A few reasons to vote for Joe Biden anyway

Sam Smith
Politicians aren't role models; they are modeled by polls and often play muddled roles.

I've been covering national politics since Eisenhower. The only president who came close to achieving the sort of things I believed in was Lyndon Johnson. . . and you wouldn't have wanted your daughter anywhere near him.

Politics is not a religion; it is a battlefield. You are choosing where and how you want to fight for your cause.

The lesser of two evils is a lesser evil.

You're not just voting for a president, you're voting for Supreme Court justices and other judges, heads of federal agencies and cabinet secretaries. 

Voting for a third party candidate may seem a fine choice but it will clearly fail. There have been only five third party presidential campaigns since Abraham Lincoln that made it into double digits – and only two of them were on the left.

Presidential campaigns are too late to change the game.You change politicians between elections not during them. And third parties do it by working at the grassroots.

There is these days a born-again strain in progressive and liberal politics in which the emphasis is more on personal honor rather than collective progress. This doesn’t help collective progress all that much, especially if you seek honor mainly on election day.

Presidential elections come only once about every 1,460 days. Vote how you wish and I will do the same, but remember: it’s what we’ve done for the past 1,460 days and what we will do in the next 1,460 days that will really matter in the end.

Politics is not a neat place. A young legislator once asked Earl Long whether ideals had any place in politics. "Hell yes," said Ol' Earl, "you should use ideals or any other damn thing you can get your hands on."

Enjoy your identity but share it with others. You don't have enough votes to do it alone. A good example is the historic Socialist Party, whose membership included Marxists of various kinds, Christian socialists, Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish socialists, foreign-language speaking sections, single-taxers and virtually every variety of American radical. By World War I it had elected 70 mayors, two members of Congress, and numerous state and local officials.

The Green Party has run presidential candidates numerous times and this has only hurt it. Third parties need to build from the bottom up. Running for president just lowers their appeal to others.

I didn't like the Clintons but I voted for them for the reasons above. As I suggested at the time, "So take your airplane barf bag to the polls, vote for Clinton and the next morning, start to help get the movement for something dramatically different going again."