2020 Democratic presidential primary

And orbs.

dr morbs orbs, coming to syfy this summer

I would add Castro to that list

not sure mayor pete moved anyone

he didn't lose anyone though which is fine for now. I like him a lot; but I'm thinking he's the perfect VP candidate

like the prospect of him debating Pence is too tempting

Castro definitely a winner

“Go to my website” gave me Howard Dean flashbacks. Remember how novel that was at the time?

lol Morning Joe's having a meltdown over last night's performance; he's terrified that the Dems have put themselves in the position of supporting health care for everyone who cross the border. It's possible he's freaking out that Biden, his favorite, was a disaster.

ffs joe

https://preview.redd.it/xd280j70g2731.jpg?width=539&auto=webp&s=d741f1e90092a1198dc1e948f9b149bb202d5b14

uh can I ask what the N is for

it's the last letter in a three-panel 'BIDEN' image from joe's instagram with the letters spread across the layout of the page

but the optics... the optics are not good

Anybody who’s ever watched Harris in a hearing knew she was gonna gut Biden last night.

Unfortunately, the photo she posted this morning makes her look like the kid who’d beat you up on the school bus and throw your book bag out the window.

except this was not her SOP prosecutorial style “gutting,” because here she spoke as a victim of the crime. “I was that little girl.”

Also thought her opening line, “I don’t think you’re a racist” was masterful. It announced that this was not an ad hominem attack, and in so doing disabled the “I don’t have a racist bone in my body” retort , while at the same time, by verbally taking the racism charge off the table, left it nonetheless hovering in the air.

Warren and Harris have always been my top two, and these debates have only solidified that opinion.

I look forward to a Warren vs Biden moment

lmao at that Biden pic

I took the same tack this year as I took in 2017, which was to completely ignore the primary debates until some of the chaff falls by the wayside. The reports I'm reading do not surprise me re: overall debate performance aside from Harris being much better at that format than my friends in politics led me to believe she would be (I expected to like what she had to say but cringe at reports of how she said it). The clip of her murking Biden is legendary.

meanwhile over on reddit

https://i.imgur.com/fnkZ3zg.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/fnkZ3zg.jpg

lol

Honestly the best argument Biden can make for his position on busing is still terrible ("my constituency charged me with fighting busing and my job was to represent my constituency") but at least is a position that allows plausible deniability between himself and the avowed racists he recruited to help his cause.

watching harris make biden eat shit rn

wonderful

states rights! my god

It was a great exchange for Kamala but afaik federally mandated desegregation busing is still a very unpopular position and I don’t expect to see her or any candidate making it a talking point on the stump.

no, and it doesn't matter, it works emotionally and now that it's looping as a debate highlight it has served its purpose

I also liked how Harris tweaked the standard "I met a man named Gary at a diner in Des Moines" trope by making her vignettes more hypothetical and therefore more universal by not being ostensibly tied to a single individual. I'm thinking particularly of when she imagined a mother in Central America sending her child to the US with a coyote or when she painted the picture of a mother with a feverish child trying to decide whether to walk through the door of the ER knowing she'd be stuck with a huge deductible.

I guess it’s not going to be a Biden Harris ticket then?

Biden is too fragile for that

yup

At this point, I would be happiest with a ticket that consisted of virtually any combination of Warren/Harris/Sanders as P/VP with Castro/Booker/Inslee/Buttigieg as alternate VP choices.

The only reason I would be happy if Warren missed the ticket completely is that she could continue being my senator.

Warren/Harris/Sanders as P/VP with Castro/Booker/Inslee/Buttigieg as alternative VP choices

otm. Whatever else, this is the best crop of Dem hopefuls since....1976? Who the hell knows.

^that’s pretty much word-for-word my view as well, including the second paragraph!

(To djp)

I also liked how Harris tweaked the standard "I met a man named Gary at a diner in Des Moines" trope

I always want someone to tell the story of a guy they met on the campaign trail who had to choose between getting health coverage and buying weed

So it's def gonna be Biden/De Blasio right?

de Blasio seems aiite
*is swiftly KO’d by NY ilxors*

Warren and Harris, majestic.

ever watched this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=75&v=m6WsyWRXY18

er

https://youtu.be/m6WsyWRXY18

Marianne Williamson has chaotic recurring Frasier character energy

— alex (@alex_abads) June 28, 2019

she's like the perfect midway point between Roz and Daphne Moon.

no, and it doesn't matter, it works emotionally and now that it's looping as a debate highlight it has served its purpose

Sure but it would be nice maybe to also hear a substantive debate on politically realistic things that could be done to improve struggling public schools. Maybe in the next debate.

As I was forcefully reminded on another board last night, debates aren't the places to learn about policy: they're arena sports designed to show how candidates eliminate or fail to eliminate the opposition.

also about how they handle themselves in high pressure moments, responding and adjusting in real time. all things that are very different from prepared speeches, choreographed campaign events, and policies researched by a staff

apparently people who work on Biden's campaign were whispering to journalists that he wasn't following their advice last night

if the ship is leaky already that's uh not a great sign

Harris was spectacular when going in on Biden but I found her uninspiring when talking about her own proposals. The first thing she mentioned when asked about the 'first thing she'd do' is a middle-class tax cut? Taxes on the middle class are probably necessary to pay for the programmes nearly every candidate is proposing, judging by the tax rates of p much any social democracy. Credit to Sanders for being honest about that. Her climate change proposal had a lot of passionate denouncement of Trump but seemed to boil down to re-entering the Paris Agreement (which afaik doesn't do anything but bind the country to set targets) and then a deflection to talking about Trump's relationships with Kim Jong-un and Putin...

...which was still better than Sanders's deflection when asked about diversity. Wow, he needs to get better at that. I did like that he began to suggest an alternative foreign policy model in placing greater emphasis on strengthening the UN and multilateral decision-making on international issues, which begins to get at an answer to what could fill the void if the US moves away from an interventionist superpower model. Transitioning funds from military spending to a green transition sounded good too. It was interesting that a lot of the most concrete things he had to say seemed to be about international issues. Many of the specific domestic policies he focused on so heavily in 2016 - getting large donations out of political campaigns, $15 minimum wage, free tuition, even the recent proposal to forgive student loan debt - barely seemed to come up in his statements. If anything, Gillibrand probably talked more about some of those things. He did talk about single-payer health care but even that was largely when pressed on it by Bennet or a moderator question. His domestic policy focus in this debate seemed to centre around some idea of mobilizing the population to revolt against capital (Wall Street, major corporations, and the military-industrial complex), which, if taken at face value, seems more radical than anything he was saying in 2016.

Williamson obv the winner.

Also, wow this party has moved to the left since 2008, when Obama-Clinton debates could feel like debates between moderate members of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Booker is a crook
Buttigieg is a lightweight cipher
Judy is a punk

Does Yang not count as a person of colour btw?

Buttigieg was awful imo. Lots of words but barely anything concrete, and what there is seemed totally milquetoast.
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