Supporting Biden

This Bernie Sanders Supporter is voting for Biden

The overriding goal is to oust Trump

My political views have shifted significantly over seven decades. I was raised in southern California by parents who wholeheartedly supported the Republican Party. My mother told me the only Democrat she ever voted for was FDR. My dad believed his business depended on Republicans being in control. As a child and into high school, this was what I knew.

Unable to handle what they had raised, I was sent off to the very progressive high school my dad’s brother ran in western Massachusetts. At Buxton, I met students and faculty with very different political and social views. Instead of the Big Bands, we listened to classical music, the Weavers and Woody Guthrie. I learned union songs, about my family’s history in progressive education and their support for unions and civil rights. My mother cried when I came home for the summer in my sophomore year with hair longer than my usual buzz cut. My dad was furious when I questioned the wisdom of building nuclear arms to win the cold war. 

After high school and a short stint at an ivy league college, I dropped out and joined VISTA. I spent five years in the south organizing voter registration drives, marches on local school boards demanding an end to segregated schools and challenging the entrenched power systems oppressing poor people of color. I supported the War on Poverty launched by Lyndon Johnson and watched it be co-opted by Republicans and Southern Democrats.

I finished college in Madison and went to the UW Law School to learn how to change the system using the rules written by those in power. I marched to end the war, in support of civil rights and for women’s’ equality. I found my passion for justice in criminal law courses and knew I wanted to defend the defenseless from the might of the government. I spent 37 years making law enforcement follow their own rules.

Along the way, I also picked up a passion for the environment and learned of the social injustices imposed on native tribes in northern Wisconsin. That led me from working on the fringes of the Democratic party into a decade of working as a Green. I helped form the Wisconsin Greens and was active with the Milwaukee Greens in the 1990s. I found a home in the Green Ten Key Values. I worked with the national Green Committees of Correspondence and helped draft position papers adding flesh to a political platform rooted in grassroots activism. I fought against the early calls for the formation of a national Green Party because I thought it too early to run national candidates when local offices were more important to advancing the Green agenda. I still hold to that belief. 

I came back to the Democratic Party when I was elected Chair of the Wisconsin Bar’s Criminal Law Section and it took a stand against re-introduction of the death penalty being floated in the Wisconsin Legislature. I recognized that in our two-party system, the only way to defeat state sponsored killing was to support the Democrats that opposed it. 

I did not become actively involved as a local Democrat until the first Obama campaign. In Barack Obama, I saw a leader with a vision of grass roots power and a willingness to embrace and champion many of the issues I hold dear. I worked hard to get him and Joe Biden elected to the White House. I took to heart the campaign’s message that grass roots activism needed to continue after the election to support the issues raised during the campaign. 

We formed a series of local progressive groups to take on local issues with our public schools and others. We were independent of the local Dems, but many of their members were active with us. 

When Scott Walker got elected and Act 10 passed in the middle of the night, the war was on. Our independent progressive groups saw the need to unify progressive independents with the local Dems. We organized, put forward a slate and won the election for the leadership of the Washington County Democratic Party. We opened an office on West Bend’s Main Street and began to organize. We are still at it. Our office and its model of progressive community grass roots activism has been emulated in many other Wisconsin counties.

We, like other Democrats, split between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2016. When Clinton won the nomination, I tried to rally other Bernie supporters to her campaign knowing that a Trump presidency was not going to be good for our democracy. We did not bring enough progressives on board to carry the state.

I supported Bernie Sanders in the current campaign too because his platform is more sweeping and progressive than Joe Biden’s. Bernie chose to end his campaign and threw his support behind Biden when it became clear that he could not prevail at the Democratic Convention. Bernie understands clearly that the overriding issue in this election is to defeat Donald Trump and rid our government of his enablers. After that happens, we can work to enact a more progressive agenda that Biden is beginning to embrace.

Now is not the time to ride the horse of political purity. We cannot survive another four years of the misogynistic Trump oligarchy and its pervasive corruption. We cannot allow Russia and other foreign interests to continue to hold power over our leaders. We must restore American leadership in a world facing a pandemic. We need to unite around the rule of law and equal justice for all.

We need to unify and work to elect Joe Biden as the next President of the United States.