Here are the "radars" from Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti just yesterday. They are so far ahead, so far more intelligent, and incisive, than anything on corporate cable television "news." It is that stark a difference. The points they make can be summarized in a connected way:
* Krystal provides concrete examples as to how Trump is, and has been, a phony populist. However, she and Saagar agree Joe Biden can't make an effective case against the corporatism Trump pursues and has enacted in office because Biden is a corporatist, too. Saagar's sub-point about Trump's China policy being different from, and more aggressive in pursuing tariffs against China than the previous five presidents is true. However, as Krystal responded, the tariff policy did not amount to much because Trump is far more beholden to Mnuchin and the plutocrats than a Peter Navarro anti-China perspective. Saagar's hope for Navarro and Lightenhouse is more misplaced than Krystal's would be if she thought Biden was going to be choosing a substantively progressive vice president.
* Saagar says Republican PAC group money, the Trump campaign, will turn Biden into "Beijing Biden" because, for the past four decades, the neo-liberal/Republican corporatist project has been to promote China as part of globalized, corporate power trade regime. Bernie Sanders opposed all of these trade deals and specifically opposed, loudly and even harshly, the law Clinton, Biden, and Republicans passed in 2000, which allowed China to flood our markets with products we ultimately then stopped producing ourselves. Even some Democratic Party voters are going to be swayed with arguments this year against "the" Chinese, and not engage in any systematic type of analysis as to how we got here, and what a hypocritical phony Trump is on this topic (Start with Trump Towers and Ivanka's shoe line). The quarter of a billion in ads the Republican-oriented PAC and campaign groups will ultimately spend this summer and fall in the Rust Belt will likely propel Trump to victory unless Trump himself makes a misstep. As Saagar has said repeatedly, in recent weeks, it is bad for the Biden campaign to have to rely on Trump, as the opponent, messing up, rather making your own case or defining that opponent. Saagar and Krystal still believe Trump is beatable, but it is a slim margin of error--and Biden cannot seem to stay on the winning side of that margin.
I can guarantee you don't hear this type of analysis from the regular commentators appearing on MSNBC or CNN. And you won't hear anything like this on FoxNews programs, other than a hint of it, but mostly couched in Trumpist language, from Tucker Carlson. It is a cavalcade of poison dumped on you every day if corporate cable news media is what you primarily rely on for political-economic narratives and strategies. The sooner the mostly older people who watch that crap wean themselves from their televisions as guides for political information, the better off the nation and planet will be.
