Please Don't Make Me Vote For Joe Biden

Ever since Elizabeth Warren stopped being a viable candidate for President (which happened at least forty-eight hours before she dropped out, but as someone who insists on going through the endgame motions in chess, even when I’ve only got my king and they’ve still got all their pieces (I’m bad at chess), I get it) - there’s been a proliferation of takes like: “Liz Warren isn’t your #Coolfunmom” and “You don’t want a Warren presidency, you want a better relationship with your mother,” etc.

Either that or they tell us she’s not Hermione. Which, yeah. Hermione was actually a Mudblood.¹

But I think there are just as many people out there who want Joe Biden to be their fun, folksy grandpa. They want him to sit America on his knee and tell us stories about how candy used to cost a nickel and there was a fair every Saturday and kiddo don’t you fret the world’s just a bing-bang and a shimmy-sham away from being right as rain again and *ruffles your hair* now run along and play, Pawpaw’s just gonna rest his eyes for a jiffy.

Pictured: a clearly inferior, but inexplicably more popular
product (the "plain cone")

If Trump hadn’t already stolen it from Reagan, made it slightly worse, and ensured no one would ever associate it with anyone but him - if he hadn’t Johnny-Cash-Hurt-ed it² - Biden could easily be running on the slogan “Make America Great Again.” His whole appeal is that things were perfectly fine before Trump showed up. It's Trump-as-usurper, aberration, weird Shakespearean-forest-fairy-fever-dream that ends with the restoration of the social order. 

I don’t agree with that description, but I’m familiar with nostalgia creep.

And Biden probably would be a fun grandpa.

In any case, I’d rather have people voting for whatever half-baked pseudo-Freudian reason of their own than voting based on  “electability.”

“Electability,” first of all, means nothing. It’s like what Ron Swanson said about being an “award winner.” The only people you can really call electable are those are elected. Barack Obama wasn’t Electable in 2008, but Kerry in 2004 and Clinton in 2016 were. And like so many other ideas³, the idea that “electability” can be determined beforehand should have gone out the window with Donald Trump.

The award: Best Mustachioed Ron (beating out Burgundy,
Howard, and Perlman)

But like any speculation (stocks, memes) the idea of “electability” runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. People who believe in it end up voting not for the candidate who will best represent their interests, who is most qualified, or even who seems most likely to fill the hole in their heart - but for the person they think other people will vote for. It becomes Family Feud. And on Family Feud, sometimes bad answers are actually good answers. If you’re asked to "name an animal that’s deadly to humans," you’ve got to to go lion, tiger, crocodile, wolf. Maybe hippopotamus. That technically-true, carefully-considered, counter-intuitive answer of “mosquitoes” isn’t going to do you any good. This isn’t Jeopardy, buddy.

And it goes deeper. If we know that other people are voting based on electability - if we recognize that we are not the only pundit-wannabe out there - then we end up thinking about who other people think everyone else is going to vote for, like some absurdist prisoners' dilemma. Factor in the fact that everyone thinks they’re of above-average intelligence, and you get an extreme, exponential regression to the mean. You get Joe Biden. Talk about malarkey.

Imagine if other things worked like this.

Favorite song? Well, I've heard lots of people talking about that “Old Town Road” rap-country thing⁴ with Hannah Montana’s dad on it, plus it’s the only pop song from the past couple years I can actually name, so…

Favorite restaurant? All those other fat, stupid Americans probably just eat McDonalds all day, so . . .

Capital of Oregon? Well, I know it’s Salem, but other people are not nearly as enlightened as me, so might as well say Portland just to be safe . . .

I’ll vote for Joe Biden if I have to. I’ll do it with all the enthusiasm of getting up to brush my teeth before bed when I’m dead tired, or waiting at a red light at 2 AM when there’s no one around, but I’ll do it. But you can’t make me like it.

_

¹ Other 2020/HP mashups I’m workshopping: Marianne Williamson as either of the Lovegoods or Sibyl Trelawney; Michael Bloomberg as some hybrid of Gilderoy Lockhart and Dobby; Amy Klobuchar as Professor Sprout; Bill DeBlasio as Cormac McLaggen (you’ve almost entirely forgotten about him, but there was a brief moment when it seemed like he could be a legitimate antagonist)

² If this take is too spicy, substitute "Jeff-Buckley-Hallelujah-ed"

³ “The Electoral College will prevent a populist demagogue from taking power”; “the United States has a functional system of check and balances”; “the Founders knew what the hell they were doing”

⁴ Created in a lab and/or Good Place-esque personal-hell-factory to torture those of us who listed our favorite music on Myspace as "anything but rap and country"