2020 Democratic presidential primary

we should have that contest on the ILX gay thread!

only if the dicks being measured are somehow doing some fundraising to pay ilx hosting costs.

bring back the statscock

stephen malkmus likes gabbard. pretty perfect, along with rivers cuomo being in the #yanggang

so baffled by p much all these veep ideas

Sanders/Winfrey

andrew yang with elon musk as veep would be epic

hadrian otm

here's my cockamamie veep idea for sanders: a Business Person Success Story who whole-heartedly supports his program and blandly explains to rotary clubs that it's all only common sense, and sheds a tear for the proud america in which her CEO forebears made only 10x their employees' median income. "my team and I built a great company, but we didn't do it alone. now i for one don't mind paying my fair share so that the highways our trucks go out on can be repaved" ... you know.... lots of charts and graphs showing how redistribution helps The Economy. "bernie, yeah, he can raise his voice and all but if you look at The Numbers, none of what he's saying is actually all that radical..." blah blah blah... this person probably does not exist btw

sanders/gritty or gtfo imo

xp if Bernie does get the nom, yes, 10-to-1 it will be a (younger) woman w/ just that kind of message (and a whiff of Wall St about her)

10-to-1 it will be a (younger) woman

Woe to Bernie if his veep choice were older than he is.

I would be in for Betty White.

sanders/gritty or gtfo imo

― the flat earth serves tea and coffee (bizarro gazzara), Friday, April 26, 2019

tbh i would take sanders more seriously with Gritty as his running mate

so baffled by p much all these veep ideas

You’re implying that you agree with my michael Jackson poster for VP idea, I assume

Michael JORDAN, Karl.

that was a weird iphone typo

This Ben Smith column is worth a skim.

These new politics look less like old presidential campaigns than like social-media fandoms: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Drake, the Marvel Universe don’t come and go. They’re eternal, as long as their protagonists provide a steady stream of content and mutual affirmation to growing groups of supporters. This is a snowball, not a narrative.

So what does that mean for the 2020 Democratic Primary?

Well, it could mean that the theory motivating most of the 20-plus candidates — that they should make their cases and wait for their turns in the sun of public attention — is just wrong. Under this theory, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar will never get their turns.

And the candidates who have found their social media and movement fandoms early — Bernie Sanders, who never let his go and Pete Buttigieg, who caught the moment, are the obvious ones — will become harder and harder for the others to dislodge, as they develop increasingly intense relationships with their core fans. There’s space for one or two more fandoms, and Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris seem closest to building them. And, perhaps, there’s enough space for a reaction against this new politics for Joe Biden.

Politics is the media business, and increasingly the media-criticism business. But spare a thought for the possibility that, as you judge the media’s coverage of the Democratic Primary, that we have a lot less to do with the outcome than we used to. The power that we used to wield has been handed over to the fandoms.

love this class-centered discourse

“Being middle class is not a number. It’s a value set,” Biden says.

— Sabrina Siddiqui (@SabrinaSiddiqui) April 29, 2019

disqualifying

Isn't the very definition of a number...

"being middle class is not a number. it's a set of numerical values"

srsly this is how the plutocracy defines middle class, straight up

from the Biden thread:

I turn on MSNBC before switching to Netflix and, sweet baby Jesus, Nicole Wallace and her chant of the ever-circling skeletal family devoted all of four minutes to praising Elizabeth Warren for not just knowing more policy than any candidate but being "electric" in a room.

Mayor Pete MeToo

huh -- i'm not finding anything about that?

I feel like the fact that the current vibe is "no one should tear down any candidate" plus the fact that there are like 57 candidates is just going to lead to a split field where no one is really all that differentiated and no one has momentum. I guess it's still early though.

Biden's remark about the middle class probably reflects how a very large fraction of Americans think about their class affiliation. iow, with a heaping dose of rationalization and self-delusion.

Almost everyone I meet thinks they're middle class, and only a few of them are right.

Exclusive: Jacob Wohl caught on tape trying to concoct a sexual assault smear against Pete Buttigieg and promising to make the accuser wealthy. Now the supposed victim says Wohl and lobbyist Jack Burkman made it all up. https://t.co/GAOW7OOdhe

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) April 29, 2019

this is the best press Mayor Pete could possibly have asked for

so weird. none of wohl's stunts work but he keeps at it.

everyone has their thing!

Before his Buttigieg smear, Jacob Wohl had already:

-Become the youngest person banned from futures trading
-Been under federal investigation for faking a similar smear against Robert Mueller
-Faked death threats against himself and reported them to police.

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) April 30, 2019

dude should be in prison but also it is amazing how bad he is at this

Wohl should team up with James O’Keefe and come up with more schemes

i blame jacob wohl's parents

he should have been kicking a ball in the street or something

he should be kicked in his balls in the street

does this idiot kid get discussed on cable news? or is he just a twitter thing?

This thing only ever made it to the RW press

more like jacob LOL amirite, etc.

Trump retweets him

It makes sense for two guys in the ‘pay people money to lie about who they did or did not have sex with’ business to be friends and colleagues

he's such a rascal that trump

He’s a downright fartknocker

always doing crazy stuff. trolling millennials. i have noticed.

like - and pls correct me if i'm out of line here - if there was some leftwing lunatic with a fairly sizeable (pre-ban) following trying to frame the special counsel investigating a sitting Democratic president or a somewhat high profile GOP candidate... it would be plastered all over cable news like 94/7? it would precipitate some Very Concerned op eds in legacy media outlets? or nah?

Trump retweets him

hahah FUCK i missed that

but i guess both sides, y'know

Points for Warren: https://m.chron.com/entertainment/restaurants-bars/article/Elizabeth-Warren-celebrates-husband-s-birthday-at-13804198.php?cmpi

the current vibe is "no one should tear down any candidate"

I actually heard "politics ain't beanbag" on NPR last weekend, a concept which apparently no rank-and-file Dems under 50 are acquainted with.