2020 Democratic presidential primary thread, pt 3: life is very long

Maybe this will lead to the cancellation of political reporting!

fingers crossed!!

remember when real political reporters would scoff at people writing about politics at home in their pajamas

Now the real political reporters will scoff at voters while they sit at home in their pajamas.

I grudgingly give Biden a little credit for not taking any shit here:
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/486812-biden-tells-man-confronting-him-about-2nd-amendment-youre-full-of-shit

Yeah, was gonna say. Not really sure cranky, yelling Biden is exactly a turn-off to a specific subset of voters, et al.

"Don't tell me that, pal, or I'm going to go outside with your ass."

There's full-throated response to gun nuts, but also... "civility"

wtf I love Biden now

whoa now. that's like loving Trump for saying "not drinking alcohol is the only good thing about me"

(and he did)

Trump acts like a mean habitual drunk anyway, so what's the difference?

'wtf I love (x) now' is a dumb meme and I'm unreasonably fond of it.

xp

“I support the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment — just like right now, if you yelled 'fire,' that's not free speech. And from the very beginning — I have a shotgun, I have a 20-gauge, a 12-gauge. My sons hunt. Guess what? You're not allowed to own any weapon. I'm not taking your gun away at all."


A clear message from a coherent man.

I am not a Biden-watcher, is his tendency on the campaign trail this year to aggressively confront people part of a long pattern of behavior or is it new? If the latter, in the clips I've seen it doesn't seem so much like a strategy as a knee-jerk response. Which could raise still more concerns about his overall level of control and situational awareness.

Otoh if he's always done this then I guess it's just his thing.

Blunt, forceful messages delivered in muddled fashion but carry with them the basic underlying negative-emotional alignment one naturally agrees with ought to appeal to any Fight Club stan.

Honeybunch.

he challenged someone (Trump?) to a push-up contest already, right?

maybe he could change his name to Jack Palance

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaign-tantrums-bidens-1988-white-house-bid-derailed-after-he-unloaded-on-new-hampshire-voter%3f_amp=true

Not so new

i don't think he's a satirist, lambchop. xxp

get a room guys

I mean we all find your pet names adorable but

Well, all but one of us do.

Not so new

Well, I guess that's a relief?

turning on the cable news and you'd have no idea it was a primary Tuesday.

I'm going to go outside with your ass

New thread title imo

for the gay thread

Well, all but one of us do.

― crusty but malignant (Eric H.),

Poor little flower. Just dropped her petals and folded her tent.

Well, reporters will not generally report on the 9,000 bland generalities uttered by a candidate for the thousandth time. Workers! People! My upbringing! America! Motherhood and pie!

But if a candidate calls one person a smegma-slurping guttersnipe, or a contumelious jackanapes, well, that's news.

An industry has evolved to supply the sort of thing it thinks we want to know about. Which, inevitably, affects what we think you want to know about.

Every time we prove them right I cringe a little, but I don't have a surefire prescription for what to do about it. Biden isn't helping matters, but he's also not the source of the trouble, he's a symptom.

Shakey, my little peachpit, I wonder what kinda plagiarism Joe will try this year

or will it be just lying about his record

https://i.redd.it/a9cpqys4try31.jpg

"How fast could I KO this chickenshit hillbilly?"

Already lying about his record re: Iraq.

Well, reporters will not generally report on the 9,000 bland generalities uttered by a candidate for the thousandth time. Workers! People! My upbringing! America! Motherhood and pie!

But if a candidate calls one person a smegma-slurping guttersnipe, or a contumelious jackanapes, well, that's news.

totally agree. it's amazing how much would be solved by just making election season 2 months long. that way, the bland generalities are squeezed into a short time period and we don't have to come up with side games to entertain ourselves on year 3 of the campaign

She slurps smegma by the seashore

A clear message from a coherent man.

I just watched the Biden clip and--let's be fair--you're conveniently leaving out his emphasis on the word "any": "Guess what? You're not allowed to own any weapon. I'm not taking your gun away at all."

With emphasis added, it makes perfect sense (which I say as someone who wishes all guns were indeed taken away).

Makes sense on its face.

v nice uppmiss, do u have jaymc's dossier outta the liberry

“I support the second amendment” followed by literal nonsense is good now, what a fuckin world

tbf by Biden standards this is perfectly lucid

idk i understood it

Don't think it matters tbh, not at this point and a lifetime of making fun of presidents from Reagan onward to no effect. Ezra Klein (god) otm:

Biden has lost a step rhetorically. In debates, his answers have, to put it gently, a meandering quality. He loses his place, says the wrong thing, mixes up words, free associates. Without engaging the question of whether this reflects a lifelong stutter or a more worrying decline, the simple fact is that Biden performs worst on the metric that media professionals judge most harshly, and most confidently: clarity of communication.

But over and over again, we’ve seen that voters just don’t care that much about malapropisms and meandering rhetorical styles. Books — yes, plural! — were published mocking George W. Bush’s garbled sentences. And Bush looks like Cicero compared to Donald Trump’s word salad.

...Journalists who’ve based their professional lives on clear, crisp, stylish communication find it shocking when candidates get lost in rhetorical mazes of their own construction. But both Bush and Trump won the presidency. And Ronald Reagan won reelection in a landslide, even though he couldn’t recall what city he was in during the first presidential debate and admitted to being “confused.”

Biden’s most visible weakness in day-to-day campaigning, in other words, is a weakness the media consistently overrates, at least when it comes to election outcomes.

trump was more lucid than current biden when he ran for the presidency in 2016

tbf by Biden standards this is perfectly lucid

Sadly otm.

trump was more lucid than current biden when he ran for the presidency in 2016

― COVID and the Gang (jim in vancouver), T

Oh? From the same Klein piece:

Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, okay, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right — who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.

If you think Trump has declined mentally that’s probably because of how your media bubble is filtering Trump stories (same w Biden)

well I just remember Trump actually landing blows on Clinton in the debates, Biden is just a disaster

Clinton "won" every debate. It just didn't matter.

Trump's stuff written down often made no sense and much hay was made of that, but in real time you got what he meant most of the time.

it's kind of hard to compare the two since lying and getting facts wrong is Trump's "style", it's hard to count these things as "gaffes" when the man is just a liar who will say whatever he has to say to make himself look better

Clinton "won" every debate. It just didn't matter.

I keep reminding ppl of this and they seem to keep forgetting.

Trump's stuff written down often made no sense and much hay was made of that, but in real time you got what he meant most of the time.

it's because of all the hand gestures and the way he varies the space between his hands, measuring the problem and approximating the size of it for the audience

she also "won" the election. it just didn't matter.