2020 Democratic presidential primary

This Taylor Branch article is 8 years old now, but I read it back when I had just started working for 0regon and found it very persuasive: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/308643/

VHS, here

https://newrepublic.com/article/153723/democrats-created-electability-monster

That's a good article. Its amazing to me that Dems are still pushing "electability" concerns in a world where game show host Donald Trump won the Presidency by promising a 2000-mile concrete wall. One of their establishment guys got dethroned by a 29 year old bartender who champions every single cause that Dems worry makes them "unelectable".

Democratic party leadership pushes these "electability" talking points completely disingenuously because they have a set of policies that they WILL NOT consider regardless of popular will. It's very convenient for them to say that they can't entertain the idea of Medicare for All because it'll render them unelectable, instead of admitting that they oppose it because they are composed almost entirely of members of the ruling class who have been placed there to serve capital. They have ideological and monetary commitments that are separate from the will of their base.

^^^deluded

well it fits the empirical evidence shakey

unless you think congressional democrats really do want Medicare For All but have just been playing 13th dimensional chess for the last several decades while the poorly insured literally die. clever! i'm sure we'll get there some day, when the time is right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Can%27t_Wait

^ i'm sure this link won't work but you get the idea

bless me it did

*sigh* why do I bother but "empirical evidence" = no

Medicare For All but have just been playing 13th dimensional chess for the last several decades

Medicare For All was first proposed in 2003. That is not several decades.

When "Democratic Party Leadership" (something not clearly defined upthread but which I will assume for the purposes of argument refers to Perez, Pelosi and Schumer) speaks about how there isn't the political will within the party to pass this kind of legislation it's because they are counting the votes of the *entire* party, which includes members in "swing" Districts that tilt considerably more conservative than the party base. That's all there is to it. If you want to argue that those members in those more conservative Districts are voting the way they are because they have literally been bribed/co-opted/corrupted by corporate lobbyists from insurance/pharma industries I think you will be hard-pressed to offer proof of that. That kind of direct quid-pro-quo is actually quite rare.

but the ugly nuts and bolts of maintaining party unity (and often shaky majorities) isn't as easy to accept or process as handy conspiracy theory narratives about all-powerful and all-corrupt officials dictating positions to a party apparatus from on-high, that just isn't how the party works.

Pelosi goes where the caucus goes, this is part of why she's such an effective leader. when a majority of her caucus is behind something, she brings it up. when they aren't, she tries to tamp down dissent and maintain unity on the points where there *is* majority support.

unless you think congressional democrats really do want Medicare For All but have just been playing 13th dimensional chess for the last several decades while the poorly insured literally die. clever! i'm sure we'll get there some day, when the time is right.

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Friday, August 2, 2019 9:11 AM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

A majority of House democrats now support future Speaker of the House Pramila Jayapal's Medicare for All Act of 2019 (HR 1384), it has 117 cosponsors

House Democrats, as a caucus, support Medicare for All and are ready to pass it.

One of their establishment guys got dethroned by a 29 year old bartender who champions every single cause that Dems worry makes them "unelectable".

Haven’t read the article yet and I will. But as much as I think AOC is the future of the party, god bless the Green New Deal and any neo keynesian policy proposals, I am just not certain her electability would be the same across both democratic and national maps than in the Bronx, NY where she got her victory. For each AOC, how many progressive lost to middle of the road candidates?

I'm sure once that bill makes it out of the 6 committees it's been referred to that Pelosi will bring it to the floor.

xp

I can't tell if that's snark

it is not, it will pass those committees, it will pass a floor vote, and then McConnell will refuse to bring it up in the Senate. Pelosi lent her support to the bill when she gave the green light in January to hold hearings on the proposal.

Nine times out of ten, to ascend to the level of congressperson you have to already be part of the ruling class. If you're not already there, then once you do get the job then the money and power that suddenly becomes available to you and the social circles you start traveling in are going to do wonders at co-opting you. There are very few high-profile Democratic politicians who have strongly-held interests that diverge from that social class. Most of them look at the general population as a "great beast" (as Hamilton put it) that must be either beaten down or bribed with the smallest handouts possible to keep them at heel.

The few politicians that significantly diverge from this tend to have two attributes that differentiate them:

1. They were not raised upper-class, so they didn't grow up with the ideological baggage and priorities of the upper class.

2. They have a strongly held political ideology with a concrete program of action (e.g. democratic socialism) that makes it harder for them to be co-opted once they enter the upper class upon being elected.

Unfortunately, there aren't very many politicians like this in the US right now, but the number is beginning to increase thanks to the actions of electorally-oriented leftist organizations like the DSA, who see the Democratic Party as a fundamentally undemocratic institution that could potentially be taken over and turned toward democracy.

What I'm saying does not require any conspiratorial thinking, just class consciousness.

stupid dems whining abt "attacking Obama" in debates

like somehow not slavishly burnishing the reputation of an ex-president has fuck-all to do with anything this year

Nine times out of ten, to ascend to the level of congressperson you have to already be part of the ruling class.

this is demonstrably untrue nonsense do you want me to break down the income levels and racial make-up of the Dem House caucus.

You tend to believe the same stuff as the people you play golf with every day.

I am just not certain her electability would be the same across both democratic and national maps than in the Bronx, NY where she got her victory.

Of course not, which is why the collective panic about is hilarious.

I think you confuse House leadership (which, yes, hangs out with rich donors, duh) and House members, Onesecond.

Yeah, the stuff I'm saying does apply more to leadership than regular members for sure.

The median net worth of a senator was $3.2 million, versus $900,000 for members of the House of Representative

https://qz.com/1190595/the-typical-us-congress-member-is-12-times-richer-than-the-typical-american-household/

it ain't just leadership

Of the Top 50 wealthiest members of the Senate/Congress, only 14 of those are Democrats in the House, and you can probably guess who at least a few of them are (Pelosi, Kennedy, Delaney, Khanna).

I think that speaks more to the astronomical wealth of Republican senators than it does to the merely great wealth of congresspeople in general

^^^

You can look up the Democratic caucus' net worths here:
http://www.rollcall.com/wealth-of-congress

You can clearly see by filtering for Democrats the large majority of the House caucus is worth less than $0.5 million, with the lowest member actually being $2.4 million in debt (I feel for sorry Alice Hastings)

yes was abt to:

I stand corrected it does turn out only 13 of those 50 are R senators : /

though the four wealthiest of those appear to be democrats

Having a debt load in the multimillions is an upper class thing.

generally true rules of thumb: Senators on average are way wealthier (although it's always interesting to see who isn't), and Republicans on average are a wealthier caucus than the Democrats

xp

Hastings is in debt because of legal fees for corruption charges from 80s FYI

Hastings is a classic corrupt South Florida machine politician who will never die.

exactly. idk if I would call him "upper class" as much as just garden variety sleazy

John Delaney is so rich

the top 2 richest congressmen are real dickheads, hmmm

"the "most votes of any presidential candidate ever" argument is symbolic but mostly meaningless -- the country's population is going up, which also means the population of voters"

For sure. The only real import it has is a counterpoint against the argument that the electorate is too misogynistic to vote for Harris or Warren...65 million Americans still voted for Hilary even after all the bullshit.

also worth noting that that data isn't for the current Congress, which (given the influx of new members and flipped Districts) is probably a bit different now. Issa is gone, for ex.

xp

That is not several decades.

Goes back to the National Health Act of 1939.

IIRC, there was a vote among the Democratic House caucus in 1993, in which a majority of Dems favored single-payer. Not enough to win over Blue Dogs or certainly bill passage, but single-payer has been in discussion a very long time.

Goes back to the National Health Act of 1939

Medicare was created in 1966

Dem bills encouraging universal coverage extend back to the New Deal. Great Society, some 27 years later, is when they finally got partial coverage for the olds.

I was referencing a specific post that specifically called out Medicare for All, not single payer or universal health coverage. words mean things.

Thought this was a great graphic, that should be shared widely (especially to any rube who suggests there isn't a difference between the parties):

https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/640-width/20190727_WOC449.png

If you want to talk the history of government funded healthcare that's fine, but let's not pretend that the reasons the National Health Act didn't even make it to a floor vote in 1939 are the same as the reasons Medicare only applied to the olds in 1966 or the reasons single payer didn't make it into Obamacare or the reasons Medicare-for-All took this long to get majority support in the House.

xp

hi Shakey, let me put it another way, though I'm really just echoing OneStepBefore, who you were incredibly rude to: The Democratic Party has, with a handful of honourable exceptions, acquiesced to the notion that the principles of an unregulated finance industry are essentially the principles that should rule us all, and has been complicit in selling out the interests of the working class who have now unsurprisingly abandoned them in droves. do you reckon that's a "deluded" point of view?

words mean things.

― Οὖτις

can't believe you still think this at this late date