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

She might be isolationist, but that is not the same as being anti-war/imperialism/intervention.

Russia intervened on the side of the warmonger for imperialist reasons, and she is clearly not against that.

she is an isolationist and a nationalist, probably. she only cares about protecting US troops, not working for peace in general. so yeah -- anti-imperialist isn't the way to classify that. but it is anti-war and anti-interventionist.

i think she doesn't care about what russia does. she wants out of the game. which is convenient for russia, but the reasons she feels this way don't seem particularly inexplicable

from the NYT obit on the Sanders campaign:

In mid-January, a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders’s pollster offered a stark prognosis for the campaign: Mr. Sanders was on track to finish strong in the first three nominating states, but Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s powerful support from older African-Americans could make him a resilient foe in South Carolina and beyond.

The pollster, Ben Tulchin, in a meeting with campaign aides, recommended a new offensive to influence older black voters, according to three people briefed on his presentation. The data showed two clear vulnerabilities for Mr. Biden: his past support for overhauling Social Security, and his authorship of a punitive criminal justice law in the 1990s.

But the suggestion met with resistance. Some senior advisers argued that it wasn’t worth diverting resources from Iowa and New Hampshire, people familiar with the campaign’s deliberations said. Others pressed Mr. Tulchin on what kind of message, exactly, would make voters rethink their support for the most loyal ally of the first black president.

Crucially, both Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane, consistently expressed reservations about going negative on Mr. Biden, preferring to stick with the left-wing policy message they have been pressing for 40 years.

Gabbard is clearly not anti-war. She would have stayed the fuck away from Assad if she was.

i mean, whatever. she is out of the race now and is pivoting to become more of a mainstream democrat.

It should also take more to be called 'anti-interventionist' than being against American intervention but okay with other people doing it. No need to call that anything other than isolationist. Not one iota of principle behind that.

i didn't call her principled. but it's a position that resonates with a lot of americans now, especially family members of veterans who are exhausted with the pointlessness of iraq and afghanistan.

it seems like myopia of the media class (of which ilx is sort of a part) to think her appeal is "weird" or that it must be "horny alt righters."

*pointlessness of the iraq and afghanistan conflicts. we seem to have made these places much worse, even though when we went in, they were being run by awful regimes.

Isolationism is totally normal. It's the drive to call it something else that is so weird.

btw did any of the three horny libertarians in Gabbard’s fan base have a meltdown when she endorsed Biden? I’m looking for lols.

No, the opposite, Niko House and Michael Tracky have fallen in behind with some impressive mental gymnastics. You love to see it. Can't remember who the third is, jimmy dore?

which is actually more lol than if they had a meltdown!

family members of veterans who are exhausted with the pointlessness of iraq and afghanistan

how many of these people have you heard from

why am I so entertained by reading Fred B schooling treesh about Tulsi on a Saturday morning

why are people obsessed with tulsi? it's not like her campaign actually caught on.

i think the only concern (at least, my concern) was that she'd stay on and do a third party run and have an effect on the final presidential vote, which will probably be razor thin margins again. of course, as soon as you mention that possibility, everyone starts yelling about how her running 3rd party would _actually_ help the democratic candidate - no, _hurt_ the democratic candidate, no _actually_ it would make no difference at all, no_ actually it would help, etc

My guess with her would be very little difference. (I'm yelling right now, by the way.)

Man, that NYT story

KEEP IT DOWN CLEMENZA

and it seems kinda sexist to ascribe her support to "horny" guys i guess, idk.

that's fair and my comment was kind of flip shorthand for a certain type of rightwinger. i think there was in fact a number of people who legitimately thought she was Good.

re certain type of rightwinger-- often overlaps with the aging white guy demo who shares memes featuring Trump as a badass golden stallion god which i will never ever stop laughing about

Sleepy Joe..

don't really get what's "anti-imperialist" or even isolationist, about supporting Narendra Modi

I don't get what's "anti-imperialist" or even isolationist, about supporting Joe Biden either!

An obvious fraud from day one, but there's been a bunch of them

Call me a centrist put Joe Biden > Narendra Modi imo

Biden has awoken from his nap and is on the case.

Everyone knows that we're facing a real crisis from the coronavirus. But do you know how we got here and what we need to do next? Ron Klain, former White House Ebola Response Coordinator, breaks it down for us: pic.twitter.com/XRkIw2EzM4

— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) March 21, 2020

Call me a centrist put Joe Biden > Narendra Modi imo

Absolutely! And I apologize to anyone I might have implied felt differently!

Just to set context here, you are asking this about a country

should as in "ought," not "do you expect would happen"

Countdown to Trump claiming it's illegal for Biden to set up a shadow administration.

"are you saying I can't...I can't....uh....are you saying it's illegal for me to CAMPAIGN?"

"I'm not saying that, lots of people though, they're saying it. Lots of people."

You all really should read the article in NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/us/politics/bernie-sanders-democrats-2020.html

Posting that article on this thread is borderline trolling

Eh. I could think of another thread where it would be worse...

Yup

You all really should read the article in NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/us/politics/bernie-sanders-democrats-2020.html

― Frederik B, Saturday, 21 March 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Try and wake yourself up, then poke sleepy Joe.

I posted an excerpt this morning.

this is so embarrassing

.@JoeBiden popped into @djdnice Instagram party tonight to show a little love. The party is now over 100k strong 💪🏾🙌🏾 Congrats D! pic.twitter.com/PnIszQPrOV

— Symone D. Sanders (@SymoneDSanders) March 22, 2020

joe biden does not exist

not more embarrassing than kissing stranger's babies and cramming various handheld foods into your mouth during campaign stops at local shops

Absolutely no: this is the equivalent of an intern wearing a cardboard mask with a photo of your face on it pretending to kiss a baby that is part of a corporation’s national advertising campaign, and waving the various handheld foods near the mouth bit of the photo of your face, before putting them down and walking backwards out of the room.

I posted an excerpt this morning.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 22 March 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Joe starts this and now everybody is sleeping!

This is good on going-on. Very little value in looking back.

https://newrepublic.com/amp/article/156982/bernie?

Can't wait for the Biden ad that features bulldozers and mass graves.

Donald Trump has failed the American people. pic.twitter.com/HsNl9M4h4r

— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) March 21, 2020

Osita nails throughout that piece why I didn't particularly care to read the rest of the NYT one: for all the 20/20 hindsight, I don't think there's a strategic pivot they could have made that would have made much more of a dent than they did.

I think there was room for a pivot to acting as though he was the frontronner and doing outreach for endorsements. Whether there was really time for that post-Nevada is another matter. Post-Iowa would have been a better time but possibly complicated by the confusion with the results delaying momentum there.

Centrist media was softening on him a bit and coming to terms with the possibility, and I think he could have toned down the outsider packaging its just whether there was enough time to do it. In any race there's a significant number of people who will vote for the winner and he could have moved more into that presumptive kind of role.

It may be that this was just beyond his ability to pull off convincingly. I'm not really sure who could manage that successfully. Ro Khanna springs to mind but difficult to see who else

I wonder what would have happened if they had gone really negative on biden. hard to go negative as a frontrunner however

I think there was room for a pivot to acting as though he was the frontronner and doing outreach for endorsements. Whether there was really time for that post-Nevada is another matter. Post-Iowa would have been a better time but possibly complicated by the confusion with the results delaying momentum there.

Who of note would ever get his endorsement outside of the people who already had? And that's even without Bloomberg (lol) buying up a ton of them.

complicated by the confusion with the results delaying momentum there

I don't know if a normally-reported Iowa would have made a difference--lots of people in both parties have won Iowa and not gone on to the nomination--but that was one giant mess, and Sanders didn't get the big moment that, say, Obama got in 2008. (Or maybe Buttigieg didn't get it--who knows?) Seems like a million years ago.

Eh, he was widely perceived as the frontrunner after Nevada in any case, was leading the 538 prediction list, was inspiring an MSNBC freakout.

Sanders also didn't really win in Iowa...