a clown car full of millionaires: the 2016 presidential primary thread

We won't know if Sanders' campaign theme of "income inequality" does or doesn't resonate with voters of color until after Iowa and New Hampshire are out of the way. Two whiter states would be hard to find. That would make South Carolina the first battleground for non-white votes and Clinton is going to play well there. However, it is traditional for presidential candidates to tailor their message to suit whatever part of the country they are campaigning in. Bernie has more than enough time to sharpen his message between now and next March. So far, Clinton's only clear message is: I am Hillary Clinton.

Just dusted off this 1987 Trump:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQWXaH4kTs8

Same guy, yet not, totally surreal. Especially his absolute refusal to divulge his net worth.

Actually in this one, around 16 min in Trump starts sounding like current Trump, less blustery but subbing Japan for China before he supports George Bush, but still familiar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmNN2MCJ-7U

http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/news/a36707/back-to-the-future-2-donald-trump-biff-tannen/

jfc @ "a vote for Bernie is a vote for Jeb" and "HRC is offering a bigger chance of winning and a bigger base in congress to do whatever she wants to do"

i guess it was only a matter of time till the "realists" showed up

we could've created this thread in 2000

I wonder if the DLC is paying gabbnebb for his weekly street team work here every saturday

― Οὖτις, Sunday, September 27, 2015 1:20 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i wonder if you realize that the DLC hasn't existed for more than 4 years, that I've never identified with that organization in any respect (though i have supported a number of quote-unquote new democrats, whether or not allied and especially in the wake of reagan, for one or another reason including my preference for electing democrats over republicans, a preference apparently not always shared by many on the left), that bill clinton, my second or third choice in 1992 until he became undeniable, was never entirely a DLC guy and, like his veep 8 years later, served up a good deal of economic populism, that I supported populist Howard Dean, who was attacked by the DLC, until he fell apart in 2004, that i supported obama over hillary in 2008, and that you've completely failed to address the substance of my remarks.

i like nearly all kinds of democrats to one degree or another, bernie sanders very much included, even though i don't like his lining up with the NRA against the Brady Bill or with Ted Cruz against reauthorization of the Export-Import bank (or with "DLC" Mickey Kaus against open borders), but i actually recognize that this is not simply a democratic country in which the primary decides the president, and as long as we're sufficiently divided that victory in a national election is in serious doubt, i'm not interested in taking unnecessary and possibly stupid risks.

i admit i hadn't "realized" that bill clinton, the guy who gave us NAFTA and deregulation of radio and wall street, was really "serving up a good deal of economic populism."

Both quotes you say 'jfc' at, J.D. was made in order to explain why minorities might not be as enthused by Sanders as white liberals. And yeah, minorities are often 'realists', but they're also the one who'd be hurt the most if Dems lose white house to racist clowns through gambling on the septenugarian socialist from one of the whitest states. imo Sanders is a bit too rightwing and reactionary.

Clinton was chair of the DLC.

frederik, it makes no sense to criticize sanders for being "rightwing and reactionary" and then suggest that HRC is better.

Of course it does. Depends on what HRC is better at. Would she be better as president? Nah, they'd be the same: worthless but still better than any republican. But better as candidate? Yup.

on immigration and guns she is by a consider margin, though to be fair to sanders he has moderated his libertarian anti-gun control stance by saying it might make sense in a place like chicago or los angeles where the demographics are different than in vermont (i'm sure he's talking about age there right), though of course then he recanted that and said that there isn't any kind of gun control law you could write that could have any kind of positive impact and this has been shown in other countries where they've tried it and it's always failed.

Nah, they'd be the same: worthless but still better than any republican. But better as candidate? Yup.

"better as candidate" is the "But I part my hair and gel it sideways" of 2015.

i think, based on their records and their platforms, there is ample evidence to suggest that bernie would be a more liberal president than hillary, fred. (how he'd get along with congress is another issue, admittedly.) anointing hillary the "better candidate" 14 months ahead of the election, and refusing to support sanders because of this, seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. i see no reason not to support sanders until the minute he drops out

I just don't think it matters how liberal the president is at this point. I'm not a 'realist', I'm a cynic...

On the other hand, I'm pretty optimistic about popular movements, which is also why I won't call myself a Sanders supporter while they attack BLM-people on twitter without him speaking out against it.

definitely the job of a presidential candidate to be monitoring the intra-party twitter debates of people who are not remotely representative of voters he's trying to court, right

yeah trump was totally in the right in not responding to that supporter calling the president a muslim

although at least in trump's case it's not like he needs the muslim vote

but hey why bother making any efforts to appeal to or listen to half the voters that voted for obama, if those ppl (yknow, like they have in chicago and los angeles but not so much in burlington or waterloo or nashua) don't realize that they just need to shut up and realize bernie and his supporters know their best interests than it's their loss.

yeah trump was totally in the right in not responding to that supporter calling the president a muslim

― balls, Sunday, September 27, 2015 8:17 PM (13 minutes ago

this is...not the same thing

balls you're kind of weirdly zealous about this anti-bernie thing, whats up

he's a fraud. the argument sets itself up as 'good person who is right on all the issues but can't get elected and couldn't govern vs corrupt person who is wrong on alot of the issues but will get elected and could govern' but really it's 'awful person who is right on a couple of issues and wrong on alot of issues but can't get elected and couldn't govern (beyond maybe passing that 'the weakest gun control laws in the country become the default for the entire country' bill the nra has had a hardon for) vs awful person who is right on a couple of issues and wrong on alot of issues but might get elected and conceivably could govern'. i was gonna compare him to ted cruz and ask if bernie supporters think the best thing that could happen for conservatism and the republican party would be ted cruz winning the nomination except that's not a fair comparison as ted cruz actually does a really good job of exemplifying conservative policy positions and appealing and reaching out to different segments of the conservative base. where and when cruz and sanders positions overlap - and they do, far too much - it's on cruz's turf. and you're right that trump not responding to a supporter crossing a line in attacking the potus and sanders not responding to supporters crossing a line in attacking black critics of his campaign aren't the same thing. the president still has his job while sanders supporters managed to get the guy who wrote about it in the post fired.

What different segments of the GOP does Cruz appeal to besides the 2 percent of "conservatives who want to give Trump/Bush policies a veneer o Ivy League constitutionality"?

breitbart lunatics + heritage foundation 'intellectuals' + liberty university holy rollers + ppl who are fed up w/ being given the option of pressing 2 for spanish + neocons. ie the ppl trump appeals to + (the ppl huckabee appeals to - the ppl kasich appeals to) + (the ppl rand paul appeals to - the ppl cynthia mckinney appealed to) + bill kristol.

i guess you're just not going to convince me that a guy is an "awful person" because he isn't commenting on the behavior of random twitter users. and on balance he's better on the issues than hillary, everyone in this thread knows that. literally no idea what "the president still has his job while sanders supporters managed to get the guy who wrote about it in the post fired" means

http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/2013-12/enhanced/webdr01/18/19/anigif_enhanced-buzz-5914-1387414313-15.gif

i don't like his positions on gun control or immigration either, believe me. but i'm not a single-issue voter

it means that sanders supporters managed to get the guy who wrote the piece who wrote about sanders supporters leveling racist attacks at blacks on twitter who voice any problems w/ the sanders campaign in the post fired from his job at alternet. seriously at this point the main difference between sanders supporters and gamergaters on twitter is the latter doesn't use deodorant while the former uses that thing w/ the crystal.

k3vin otm

thank god hillary has no shitty annoying supporters on the internet or this would be a really tough decision

Thank god hillary has no supporters

Except gabbneb

yeah she sucks and her supporters suck too, i've spent the past seven years at least rmde on a good day and coming off like richard mellon scaife on a bad day at the various pumas in my facebook feed (did you know we could have had 3% unemployment and gay marriage by groundhog day 2009 if hillary had won?). but at least they don't pretend they're about the moral high ground or a better kind of politics and their idea of minority outreach doesn't take its cues from the 92 perot campaign.

This is the weirdest fucking argument

Alfred otm

^^^OTM

nbc/wsj poll

http://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2015_39/1238591/goppoll_d2145a71599587813265ebbf98f05bed.nbcnews-ux-2880-1000.jpg
http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2015_39/1238596/dempoll_0c52c2a467181c5a909d9d6505d87b09.nbcnews-ux-2880-1000.jpg

huh. that republican poll loses August when Trump had his margin at 40-ish percent, so it looks like his support is still increasing

yeah i don't think nbc/wsj ran a poll in august. it definitely appears at a minimum he's plateaued, i'm not sure what would sink him but i'm not sure what would give him a bump either. presumably everybody's made up their mind about him by now. it is interesting though that the nate silver argument has been to ignore trump because his ceiling is low and gradually as ppl dropped out of the race that support would go to bush or rubio or whoever. even though the main cultural conservative issue driving the carson and fiorina campaigns is different (abortion vs immigration), considering how much apparent antipathy toward anyone who's ever won an election anywhere there is among gop voters i'm not so sure their support would move to rubio or bush instead of trump. i also wonder how much their support is a mirage, if they just don't have the on the ground political skills to transform that support into delegates ie if they're pat robertson 1988.

I feel like these arguments always somehow take place in some alternate universe where there aren't about 75 million Democrats who really like Hilary Clinton and are excited about the prospect of her becoming President.

ha, true

If Trump and Fiorina and Carson are non-starters, and Bush continues to sputter, Rubio seems well-positioned. Maybe, as people here point out, he'd need to get much better for that to happen, but that doesn't seem impossible; when I watch Bush, is almost seems impossible that he's going to get any better.

There aren't even 75 million Democrats in the country let alone 75 million who "really like" Hilary.

Sorry, that's true, i was thoughtlessly applying "between 25 and 30% of registered voters are Democrats" to 300m population, but of course it's only the proportion of registered voters, a much smaller group.

Would you accept 45m?

I think the problem in your statement is more the "really like" part

Oh and the "excited by"

Replace that stuff with "will grudgingly accept if necessary" and I'll sign on to your campaign.

But that's exactly my point -- I don't get where the idea comes from that Democrats are going to grudgingly hold their noses and vote for HRC. I don't see much daylight between her politics and Obama's politics. And don't you think Democrats would enthusiastically vote for Obama if he could run again?

at this point every hillary supporter i know is a fired up enthusiastic supporter. it's not at where obama was but considerably higher than i ever saw for gore or kerry. if you don't know someone who loves loves loves them some hillary you're in a pretty nice echo chamber and i envy you. at the same time sanders is having far more success than previous candidacies of his kind managed and i don't think that's entirely due to the smaller field (i don't think he's a factor largely because he's drawn the anti-hillary support either). i always thought a warren candidacy would be doomed but now i'm not so sure. i'd still rather have her in the senate though. i wonder how a sherrod brown campaign would have gone also.

i admit i hadn't "realized" that bill clinton, the guy who gave us NAFTA and deregulation of radio and wall street, was really "serving up a good deal of economic populism."

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Sunday, September 27, 2015 7:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

clinton was also "it's the economy, stupid" and tax increases (top two brackets, corporate tax, gas tax) and the earned-income tax credit among many others and major expansion of pell grants and college scholarships and the family and medical leave act and attempted universal health care falling back to the state childrens' health insurance program (thanks to hillary, on the issue that's driven her entire career) and how old were you in 1993 anyway?

"(Thought it was just me ;) I liked his "people like you" most-seems nice"

convenient excision of the "(and me)". you, like the vast majority of ilx posters, are a white college graduate, correct? congratulations, you belong to a big 24% of the 2012 obama coalition.

bernie's message resonates in Vermont and New Hampshire and to a lesser extent Iowa because those are three of the whitest (#1s 1, 3, and 5) and two of the smallest (#49 and 42 in population; 46 and 45 in area) and most highly-educated (#s 7 and 8 by college-grad %) states in the nation, all of which, like the vast majority of the blue states, are also in the top half by average income (NH is #6). scandinavian-style democratic socialism flies in small racial monocultures where people identify with one another culturally (Sweden is home to fewer people than NC; the other scandinavian countries are all smaller in population than Maryland) and organize together economically (scandinavian nations are home to vastly stronger labor movements than the US), but not in one of the biggest and most diverse nations in the world (nation of nations, really, still fighting a cold civil and economic war - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/which-of-the-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in/). Obama won both IA and NH in 2012 by (barely) winning the white (51%) and college-eduated (50%) votes in each, but he lost those votes in FL, VA, OH, CO and NV, all of which he won (like a number of blue states too) thanks only to black and hispanic vote that, like a not-insubstantial percentage of the low-income republican-leaning white vote, sees the contest primarily through a racial/ethnic/cultural rather than economic prism.

in 2008, barack won by taking the core democratic coalition, which joins the above link's combined yankeedom/new netherland (i.e. the Northeast and Great Lakes) with the Left Coast, and adding to it enough of hispanic el norte (the southwest, and, for robert david sullivan but not woodard who deems it an extension of the caribbean, south florida) and the white ethnic (more culturally/ethnically yes german- and less anglo-american) midlands (similar to chris matthews' "scranton to osh kosh"), the latter of which he was the first democrat to win convincingly since the 70s, to go well over the top. if you want a "white" candidate without a connection to communities of color to champion an income-focused message, i think you're risking reversion back to the Kerry/Gore (remember "the people vs. the powerful"?) coalition in which we won far less of el norte and the midlands ad had to rely on the bank-shot of barely winning those small white states at the margins of yankeedom but apart from appalachia to take the electoral college. Kerry took neighboring NH, but lost IA, OH, and FL in addition to all the Southwestern states. Gore barely won IA (and, even closer, NM), but Nader took NH from him (with the aid of a lot of Bernie voters), allowing Bush to steal too-close FL. Bill Clinton otoh won all these states, most of them twice (CO only in 92, FL only in 96), and either edge-Midlander Illinoisan Hillary (and her Appalachian husband) or Scranton-born Midlander Biden is best positioned to keep them in the fold this time, certainly moreso than a Yankee/New Netherland Jew.

in the highly unlikely hypothetical event that Bernie got the nom, he would probably win neighboring NH in the general, but I think he'd have a tougher time in potential-VP Joni Ernst's IA (not to mention neighboring WI, which Kerry carried by 0.4%, quite possibly due to that damn Carhartt jacket, and Gore, thanks to Nader, by just 0.2%) or the empty-suit-whose-name-I-don't-remember's CO (maybe he can turn out the berner vote as it were). perhaps hispanic animus against the GOP is strong enough to keep NM and perhaps NV in his fold, but I wouldn't want to rely on that against a spanish-speaking Republican nominee (who can point out bernie's past opposition to open borders and involvement in killing immigration reform in 2007), especially one with a Mexican-American wife. even if he did win both, Bernie would need one more state on top. It's possible that the combination of the hispanic, african-american, and Jewish votes might put him over the top in FL, the one place where the last might have a significant impact, regardless who wins the SW states, but i wouldn't want to count on that against a Republican who's actually from Florida and possibly Cuban-American. never mind that all this assumes that his candidacy wouldn't end before it begins by drawing a more immigration/business-friendly and gun-unfriendly independent like Michael Bloomberg into the race (explain how a Democrat wins without NY and surrounding states).

PS you have been very nice to me. morbs and others too.