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

imo she’s laying the groundwork for not endorsing Bernie because she is a Democratic Party lifer (post-party switch obv), and that’s NOT meant to be an epithet in this instance. she probably sees many more years of public service in her future and she wants to be in the tent. if the Bernie-sphere can be rendered as toxic as Biden’s public lifetime of unconscionable positions and the fact that he’s very clearly not operating at peak mental capacity, then it’s seen as wholly defensible even as her policies ostensibly align much more closely with Sanders

I don’t actually blame her from a certain standpoint, the party apparatus is very powerful and flouting it comes with a price. but if you think this specific tactic gets us any closer to single payer or a meaningful reduction in carbon emissions, then you have as little claim on political reality as t most pie in the sky Bernie bro.

Puffin otm’ing up the joint

man who could have seen this ‘sanders cannot lose, he can only be betrayed’ narrative coming

Biden's faults have not stopped him from getting endorsements from people who are not white nor male nor straight.

"The people I hear from who are mourning the Warren campaign have a few more concerns. They speak of how all women candidates have been treated and how it resonates with things they see in their own lives. Talked over, shouted down, passed over, ignored."

This isn't going to go away till the world changes, and what we perhaps have is a candidate who may set things on a different path. This is individualizing pain and refusing to look at what's at stake for everyone else. Try to gain power. The moderates totally understand this.

"what we perhaps have" we???

This isn't going to go away till the world changes

Otm, if only there were a way to try to get the world to change. You could call it, I dunno, "tickypols"

man who could have seen this ‘sanders cannot lose, he can only be betrayed’ narrative coming

I dunno. I do have a daughter, but even if I didn't I would like to think that I would advocate for a better atmosphere in which she and her peers might live and conduct a public life in a democracy.

well I don’t blame you will. the gym is the quintessence of individualized pain

xp

my warren-supporting friends are regularly voicing their sentiments this week from what is obviously an endorsement of the premise that she was clearly the best candidate, specifically in the sense of being most intelligent capable and effective. in each case it's that premise that licenses their implying that others are at fault in some way for not sharing their position, because how else COULD anyone reject the best most intelligent etc etc?

i don't think any candidate's supporters have more of an affinity for that pattern of thinking than any other, so it's unfair to insinuate that there is something special about sanders supporters in that regard.

I think Warren’s most objective advantage over Sanders and Biden would’ve been that she’s least likely to be dead soon and that’s hard to campaign on

she probably sees many more years of public service in her future

she's 70

Many (though certainly not all) Warren ppl have long been condescendingly baffled by the concept that anyone could prefer Sanders. She was long branded as "Sanders for adults". Not shocked that hasn't helped with the burying of hatchets. (obviously some bernie folks have uh their own flaws but we've covered that)

big difference between 70 and 79

Yeah but she’s a woman, clearly very sharp, and by all appearances very healthy. She could still be doing this well into her 80s. and I hope she does

x post to morbs

This isn't going to go away till the world changes

Ensuring equality and freedom for women is changing the world. It's not the thing you wait to do afterward.

even as I hurtle towards middle age I will cop to being extremely ageist when it comes to politics, but Sanders (and you some degree Warren) have curbed some of that for me. I mean besides those two, who are the legitimate leftist firebrands in the democratic part older than 35 and younger than 70?

*to some degree Warren

I guess it depends on what you mean by leftist or a firebrand.

or for that matter, llegitimate.

pretty sure if Warren winds up not endorsing Bernie, it's not simply going to be because of Bernie Bros. You can mention a thing without it being "the only" thing. or even the primary thing.

I think losing her own home state -not even the runner-up- had to have been a severe blow to Warren and is also messing with her ability to come to an endorsement announcement either way. I’m just projecting here, as a fellow human being , but when I take a hard hit that shakes my sense of being supported in the world, it’s just hard to come back quickly and make full-throated declarations on behalf of anything or anyone (including myself). And an endorsement is not very credible or useful if it’s not full-throated and delivered with conviction. Just a thought.

fair.

I guess... national profile, generally positive associations, at least within the left of center and further left, and think the GND (or similar) and M4A are as important as every single Republican sees the pro life movement and protecting their read of the 2nd Amnemdnet

Ensuring equality and freedom for women is changing the world. It's not the thing you wait to do afterward.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Saturday, 7 March 2020 bookmarkflaglink

ok, is Warren's silence doing this? Bernie went all out for Clinton, why can't Warren do the minimum?

Just to expand on my point: I think coming in third in Mass. could have sent Warren’s internal political compass spinning to the point where strategic decisions like endorsements will be difficult for a while. Maybe she’s waiting for the compass to settle.

But not spinning out so hard she's avoiding media appearances

not at all surprising to me she did poorly here, she appeals to the same narrow band as anywhere else once you put a bernie to the left of her

my warren-supporting friends are regularly voicing their sentiments this week from what is obviously an endorsement of the premise that she was clearly the best candidate, specifically in the sense of being most intelligent capable and effective. in each case it's that premise that licenses their implying that others are at fault in some way for not sharing their position, because how else COULD anyone reject the best most intelligent etc etc?

i don't think any candidate's supporters have more of an affinity for that pattern of thinking than any other, so it's unfair to insinuate that there is something special about sanders supporters in that regard.

― j., Saturday, March 7, 2020 1:27 PM (fifteen minutes ago)

idk I don't see a lot of sanders supporters openly admitting that their campaign has made mistakes, and while I agree that there's plenty of finger pointing from the warren camp, there's also been a decent amount of talk about the mistakes that were made. maybe the bros are all sitting on their hands waiting until the body is officially declared dead, but I kinda doubt it. and I mean, sanders went from winning with 35% of the vote to losing with 35% of the vote - I think there's a good argument that the campaign actually had a fairly cohesive strategy (trump 2016), just one that was dependent on forces outside of its control.

i don't know that there was a way to beat such a sudden coordinated push

I will say my Warren friends (most tbh, except for the Pete dork) definitely seem to be gravitating towards Joe, mostly bc they seem chastened(?) by a mediaverse that rewards centrism and have been convinced he’s possibly ever so slightly more electable. And yes, a couple are pretty angry and seem to be doing so punitively. I’m not poking the bear, but the latter does seem as futile and wrong-headed as Bernie dead-enders who did the same to Hillary in 2016. I was annoyed by that back then, and it honestly took me 2 solid years to come around to the candidate himself.

That post should have been preceded with:

it may just be online anecdata in the places I check, but it does seem like a lot of Warren supporters have jumped over to Bernie.

fwiw after finding out about the term “bobos” by which Parisians refer to the bohemian-ish bourgeoisie that populate some of their northeastern quartiers I’ve gradually and begrudgingly come to accept that’s the label that best describes my station.

Did French people learn this from David Brooks or was he adopting a Parisianism?

The level of antipathy here for Sanders and his campaign has genuinely surprised and saddened me. If he is struggling even here that paints such a bleak picture for the future. It all seemed so different even a week or two ago.

sanders went from winning with 35% of the vote to losing with 35% of the vote

Well yeah. Sanders looked great early on because he had the biggest base in a fractured field. But it was always, always, always a minority of the total field. That's a good place to start from -- everyone would rather start with a locked-in 35 percent than 15 percent or 5 percent. But of course it's not enough and of course you have to build it. It's like starting a poker hand with pocket aces -- it's nice, but if you don't add to it, you're probably going to lose.

The "sudden coordinated push" shouldn't have surprised anyone, because everyone always should have been adding up all of those candidates' numbers as "the moderate bloc" or whatever, and assume that eventually one of them could emerge as the consensus. The consensus happened fast, sure, but you had to be ready for it, have a strategy for it. As far as anyone can tell so far, the Sanders campaign didn't seem to have that strategy.

Lol what on earth could the strategy have been

the "better things aren't possible" message has really won out, I'm starting to grimly believe it

#BeBest

hope your furious children are a comfort to you in your old age Shakey

#NotUsThem

Lol what on earth could the strategy have been

I don't know man, I'm not spending millions of dollars running a political campaign. But if I was, it's the kind of thing I would have planned for.

Tbh i think Bernie ran the best campaign he could have. You can bitch about surrogates and supporters but he was rock solid throughout. I hope it was enough to spark some more AOC types to spring up, that's really the best outcome we could hope for at this point.

i don't know that there was a way to beat such a sudden coordinated push

the way to beat such a coordinated push would be to be a candidate that appealed to a broader spectrum of voters. maybe there was just no way to do that without tarnishing his brand - it's totally possible. but he didn't spend his week-as-frontrunner softening the revolution, he spent it railing on the establishment + putting every florida democratic politician in a spot where they had to publicly disagree with him. maybe he wasn't gonna break his ceiling regardless, and again, maybe the trump-style plurality coup was actually his best shot at getting the nomination so it wasn't 'a mistake'. but he ended up where he was because of a sequence of actions taken by bernie sanders, and the warren betrayal narrative mostly seems like a way to avoid admitting that.

the fucked up thing is I lead an exceedingly comfortable life, I could tune out, not vote for anybody, keep my head down, avoid the 'vid, and be basically fine from now until pogroms break out one of these years or I stop being able to get the pharmacopoeia that keeps me comfortable or whatever, but could I do that while friends start suffering sooner than I do?

Tbh i think Bernie ran the best campaign he could have

for example

If a majority of Democratic primaries voters want what Bernie is selling but not from him maybe a better vector will run next time. If a majority of Democratic primaries voters are better things aren't possible true believers and will stay that way til they die then lol we're all gonna die

I hope Bernie gets enough delegates to extract some useful concessions, whatever those might be.

Ignoring whatever shit everyone's fighting about to publicly complain that there was a debate for every primary/caucus in February and nothing between ST and mini ST. Seems stupid.

It may be true, maybe Bernie has run the best possible Bernie campaign and the reality is that despite fervent hopes of his followers there was just no way to turn him from a cult artist to a mainstream phenom. In which case, you can either say, "Well, I guess he wasn't the figure to lead this particular charge." Or you can say, fuck all these morons who don't know what's good for them. Whichever makes you feel better.