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Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

Biden wasn’t just selected. People voted for him from a pool of 20-ish candidates in the democratic race. Yes, Biden is soft. He is not an entertainer. He probably has many missing qualities that Trump had. However he has almost half a century of experience in Congress driving bills and fighting for his constituents. He was the safe bet.

Out of the 20 candidates, Biden was the most likely to defeat Trump. He is a realist compared to the other candidates. People realized that and voted for him. If Bernie was chosen as the candidate, Trump would have won a second term. The bet panned out.

I feel it’s so easy to live in a Democratic bubble in Washington state. I guess same goes to California. Middle America thinks in a very very different way than we do.

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Saying that Bernie was cheated isn’t exactly right but also not exactly wrong. The entire news media apparatus beat him down with a lot of extremely bad faith questions. “Do you support confiscating everyone’s guns?” “Ok so do you think guns are great and everyone should have them?” kinda thing.

That may be half of the problem, but the other half is that I think most people think Bernie was just over promising and that they could never have socialized health care, even though most everyone else has it. Much in the same way that the UK couldn’t imagine a country without socialized healthcare, thus voting in Boris Johnson, the US can’t imagine a country with it. We’re just completely stuck. It’s a shame.

> However he has almost half a century of experience in Congress driving bills and fighting for his constituents. He was the safe bet.

It is extremely notable that Biden is the first candidate in ~30 years to win the presidency and have what I'd call a "serious" career in US Federal politics.

There is circumstantial but somewhat compelling evidence that American's don't like Congressional experience. Congress is despised, their wins are thin, their lies are large and their missteps catastrophic.

Where does 12 years come from? Obama served more years in federal government as a senator than did Bush or Clinton (former state governors).

My mistake, thanks, upped the number of years from 12 to 30.

>If Bernie was chosen as the candidate, Trump would have won a second term. The bet panned out.

Big citation needed. I live in Ohio which went red, you do live in a Democratic bubble but it is different than what you imagine it is.

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