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

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xp

I read this great Mishima story about a guy committing seppuku, distressingly erotic, seems cool

― silby, Tuesday, 7 April 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Patriotism is one of the all-time great short stories.

I was going to post the (excellent) short film but I don't wish to feed silby's current state - hope you feel more positive toward life and reach out to the folks you like best, silby.

guilty wtf lol's @ Aimless pvmnic telling someone to "drink raw sewage" (?)

fellas we're only a few weeks into this thing!

anyway Silby I hope you did not do that and today goes better

is the presumptive Democratic nominee weighing in on this WI situation or nah

he's actually in a meeting with tom friedman right now, i believe

they're talking about the 1950s

i am actually on board with the idea of not shitting on joe biden all the time, given that he is what we have.

but goddammit, joe is asking for people to shit in his mouth.

What do Fig Newtons and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches have in common? Listen to this preview of this week's podcast to find out — and then check out the full episode at https://t.co/t11Fa0CorE or wherever you get your podcasts. pic.twitter.com/AfL018UA4h

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 7, 2020

he's gonna fucking lose if he doesn't figure out to be a normal human being. i blame whatever advisors are telling him this is a good idea. you can't blame an old-timer for not really understanding what a podcast is. you might fault him for not understanding that this might not be the best time to roll out a podcast episode by hyping it up with a fig newton + PBJ trivia teaser. but someone he has hired to guide him, SOMEONE, must know this is idiotic

the worst since Humphrey? Or worse than HH?

"I found out John Kerry has the same addiction - "peanut butter and jelly sandwiches"

smh

Is this senior citizen outreach?

Gotta pick up that important “senior citizens who are swing voters and actively listen to podcasts” segment

I would contributed to a GoFundMe to get that guy a fucking teleprompter, and an assistant with a cattle prod who will jab him every time he departs from the script in a folksy manner

jeez

do you think operating less than a third of the usual number of polling places is going to a) increase or b) decrease the number of voters at each Wisconsin location

― donald failson (sic), Monday, April 6, 2020 5:42 AM (two days ago)

welp

Milwaukee will have five polling places tomorrow, instead of 180. Five! My mom, who's been waiting for her absentee ballot for ~a month, won't get to vote.

― geoffreyess, Tuesday, April 7, 2020 2:28 PM (yesterday)

is the presumptive Democratic nominee weighing in on this WI situation or nah

― A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Chooglin (will), Wednesday, April 8, 2020 3:09 AM (one hour ago)

he has strong opinions (apologies for xpost from the Biden thread):

JOE BIDEN: “We cannot let this, we’ve never allowed any crisis from the Civil War straight through to the pandemic of 17, all the way around, 16, we have never, never let our democracy sakes second fiddle, way they, we can both have a democracy and ... correct the public health.” pic.twitter.com/ufXFh5cAtY

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) April 7, 2020

Wisconsin Primary Voters Receive ‘I Voted’ Gravestones https://t.co/9oy10KTQo1 pic.twitter.com/Ke76tDjlXo

— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 7, 2020

LOL

shocking decision to move ahead with this

have you been noticing WI politics lately, treesh? they're in the full grasp of aggressively ultra-conservative nincompoops.

great thread the last couple of days!

https://media2.giphy.com/media/12m6YBQBVVPMK4/source.gif

Biden 2020: If Andy Rooney Had Lived

shocking decision to move ahead with this

Shocking without being surprising.

have you been noticing WI politics lately, treesh? they're in the full grasp of aggressively ultra-conservative nincompoops.

Worth noting that Democrats swept every statewide election in 2018 but the GOP leaders in the gerrymandered state legislature are doing everything they can to keep the state from being governed, including keeping measures that might have bipartisan support from the whole legislature (like postponing in-person voting) from being voted on.

bernie's out

shall we rehash our greatest hits

RIP

RIP

:(

Cue the switch from arguing about whether he should drop out to arguing about why he shouldn't have, I can't wait.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/AjarDaringAsiaticmouflon-size_restricted.gif

Bernie Sanders is a fucking hero. Let’s come together and beat this guy.

— Andrew Yang🧢 (@AndrewYang) April 8, 2020

good luck usa, congrats to the Tories, etc

violently angry at being asked to vote for the lesser of two rapists

It’s offensive

Quite a lot of people able to overlook that. Sorry Bernie.

hardly the first time two rapists were running against each other for President

(although I don't think the rape accusation against Biden is remotely credible tbh)

We all think things

Some do have more trouble, it's true.

In this economy???

This thread should be awesome for the next several hours

I'd been slowly moving towards Biden stepping aside the past few weeks. Basically, I hope someone takes him aside this morning and says, "Okay, fuckhead--you're the nominee, now get it together."

Suspension of Disbelief 2020

he's not gonna step aside

sometimes I think he's taking Trump as a model, ie "I can be rambling and incomprehensible too! Americans seem to love that! Makes me just like them, just an ordinary Joe, now look folks, that's number one"

"You want a doddering grandpa? I'VE DONE IT, I GOT IT DONE"

He doesn’t have any more of an inner life than Trump does at this point, he’s a malfunctioning automaton

Happy All Your Christmases Come At Once to the 15%+ of Berners who are now free to admit they were going to vote Trump all along.

— 💥💥🔊BASS, MIDS, TOPS OUT NOW🔊💥💥 (@joemuggs) April 8, 2020

thought this roundup from perry bacon yesterday was pretty fair and worth reading: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/did-sanders-blow-it-for-the-democratic-left-or-was-the-nomination-always-out-of-reach/

Also, a lot of campaign tactics seem clearly misguided in hindsight but were entirely defensible in the moment. And looking at Warren and Sanders’s campaigns combined is helpful in illustrating this point. For example, it’s hard to claim that Sanders lost because he didn’t court the party establishment enough if you consider how much Warren pursued party elites to little avail. Perhaps Warren should have talked about electability more when she was surging in the polls, but Sanders emphasized his ability to build support among people who backed Trump in 2016 from the beginning of his campaign and Democratic voters still thought Biden was the safest choice.

Finally, some of the more campaign-centric narratives seem clearly contradicted by the structural case I laid out above. Biden’s support among black voters was strong before he formally started his campaign, and none of the other candidates — including two prominent black ones (Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris) — ever really dented it, so it’s hard to say that flawed black outreach was a particular failing of Sanders or Warren.

But the full-scale push for Medicare for All by Sanders, Warren and the broader left — even after it was clear that they were losing the primary debate on that issue — seems like it was a mistake electorally, even if it was a righteous cause. (The massive numbers of people losing their jobs as businesses shut down to slow the spread the coronavirus has probably bolstered the case that Americans’ health insurance should not be tied to their jobs, as Sanders aides are now arguing.) Once Biden entered the race and started pushing back against Medicare for All, Buttigieg and Harris, who are fairly savvy about seeing shifts in the political winds, started backtracking from the idea. Warren and Sanders could have done the same. Some Democrats doubted Warren’s electability for reasons that were somewhat unfair to her (she is a woman and lives in Massachusetts), but her embrace of Medicare for All freed her critics to argue that they were worried her policies made her unelectable, not her gender.

After all, basically no one thinks Medicare for All has any chance of passing Congress anytime soon. Warren, after months of criticism, eventually started pushing for a phased-in Medicare for All plan that would start with a Medicare-style public option, along the lines of what Biden and Buttigieg were proposing. Sanders never backtracked from Medicare for All, but one of his top surrogates, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, conceded in February that a Medicare buy-in might be all that could get passed in Congress, at least in the short term.

Medicare for All “has taken a lot of the oxygen out of the room for more popular health care ideas,” said Julian NoiseCat, vice president for policy and strategy at Data for Progress, a think tank allied with the party’s left wing.

And the Medicare for All issue can be tied to a broader narrative of the left failing that goes something like this: In an environment where it was fairly predictable that a candidate backed by black voters and electability-minded voters would do well, the party’s left wing championed Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, neither of whom had history of connecting with black voters or running based on electability. Both ran campaigns that emphasized their leftism, particularly on Medicare for All. Neither campaign seemed well prepared for the backlash against leftism from the party’s center-left elites, nor did they seem to have any plan to convince voters who aren’t very liberal that they could get elected on these liberal ideas and then implement them as president.

(TW: because he is an honest person with a functioning brain, his description of what happened just prior to super tuesday avoids the bizarre doublespeak this thread has produced and favored over the past couple of months)

Needless to say those people are scum