Your 2020 Presidential Candidate Speculation Thread

the thought that someone could support a politician best known for backing Bernie and yet also consider themselves a libertarian makes my brain bleed.

But no other Democrat has been received like this. Gabbard has alienated some “Democrats by meeting with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, and, more recently, by echoing conservative accusations of “religious bigotry” against Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) after she questioned a conservative Catholic Trump nominee. That led the president of the Center for American Progress to joke that Gabbard could own the “pro-Assad, pro-Bannon, anti-Mazie Hirono lane” of the primary.”

“But what makes some Democrats most nervous about a Gabbard candidacy is the potential for mischief on her behalf. RT, the Russia-funded news network, has run a series of glowing pieces about Gabbard, content that dredges up painful liberal memories of Russian propaganda boosting the 2016 Trump campaign.

“Establishment figures on both Right and Left are scrambling to smear the antiwar congresswoman with impeccable identity-politics bona fides,” read a typical RT dispatch this weekend.

Gabbard has barely registered in early primary polls, but no candidate makes Democrats so nervous about the tone of their coming contest.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/paloma/the-trailer/2019/01/13/the-trailer-will-sanders-s-2016-supporters-rally-behind-him-this-time/5c3954241b326b66fc5a1c2e/

the thought that someone could support a politician best known for backing Bernie and yet also consider themselves a libertarian makes my brain bleed.

― Evans on Hammond (evol j), 14. januar 2019 17:12 (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh... The only Danish dude I know who was a fall on BernieBro - he went to the US on holiday to volunteer - used to be anti-tax libertarian posting on facebook about how socialists wanted to send all opponents to Gulags. There's def an overlap, however small. But the Ron Paul brigade was always small as well.

I don't think we need to think too hard about Tulsi. The "ex-gay" stuff is quite enough to put her out of the running for your bog-standard NPR / Whole Foods urban-suburban cultiral lib set.

Unexpected: One of the first issues Elizabeth Warren emails her list about after getting into the presidential race is...D.C. statehood.

(from Friday, am told this went to her whole list, not just DC residents) pic.twitter.com/npUdmpEX6V

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) January 14, 2019

v cool

that sounds like a great way to tip the balance in the Senate, but what kind of timeframe does this have? could it happen, like, before 2020?

it'll never happen

same with Puerto Rico, or American Samoa or wherever - the minority party will block any move to give the majority party more Senate seats

Maybe the republican party won’t always exist.

It's kinda insane it didn't happen in 2009.

a great way to really ensure it never happens is to never get popular politicians to propose/promote it

I don't think convincing Democrats of the virtues of statehood for various American territories is really the issue

Might be just good politics to get it in the conversation, it’s not like she’ll make her entire candidacy on promising to make it happen. If the hindrance to it is Republicans then getting them on record trying to justify the unjustifiable doesn’t hurt

Republicans mostly ignore the issue of DC and PR statehood, but they've had decades in which to form their vague and evasive public justifications, so this is hardly a potent 'gotcha'.

There is basically no downside to a D candidate advocating DC statehood.

Dems are like "yes please, two more Senators."

Republicans get even more spittle-flecked with hysterics about the Radical Liberal Agenda!!!eleventy!!, which means they spend more time with Elizabeth Warren occupying their heads "rent-free," as they used to say about Sarah Palin.

Lastly the constitutional hurdles it would take would involve decades of sustained advocacy and truly herculean political will. Neither of which is realistic in the present environment. So it's a zero-cost feel-good move to declare yourself in favor of it.

(Which is not to say I'm against it! Quite the contrary. Just saying it doesn't cost a Dem anything to advocate it, and it's so unlikely to actually come up for a vote that it doesn't require much effort past the general statement of support.)

Similarly I’d kind of like to see ending the electoral college brought up by a candidate even if the hurdles are impossible

Maybe the republican party won’t always exist.

― Trϵϵship, Monday, January 14, 2019 12:58 PM

Nor will America.

Oh you heard about Oumuamua too?

Similarly I’d kind of like to see ending the electoral college brought up by a candidate even if the hurdles are impossible

― Nerdstrom Poindexter, Monday, January 14, 2019 3:31 PM (fifty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tombot was convinced after the 2016 election that the electoral college would be abolished in 5 years

lol

Eliding the differences between someone who publicly supported civil unions and was too cowardly to say more and someone who *opposed even civil unions* while calling gay people "homosexual extremists" is a pretty stan move, imo. https://t.co/Q6ir3ZjG8i

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) January 15, 2019

Gabbard fans/stans are so fucking weird

I do think it's a little off-putting to hand-wave Dem politicians who weren't staunchly in favor of gay marriage until recently. I heard the Pod Save guys do this on their latest episode and even though I know I don't have a lot of company on this board in terms of generally liking those guys, it did stick in my craw. Someone like Obama deserves zero credit for "evolving" on the issue. I've been wrong about a lot of things in my life but I have always been 100% in favor of gay marriage, even as a teenager, so miss me with that bullshit.

I would like to not have Sanders, Trump or Clinton run in 2020.

Xpost Agreed but it’s often in the context of the exceedingly bad equivalency of people the pro civil unions but too scared to publicly support gay marriage pols as “the same thing” as Gabbard’s past.

*people comparing

I don’t see a good reason for Bernie from his POV not to run as long as he’s healthy. I don’t want to see a return of 2016 grievances to the discourse as much as anybody else but I don’t think that kind of thing is going to be a part of his message. And if it’s not everyone else should be able to avoid bringing that stuff into the debate.

yeah I'm with Simon, being against gay marriage is insane and always has been, Dems who said nothing in 2004 when Karl Rove made it a marquee issue are cowards. Gabbard is on another level though - you can't recover from a documented past of yelling at activists and calling them slurs and "homosexual extremists."

Yeah, I never understood people who evolved in that thinking. They mean it just became a political or social liability at some point.

yeah that's something you figure out when you're a kid, it's more black & white than abortion for example imo

Abortion was pretty black and white to me as a kid.

yeah my only change on abortion even as someone raised catholic was pivoting from the "should be safe/legal/rare" line to "free, easily accessible + on demand"

obama's "evolution" on gay rights was of course implausible and surely his early reticence reflected cynicism and political cowardice. but it more or less flew, because he *was* tracking (or trailing) public opinion so well. it genuinely jibed with an "evolution" that a ton of straight americans had gone through in the course of the 90s and 00s. that that happened reflects tremendous ongoing legal and cultural work done by queer activists for decades, so that should be celebrated.

gabbard's version doesn't wash, not only because the stuff in her history is so egregiously and non-passively shitty, but because she was *not* in step with this cultural shift. she was screaming slurs and opposing civil unions when the norm was becoming some version of "huh maybe being gay isn't a choice, and my neighbor's nephew is gay and the sky hasn't fallen in, and 'civil union' sounds like a nice nonthreatening thing, and i find the gay characters on TV kinda loud and annoying but also harmless and sexless." now we can look back at that period and its blinkered separate-but-equal solutions and boxed-in roles for gay identity and sigh, and we should. but obama was in step with the outflowing tide, and gabbard was behind it; her remarks and activism now sit high and dry as ugly things that most dem voters are not going to feel a positive emotional identification with.

yeah that's something you figure out when you're a kid, it's more black & white than abortion for example imo

If you grow up in a churchy environment and go to private Christian school for most of your youth, you might be college age before your perspective begins to "evolve." I'm speaking from personal experience.

That said, Tulsi Gabbard's history is FUCKING AWFUL and does not mirror mine in any way.

Abortion was pretty black and white to me as a kid.

― Yerac, Tuesday, January 15, 2019 12:24 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

me too, but unlike gay marriage there are subsets to the issue, liek Simon & Johnny said: what stage is OK to terminate, "should be last resort/rare," access, pay. gay marriage is literally just two people that want to get married.

marriage is pretty overrated as a hill to die on but if it prevents death or suffering i hope everyone gets fucking married

equal marriage is a hill to die on

I never felt like “marriage” was the ultimate point so much as it was an obvious way to push 14th amendment jurisprudence forward as pertains gay folks. Like for all his various flaws and the vagueness of the Obergeffel opinion Kennedy did put it in black and white once again that equal protection means equal protection and that was worth the effort. I’m sure all the wealthy white gay marriage advocates are now turning their efforts to the protection of young trans people of color right?

equality is a hill to die on

Looking back on it, sure it seems ludicrous to deny equal marriage rights to all consenting adults. But when you grow up in an environment that's so sheilded and heteronormative, you really don't begin to experience real empathy for people not exactly like you until you begin meeting them.

I was fortunate to never have been directly told that homosexuality is evil and that gay people were out to destroy civilization. I was pretty much never told anything at all. But that's unfortunately not the case for a bunch of people who grew up in situations similar to mine.

That damage is long lasting and deeply embedded.

When someone says their thinking has evolved, I totally get it.

i don't really get "evolving" on gay marriage in middle age. i mean just from a personal point of view, in my 30s my police are so calcified already lol

politics fuck

All depends on when you start questioning yourself, really. I was still firmly in the "separate but equal" camp as recently as the 2000 election...just like a lot of candidates were.

And that was 10 years after I last stepped foot in a church.

I never felt like “marriage” was the ultimate point so much as it was an obvious way to push 14th amendment jurisprudence forward as pertains gay folks.

^^^ This. And you know who was most obtuse about misunderstanding this basic point? Gays. NO WE DON'T WANT A BOURGEOIS INSTITUTION.

seems a little bit of an obtuse point, obv that wasn't the liberal rationale for opposing gay marriage

look i'm not a fuckin RCP think-by-numbers type or anything but the police unions question seem resolutely uncomplicated to me

1. police unions are unions
2. police, when following their typical orders at scale, enact the power relations of private property and capital
3. police, at scale, are workers operating on behalf of the ruling classes
4. a police union, by operating in the ostensible best interest of those particular workers, operates at scale on behalf of the power relations of private property and capital
5. while this is the opposite of the typical purpose of a labor union, it's very much in line with the purpose of a company union, which have a long history that's continued since their outlawing nearly a hundred years ago

it's not about semantics it's about power ffs