No problem. We all post with our own blend of humor and sincerity and sometimes we all find ourselves leaning a direction the other person isn't going.
Now, your sincere point definitely merited a sincere response I'll try my best.
I think "Tim is opposed to Sanders" is actually an inaccurate simplification. I would describe myself as a political strategist with a strong preference towards the Democratic party's positions. Political strategist because I don't actually have any great investment in any particular candidate so I cannot really claim to be anyone's "supporter." I also consider pretty much all of Sanders' positions to be 'Democratic party positions' since theoretically Sanders is running as a Democrat and that makes his positions Democratic party positions, especially since they are mostly held in a much wider spread beyond him and his supporters within the Democratic party.
So, any 'opposition' I might have to Sanders is on a strategic level. If I work this year's campaigns it will, as usual, be at the local level trying to hold a congressional seat for the Democrats. In the process I will certainly provide passing support to the Democratic party candidate at the top of the ticket, but I live in California so that support, from a practical standpoint, will be irrelevant. Likelihood of holding the congressional seat, believe it or not and like it or not, will be profoundly enhanced by having Biden at the top of the ticket rather than Sanders. That isn't necessarily true everywhere, but I know my district and there is no question that it is true here.
Now, given that...
No, I do not think that "popular" criticism of Biden is "wrongthink." I think that since it appears at this point that Biden is very likely to be running against Trump and representing the Democratic party vilifying him in speculative fashion is counterproductive for Democrats to be doing. I don't vilify Sanders. Biden doesn't vilify Sanders. Hopefully Sanders will avoid vilifying Biden. Bad strategy doesn't help anyone.
I don't think anyone vilifying Biden is necessarily doing so from within the Democrat Party structure though, at least not on any scale. There have been some potshots between both, at both (I'm avoiding paywall links, so it's very hard to often read into headlines of "criticism" which are milder than the headline sometimes makes out), so
here's an example of a general set Biden was tossing out before it was just him and Sanders in the game. You can call it true if you want, but in my opinion de-escalating rhetoric around the term "socialism" would be a better use of my (Biden's) immense money, connections and political clout.
The fact that mainstream Democrats are more than happy to go with this modern kind of Red Scare-esque language is no source of unending frustration (and the same thoughts are starting to happen in the UK, too).
Which leads us to the actual problem underlying this in terms of electability - the US is still stuck, culturally, in some kind of repetitive post-Cold War loop when it comes to leftwing politics and the accuracy of labels used for them. The Overton window is massively to the right compared to (even, still) the UK and other Western nations which has a profound impact on what people can campaign on in a realistic sense. The problem underneath this is that a lot of systems are beginning to fail in our modern world; symptoms of climate change are just one set of examples of this. Moderate, inches gained kind of reform isn't something that's viable in the long term, but people are still playing the US electoral game like it
is a long term thing. That's going to lead to increasing dissonance particularly over the next two to three electoral cycles.
Which is why you're going to increasingly find (especially amongst younger political activists) increased anger and disappointment when the Democrats default to the same strategy they thought would work in 2016 (moderate centre-right established Democratic candidate). Political apathy is on the rise, and sticking to what's tried and tested in the hope it averts a repeat of 2016 isn't always going to be seen as the most sensible tactic. When you talk about bad strategy, people who don't think Biden has a good shot are also talking strategy (not necessarily in this thread, I don't know, but certainly from what I've seen). They're talking about it because there's still time for it to change (less time than there was a week ago, but hey). There'll probably be a lot more resignation if / when Biden takes the nomination, and then it'll be on Biden and his team, and his supporters, in the event they lose. What I don't want to see is "well Sanders didn't try hard enough" (like they tried with Clinton in 2016, despite the fact he canvassed for her) or any other centrist / conservative thinkpieces on how the more radical candidate(s) are somehow to blame (in the theoretical event Biden is on the ticket and he loses against Trump). If there is
surety about this political strategy, there also needs to be honesty if it fails, because the
next time around the Democrats are really going to have to do some thinking in that case.
