Your next 2020 Democratic presidential primary thread: Now we're serious

I didn't speak to the effectiveness of tactics, I only know that a permanent hands-off policy when it comes to criticizing your political opponents isn't really tenable

yeah but it sometimes just means that Christie torpedoes Rubio or Gephart cuts Dean down

My basic stance on alll this is that I like Bernie Sanders and dislike Nathan J Robinson and fortunately Nathan J Robinson isn't running for president

I don't have every syllable of this controversy committed to memory but my recollection is that Bernie initially said his "a woman can't win" statement was more along the lines of observing that it'd be something Trump would weaponize and be particularly awful about. which certainly isn't a particularly profound or brave thing to say but seemed like a decent enough explanation for a potential misunderstanding that would allow everyone to move on. I don't really understand why he didn't reiterate that position last night but instead decided to double down on essentially treating the whole thing like a lie. It's either that he doesn't possess the mental acuity to make that pivot when it's necessary, or that he's just the kind of person who gets so incredibly annoyed when the conversation is on something he (rightly) deems to be trivial that he can't be bothered to finesse the situation appropriately. and the people who love him indeed love him for exactly that kind of "no BS" mindset but it ignores the unfortunate realities of 21st century political media.

like, it's not going to cause me to change my own vote, but it seems to me pretty undeniable that when he decided to pick nits with the whole "I HAVE beaten a Republican incumbent" exchange, he came off like a huge asshole.

It's either that he doesn't possess the mental acuity to make that pivot when it's necessary, or that he's just the kind of person who gets so incredibly annoyed when the conversation is on something he (rightly) deems to be trivial that he can't be bothered to finesse the situation appropriately.

seems a third possibilty is missing here

That he is lying?

xxxp There's a difference between the two parts of that first sentence though - no-one, I'm sure, is under any illusions that Trump and surrogates will be amazingly horrific if Sanders gets the nomination, but if Warren had phrased this as "a jew can't win", it'd deservedly be a pretty big story.

like, it's not going to cause me to change my own vote, but it seems to me pretty undeniable that when he decided to pick nits with the whole "I HAVE beaten a Republican incumbent" exchange, he came off like a huge asshole.

Well, he has.

Whatever point Warren was making there in the first place seemed pretty dumb to me - women by virtue of their gender are more able to win elections and defeat Republican incumbents? And Bernie's doesn't count because it happened 30 years ago (and he won every VT election since)?

you're not supposed to fact check girl power

fact or not, if you don't think that didn't come off petty af i don't know what to tell you.

yeah it felt like a huge mistake

a huge mistake no one will remember in 48 hours

feel like no one has learned anything from either participating in or watching the debate

I honestly don't think it was pettier than counting the total number of elections that have been lost by three opponents, two of whom have been in electoral politics since the early 70s (vs Warren's two electoral wins), or establishing a 30-year cutoff for beating a Republican incumbent in order to exclude your opponent's win, but OK.

The rigorous accuracy of Warren's numbers makes it pettier imo. That's a weird talking point to prepare.

she should have said "in this century"

Politifact:

The two candidates sparred over the meaning of "at any time in the past 30 years."

As the list above shows, Sanders defeated an incumbent Republican in 1990. That’s right on Warren’s cutoff of 30 years.

don't elections usually happen in November? It was 29 years and 3 months ago then.

Yang mentioned that on Twitter, lol

a little chagrined i am no longer in Mordy's Top 2

our top 2 US posters xyzzz and fred

thanks for the early morning lol mordy

Now that we're all friends again, what's next?

On my part, a determination to raise my profile.

yang pulling a neil tyson there xxp

tmi

still pretty sure some of this Sanders/Warren dumped material is coming from the DNC

i am really sorry to keep this going in any way, but is there some sort of authoritative account of what actually happened re: sanders/warren, that meeting, etc?

a debate moderator last night posed a question to warren that was like "how do you react to sanders saying that a woman can't win the presidency?", as if it were a fact that he said it.

fwiw both warren and sanders seem eager to move on and not make this a big issue

oh great, i know i'm ilx's resident copy/paster of talking points memo links, and now i just saw they discussed this 20 minutes ago.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/does-cnn-have-it-in-for-bernie-sanders

What struck me at last night’s debate was the blatant hostility of CNN to Senator Bernie Sanders. Here’s how their reporter framed the question to Sanders about Warren’s claim (which she alone is in a position to make since they were the only two people in the room):

PHILLIP: Let’s now turn to — let’s now turn to an issue that’s come up in the last 48 hours. Sen. Sanders, CNN reported yesterday that — and Sen. Sanders, Sen. Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?

Now what’s odd about that? Warren couldn’t “confirm” CNN’s reporting. She could only confirm that she had told people who had told CNN that Sanders had told her a woman candidate couldn’t win. It’s strictly a he said/she said situation. And the CNN “reporter” knew that Sanders had denied making the statement. CNN repeated this canard when they asked Warren to respond.

"Why did you say that?"

wtf?

Definitely seemed like moderators hated Sanders. Not just on the Warren exchange. Other typical questions would be something like (not an actual quote): Senator Sanders, your plans would bankrupt the nation and put us on the road to serfdom. Why won’t you level with the American people about that?

This Matt Yglesias piece on Warren (part of a Vox series; the first installment was about Sanders) is pretty good.

The next Democratic president will also be dealing with an executive branch gutted by the Trump presidency. Civil servants have been leaving at an accelerated pace, and crucial agencies, like the State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, have hemorrhaged talent.

That’s why something else that Date told me is of particular importance: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone who’s a better recruiter.” You hear that a lot from people who’ve been recruited by Warren, or watched her recruit others. One former CFPB official described the agency’s hiring process this way: “They used the meeting with Elizabeth Warren to basically make it so you couldn’t say no.”

When I asked Warren what people didn’t understand about the powers federal agencies wielded, that was her answer. “Personnel is policy here,” she replied. “The tools are already embedded in the agencies. It’s just going to take somebody to pick them up and use them.”

The tricky thing about this part of Warren’s worldview is that no candidate would really argue with it. They all agree that personnel matters, that choosing good people and managing them well is important. But there’s a difference between knowing it and prioritizing it, between saying it and doing it. For Warren, putting the right people in the right jobs — and, just as importantly, keeping the wrong people out of those jobs — is an obsession, and she spends her political capital accordingly.

Ezra Klein piece

xp as a staunch bernie supporter I do think this is one particular area of strength for EW, that she's detail oriented on a comprehensive scale which has no doubt served her in litigation and forming consumer protection bureau, etc

this is not a quality generally associated w/ a good executive much less POTUS but then again these are unusual times

“Personnel is policy here,” she replied.

Goddamn, right into my veins.

that's a really good piece

agreed

The counterargument (which I'll hear from Sanders people): understanding – mastering – the system as Warren does is exactly what we don't need when we could be destroying the system.

Warren's the wonk candidate, for sure.

It's a rough take, but yesterday I broke it down as Yang fashioning himself as a silicon valley-style pseudo-libertarian technocrat and Buttigieg is the corporate management consultancy technocrat

A strange facet of the 2020 primary is that it has inverted Bernie Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s reputations. Today, Sanders is seen as the revolutionary willing to challenge the Democratic establishment, whereas Warren is attacked by the left as a technocrat of suspect progressive credentials. But during the Obama years, it was Warren who had a reputation for being willing to challenge, and even foil, a Democratic administration, while Sanders was known as an ideological gadfly but fundamentally a team player.

She never gets enough credit for this imo

"and the former who has now posted his 30th tweet making the same joke about 'things bernie told people in confidence' and now the confetti at the supermarket is raining down and he has won a free turkey. hopefully this celebration will suffice and he will not longer feel compelled to dennis perrin up the site."

Looking for 31st rn, just love confetti and 🦃

The counterargument (which I'll hear from Sanders people): understanding – mastering – the system as Warren does is exactly what we don't need when we could be destroying the system.

who in the Bernie camp is adocating that gov needs shrinking or that ignorance is an asset? For all the revolutionary rhetoric Bernie is an institutionalist, he's not out there railing against the rules per se

I should've said "Sanders fans." The previous Yglesias essay reminded us how canny an institutionalist Sanders has been.

xxp - it isn’t that candidates aren’t allowed to criticize one another, it’s that this is simultaneously a relatively banal accusation, and yet one that has very probably resulted in at least one person flat-out lying, given how much their accounts diverge. meaning supporters of either are more likely to dig in their positions, and non-supporters of either now have both candidates in this state of quantum maybe-lying, i.e. looking worse.

I was objecting to fred's characterization that Sanders erred by "breaking the truce" (was there paperwork?) by drawing distinctions btwn them in volunteer material

also xp - I think the inversion in reputation is pretty obviously due to sanders in the 2016 primary

I was objecting to fred's characterization that Sanders erred by "breaking the truce" (was there paperwork?) by drawing distinctions btwn them in volunteer material

― bold caucasian eroticism (Simon H.), Wednesday, January 15, 2020 11:52 AM (twenty-one seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

the timing on this may not work out (really depends on whether cnn was reporting the story before the volunteer slack thing) but if this all was an overreaction to that then that makes that random bernie volunteer the gavrilo princip of extremely pointless beef

it's so petty it's hard to see how fixating on it (like on berner on my fb timeline has w/ like a dozen posts on the topic) makes anyone look good - impossible to understand why either candidate or their supporters would want to spend a second discussing or thinking about it.

pettiness seems to be some kind of defining sin of our era maybe it's social media's fault

free faaaaaalin'