2020 Democratic presidential primary

not doing christmas till the weekend, no judging!

I like Yang. He may be my 3rd or 4th at this point too, knowing that we will never get to that point.

not doing christmas till the weekend, no judging!

― Simon H., Tuesday, December 24, 2019 5:55 PM

I always judge!

are you people still here on Xmas Eve

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, December 24, 2019 5:50 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

just got to work!

I want to be clear. I don't hate any candidate except for Bernie. I think he's a white nationalist trump supporter enabler.

I don't care for Tulsi either, but she has no freaking chance.

But I won't settle for tone deaf, racially insensitive candidates.

That's why I'm Joe

— The Who Matters (@raising_hill) December 24, 2019

Why did I look at the replies

very online Democrats: as smart as Trumpists

who is The Who Matters?

Ha, almost every one of 'her' tweets is some ludicrously OTT button-pushing attack on Sanders or his supporters (or Warren for being a Trojan horse for Bernie). Almost definitely a troll or bot imo.

Nah, there were a lot of broken brains after 2016.

Twitter is a psychosis

I believe she’s a real person but her weird Twitter vendetta seems pretty run-of-the-mill as far as weird Twitter vendettas go

She retweeted a tweet claiming that Bernie is going to vote against convicting Trump. She also hates AOC and Warren fwiw.

Left twitter has its own delusions, not saying this is exclusive to centrists. I really just believe Twitter is a psychosis. All of it.

imagine the level of psychotic self-delusion you have to have in order to believe that bernie sanders, the most prominent jewish candidate in u.s. political history and someone who lost family members in the holocaust, is an enabler of "white supremacists," or that sanders is "racially insensitive" in a way that biden (who opposed busing and praised segregationists) and buttigieg (no comment necessary) are not

Stephen Miller's family fled anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe iirc

is she saying he is a white nationalist andan enabler of trump supporters, or an enabler of white supremacist trump supporters?

either way, lol. what scurrilous trash.

Imagine paying any attention at all to Bernie Sanders' campaign and thinking he was a white supremacist, really.

i don't think they're paying attention to the actual campaign at all, they're just obsessed w/ the handful of bernie supporters who have been rude to them on twitter

People like that believe with all their heart that Bernie actively worked to cost Hillary the general election. They’re not nefarious, just dumb.

xxp: the point of UBI is that it would in time obviate the need for the rest of confusing panoply of monetary welfare schemes. If everyone is guaranteed a subsistence level safety net, then a whole alphabet soup of other programs (SSI, TANF, CHIP, SNAP, EITC, and housing assistance) that beneficiaries piece together is no longer necessary. I see the main argument in favor of UBI is that it will in fact be more efficient, and will create a middle class constituency for both subsistence level welfare and a carbon tax; and the arguments against being that UBI will be better in low income/cost states, but worse in high income/cost states, and that tying it to the carbon tax is a recipe for it a) never being implemented, or b) being implemented, immediately being used to prematurely eliminate other programs, and in the long term used to eliminate even the UBI, if carbon tax revenues decline.

I'm glad Yang is pushing the Overton window here. I think his messaging is politically counterproductive ($1000 for you, every month), and I'd never support/vote for a presidential candidate with zero experience in government.

$1000/month is also nowhere close to a subsistence income, so in the present day, using it as an excuse to eliminate a host of more expansive (tho repeatedly slashed) entitlements is just warmed-over neoliberal horseshit --- renege on any obligation to actually provide a guaranteed standard of living, just throw people into the market with dollars to spend... surely the things they need will be there, and if they aren't then surely supply and demand will create them! it's just charter schools writ large, and on the cheap. fuck that. i'd rather have a committment to specific things we believe everyone should have - decent homes, clean drinking water, health care, education, transportation

but i guess we have the UBI thread for such rants, sorry

DC otm as usual

UBI is a Trojan Horse for the destruction of any lingering vestiges of the social safety net. I appreciate Yang for trying out-of-the-box ideas, but it's a bad one.

(xp)

People like that believe with all their heart that Bernie actively worked to cost Hillary the general election. They’re not nefarious, just dumb.

The cause-and-effect logistics of how he supposedly cost her the election always seem so far-fetched to me. He did this by... competing in a primary and not withdrawing earlier than he was legally required to? Spreading factually accurate information about her Wall Street ties that no one, including Barack Obama, had ever pointed out before? Making her look bad for questioning how one of the richest countries in the world could pay for free college and health care like many others do? Not controlling everything randos on Twitter were saying? And he was influential enough to have this negative impact but not enough for his endorsement of and campaigning for Clinton to have any impact in her favour. And we can be reasonably certain that swing voters in key states were likely to vote for Hillary Clinton if she - not even a VP but the most qualified person to ever run for President by virtue of an eight-year Senate term and a four-year Cabinet term - had faced no serious opposition in the primary but they were so demoralized by the Democratic primary that they lost any motivation to do so and may have even been inspired to vote for Trump? Of every factor that might have made a difference, it is really important to focus on this one?

She retweeted a tweet claiming that Bernie is going to vote against convicting Trump. She also hates AOC and Warren fwiw.

She is also ride or die for Julian Castro.

I will say, I learned from her feed that Ocasio-Cortez has a primary challenger, which I did not know!

This Sanders interview is worth reading.

Goldberg: Before we move around the table, let me exercise my prerogative and ask you one other question. What do you say to voters who worry that in a general election a candidate as far to the left as you are is gonna alienate swing voters and moderates and independents?

Sanders: Excellent question, I’ve heard it once or twice. (Laughter) I want you to think about this. In my view, and I’ve thought about this a whole lot, anyone who underestimates Donald Trump as a candidate, for a variety of reasons, will be very mistaken.

He is going to be a very, very strong candidate. He certainly has a very strong base. He will have unlimited amounts of money to campaign on. He is a pathological liar. He will merge in an unprecedented way agencies of government with his campaign, because he doesn’t particularly believe in the rule of law. So he is going to be a very, very tough opponent.

The only way that you beat Trump is by having an unprecedented campaign, an unprecedentedly large voter turnout. And we’ll have to combat every single day the voter suppression which you’ve recently seen manifest itself in Wisconsin and Georgia. And we can expect that to take place all over the country. We are living in perilous times, and Republicans understand that if they can keep poor people and people of color and young people from voting, they’ve got a better shot to do it. And I have zero doubt that they will do it. They’ve appointed right-wing judges who will sustain their efforts. So we have to combat that in every way we can.

But the reason I believe that I am the strongest candidate, and the reason I believe our approach is right is if you want a large voter turnout, if we understand that there are tens of millions of people in this country who don’t vote, who’ve kind of given up on the political process, that young people — although we’re seeing some real gains there and we’re working really hard on this thing — young people, who are by and large progressive — my guess is roughly speaking for every three people under 30 who vote, two of them are going to vote progressive, okay, but many of them don’t vote — I think I am by far the strongest candidate to reach out to those people. I think I’m the strongest candidate to bring together a multiracial coalition of African Americans, of Latinos, of Asians.

So to answer your question, I don’t believe that the [way to win] this election is to just speak to Republican women in the suburbs. That’s one theory. And I think many of those women will vote for me because they are appalled, correctly so, about Trump’s personal behavior and his temperament. I think we can win many of them. Not all of them. But on the other hand, the key to this election is can we get millions of young people who have never voted before into the political process, many working people who understand that Trump is a fraud, can we get them voting? That is the key to this election. So I’ve heard that hypothesis, I just don’t agree with it.

And let me add to that if I might, [there are] people who run the same old, same old type of campaign. And you know, [former Vice President] Joe Biden is a personal friend of mine, so I’m not here to, you know, to attack him. But my God, if you are, if you’re a Donald Trump and you got Biden having voted for the war in Iraq, Biden having voted for these terrible, in my view, trade agreements, Biden having voted for the bankruptcy bill. Trump will eat his lunch.

the god

otm

get his ass

otfm

I know this sounds fatalistic but there’s a very good chance none of these candidates can beat Trump, so if we’re going to go down again let’s at least go down with our best. If we go with Biden and he loses (and I do think he would) the what-ifs will be 100x worse than they were in 2016.

bummer counterargument: if bernie gets the nom and loses, we will never hear the end of it as "proof" that running on progressivism is madness.

not gonna let that sway me, mind you, just yknow a thing to be braced for, amidst all the much more immediately and materially harmful effects a second trump term would have on people's lives.

Gotta shoot your shot

$1000/month is also nowhere close to a subsistence income, so in the present day, using it as an excuse to eliminate a host of more expansive (tho repeatedly slashed) entitlements is just warmed-over neoliberal horseshit --- renege on any obligation to actually provide a guaranteed standard of living, just throw people into the market with dollars to spend... surely the things they need will be there, and if they aren't then surely supply and demand will create them! it's just charter schools writ large, and on the cheap. fuck that. i'd rather have a committment to specific things we believe everyone should have - decent homes, clean drinking water, health care, education, transportation

― Doctor Casino, Wednesday, December 25, 2019 7:34 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is a great post

I know this sounds fatalistic but there’s a very good chance none of these candidates can beat Trump

otm

It's not like Trump has gotten more popular in the last four years and I'll take a wild guess that any Democrat will actively campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin this time.

it’s only stupid in the probabilistic sense: there can’t be a good “chance” none of the candidates “can” beat trump. of course all the front runners could. but they all could also lose

the sentiment I don’t think is stupid

Bernie lays out several reasons in that video right there why he's a formidable opponent, without even getting into the garbage voters that got him elected in the first place

Harsh on the people of Vermont, imo.

god he sucks. you can just see him mouthing the words but that he doesn't believe any of it

.@jonkarl: "Your ad says 'Medicare for all.' Your plan is not 'Medicare for all' ... there's not even a public option."

"Our plan is to expand a universal health care system to all Americans," Andrew Yang says, adding it will happen "over time." https://t.co/ZODaeI0IgO pic.twitter.com/sO7OiMx4Yb

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) December 29, 2019

icymi

Centrists are the most ideological political actors (meaning, substituting preconceived biases for reasoned reflection). Mainstream pubs never acknowledged this defining features of our political culture. So, for the NYT, this is groundbreaking. Yay! https://t.co/A9rqNIxD1p

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) December 23, 2019

Biden in New Hampshire: “Are any of you truck drivers in here?”

*no hands go up*

— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) December 30, 2019

lol

*Biden sadly crosses "keep on truckin!" joke off of notecards*

"Does anyone here have Prince Albert in a can?"

Jesus fuck.

.@JoeBiden was asked if he would consider choosing a Republican running mate if he is nominee for a show-of-force unity ticket:

“I would” Biden said but added he couldn’t think of anyone at the moment.

— Bo Erickson CBS (@BoKnowsNews) December 30, 2019

Man.

How about choosing a true independent with a first name you can trust, Joe Lieberman

Biden/Romney