Democratic (Party) Direction

It must be disheartening to give a speech when it sounds like 90% of the crowd isn't paying attention.

like i can kind of see how Hillary would rub people the wrong way. she's a terrible campaigner. whether it's fair or 'true' or whatever, she really does scan as phony to her very core. not so much that she's trying to trick anyone (though there's def elements of that); just that she's bereft of that personal touch easily evinced by Bill, W, and in his own distinct way - Obama

i don't get that sense from Warren.

i would vote Warren in a heartbeat. love her no-nonsense personality. she comes across very genuine. esp compared to the lizard bot that just ran (and lost).

she is, of course, bad on Israel-Palestine, like every 'national' Dem I can think of

the Wall Street/ Koch knives would certainly be out for her though in way we def did not see in '16 for HRC.

yeah i was kind of afraid of that
xpost

She'll probably be a strong presidential candidate. In 2016, though, I just wanted a strong lib bench in the Senate, and I have to admit that Senate Dems have made many lib noises this year.

I agree with those saying she's not a brilliant speaker or anything, but neither is/was Bernie, and she has a similar no-bullshit flavor that could pay off and get people out who stayed home last time. But again this is all pretty immaterial right now

"i'm the son of a millwright from a small town in southern oregon. i was the first in my family to go to college. i live in the same blue collar community i grew up in. and my children go to the same public schools i did." *faint cheering from crowd*
- i get that he has to establish his real person bona fides so that he has the standing to attack trump's continual fucking over of real people, but maaaaan do i hate this kind of shit. but it's ok, he knows that few people in the DNC know his background, so he just has to say it and move on.

"where i come from, people like donald trump are not the problem...they're not the solution...they are the problem!" *looks at tv camera*
- that was a bit of a goof

"bernie's leadership on progressive issues, his willingness to stand up to the powers that be, have galvanized a grassroots movement that is here tonight, and will continue long after november, and we need it to continue long after november!"
- sometimes moments like these snap me back to the summer of 2016 and it is jarring. what is this world. what happened to the old world. are they still living?

"and that is exactly what we are going to do when we follow the vision of bernie sanders and hillary clinton, and elect her, hillary clinton and tim kaine in november!"
- "elect the vision of bernie sanders and hillary clinton and tim kaine 2016" - brainstorming alternative campaign slogans

eh, i guess that wasn't a very good random jeff merkley speech to view for this purpose, since he was basically asked to make a 5-minute speech that would appeal to both bernie and clinton fans while offending no one except for trump supporters. i'm not sure how you do that without looking like a tool. he seems like someone who would connect well with people on a smaller stage or in the mysterious realms of IRL. but he falls victim to the same problem that afflicts 99.9% of politicians on huge stages, which is that he just seems fake. trump does not appear fake. that may be the biggest thing he has going for him. obama had a way of addressing large audiences that seemed remarkably natural. it seems to be a trait that just about everyone from reagan on has possessed.

i have changed my mind. ryan seacrest for president

Warren is a scold, she just happens to be one of the very few politicians principled enough to scold the people who badly deserve to be fucking scolded in this country. I just don't know if that distinction would get through to the average voter.

Sanders has precisely one note he's been hammering away at tirelessly for years and is still pretty popular so that sort of doggedness may not be a dealbreaker. (I realize that this quality is not necessarily rewarded in women / female politicians.)

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-congressional-map-is-historically-biased-toward-the-gop/

So far I've seen no evidence that she repulses average voters

I like Warren a lot but, in this environment of desperately seeking The Perfect Candidate, I feel like she would get eviscerated for her conservative past as soon as she became the front-runner.

Warren is a scold.

Are you using sexist language deliberately because you anticipate a sexist reaction to Warren as candidate?

So far I've seen no evidence that she repulses average voters

You should speak to some MA conservatives.

"this environment of desperately seeking The Perfect Candidate"

no, just less of an asshole than the Clintons

I would wager the closer we get to 2020 the less you're going to see Perfect Candidate type rhetoric/argumentation.

There is an entire groundswell of anti-Warren sentiment built around the idea that she manipulated Affirmative Action rules to get hired as a professor that is more persistent and pervasive than should be reasonable, PLUS the polling in the wake of the election showed her faring very weakly in a run for her MA Senate seat against any random Republican, including total jokes like Roger Clement.

I would want her to win if she was the candidate. I would not be surprised if she went down in flames the same way Clinton did.

I'm as wary of political dynasties as anyone but if Michelle Obama backs single payer, ending the expansion of the carceral state and/or taxing the fuck out of the rich, sign me up.

Of course, I looked at a much more recent (informal) poll and Warren is currently walloping the two reported Republicans who are going to run by more than 30 points, so I'm less fatalistic now.

Even if Michelle Obama didn't do all that, I'd vote for her just to watch the rights' faces melt like they opened the Ark of the Covenant.

I like Warren a lot but, in this environment of desperately seeking The Perfect Candidate, I feel like she would get eviscerated for her conservative past as soon as she became the front-runner.

Thanks to a friend of mine I see a lot of tweets from Twitter leftists (or "leftists" for the potentially salty) who are already gearing up to do exactly that.

again, if it were 2019, those same leftists would be volunteering for her campaign.

those same leftists

it's cool they're all the same

yes, all leftists are the same. that is clearly what I meant and said.

Pretty sure you can find some Twitter users to back up pretty much anything you want to say. Berniebros for Trump and Hillarystans who think Bernie's a Russian agent and gay progressives for Putin and etc.

A followup piece from Cooper: http://theweek.com/articles/716472/lets-talk-about-who-leftists-distrust--why

Still not a single mention of who WOULD be a good candidate.

leftist-approved candidates: an actual homeless person, an actual terrorist, a thinkpiece author, an anti-trump collage artist, a kindly old owl...

sounds like a Bloom County comic

But leftists like myself believe that in addition to instead of traditional civil rights policy, nothing short of a total overhaul of American capitalism will suffice to actually eradicate oppression from our society.

It may be unfair but this is how I interpret this guy.

I've seen Nina Turner's name come up as a left approved candidate.

Again, this notion that leftists who criticize and prod candidates because they demand perfection and will neither accept nor support anything less...where does that come from? That's not even true of the *Marxists* I organize with.

generally speaking, putting words into peoples mouths based on your perception of a group of people you see them as belonging to is unfair, yeah

I've seen Nina Turner's name come up as a left approved candidate.

Yes, but I've seen no indication she has those kind of ambitions.

generally speaking, putting words into peoples mouths based on your perception of a group of people you see them as belonging to is unfair, yeah

Also generally speaking, any white person who pushes out a "why can't we get better black people than this?" article is not going to get the benefit of the doubt from me, particularly one that is as thinly-researched and inference-heavy as the one he put out.

Pretty sure that's doubling down on putting words in his mouth.

Still not a single mention of who WOULD be a good candidate.

It's the middle of 2017 - he's responding to the people who are clearly gearing up for a campaign, why is it on him to pick someone now and back them?

i miss back when you used to argue for gun ownership and drew the ire of ilx instead of this new generic ilx leftist poster

It may be unfair but this is how I interpret this guy.

Out of curiosity DJP is this how you would interpret anyone making that argument, or do you just distrust this guy

(I'm really not asking to bait anyone, I'm always curious about how traditionally far-left arguments land)

iirc "generally speaking" is not applicable for most interactions minorities have with white men in the USA so I'm basically with DJP here on him being allowed to have his own interpretation based on context

he's got the right to do whatever he wants!

i miss back when you used to argue for gun ownership and drew the ire of ilx instead of this new generic ilx leftist poster

Well, I mean, my stance on guns is basically just generic leftism - economic justice, ending the drug war and curtailing mass incarceration policies are going to do more for violence in America than pie in the sky ideas about gun control and are where I'd choose to focus political energies.

My interpretation based on the context of The Week being a commercial enterprise is that political purity tests are like personality quizzes or listicles for a certain type of reader, plus, if you can tee up a lot of extra eyeballs by framing the whole thing so it becomes an instant viral hate-read, everybody "wins"

I find the way various dimensions of justice (social, racial, economic, etc) get teased out and separated from each other or ranked is very tiresome. people like Tim Faust have done a great job illustrating how the fight for single payer has vast positive implications for many different sectors, and I'd love to see more writing and argumentation along those lines, not least of all because it's based on providing a hopeful path forward and not just complaining about libs

The reason why I specifically keep bringing up the racial aspect of this and hammering on intersectionality (because my priorities align left and, while I don't hate capitalism, I would not be sad if we swung towards a more socialist system) is because the assumption that these economic changes will automatically help people of color is not actually borne out by the history of social programs in this country, which have historically been designed to implicitly or explicitly exclude people of color or have been ferociously gutted once the common perception is that more people of color benefit from them than white people. I will not take any economic message seriously that does not explicitly address this and keeps it as a core tenet for success rather than a hoped-for side-effect, which is exactly what neoliberalism has already done to these communities.

otm. I don't know how we can read about the New Deal, for example, and not realize that people of color were not among its primary beneficiaries. And the Progressive movement was worse.

You can't credibly argue that things are different now, either; not after this past election.

great post xp