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

http://cdn.mises.org/styles/slideshow/s3/static-page/img/lesser_evil.jpg

meh

anyway time for a general thread

imagine being surprised by this in any way

lol srsly, he literally said that he would do exactly this

hE dIdN"t SaY tHe WoRdS rIgHt

The lesser evil jpg coming from the Mises Institute is a nice touch.

VON Mises, thank you.

srsly tho let's lock this, enfin

seconded

you know, before we close it maybe we can just hash out the culpability of elizabeth warren's actions on the demise of bernie sanders' campaign, particular around sup-

(Karl makes 'zipping it' motion across his closed lips)

guess what?

fuck Obama

NYT: "Mr. Obama has been considerably more engaged in the campaign’s denouement than has been previously revealed....he was becoming more agitated by the state of the race as Mr. Sanders surged, and Mr. Biden slumped." https://t.co/jLv3JVyID8

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 14, 2020

Biden ripping off his face to reveal that he’s been Obama all along would be a boost tbh

someone more talented than I am needs to get on the Mission Impossible gif ASAP

uh, what is the news again? read the lead paragraphs again

Over the past year, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former President Barack Obama practiced a political distancing of sorts, with Mr. Obama maintaining a posture of public neutrality in the Democratic primaries, offering counsel to any candidate who called (most did), and Mr. Biden saying he wanted to win on his own.

But with calibrated stealth, Mr. Obama has been considerably more engaged in the campaign’s denouement than has been previously revealed.

For months, he had kept in close contact with senior party officials, in hopes of preventing a repeat of the protracted and nasty 2016 primary race.

Then, in the weeks after it became clear that Mr. Biden was the party’s near-certain nominee, Mr. Obama — telling a friend he needed to “accelerate the endgame” — had at least four long conversations with his former vice president’s remaining rival, Senator Bernie Sanders. Mr. Obama’s efforts to ease the senator out of the race played a significant role in his decision to end his bid and, on Monday, endorse Mr. Biden, according to people close to the Vermont independent.

so, he kept in contact with the DNC before it was clear biden was going to win. and then, after it was clear he was going to win, he wanted bernie sanders to exit - just like a million other people and half of this board

goodness me a former president exercising the power of other former presidents -- the world may end

i would be more interested if there was some juicy information about obama orchestrating the klob/pete dropout just before super tuesday. but this is the closest it gets:

...former President Barack Obama practiced a political distancing of sorts, with Mr. Obama maintaining a posture of public neutrality in the Democratic primaries, offering counsel to any candidate who called (most did), and Mr. Biden saying he wanted to win on his own.

...Mr. Obama did not directly encourage Mr. Sanders’s rivals to endorse Mr. Biden ahead of the decisive Super Tuesday primaries. But he did tell Pete Buttigieg, a moderate, that he would never have more leverage than on the day that he was quitting the race — and the former South Bend mayor soon joined the avalanche of former candidates backing Mr. Biden.

so obama informed pete that he had some leverage in quitting the race at that point. i'm going to assume pete had figured that out already.

on the whole the story seems to be that obama didn't want bernie to win, but that the DNC was frustrated with him for not being vocal about it and wanted him to more actively use his political clout

Either this news is old news or reality finally played out pretty much exactly as I imagined it. Like, I thought there were already at least strong hints that Obama had been orchestrating things behind the scenes to swing the nom in Great Granduncle Joe's direction.

And I assumed he was instrumental in the near-simultaneous Buttigieg/Klobuchar drop-out.

if Obama is demonstrating a Machiavellian acumen for behind-the-scenes power, it will shock many of us who watched him in the White House for eight years.

https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1PlJQmrlRMzJE

(that's Obama endorsing Biden)

Why is Obama so much better at looking into a camera and saying stuff than anybody else is?

he borrowed some equipment from Netflix

He's the only person who has ever used a teleprompter

Meanwhile, poor Trump is forced by the deep state to wing it for two hours every night.

I assumed he was instrumental in the near-simultaneous Buttigieg/Klobuchar drop-out.

I kept seeing people -- mostly Sanders supporters -- saying this, and I never understood it. Not saying there weren't backroom phone calls and nudges, but it was 100 percent in Buttigieg and Klobuchar's own self-interest to do that. They knew they were both going to have to drop out right after Super Tuesday (whatever they were saying to their rallies at the time, they had polling, they knew where it was going). By dropping out and endorsing before Super Tuesday, they maximized their leverage to get whatever they got for it, even if it was just prime speaking spots at the convention or consideration for Cabinet posts or whatever. It was smart politics all the way around, and the motivations for everyone were perfectly clear. There didn't need to be anything sinister about it.

Their endorsements were way more valuable -- to them, as much as Biden -- on March 2 than they would have been on March 4.

discussed a little in this piece last week:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/09/barack-obama-joe-biden-2020-campaign-178115

But some of his aides now concede that behind the scenes Obama played a role in nudging things in Biden’s direction at the crucial moment when the Biden team was organizing former candidates to coalesce around Biden.

“I know he did a few things,” said one longtime close adviser to Obama. “He was talking to Biden regularly in that period. I don’t know exactly what he said, but you can speculate! It’s noteworthy that he called Klobuchar and the others right when they got out.”

A person with knowledge of Obama’s conversation with Buttigieg after the former Indiana mayor exited the race explained it this way: “Obama talked to Pete the night that Pete dropped out. When Pete told Obama that he was 99.9 percent of the way there in terms of endorsing Biden, I would say that Obama was encouraging. But I would also say that Obama was very careful not to be seen as putting a thumb on the scale. He and the people close to him are very careful about the optics — the 2016-style optics. Sanders and his supporters had reason to believe the party put the thumb on the scale for Hillary in 2016 and he wanted to avoid that. Obama wasn’t the driving force, but he was encouraging of people who had those instincts to rally around Biden. But he was very cautious and discreet in how he operated.”

A Democratic strategist added, “The truth is, he’d rather be on David Geffen’s yacht than dealing with internal Democratic party bullshit.”

also no need to get excited, but an oil collapse on topic of covid recession is not good for republicans in texas

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/13/economic-meltdown-democrats-hope-texas-184613

Trump was talking to Mohammed bin Salman just last week trying to get oil prices back up to the level where fracking makes a profit, mainly because all the states where fossil fuels are a big component of the economy (except CA) are in Trumpland.

“The truth is, he’d rather be on David Geffen’s yacht than dealing with internal Democratic party bullshit.”

Now that's the Obama we know and love.

He long stopped impressing me but it's rare to see a recently retired president acknowledge his policies wouldn't work anymore; he even tipped his hat to Elizabeth Warren.

Political rags teasing liberals with the hope of a purple Texas is just cruel at this point.

Orgasm denial BDSM for former DailyKOS readers.

uh the geffen “quote” is from a “dem strategist.”

Orgasm denial BDSM for former DailyKOS readers.

politics thread title for May

is this good

"It may have taken a once-in-a-century pandemic, but the Democrats are not in disarray," writes @jmartnyt. "Not since 2004 has the Democratic Party rallied behind its nominee this early." https://t.co/939UenM2Ys

— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) April 14, 2020

The John Kerry Presidential Library is a good place to stop if you're visiting Boston.

luv 2 not be in disarray

it's like I always say if you want to gauge the health of a party you look at how arrayed it is

array of hope

And I see, that these are the eyes of disarray
Would you even care?

quicker than array of light!

everybody loves arrayment

it's a shame about array

voodoo array

new phone, who disarray

I wanna know, have you ever seen array

a hard arrayn's gonna fall

here comes array again

stil I wonder, who'll stop array