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

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

https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/letter-new-left-biden/

if anyone's running low on tp

"An Open Letter to the New New Left From the Old New Left"

“work hard to elect him” lol as if, that’s definitely too much to ask

Doesnt @JoeBiden already have that white suburban female vote covered https://t.co/T8t9ntIVkj

— Kim Gordon (@KimletGordon) April 17, 2020

Kim Gordon keeping the torch burning

pfft everyone knows the intercept is in the tank for putin

Oops, meant that for the Bernie bro thread

they're all the Bernie bro thread

“work hard to elect him” lol as if, that’s definitely too much to ask

and here I thought Dems didn't know how to open a negotiation by asking for more than they think they'll get. turns out some of them must have figured it out.

I was searching for an analog in my experience to this Sanders/Biden situation. I rejected my first thought, which tried to compare it to McCarthy/Humphrey, because Humphrey was to deeply a part of the war administration that McCarthy supporters were trying to overthrow.

The nearest I could come was the counterfactual of Ed Muskie having beat out McGovern and asking McGovern supporters to help him beat Nixon. It would have been a hard sell, but we all had had a good dose of Nixon's war policy by then and I am sure that our hatred of Nixon would have sealed the deal. But to "work hard" for Muskie would have been a bridge too far for most anti-war youth.

the analog is every primary ever

if the current state of the US, both domestically and internationally, has not already put you in a position to determine if you plan to vote against or for Donald Trump, a call from a phone bank ain't gonna do it.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EV2HSSuX0AYxb_u?format=jpg&name=medium

lol

goddamn, coronavirus is rotting the brains of america's pundit class

if the current state of the US, both domestically and internationally, has not already put you in a position to determine if you plan to vote against or for Donald Trump, a call from a phone bank ain't gonna do it.

This is a helpful balm on the off-chance you were feeling guilty about not phone-banking, or if you are phone-banking and you don't feel like you're doing ENOUGH phone-banking.

Surely there is a demographic for whom a landline phone call from a stranger will make a difference in what they do or don't do. I know I am not in this demographic. Happy to be educated on who they are.

the analog is every primary ever

What makes this primary unusual is the size of the progressive movement's vote share, which must be courted by the colorless, lifeless moderate. No one as progressive as Sanders has come this close to the nomination in a very long time, except... Sanders in 2016. And in this case the occupant of the White House isn't Obama, but Trump, whose policies, corruption and incompetence make him as hated by progressives as Nixon was.

it's a shame Jay Inslee died and so couldn't be finagled into the Democratic nominee, or put on national TV every night like the governor of New York

The president’s statements this morning encourage illegal and dangerous acts. He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting COVID-19.

His unhinged rantings and calls for people to “liberate” states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before.

The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies - even while his own administration says the virus is real, it is deadly and that we have a long way to go before restrictions can be lifted.

Just yesterday, the president told the nation science would guide his plan for easing restrictions. The White House released a sensible plan laying out many of the guidelines that I agree are essential to follow, as we work to resume economic activity.

Less than 24 hrs later, Trump is off the rails, ignoring his own plan and spewing dangerous, anti-democratic rhetoric.

The president’s actions threaten his own goal of recovery. His words will likely cause a spike in infections where distancing is working.

That will further postpose the 14 days of decline his own guidance says is necessary to ease restrictions.

We appreciate our continued relationship with the vice president, Dr. Birx, Admiral Polowczyk, Admiral Giroir and others in the federal government. But their work is undermined by the president's irresponsible statements.

I hope someday we can look at today’s meltdown as something to be pitied, rather than condemned. But we don’t have that luxury today. There is too much at stake.

I encourage political leaders of all sorts to speak out firmly against the president’s calls for rebellion.

Americans need to work together to protect each other. It’s the only way to slow the spread of this deadly virus and get us on the road to recovery.

btw NY has CANCELED its prez primary while there are still local contests that will be held... so what is the prince up to?

Strong suspicion that the cancellation of the Dem primary, while it has the side effect of harming this bid to get Bernie delegates to the convention, is really about protecting threatened Dem incumbents challenged from the left by giving voters less reason to turn out https://t.co/Hcm9jqzf78

— David Dayen (@ddayen) April 27, 2020