We need more candidates to drop out of the Democratic field, but I’m not happy at seeing some of the more interesting candidates dropping out, like Julian Castro. We still have 14 people spreading confusion and acting as spoilers! Get rid of Steyer and Bloomberg, we don’t need any more narcissistic billionaires. Williamson is a flake, Yang is an oblivious entrepreneur, Gabbard is a mole, Bennet, Delaney, and Patrick are negligible nobodies who don’t have a chance. It’s incomprehensible that anyone is still promoting Buttigieg. I wish I could fling Biden into a dumpster somewhere, but he has a polling advantage and needs to be taken seriously. There were 15 candidates who dropped out!
The process is generating a lot of noise and the winnowing that is happening isn’t based on merit, at all.
But if we don’t prop up a bunch bland, apolitical, rich and mostly white folks, the Democrats might actually have to put money and support behind someone with actual ideas. And with the prospect of Donald Trump getting
electedre-elected, it’s just too, too risky to back a candidate who might want government to do something!I like that Bloomberg is spending millions on attack ads and making himself unpopular. That is a good strategy.
Biden could be less disastrous if he picked a progressive VP, to set them up for a run against the dem party as well as Pence. But he’s too into himself, which is the problem. He could take Mayor Pete as VP “so the kid can get some training” but again Biden is just about Biden.
The only way I’d support Biden is if his VP is someone like Stacey Abrams. If the dems run Biden they will lose Pennsylvania.
Akira MacKenzie@1
I don’t think that’s a serious concern. No matter who is elected, if it’s not Trump, we’ll almost certainly still have a GOP Senate and guaranteed gridlock. If by some miracle, Democrats retake the Senate, it gets a little more interesting, but that wasn’t enough for Obama his first two years (he did push through a weak stimulus package and ACA, and the backlash was overwhelming).
I took one of my rare trips outside the SF Bay Area recently and saw some knucklehead’s truck with a giant Trump flag attached. That’s the kind of enthusiasm Democrats are up against. I will vote for any Democrat on the ballot in the general election (including a ham sandwich like the comic, or my preference, a big rubber stopper in the door of the Oval Office). I would prefer Warren if my preferences mattered (they don’t). Biden is a really dumb choice for the party, but I’ll vote for him. Everything about Buttigieg makes me feel I am being sold a product, like he hits all these great bullet points some committee came up with. I think Sanders at this point is the only one running a competent campaign with organic, enthusiastic support, and ought to be covered that way (not that I think there is a “Republicrat media conspiracy” but those in the media just naturally think like beltway insiders without realizing it). I will not vote for Sanders with much enthusiasm but I am starting to think he is the most electable candidate.
Bernie’s THE one to vote for!
jack16
“The process is generating a lot of noise and the winnowing that is happening isn’t based on merit, at all.”
When was the last time we had any election that was based on merit at all?
Seriously, when? I can’t recall a single election over the course of my near six decades of life!
wzrd1@5 I agree that “merit” is besides the point. Symbolism more that “qualification” is hugely important. Trump has very little ability, but there’s no mistaking what people were voting for by choosing him (and what people like me were voting against). Sometimes political savvy is useful (LBJ or even Bill Clinton) so I like to see that in a candidate. An ability to inspire, like FDR or JFK is probably the main thing voters are after. (I also think Obama had plenty of “merit” and though I like him, I don’t think he was very effective.) There are a lot of subjective factors in what makes a great or even good president.
That said, the question of the day is not what makes a good president, but how to remove a truly terrible one.
If Sanders and Warren join a single ticket, I for one will squee all the way to the polls.
Cory Booker is still in, right? I kind of like Booker, but I don’t see the point.
@#2, Marcus Ranum
So, you missed Biden’s speculation on CNN that he might choose a Republican as a running mate? Because hey, nothing says “wants to fix the country” like “thinks the Republicans would not immediately try to assassinate him to take back the Presidency”.
Whoa whoa PZ you better be careful talkin about my boy Yang, son. I agree with you on all the other candidates but Yang still has some fight in him.
Humanistic capitalism? Healthcare for all? Freedom dividend? What’s not to like? Him and Bernie have the most coherently laid out policies of any of the candidates.
That’s why I will be pulling the lever for Yang this year. Get ready Seattle, get ready America. President chingchong on the way. (Asian people get to say chingchong.)
Yang 2020 y’all, 1000 dollars get that bag.
Thank you Pharyngula, Slatestarcodex, and thelastpsychiatrist for shaping my perspectives over the last few years. This year will be the first year voting for me and I’m stoked.
Beating Trump, yes, but in my ridiculously unrealistic dreams, a President who will also govern so as to prevent the country from backsliding even further into the abyss once he or she has left the office.
Of course it will all be for nought if Dems don’t take both houses and get a good hold of state and local offices!
Well, I’ll say this for Yang; he has a sense of humor, which has made this whole interminable process slightly more bearable.
While I don’t see Yang as president, he’s bringing up some important ideas that I hope gain wider traction. And for a while there, I thought he was consistently improving as a candidate. But I was very disappointed the last time I saw him, walking back his support for Medicare fir All, even saying there should be co-payments so people had “skin in the game”. Ugh.
@Marcus Ranum #2:
Why do you say this? I thought Pennsylvania was where he was most beloved, the “third senator” for the state. Polls in PA (as in the US generally) show the widest margin for Biden over Trump, vs. other hypothetical matchups. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/pennsylvania/
Well, we all have “skin” in the healthcare “game” whether we like it or not, but I do think a lot of leftists have a kneejerk reaction to any discussion of incentives. While it’s true that these arguments are most often abused to justify inequality, it doesn’t mean there is no validity to them. Often nominal fees are enough to discourage waste (e.g. 10 cents for a disposable bag). In the case of healthcare, people should probably be seeking more preventive care and less emergency care. They should get the emergency care when they need it, no questions asked and it shouldn’t bankrupt them, but the exact implementation of policies can definitely make a difference in the behavioral response and in the resulting effectiveness. This should be studied empirically, not on the basis of distaste for word choices (and I hate “skin in the game” just as much as anyone).
The expression comes up with higher education as well. Personally, I think our university system is so broken that merely subsidizing existing high tuitions is likely to fail. If someone convinced me that paying everyone’s college tuition would have the desired outcome, I’d be all for it. However, it seems unlikely to me based on everyone I’ve ever met and their attitudes about education. If someone is working hard, taking their classes seriously, and gaining a benefit, they should be able to keep doing it and should never be forced to leave for financial reasons. If they’re not, then they should find some other path and not use college as a holding pattern. (Note: I don’t see a way to accomplish this idea; I’m just stating the constraints on the problem.)
I’m increasingly convinced that Bernie Sanders is the only electable opponent to Trump, because Sanders supporters are the most likely to sit out the election if they don’t get their favorite. Are the much-hated “neoliberals” really going to vote for Trump because Sanders is some kind of existential threat? I think it is pretty likely that even someone who wished Hillary Clinton was running this year (and they exist) would still do whatever it takes to defeat Trump.
And underreported upset in 2016 (that would have been a big story if Clinton won) was that Orange County, CA went Democratic for the first time since 1936. It’s conceivable that some of the “suburban Republican” votes for Hillary Clinton will now go to the newly mainstreamed Trump. But I don’t think Democrats will win those back with centrism either.
Personally, I find Sanders inflexible and annoying, though I respect his integrity. Despite that, I am more likely than ever to vote for him in the CA Democratic primary. It’s him or Warren at this point.
Williamson seems to be preparing to drop out of the race.
Link
@#16, PaulBC
An interesting question. Not only is Obama reported to be willing to sabotage Sanders if he wins the nomination with a sheer majority of delegates — with others in the party apparently concurring — which would absolutely guarantee a Trump win and the complete destruction of the Democratic Party’s chances for the foreseeable future. (The Democrats don’t control elections. Independents do. Which independents, exactly, are going to vote Democratic if the party explicitly refuses to even run the candidate preferred by a majority of its own membership, let alone the country as a whole?) In addition to that, of course, although different sources give different figures, everyone is pretty much agreed that supporters of Hillary Clinton in 2008 voted for McCain both in larger numbers and larger percentage than supporters of Bernie Sanders voted for Trump in 2016. So there’s a certain amount of evidence that all the people demanding that Sanders supporters have to support the party no matter what will toss that argument out the window the minute it applies to them, instead.
Frankly, I find your attitude ridiculous.
For the last 30 years or so, “centrists” like the Clintons have pushed the Democrats further and further to the right. And every time they have done so on important policy, the degree to which they have differed with non-centrists has been the degree to which the outcomes of their chosen policies have been wrong.
Not “immoral”. Not “unethical”. Just wrong.
Did the Centrists really believe that Reagan’s NAFTA would help Americans? Possibly — but regardless of whether they believed so or not, the policy was a disaster, and it only got ratified because of them. Before the Clinton camp took over enough of Congress to get ratification through, NAFTA was a dead letter like the TPP later became (thank goodness).
Did the Centrists really believe that “the end of welfare as we know it” would be a good idea? Did they really think that deregulating the markets and the banks (on Alan Greenspan’s advice) would make the average American richer? Did they seriously believe that invading Iraq was necessary or would turn out to be good for the people living in the region? All of that is possible (although there is a certain amount of evidence that most of them were simply on the take from the rich backers of all those policies) so possibly Centrists really do have the good of the public in mind — but it doesn’t matter, because they are consistently wrong.
Bernie Sanders has been a rigid upholder of what was Democratic policy before the Centrists took over. He has annoyed a lot of people by constantly objecting to Centrist policy. But frankly: he has been right. He objected to NAFTA. He objected to deregulation. He objected to the Iraq invasion. That’s only annoying if you seriously want bad policy.
Republicans have been claiming since at least 1980 that 1 plus 1 is 11. Some of them seriously believe it, some of them just know they can pocket the difference if they can fool the public into accepting it, some of them don’t care if they’re wrong as long as it makes “liberals” mad. Centrists in the Democratic Party assure us that 11 is wrong — the real answer is 9. Sanders has constantly been excoriated for pointing out that the answer is 2 — and I am getting really fucking tired of people who think that somehow things will be better if maybe we move the party even closer to the Republicans an run somebody who says 1 plus 1 is 10, instead, like Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton.
So, just read the thread. Heh. Good old USA politics, best in the world.
Vicar to PaulBC:
One which you didn’t actually address in that response.
One which you didn’t actually dispute in that response.
Vicar@18
So why did he wait so long to declare as a Democrat? The party was apparently too compromised for him in 1972 already. I find this very strange, though I know from experience that Sanders supporters consider it to be an unfair question. A serious response might be nice though.
In 2016, the Democratic party had a hand-picked choice in Hillary Clinton, and supported her based on the confidence that she’d actually win the election against Trump. Yes, they rigged the nomination with superdelegates and other tricks. Parties used to rig nominations even more, and historically, the nominating process was not even expected to be democratic. If the Sanders campaign had an actual plan to address the rigging and not just point it out repeatedly, then I might have taken him seriously as a candidate in 2016.
This year, things are much different. I don’t think anyone has a great deal of confidence that Trump can be defeated (which is crazy and sad). It’ll indeed be “interesting” to see if the Democratic establishment hates Sanders so much that they’ll work for a Trump victory. If so, I’ll revise my estimates, but it’s unclear why “neoliberal” globalists would see any common ground with Trumpism. It’s of course entirely possible that they’ll put their thumb on the scales for Biden, that he’ll squeak in and lose. As I said, I think this year (which is very different from 2016) Sanders may be the most electable candidate. I may vote for him in the primaries.
My attitude doesn’t really make a difference one way or another.
And why am I showing my “bad attitude”? I’m just angry. There is no reason Trump should have won the 2016 election. There is no reason that anyone who would have voted for John Kerry in 2004 should have developed the slightest hesitation about voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Yes, the DLC gave away the party to Republicans when Clinton got elected, and it does suck (not that the party was that great during the Reagan years or earlier). But losing a winnable election sucks even worse as far as I’m concerned. Consolidating Republican power behind Trump has so far led to two SCOTUS members picked by the Federalist Society and countless others on the federal judiciary. It led to the most irresponsible corporate tax giveaway ever past. Trump (this time mostly on his own with little shit Stephen Miller) has introduced the most inhumane refugee policies in decades. This was all avoidable. I realize it has been more than three years, but no I am not going to “move on.” We are all still living with this catastrophe.
I still don’t fully understand how Biden has so much support. I’m sure a good chunk of it is people who don’t really pay attention and just recognize him as the Vice President to a fairly popular president, but that can’t be all of it, right? There have to be informed people that actually like something about him, even if I can’t imagine what that is.
ColeYote@22 It’s a good question, particularly since he already flamed out pretty hard in 1988 after admitting to plagiarizing some speeches.
The association with Obama is certainly part of it, plus as much as I can’t stand a glad-hander, it is an effective political tactic. He was also effective debating Paul Ryan in 2012 and has established himself whether deservedly or not as a having cultural affinities to plain talking blue collar men (and I think it’s safe to leave that gender-specific). He’s presumably seen as “safe”, which I think is a miscalculation. He’s not going to pull in any votes away from Trump. Committed leftwing Democrats may not be able to vote for him at all, and less committed voters may not be bothered to vote unless ousting Trump is seen as a goal in itself (which it won’t be to those who haven’t been paying attention and see the fact that the country hasn’t been destroyed yet as reason not to panic).
It’ll be a complete disaster if Biden is the nominee. Not that he would be guaranteed to lose but he sure isn’t a “safe” anything.
I would truly like to see Castro named as the running-mate of whichever Democrat eventually becomes the nominee. I’ve known both of the Castro brothers for many years, and I’ve found them both to be very impressive. As a VP candidate, I think that Julian would bring the Latinx vote, as well as a wealth of experience in dealing with the problems of immigrants. He would bring much to any campaign.
Well, of course Otherwise, people might get sick just for the hell of it.
/s