U.S. Politics, November 2024: GARBAGE DAY!!

right wing spooks sabotaging Carter's hostage rescue helicopters helped as well, ftr

The biggest arseholes.

Xp xyzzz — that’s not that old! I remember that as a kid as well and I don’t consider myself old.

The writer of that (pretty good) thread considers himself old.

You are only as old as you feel :-)

Yeah I was nine

i was 18 in 88 when Dukakis was the nominee and didnt vote in my first election after 8 years of Raygun he was such a LAMO

I was 19 in '88 and Dukakis came to my campus on the campaign trail. I went to him, the energy in the room was not palpable. But I voted for him anyway.

In a way it was good because it gave me a low bar of expectations for presidential candidates.

Went to see him

Biden giving her bullshit titles like Immigration Czar helped torpedo this campaign.

Cmon man, this was not at all a title Biden gave her, disappointed to see a right wing talking point thrown around here as if it’s true. Yes he tasked her with dealing with the border, yes a stupid move, but that “Immigration Czar” and “Border Czar” was shit right wingers were calling her.

thought this was interesting about how that all came about:

ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: Immigration, I think, is a pretty fascinating illustration of this whole theme in general. It’s telling, right, that you immediately say immigration and don’t specify the so-called root causes issue. What does that mean? That means your portfolio is ostensibly trying to grapple with things like impoverished conditions and crime from Central American countries that are actually causing these migrants to flee north to begin with.

The way that that assignment came about — and this speaks to, I think, just the lack of a broader strategy that the West Wing had when it came to her — as Ron Klain, Joe Biden’s former chief of staff, told me, they were in a meeting, talking about this very issue. And Kamala Harris, as Klain told me, spoke rather forcefully and rather well about her ideas for alleviating some of these root cause elements.

And Joe Biden was impressed with her ideas. And he essentially said, why don’t you take that issue? Why don’t you take it on? And she’s kind of silent for a moment. And after the meeting, she approaches Klain and says, I’m really happy to be engaged on this, but I was sort of throwing those things out there in the hopes that someone else could take them on and not me, because it is just a completely no-win issue. I mean, to the extent that you can, as a governing leader, help alleviate those root causes, I mean, that’s a 10, 15-year at minimum metric.

EZRA KLEIN: Kamala Harris, as vice president, is going to fix El Salvador?

ELAINA PLOTT CALABRO: Yes. Word is out on whether that has happened yet. ... But anyway, Ron Klain says, look, I get it. But — and here’s the important part — when Joe Biden was vice president, this was the issue he took on for Barack Obama. So he didn’t even see it as, oh, I’m saddling her with the thing that I don’t want to do, or sort of the scraps. He saw it as a great sign of respect that he would take the issue that he had worked on for Barack Obama and feel enough confidence in her that he would want to give it to her as well.

So completely divorced from questions like, can she make any meaningful, just optically, a sense of a win on an issue like this? And what does that mean for her profile as a vice president? Things like that were just not coming into the equation at all.

If you prefer “gave her unpopular and impossible jobs” cool - the actual title doesn’t matter, he weighed her down with the border even more than simply being Biden’s VP.

Sure, but you said "bullshit titles."

He also didn't weigh her down with the border, he basically gave her a diplomatic portfolio — talk to these countries, work on solutions. Totally reasonable job for a vice president. The rest of it was invented by Fox et al.

But see, they're good at driving the story!

She's not a diplomat, she's the Vice President! Her job is to wait around in case he dies and cast tie-breaking votes. We have actual diplomats to do shitty, unpopular jobs. If he didn't weigh her down with an unsolvable problem (because it's not actually a problem and because we don't have a time machine to undo the last 90 years of Central American policy) how did they have a story to run with?

From the left she was promising a continuation of Biden's immigration policy (bad!), from the center-right onward she was responsible for 'the border crisis.' Appealing to people who think immigration is not a major crisis and Biden has been great on immigration is a pretty narrow slice of the electorate.

yes we can beat her up for her failures, and kudos to you guys who seem really focused on that! but in the end most people just wanted a celebrity strongman, a total dipshit who falsely promises prosperity and is all in for white supremacy and the degradation of women

torn behind 'blaming the voters' and a poorly executed campaign, but it's probably neither - this is how democracy is supposed to work, voting the bums out (who secured real wins for you) and bringing back the other bum (with his own self-interests at heart)... I'm defeated, deflated, but not angry at the voters who made this choice

(to be fair, I think Harris ran a pretty solid campaign with the time she had, really energized a big portion of the electorate, but alas)

I reprimanded a friend in 2016 who said that we, all of us in this country, deserved the beating we were all about to get, the first time Trump was elected

But now I agree. We as a country deserve all of the pain he is going to deliver.

I know he has his sights on punishing California, but all the undocumented farm workers he aims to deport? That's all solidly red territory, those farmers are all Trump voters... ditto for the Arkansas poultry plant workers... you reap what you sow

The problem with the country feeling pain, deserved or not, is that it always gets felt most by the people who are already struggling.

Can't wait for people to be surprised that he actually meant he was going to try to deport a million people a year.

how dare the leopards eat MY face

We as a country deserve all of the pain he is going to deliver.

I completely disagree with this btw, nobody deserves pain and least of all red state voters. People want something better, the Democrats failed to offer that, it's not rocket science.

I tend not to blame the voters for the same reason I don't hold myself responsible for everything terrible the candidates I vote for do. For a large part of the electorate, voting is just an expression of one or a few priorities and the belief that one candidate is at least marginally better on those priorities. Yes, there are legit white supremacist hardcore trumpers, and I don't forgive them, but there have never been enough of those to win an election. He needed people who just felt like "my rent and bills and groceries are too high, fuck it let's try someone else" to vote for him too in order to win.

I honestly wish some of my friends on the left were able to detach themselves a bit more from the candidate in their voting, we might be better off. No, you are not endorsing everything a candidate stands for by voting for them. It is not a deep personal moral choice, it's just a very minor tactical one.

I reprimanded a friend in 2016 who said that we, all of us in this country, deserved the beating we were all about to get, the first time Trump was elected

But now I agree. We as a country deserve all of the pain he is going to deliver.

― Dan S, Thursday, November 7, 2024 8:35 PM (fifty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean honestly, this strikes me as a pathological way to view elections. This sounds like a your psyche issue, not an America issue.

yeah, not onboard with the 'we deserve this'... an we're probably not going to descend into full-blown fascism with this election. DeSantis could not have pulled this off, Trump is a bit of a unicorn

The outcome was personally shocking, but now that I fully consider it, this is how the nation goes sometimes

Like Clint Eastwood said, deserve's got nothin to do with it.

we're probably not going to descend into full-blown fascism with this election

The optimistic take: We had Donald Trump as president for four years already. He was a lazy idiot who hired incompetents and maniacs who had no idea how to actually do anything. Remember "Infrastructure Week"? Remember "We'll have an announcement about that in two weeks"? Basically everything his administration achieved, it achieved through court decisions. The actual day-to-day government consisted of sycophants sitting around a conference table saying, "You're a genius, sir! We are honored to be in your presence!" Four years later, his brain demonstrably more melted, he's going to spend approximately twice as much time holed up in the Oval Office bedroom on "executive time" as he did in his first term. He'll be Truth-ing and yukking it up with his new buddy Elon (another incompetent idiot) and very little will actually happen. He'll be totally unable to even conceptualize the logistics of carrying out any of his apocalyptic deportation plans, and the minute something seems likely to blow up in his face, or be actual work, he'll abandon it and find someone to blame for its failure. If he tries to take the ACA away, the insurance companies will explain just how much money they'd lose, and bribe him to back down from it. Industry leaders will explain to him that no, going back to a 100% petroleum-based energy system is actually not a good idea, and we're gonna stick with the very profitable electric and solar and hybrid stuff we've been doing for years now. And then they'll bribe him to back down from that.

But, you know, I've been wrong about everything all year, so.

The crazy shit is going to start a long time before the inauguration. The number of deals being cut right now, can you even imagine?

The US president has a shitload of power, but there are a lot of people who have to help them out in order for that power to operate at full capacity. Let's hope the checks and balances do their job to limit some of the damage. No guarantees, but it does require some coordination and finesse to pull it all together.

xp'ing to some stuff from this morning

I’ve come to grudgingly admit that Trump was not a very weak candidate (obviously, he won bigly.) No other politician in my lifetime, saying and doing egregious and stupid shit every single day, the subject of endless mockery, could survive, and rally not only the MAGA faithful wearing “I’m voting for the felon” shirts but a plethora of others who overlooked his countless faults and still voted for him, because he stands for what they stand for. That’s not a weak candidate imo, it’s the perfect candidate for this perfectly fucked nation.

― Glam conspiracist (Dan Peterson), Thursday, November 7, 2024 7:33 AM (fourteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i don't think trump is as weak as e.g. unperson and others have argued itt and elsewhere, but this is a gross overreaction. he is weak relative to most reasonable counterfactuals (e.g. nikki haley)

trump has massive net unfavorables, and lost hard in 2018 and 2020. 2020 in particular he should’ve won easily given the strength of the economy through 2019, rapid development of vaccines, pandemic stimulus but lost because of his own flagrant incompetence and stupidity

he did win 2024 decisively, but so would any other republican candidate. voters’ top two issues in every poll for the last two years were the economy and immigration, and on those issues they said they trusted republicans most. a candidate who took similar positions on those issues but without trump’s countless faults would have done even better

What I am taking from anti-incumbent backlash discourse is not 'COVID has dealt a bad hand nothing that could be done' but politicians in general don't do enough for people. So when an event like COVID hits people struggle and are left to fend for themselves.

This reflects on the political class.

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, November 7, 2024 4:18 AM (eighteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think this is the wrong takeaway. the backlash isn’t against not generous enough state support during covid. there doesn't seem to be a gap between countries with more or less generous covid benefits: backlash happened in countries that were stingy (uk) as well as countries that were most generous (canada, netherlands). imo it’s more about the inflation that happened in 2021-23. and it's a non-ideological backlash. in countries with the right in power, left and center-left parties won, but the opposite happened in countries with the left/centre-left in power. in countries with generous covid benefits, many voters seem to have blamed the benefits for the inflation

Let's hope the checks and balances do their job to limit some of the damage.

I'm counting on incompetence, corruption and dumb ego infighting more than I am on checks and balances. But both can help.

And yeah people react to inflation like it's bad magic and they need a new magician.

honestly the most depressing post I've seen today is "well, I guess voters just said they prefer 8% unemployment and 2% inflation to the opposite"

imo, the inflation of 2021-2023 could have been limited through corporate and wealth tax policies that the political class was far too timid to implement. the money supply was artificially ballooned through COVID era subsidies, but the excess money that flowed to the big corporations and the rich could have been sopped up by taxation and used to pay down government debt obligations incurred during COVID. It was never going to happen bcz of corporate/wealth interests, but the option was there.

Greg Abbott is already making excuses, calling deportation "a mountain to climb."

I reprimanded a friend in 2016 who said that we, all of us in this country, deserved the beating we were all about to get, the first time Trump was elected

But now I agree. We as a country deserve all of the pain he is going to deliver.

― Dan S, Thursday, November 7, 2024 5:35 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

This country is irredeemable, but individuals are not a country, and to write and think this kind of baloney shows a major lack of empathy for how the fuckwad will make things worse for individuals who are just trying to live as best they can.

imo, the inflation of 2021-2023 could have been limited through corporate and wealth tax policies that the political class was far too timid to implement. the money supply was artificially ballooned through COVID era subsidies, but the excess money that flowed to the big corporations and the rich could have been sopped up by taxation and used to pay down government debt obligations incurred during COVID. It was never going to happen bcz of corporate/wealth interests, but the option was there.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Thursday, November 7, 2024 10:39 PM (forty-six seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

idk i don't think you can tax the rich your way out of post-pandemic supply-chain driven inflation. at least i'm not aware of any precedent for that in any country in history. would be curious to hear about it though. the inflation was pretty unprecedented, i think everyone in the world was caught off guard. fed was doing QE way too late in the game though, that's one thing no one talks about

honestly the most depressing post I've seen today is "well, I guess voters just said they prefer 8% unemployment and 2% inflation to the opposite

I think voters would prefer higher pay and not having to work two jobs to even live paycheck to paycheck.

I think voters would prefer higher pay and not having to work two jobs to even live paycheck to paycheck.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Thursday, November 7, 2024 10:48 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

number of people working two jobs was actually lower during most of biden's term than at any other point since 1994

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1ztC9

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620

That does appear to be climbing pretty steeply back to "normal" after a COVID-induced drop, though.

And the 23-24 trend line looks marginally higher than the pre-COVID years.

But none of that’s going away and will only be exacerbated so survive the next two years and maybe 2026 is a bloodbath?

i'm not arguing for any particular interpretation of that graph, which imo would be wrong--lots of things can influence the share of people working two jobs, some good some bad--just pointing out that by table's measure, the economy was better under biden than the period 1994-2010 since fewer people worked two jobs

xpost Maybe. Or Trump will be rewarded as the electorate finally realizes that inflation is under control.

Per the lame duck period in 2016/2017 we'll probably see a massive increase in people feeling positive about the economy in the next few months

Inflation is under control but rents and prices aren’t going to drop and wages aren’t going to explode.

yeah the vibes are about to get really good, republicans are gonna start saying the economy is great. i doubt they'll even wait until january

I know we're all in different stages of dealing with the post-election fallout, so I get those who feel like venting about wishing that the Trump voters become the ironic victims of their own making. But that just feels wrong.

This country is irredeemable, but individuals are not a country, and to write and think this kind of baloney shows a major lack of empathy for how the fuckwad will make things worse for individuals who are just trying to live as best they can.

I'm with The Table is the Table here, we need a system where everyone benefits, not just those who vote the right way. As angry as i am at the millions who voted for Mr. Mud Mask In Public, even those who did it for the most horrific reasons, we need to resist the calling of electoral Calvinism. Maybe I'm naive, but the Trump sycophant of today might see the light and jump ship tomorrow, and we should welcome them to the movement - they just need to know that we do not welcome [you name it]phobia, and they are good. Bob Mould said something similar about people ditching Reagan in the '80s, so who am i to argue?