US Politics February 2019: This is one of the great losers of all time.

boom

Still don’t think she has anything to apologize for

right...

I feel like there a fair amount of people who genuinely thought her choice of words was poor while sympathetic to the point she was trying to make. Like, it wasn’t 100% only bad faith right wingers claiming she was being anti-Semitic, no?

politico coverage of beto, so pinch of salt, but...

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/13/schumer-beto-castro-2020-senate-bid-1168554

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer met with former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke last week to discuss a possible 2020 Senate campaign against GOP Sen. John Cornyn, according to a source familiar with the meeting.

good

That's probably the wisest move for him rn.

<cue all the Cronyn and Cronyn PAC ads in 2020 accusing Beto of being 'owned' by Schumer>

Cornyn, or "Crony-N", amirite?

Beto’s gonna be prez one day. The Obama power is with him.

...

Legit star power, charisma, well spoken, boy scout-ish, almost took over a Texas Senate seat out of the gate. Not a radical assumption but cool comment.

love my handsome republican candidate beto

However, a new analysis of congressional votes from the non-profit news organisation Capital & Main shows that even as O’Rourke represented one of the most solidly Democratic congressional districts in the United States, he has frequently voted against the majority of House Democrats in support of Republican bills and Trump administration priorities.

Capital & Main reviewed the 167 votes O’Rourke has cast in the House in opposition to the majority of his own party during his six-year tenure in Congress. Many of those votes were not progressive dissents alongside other left-leaning lawmakers, but instead votes to help pass Republican-sponsored legislation.

O’Rourke has voted for GOP bills that his fellow Democratic lawmakers said reinforced Republicans’ anti-tax ideology, chipped away at the Affordable Care Act (ACA), weakened Wall Street regulations, boosted the fossil fuel industry and bolstered Donald Trump’s immigration policy.

Consumer, environmental, public health and civil rights organizations have cast legislation backed by O’Rourke as aiding big banks, undermining the fight against climate change and supporting Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. During the previous administration, Barack Obama’s White House issued statements slamming two GOP bills backed by the 46-year-old Democratic legislator.

O’Rourke’s votes for Republican legislation – which at times put him at odds with a majority of Texas Democratic lawmakers in Congress – underscore his membership in the New Democrat Coalition, the faction of House Democrats most closely aligned with business interests.

I thought for a second that you'd posted a news story about some threat to his handsomeness. Don't scare me like that.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/andrew-mccabe-fbi-book-excerpt-the-threat/582748/

almost took over a Texas Senate seat

Abrams, Beto, and Gillum are breaths of fresh air and I am glad they are on the scene, but. I am really looking forward to a day when Democrats don't need to cite "almost winning something" as an achievement.

hence my reluctance to crown the Texan white boy as anything other than another decent 2020 senatorial candidate

Beto would be a dumb pick in this field of way more accomplished and progressive people

oh, good morning!

I'll have the Denver omlette and a side of tax returns

a Stalin Stale Ale for me, please

Jeet threading on Abrams' continued elite legitimacy

1. I wouldn't say "piss off" but I have doubts. The evidence of accountability was that Abrams was asked a pointed question on a panel. Hardly sufficient redress for lying to congress, covering up massacres & praising genocidal leaders. https://t.co/Wis8ZitshM

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 14, 2019

the fact that there are currently two prominent Abramses occupying vastly different political territory keeps tripping me up

Lol me too

Beto couldn't beat Ted Cruz, and let me tell you something, between the two senators, Texans actually like John Cornyn.

In his response Corey Robin linked to this 2004 review

btw interesting the Prez got no blowback for claiming Ilhan Omar's "anti-Semitism" was "deep-seeded in her heart"

Fox banned an ad showing Nazis in a bad light bc it hit too close to home. (This is not a joke and there is no punchline)https://t.co/NHuPZHAThF

— Eli Valley (@elivalley) February 14, 2019

I know it's way way too early for March thread titles but "This is not a joke and there is no punchline" is a worthy contender

Beto would be a dumb pick in this field of way more accomplished and progressive people

― Trϵϵship, Thursday, February 14, 2019 1:58 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yup. i think the bloom is off the rose, so to speak. the remote possibility that a dem could be elected senator in texas made everyone root for him, but the very different context of a national election he's not A-list, for ideological and other reasons.
unless there's some sea change in voter registration and turnout patterns, i don't see how he can beat cornyn, but i also think there's value in having someone with an outside change running, just to keep up the enthusiasm and help downballot candidates.

I'm personally very suspicious of Beto based on all the things bizarro gazzara outlined, but I do have a feeling that if he ran and made at least somewhat of an effort to say the right things, he would get lumped in with the Harrises and Gillibrands as being youngish and fairly progressive. political junkies and left Twitter would cry foul, no doubt, but I think the average primary voter wouldn't care about his record nearly as much as his charisma. in other words, I doubt he would get labeled as being part of the Biden wing of the party even though his record probably warrants it.

all I want is someone who knows which way the wind is blowing. I feel like Bernie & Warren do have a lot of progressive cred but I'd be willing to get behind someone with a centrist past if they seemed willing to get on board with what left-wing voters want in 2020. That said I have my suspicions about Beto - he's got a lot of charm and he's very well spoken but I never really sensed the dude had, y'know, much of a plan

his plan was to coast on charisma and hope no-one looked to closely at this voting record iirc

I can relate (winks roguishly, shoots finger guns at you, desperately hopes he has distracted you from his essential vapidity).

Cory Booker always gets shit on as a centrist at best, but his voting record, afaict, turns out to be one of the most anti-Trump, more than Harris, and about on par with that of Gillibrand. So the anti-Beto shit ... it just seems like such bullshit as well, to indicate, what, he's a secret Republican? Nothing (again, as far as I saw) of his campaign for senate indicated some stealth right wing or even particularly moderate motive. I suppose if purity test Dems insist only on the candidate to the farthest left then everyone else is going to seem like a right-winger.

hang on though - if you're going to use Cory Booker's votes against conservative stuff as evidence in his favor, then shouldn't O'Rourke's votes in favor of conservative stuff count as evidence against him?

once again for those at the back:

During the previous administration, Barack Obama’s White House issued statements slamming two GOP bills backed by the 46-year-old Democratic legislator.

i don't think holding a candidate to account for their voting record is a stringent purity test tbh

doc c otm

xpost No, I just mean that I never really followed Booker, but I always got the feeling he was pretty moderate. Which maybe he is, but his voting record demonstrates otherwise (by today's standards). So Beto, there's his voting record, sure, but sort of the reverse is that everything he has demonstrated since then has seemed otherwise. I just mean voting record is less important than their positions and fights going forward, imo.

Gillibrand tacked left, too, iirc.

And Harris is doing it now, right?

Whenever someone posts about Beto on fb one of my friends always responds "Get a job" (about him). It's like the "good mournings" here. Her visceral disgust with him cracks me up.

Booker has two major problems, one is that he takes a TON of corporate cash, another is that his "Love everyone, especially your enemy!" attitude is almost certainly gonna be taken advantage of, at this point the Republicans are operating in such blatant bad faith that we need a candidate willing to treat them as a foe to be vanquished, not a party to be "worked with"....we all saw how well that worked for Obama

What amuses me about Booker's love-thy-enemies approach is that on the stump he's unctuous and creepy, oozing fraudlence. I'd keep small pets away from him.

yeah it's gross

but every party needs its Nixon

He didn’t seem creepy to me when I saw him on the stump supporting Menendez last fall. Maybe it was just the contrast. Next to Menendez most politicians would probably seem wholesome. He was a good speaker if perhaps a bit too polished.

I just mean voting record is less important than their positions and fights going forward, imo.

rip Lyndon Larouche

he left us when we needed him most

beto just left office last month - I feel like talking about what he's done "since then" on his voting record is at least little different than talking about idk what gillibrand did in the House ten years ago and how she's shifted "since then" - we have a little more reason there to buy the "progressive pressure moves this politician to adjust - that's useful" argument. the votes being discussed for beto are on trump/ryan bills from the last couple years, right?

He didn’t seem creepy to me when I saw him on the stump supporting Menendez last fall. Maybe it was just the contrast. Next to Menendez most politicians would probably seem wholesome. He was a good speaker if perhaps a bit too polished.

As a New Jersey native, I'll take Menendez's open venality (toward goals I support) over Booker's gooey bullshit any day. I feel like Menendez should have run for governor at some point - he could have been our own Huey Long.