Your next 2020 Democratic presidential primary thread: Now we're serious

let me try again:

when the candidate starts to qualify her formerly full-throated support of M4A, she will lose some supporters and gain others

Yeah that was kind of a dealbreaker!

And I love technocrats.

I don’t know how much my own experience applies to the rest of the electorate but my issue with Warren is less with her policies, not at all with her party ID in the 80s, just that she’s been running an increasingly poor, incoherent campaign. What I’ve seen of her political instincts makes me think she’d be a disastrous nominee against Trump; I don’t think she’d be able to keep Trump from completely controlling what the election is about.

Also foreign policy, I don’t get the sense she has any solid principles there, Sanders is really the only one I’d trust not to put in the same old crew to run things.

fwiw, I finally had a conversation with a relative about the primary that I’d been mildly dreading since they are a former republican and I was pretty sure, and conventional “the party is moving too far left!!!” wisdom would affirm, that it was going to be them selling me on biden. but it was instead largely about how they don’t trust him (they didn’t have a clear favorite, though if I had to guess I’d guess either warren - they didn’t think she could win but did mention her first, unprompted - or sanders, where concern was his age, to which I said everyone was old. but the fact that their least-worst preferences were also the two most progressive is, I think, something, since I doubt this relative is a special unique electoral anomaly in how they think

tl;dr the hand-waving freakoutery about how a progressive can’t win because they’re being progressive is divorced from how non-pundits assess candidates, but we knew that

What the fuck is this. pic.twitter.com/g9Hffw9aQt

— Tania Singh (@TwinklingTania) January 29, 2020

I feel bad for Big Gay Ice Cream.

when the candidate starts to qualify her formerly full-throated support of M4A, she will lose some supporters and gain others

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, January 29, 2020 10:45 AM (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah that was kind of a dealbreaker!

― Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Wednesday, January 29, 2020 10:46 AM (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I feel like a lot of the objection to Warren on this is because she released a detailed plan that called for a transition to Medicare for All, instead of just promising it outright. If M4A is adopted, it will necessarily require a transition of some sort. Perhaps it's the case that the particular policies she proposes make it less likely for M4A to ultimately come to fruition, but I hear that criticism less than the claim that she can no longer be trusted because she's not pure enough on the issue.

yep, and the M4M "farrago" is received wisdom for pundits

pure

*takes a drink*

it she really had to make that pivot for whatever reason, it was her job to do so without making it seem like a retreat/compromise, and she simply didn't do this well enough imho

https://slate.com/business/2019/11/elizabeth-warrens-health-care-medicare-for-all-single-payer-unfair.html

roffling at "big gay ice cream is the best"

It doesn’t look good. https://t.co/TSWjsAZTFM

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) January 29, 2020

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0f/Wonder_Twins.jpg

at last, it's klobbering time

biden and klobuchar. good cop, bad cop. biden gives you an unsolicited shoulder-massage. klobuchar throws a beverage at you

re the latter: at least you can duck

There should be a candidate named Andrew Yin for men who have been on a date.

— Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) January 29, 2020

daaamn

yep, and the M4M "farrago" is received wisdom for pundits

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, January 29, 2020 9:15 AM (thirty-eight minutes ago)

hi point of order

anyway I liked the "I've got a plan for that" Warren but there's literally a Medicare for All bill in the house with 150 or something cosponsors, just support that!

sorry, 118 cosponsors. If your "medicare for all" proposal isn't "I endorse HR1384, would vote for it in the Senate, and would sign it as President" you're fuckin around too much for my taste https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1384/text

lol from the past

Which is why Trump can’t win either nomination or presidency. He’s defying important realities of American politics. They’ll catch up w him

— David Frum (@davidfrum) September 7, 2015

This is exactly the kind of stuff I think about with all these anti-sanders articles. Honestly, I don't think anyone knows who the most electable candidate is, they all have hurdles to overcome.

It’s probably been linked already but Matt Yglesias, who has always struck me as a resolute pragmatist, made a well-reasoned case in Vox a couple of weeks ago that Sanders is arguably the most electable candidate based on evidence of past elections in comparison with the field.

yep, and the M4M "farrago" is received wisdom for pundits

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, January 29, 2020 9:15 AM (thirty-eight minutes ago)

hi point of order

― Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Wednesday, January 29, 2020 12:54 PM (two hours ago)

Overruled.

Yglesias will always be the "different safety standards are cool!" numbnuts to me

The M4M "Farrago" - A Memoir

Today in "fuck Amy Klobuchar":

Minneapolis NAACP, Black Lives Matter call on Klobuchar to suspend campaign

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is being called to suspend her presidential campaign after an Associated Press story published Tuesday offered a critical account of her handling of a case while she was Hennepin County's District Attorney.

As the county DA, Klobuchar led the case against Myon Burrell, who was a teenager at the time and was sentenced to life in prison for the 2002 murder of 11-year-old Tyesha Edwards. The AP story revealed that Klobuchar prosecuted Burrell, now 33, despite there being little evidence and even though his co-defendant confessed to the crime and said Burrell wasn’t there.

Though Klobuchar was not the county’s top prosecutor the second time Burrell was convicted after filing an appeal, she reportedly denied his request to attend his mother’s funeral, claiming he was a threat to society.

YIKES

TIL: Andrew Yang’s plan to fix American infrastructure is to establish a “Legion of Builders and Destroyers” 🤟⚡️ pic.twitter.com/05V8Vgj20K

— Amanda Kolson Hurley (@amandakhurley) January 30, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDtMS6dWllg

i think that's cool

honestly giving a fun name to important federal work/jobs is a harmless way to make those jobs slightly more desirable and prestigious

rename "teachers" to MIND CAPTAINS imho

a politically-isolated infrastructure super-force with restored urban-renewal superpowers might as well come with instructions for how it could be completely dominated by real estate interests, the cars-gas-highway lobby, frackers, etc. etc. also they misspelled "levees."

(but in general, yes i would support a gigantic new public works program, several times the size of the New Deal's even. desperately needed and could do tons of good at all kinds of levels, especially if fused with the GND.)

The Commander of Clear Out Bad Residential Areas subdivision will have so much authority to clean the streets of slums and shit, sounds like a really patriotic idea.

Dept Of Destruction And Creation Are One And the Same If You Really Think About It

hmmmm

Elizabeth Warren proposes criminal penalties for spreading disinformation online https://t.co/7tUD3dvDxq

— CNBC (@CNBC) January 29, 2020

that headline is wildly misleading

Morbs, do you even read stories about people you hate or skim terrible headlines

FWIW if said that if I were king a large portion of the peacetime military budget would be spent on military/civilian infrastructure projects under the banner of the ACOE so this is just a tech bro inventing a bus as far as I’m concerned

the critical issue is the "ability to overrule local ordinances and regulations," which is attractive when one pictures a handful of rich NIMBYs holding up a transit project, but nightmarish when contemplated as a means to wipe the slate clean of all efforts over the past fifty years to limit the state's power of the bulldozer, require citizen involvement, require environmental impact review, etc. yeah some of that stuff is a headache, yeah it makes projects more costly and slows them down and can often halt "good" seeming projects but it's all there for a reason. and the idea that the body deciding things would be somehow objective and apolitical is laughably naïve at best (tho very consistent with contemporary technocracy discourse, the bread and butter of SV types like Yang).

Offering this insignia to the new Legion.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71EYCy8jkOL._AC_SL1010_.jpg

rename "teachers" to MIND CAPTAINS imho

― sean gramophone, Thursday, January 30, 2020 11:56 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

approved

I don't hate EW, Alfred, I just know a player when I see one

Forgive me if I’m completely ignorant and this has been discussed a million times, but wth?!

I don't think you've seen ALL of this.

In 1987, when @JoeBiden ran for President, he didn't get caught in 1 lie, he got caught in at least 9 wildly different lies and acts of plagiarism.

It engulfed his campaign and he resigned in disgrace.

FULL STORY: https://t.co/vm18cq7OAa pic.twitter.com/FUjALdqA3C

— Shaun King (@shaunking) January 29, 2020

those of us old enough remember

Barack sure could pick em eh

ah shaun king, the integrity and honesty expert has logged on.

Time to drag out 87-year-old Mark Russell to reprise his "Is it Joe Biden, or is it Memorex?" zing

lol, cold-blooded

I asked Biden what he sees as his biggest contrast with Buttigieg. He replied: “You guys have seen pete, he’s a good guy, you’ve seen bernie, you’ve seen me. Some things are just a self-evident contrast. I’ve gotten more than 8,600 votes in my life.”

— Alexandra Jaffe (@ajjaffe) January 30, 2020