Trump. RootsAction.org did a big social media campaign that everyone saw #VoteTrumpOut in swing states and 'Then Challenge Biden'. Well, now it's time to challenge Biden. If progressives ease off and they go to sleep and think, oh, we got rid of Trump, we got a Democrat in there, it's going to be a couple of years of vacillation, hesitation, corporatism and a right-wing Republican will be storming back into power, and believe me, the next Republican candidate for president will have learned the playbook from Trump, the faux populism.

There will be a new threat slicker, smarter than Trump. That will only happen if the Democrats do not deliver big changes for poor working-class and middle-class people.

Paul Jay

So what do you make of it so far, the Biden administration, in terms of appointments, announcements, it's kind of a mixed bag. What's your take?

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