2020 Democratic presidential primary

Pierce was an idol of mine for many years or maybe he just seemed like a smart, biting cynic before the Internets came along.

And I really don't get his impassioned defense of Harris.

He's still great when it comes to sports.

A cynic is a sentimentalist, and Pierce is not a sentimentalist. Y'all have read the wrong man.

he’s turned into a hack. it’s sad but trump did that to a lot of people

I think that's how I feel Kevin but that might be me just being lazy.

And OK, Al. But he just seems fucking angry all the time and if I want that, I just look at Twitter for ten minutes.

Milo and Al, have we been on ILX for 20 years together yet?

maybe you too Kevin?

he’s turned into a hack. it’s sad but trump did that to a lot of people

― k3vin k.

Wow -- how fiendishly we disagree. He's not the first columnist I read anymore, but his turns of phrase still depend on how shrewdly he looks at the race, impeachment, and where we're at morally.

and, yeah, I'm fucking angry all the time too, and anger, like John Lydon sang, is an energy. It's also clarifying and -- what the hacks miss -- makes you lighter on your feet.

yes

The best clear-eyed take on the Harris withdrawal is Erik Loomis'.

pierce is fine but has weird blind spots

his sheer commitment to the nicknames/stock phrases is occasionally funny but usually annoying

really never need to see the word 'shebeen' again

lol

there's so much anger on the Internet that I don't know how to choose from it all

let the algorithm make you angry, it's what it does best

Let's say I have more to lose from GOP governance than most posters but this fact has not made me loathe the tergiversation I often read here.

tergiversation is a great word

many xps - close to 20? 2002 or 3 for me, I think. The first ILX link I ever clicked on lead to a photo of Momus's cock (he did not manscape).

xp: those were the days, milo. I think I sent you some CDRs back in the day. Maybe the Prince 12" collection?

I had to look up tergiversation but am glad I can now appear more enlightened. Indeed, a great word.

Do you have a link for Loomis' take on Harris, Al?

Liz Phair's Girlysound Tapes!

oh I guess Al you mean this
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/03/kamala-harris-drops-out-out-of-presidential-race-074902

from that article:

Still, she was unable to make significant inroads with black voters, a key Democratic voting bloc, in the same way that Biden has, despite running neck and neck with the former vice president in endorsements from members of the CBC.

Someone other than Charles Pierce explain to me why she could not do this.

I think the community of online political junkies has not managed to come to terms with the extent to which a very significant portion of Democrats really like Joe Biden.

Milo and Al, have we been on ILX for 20 years together yet?

― Joe Gargan (dandydonweiner), Tuesday, December 3, 2019 11:03 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

maybe you too Kevin?

― Joe Gargan (dandydonweiner), Tuesday, December 3, 2019 11:04 PM (yesterday)

it's been about 11 for me. I've made several good posts

a very significant portion of Democrats really like Joe Biden

definitely a halo effect from their liking Obama, but people are like that so what can you do?

True enough

as was pointed out somewhere in these 14k posts, biden -- for all his half-assedness/use of the word 'articulate' -- totally played loyal lieutenant to a black guy for eight years. that doesn't make him worthy of the top job, but it's actually pretty cool for american history

Harris doesn't have the highest name recognition among non-political junkies, I would guess. Obama was only a Senator for two years but he was once-in-a-lifetime charismatic and had the DNC speech under his belt.

Onion jokes about Biden and Obama being bros are going to doom us all.

anyway given the cultural climate, the dems should just make the primary a vote-them-off reality tv show. imagine the ratings, and trump's dismay

https://politics.theonion.com/one-eyed-man-who-kamala-harris-locked-up-25-years-ago-q-1840182471

I'm still confused about Biden's support in the black community.

― akm, Wednesday, 11 September 2019 16:57 (two months ago) link

I think it's fairly explicable - older black voters know how deeply racist this country is and are more inclined to think that as a result a white man (or in Hillary's case, a white woman) will have an easier time maneuvering the levers of power in their favor than a black candidate. Black voters on the whole didn't coalesce behind Obama until he won Iowa, there was a huge swing after that. Same dynamic.

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, 11 September 2019 17:03 (two months ago) link

(still under a year to the 20-year mark of ILX - next August, I think?)

oh I guess Al you mean this
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/03/kamala-harris-drops-out-out-of-presidential-race-074902

― Joe Gargan (dandydonweiner),

No. This: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/12/harris-out

so who's going to get most of Harris's Clintonite hacks/donors, Booty or Biden?

She was so indistinct toward the end that I'm not sure what a Kamala Harris voter is.

a DNC apparatchik

I won't go that far. She, Sanders, and Warren are the only candidates who realize the GOP is a rat's nest of fascism. She had little interest in comity, hence her increased wobbliness when discussing campaign bullet points.

Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Bloomberg -- they wanna sit at the table with Uncle Mitch and work stuff out.

I think polls indicate that there’s no consistent “second choice” among her voters

I mean supporters

he'd be licking his lips if he thought any of them would win xxp

I do think being half-Indian made many black voters distrust Harris in a way that Obama being half-white wouldn't; put that on top of her record as a prosecutor (which, ACTUALLY, is not nearly as bad as has been painted) and there was a strong sense of "not really one of us" swirling around her public image that she never overcame.

I think, had Trump not been President, she would have very happily stayed in the Senate and continued to build a record that would have matched the progressive rhetoric she attempted to sell and people would have been much more amenable to her as a left-leaning establishment candidate in the same policy vein as Obama.

I do think being half-Indian made many black voters distrust Harris in a way that Obama being half-white wouldn't

Could you expand on what you mean by this?

There is a really stupid tug-of-war within the American black community about what it means to be black in America and who counts; probably the most visible iteration of it is tension between black Americans descended from slaves in the continental US and black people descended from (or simply from) the Caribbean Islands. Some vocal subsection of slave descendants claim others are not "really" African-Americans because they don't trace their lineage back to the same institutional slavery; Harris got some of this blowback pretty early on in her campaign by identifying with both her mother's heritage as well as her father's, as shown by the overreaction to that radio interview that people willfully misinterpreted to make it sound like she was faking black credentials by saying she listened to Tupac and Snoop in college, before they actually had any records out. (This seems trivial but apparently it was important enough of an issue for there to be a write-up in the Times about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/us/politics/kamala-harris-snoop-tupac.html)

So, this perceived disingenuousness combined with "is she really black?" nonsense combined with "Kamala is a cop" combined with a bad campaign = Harris never generates wide support within the black community for her campaign.

Oh, I see, so her mother being an immigrant could actually work against her in that community vs Obama's mother being a native-born American?

Correct. Also, white people mixing with black people is expected/understood; other pairings are *exotic* and there's a suspicion that the biracial person is de facto subsuming their blackness in favor of the other ethnicity due to the way America ranks non-white ethnicities.

Some of these gnarled politics also play out in Miami between black Americans, Afro-Cubans, and Cubans of Spanish descent (who of course have Moorish blood).

I should also point out that some of these suspicions floated around Obama, only once he started talking people were by and large so captivated that they burned away.

(Also, he's a man)