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

'Oh, wait a minute, senator. You know, not only do I have hundreds of thousands of donors, most of them small, and I'm very proud that for the first time a majority of my donors are women, 60 percent. [Cheers and applause.] So I— I represented New York, and I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy, and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.' - guess who

Wait a sec. Wall Street had to "rebuild" after 9/11?

wtf does that even mean

it means

a noun, a verb, Wall Street

Hillary WalMart Clinton 2016

lol, wait you guys really can't figure out what that means?

there was this thing called "the world trade center"

balls, nonpatronizing Democratic advance man

x-p, boldly advancing the Dem agenda
And this other thing called "the stock market crash."

apparently hillary's been getting some good cheap pops in, not sure that matters really (though i guess it could be argued that ppl in iowa might actually be watching this - somebody somewhere has to be right? - and if she somehow pulled off a win in iowa that would be "huge" in that bs narrative sense). she's looked like she's improved at politicking but, i mean, the falcons looked like they'd improved at football when they played the texans. it's good to see blood drawn at least. bernie went after her for her iraq vote; obv not likely to cripple her like it did in 08 but it'd be nice if it still matters esp since she's shown no sign of having learned much from the mistake.

there was this thing called "the world trade center"

Thank you for that clarification. Until now I had no idea that the World Trade Center and Wall Street were synonymous. I was suffering under the impression that Wall Street's stock exchanges, investment banks, commercial banks, and brokerage firms were largely located in other buildings and were able to resume operations fairly quickly after relatively brief interruptions in 2001.

a mere speedbump for cantor fitzgerald

balls do you honestly want us to believe that wall street is donating to the clinton campaign b/c of her heroic efforts to rebuild after 9/11? or are you just trolling?

sanders should have used the phrase "return on investment"

in other news, i think i figured o'malley out: he has the affect of a televangelist.

no i don't think wall street has donated to clinton (or schumer) because of their efforts to get emergency funding after 9/11, i'm just not going 'wut wuz 9/11???' either

o'malley's inability to get any traction is kinda reassuring, like a marker of progress kinda for the democratic party. there's no way that dude thought bernie sanders would be the challenger to hillary and he would be an afterthought.

saw my first rubio bumper sticker the other day, way earlier in the cycle than i ever saw a romney or mccain. have yet to see a jeb (and i occasionally still see w - the president stickers, which i never really understood the popularity of)

seems the Eisenhower line was the hit of the night

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdtPZq5cItQ

IIRC "W - The President" was kinda the "classy" version of "Sore Loserman" bumper stickers. I mean there's always "you can disagree if you want but he's THE PRESIDENT so you're wrong, nyeah!" type bumper stickers but here there was the particular angle of the recounts and the stolen election, so the extra insistence on him really really being THE PRESIDENT was kinda the point... right? But I might be misremembering when those showed up. This is also reminding me of people acquiring "Bush/Cheney" yard signs but defacing them to "Push Cheney off a cliff" before putting them out. Sigh.

The Eisenhower line was good but probably needed some kind of disclaimer that he's talking about marginal tax rates. Had anybody been watching, they could easily have come away thinking that Bernie Sanders wants to raise their taxes to somewhere between 50 and 90% of their income.

I only watched very intermittently, seemed like a lot of crosstalk and people staying on-message and O'Malley living up nicely to the Bad Lip Reading parody of the last one. Probably the most interesting bit was the moderator asking Sanders to confirm he was saying that ISIS was in some way linked to the invasion of Iraq and Sanders basically being like, uh, yeah? I sincerely have no idea what the conventional wisdom/public opinion says on this but it would be sad (if unsurprising) if the effort is to frame that as a weird lunatic-fringe position.

I mean it really does seem fairly self-evident but I guess people are primed to imagine that entire part of Asia as a "powder keg" or some other accident-prone figure primed for "instability," and so it becomes easy to pass over the actual reality of the US invasion and think of it in the abstract as, oh, well, without Saddam things were able to get more "unstable." I kinda wish Sanders had been like "well yeah - if a foreign invasion on US soil had killed half a million people and devastated our major cities, we would certainly see consequences for many many years" but maybe it wasn't the right time for that.

I sincerely have no idea what the conventional wisdom/public opinion says on this but it would be sad (if unsurprising) if the effort is to frame that as a weird lunatic-fringe position.

precisely what's happening if you watch FOX, and of course Obama responsible b/c we pulled out the troops at the height of the surge

xp I think that's probably quite optimistic! - I think people are primed to think of that part of Asia as a place where (some/all) people are baddies who hate us because we're goodies.

ah yes of course. we all remember well how things were going splendidly in iraq exactly up until the moment of the 'surge.'

man. i'm glad i don't get casually exposed to fox as much anymore - - - it was sort of useful to know what was going on w/ the enemy but also it meant my blood was boiling a LOT and not in a healthy way. in particular, the wendy's on campus when i was in grad school 06-09 was tuned to fox news 24/7, and let me tell you their hamburgers and fries do not go down any smoother for having sean hannity in the background.

xpost hrm. sigh. yeah, i think you're right that that's the background narrative for a lot of people, but surely watching the iraq war and the insurgency unfold slowly over the course of a decade may have involved some shifts in that. i dunno.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/11/15/hillary-clinton-invoked-911-to-defend-her-ties-to-wall-street-what/?postshare=861447593332696&tid=ss_tw

Hillary is getting more criticism for this (mentioned up thread)

XPs The "W" stickers date back to the '04 election.

yeah the design of the w the president stickers is more what i didn't quite get, like it seemed to be modeled after some other popular branding, the way you'll see xian t-shirts at walmart that mimic secular t-shirts or brands. i kept thinking 'is this some calvin klein reference?'

nice to see some blowback to clinton, she apparently won the room (and i'm guessing if it wasn't literally the day after paris it wouldn't have worked, or i hope so at least) but it's the kind of dumb gaffe that make these debates consequential in the general. sign of the times maybe in that normally that might have been a perfect opportunity to triangulate and play to the center but those aren't winning strategies any more (her husband would've welcomed that attack back in the day). would've liked to have heard some more actual policy details re: isis. sanders campaign seemed to be limited to hitting hillary for voting for iraq and noting that isis sprung out of the aftermath. totally fair on both points but i would've liked to have heard what he intends to do or not do (maybe he did go into this and the press ignored it cuz it doesn't play into the narrative or it wasn't a point scoring zing). hillary signaled a foreign policy vision, not that we couldn't have guessed, specifically saying she would take a more engaged approach against isis and actually kind of rebuking obama on that front. would've been nice if she'd been hammered over that, though maybe the timing made it difficult. sanders apparently brought up climate change as a national security issue, i'm sure he caught some beltway flack for it but kudos to him for that.

One thing that's been clear--last night and in general--is that Sanders will not go after Clinton beyond a certain point, and that when he flirts with that line, he immediately pulls back and starts saying nice things about her. That could be for a variety of reasons.

yeah for whatever reason he doesn't go in for the kill. obama lacked that instinct as well but he was smarter on so many other fronts and had so many other advantages it didn't matter (and kinda helped play into his brand of a different kind of politics). i can remember reading some big attempt at a takedown piece in the new republic or the atlantic - one of those guys - around 2005, 2006 where he said beyond just finding it silly and distasteful he doesn't think those kind of cynical, dirty politics are effective for promoting a progressive agenda which i'm not sure i agree. i mean fdr wasn't afraid to cut a bitch. i do agree largely that cynicism in politics works toward conservative ends, whether deliberately or not.

'That could be for a variety of reasons.' - about 14 of them left at last count.

yeah it could be he's afraid of playing the role of spoiler. i mean everyone knows what the first paragraph of nader's obit is gonna mention.

I didn't watch much from the 2008 debates before Iowa. Obama mostly hung back in the ones after Iowa, but he was leading by then, however precariously.

My guesses with Sanders: 1) he presents himself as someone who disdains that sort of thing, so he tries to follow through with that; 2) if he went after her too aggressively, the crowd would turn on him (she seems to be solidly popular with Democratic voters in general, including his own supporters); 3) he's realistic about his chances of winning, and is much more interested in influencing where she goes into the general economically; 4) (related) he just doesn't see any point in damaging her too vigorously before the general.

Also, he just might not have the stomach for it--some people don't. Clinton does.

He genuinely likes her? I don't genuinely like her, but it's possible, I guess.

clintons in general pretty good at using attacks to their advantage also. her husband i don't have to mention the myriad way but even w/ her she managed to utilize "likable enough" toward a new hampshire victory. even now she's damn near wearing a button saying 'ask me about benghazi'.

balls, what's your address? I'll mail you one.

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0226/7001/products/conservative-outfitters_tshirt_10029_larger_1382638300.png?v=1389252014

this is the only campaign 2016 shirt i'll wear

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61zvtukP%2BjL._UL1500_.jpg

Bernie Sanford?

Ha, "I'm comin' for ya Elizabeth ... Warren!"

clintons in general pretty good at using attacks to their advantage also

that's true, but i can't help but think the way she goes for the gender angle ("i'd be the first woman president!" "lots of women voted for me") is starting to seem a little clumsy. how many folks does this kind of obvious pandering really play with?

how many folks does this kind of obvious pandering really play with?

A whole fucking lot. Also, is it "obvious pandering" or pointing out a really embarrassing truth?

yeah but she uses it as a non-sequitir to deflect from attacks, and in that context it's cheap and cynical.

When discussing electoral politics, "cheap" and "cynical" are highly, highly relative, and Clinton's talking about gender doesn't come anywhere close to clearing the bar IMO.

yeah when a major concern of the opposition is attacking women's rights, highlighting the contrast doesn't strike me as cynical, esp since women have been an extremely important part of the base this decade.

she repeatedly implies that we should vote for her because she's a woman. if you think that's a substantive advantage she has over other candidates, then i suppose we disagree. if her career has demonstrated anything, it's that a woman is capable of practicing as cynical and compromised a politics as any man.

it should be about hiring the most qualified person not about demographics right

When discussing electoral politics, "cheap" and "cynical" are highly, highly relative, and Clinton's talking about gender doesn't come anywhere close to clearing the bar IMO.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Sunday, November 15, 2015 7:07 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How about her hiding behind 9/11--saying she was Florence Nightingale for the suffering banksters--to explain her "relationship" to Wall Street. Yuck.
P.S. Notice how she never said she'd reinstate Glass-Steagall

tee hee

“There are a lot of Christians in Syria that have no place now,” he explained. “They’ll be either executed or imprisoned, either by Assad or by ISIS. And I think we should have — we should focus our efforts as it relates to the Christians that are being slaughtered.”

Tapper wondered how screeners would know which refugees were Christians.

“We do that all the time,” Bush insisted. “I think we need to be — obviously — very, very cautious. This also calls to mind the need to protect our borders, our southern border particularly.”

they're ALL drunk

P.S. Notice how she never said she'd reinstate Glass-Steagall

I'd have to check--she had some vague comment about her willingness to look at the issue--but I think she specifically said she wouldn't reinstate it.

it should be about hiring the most qualified person not about demographics right

― balls, Sunday, November 15, 2015 6:18 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i assume you're trying to insinuate some kind of regressive implication to my remarks, but you'll have to spell it out a bit more. or perhaps you could explain how having a vagina is any kind of argument for hillary clinton as president... preferably an argument that doesn't essentialize or trade in stereotypes.

actually i really only need leave two words here: margaret thatcher

When discussing electoral politics, "cheap" and "cynical" are highly, highly relative, and Clinton's talking about gender doesn't come anywhere close to clearing the bar IMO.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Sunday, November 15, 2015 7:07 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah when a major concern of the opposition is attacking women's rights, highlighting the contrast doesn't strike me as cynical, esp since women have been an extremely important part of the base this decade.

― balls, Sunday, November 15, 2015 7:12 PM (35 minutes ago)

it would also depend on the debate/election opponent. in the general against a republican, it might be sort of coherent. against bernie sanders -- who i will admit said something about her yelling that one time making him a misogynist -- it comes across as a clumsy dodge. then again it's entirely possible that hilary isn't even taking these debates seriously (why should she?) and is running against the republicans already

neeeed the ask me about benghazi button