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

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'

people forget that a notable segment of the people locked into the primaries treat it like college football and post about it in the same way

there are also game day chants, monday morning quarterbacks, and the entire gamut of cliches

nah just human nature, one of the more alienating and depressing parts thereof

Here's a reminder that Bernie Sanders has proposed putting 20% of every publicly traded company under worker control and that it's never come up in a debate.

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) January 15, 2020

i assume that just means everybody's cool with it

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

― symsymsym, Wednesday, January 15, 2020 11:32 AM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

The other day Bernie supporters were sharing a Ryan Grimm interview where he talks about how Warren used her relationships with reporters to prevent Obama/Congress from neutering the CFPB as evidence that she was "nasty."

my local peers are annoyed that women's healthcare and specifically abortion wasn't the topic of a question, especially in a state where the legislature and governor seem hell-bent on perpetually introducing legislation that seems like Roe v. Wade overturn-bait

fwiw the candidates on stage who have held national office have a solid 100 on the NARAL scorecard with the exception of Biden (75) and there's was an extremely managerially-worded statement from Buttigieg about pharmaceutical abortion

"extremely managerial" is on Pete's business cards.

in a hip new font

my comment on the statement was that you could remove 2/3rds of the words and have a coherent statement

coherent sentence, that is

Mayor Pete Buttigieg said this week that while he supports the “spirit” of expansion of medication abortion, there needs to be “more research into the pros and cons and unintended consequences of its use in the context of the United States.” https://t.co/OgUlEBvRiP

— BoldProgressives.org (@BoldProgressive) December 22, 2019

those well known pros and secret, pesky cons of medication abortion in the context of the United States! why did no one else think of those

But as Buttigieg told the New York Times in November, making such federal policy a reality “could have the unintended consequence of setting people up for a criminal investigation or even jail” since self-administered abortion care is illegal in some states.

"What is an American vagina? We simply do not know."

If the Democratic debates were just moderators goading candidates into screaming “abortion on demand without apology” directly into the camera I would watch.

abortion the health insurance company employees

jesus my brain is a mess today

ABORTING the employees

that's taken out of context twice

the first instance is that, in the nyt article, pete's "unintended consequences" quote is immediately followed by "We must first work on decriminalization efforts."

but then the second instance is that the "context of the united states" part comes after that, and it isn't really clear what it refers to

“Abortion on demand without apology” is so much easier to say

he supports the “spirit” of expansion of medication abortion

This is also my favorite Rush song