Can we elect co-presidents? Because I’m trying to decide who terrifies the awful people the most.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Can we elect co-presidents? Because I’m trying to decide who terrifies the awful people the most.
I’m willing to bet it’s the woman who terrifies them more.
These are amazing. I hope they’re made by the campaigns themselves.
I mean, yes you’ve uncovered an inherent flaw in the unitary executive. With a Sanders presidency I’d love to see Warren as either sec. treasury or senate majority leader, we need qualified ideologically sound people at all positions at all levels of government.
#3 — Agreed wholeheartedly. As much as I’d love to see Warren as president (here’s hoping Bernie takes that spot and not Biden nor Buttigieg), she should be somewhere in the higher positions of the White House.
Giving Warren VP or an important cabinet position “to get things done” reeks of a lot of the systemic sexism that is sadly a fact of life in today’s politics. That said it currently looks like mass support for and unification behind Sanders is the best progressive strategy the US has at this stage.
=8)-DX
Warren belongs in the senate to be more sure of keeping a seat, the VP role should be used to groom young female or minority (or both) left talent for future presidential roles.
I know, I know. I have the same feelings. I am committed emotionally and financially to Warren. I do really like Sanders too. I will wait til Super Tuesday and see how things look.
If she is not the nominee, I really think we need to keep Warren in the Senate. She need to be the Lion in the Senate and get the agenda through. I like someone like Paul Krugman as Secretary of the Treasury.
As for VP as we are probably going to have an old, white person as the Presidential nominee, we need a POC and/or woman as VP. Non-white people deserve and need a person that either looks like them or can relate to them in some manner. I would look hard at Julian Castro and Stacy Abrams.
I actually did a post on my Facebook politics page looking at a a cabinet dream team. Comments and criticism highly welcomed.
https://www.facebook.com/brucenwwi/posts/2639320159642769
In the general election, I will vote for whoever the Democrats nominate…even if I have to hold my nose and vote for Bloomberg. In the primary (3 March), I’m planning to vote for Warren.
Can we elect co-presidents?
Only if you are the NY Times.
I can see Bloomberg adopting the second image, just changing the + to =
(and fixing the paid for)
If enough people openly say they would vote even for Bloomberg, then putting Bloomberg up becomes thinkable.
Everyone should be screaming no way to Bloomberg and work hard at keeping him out. It should be made obvious that Bloomberg will lose votes, unequivocally.
8: Bloomberg would be worse then trump, because it would mean both a competent fash in the white house and that both parties had fallen to fascist oligarchs.
Re: DanDare @ #11…
With Trump in the White House, Bloomberg is a “lesser of two evils” candidate. No third party will come close to taking down Trump. In fact, it’s unlikely that any third party candidate will get even a single Electoral College vote. That makes the Democratic party candidate–whoever it happens to be–the only game in town to get rid of Trump. That doesn’t mean I will like the Democratic candidate, only that Trump will be clearly worse.
@13 Bloomberg and Trump are indistinguishable across the board.
@ whheydt (11) — If Bloomberg does become the Democratic nominee, it would not only be the death of the Democratic party, but the death of a democratic United States. And after seeing how Bloomberg fared in the past two Democratic debates, I really doubt he’d be able to competently handle Trump during the debates, and getting enough votes to beat Trump on November 3 would be highly unlikely IMO.
Sorry, I don’t believe the average American can absorb the amount of information in those posters to make a decision.
Hmmm…strange juxtaposition of Sanders and PE. On the surface it’s a fight against power, but just how strong is Sanders’ messaging on racial issues? Is he fist pumping Black Power strong along the lines of the Black Panther-Nation of Islam hybrid aesthetic captured quite assertively by Public Enemy in their heyday? What is his stance on the S1Ws?
https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2011.33.8
https://entertainment.theonion.com/retired-s1ws-recalled-to-active-duty-1819568726
To those saying Bloomberg is the same or worse than Trump:
Bloomberg at least acknowledges that climate change is real. He acknowledges that guns do indeed kill people. Getting the latter acknowledged in public policy could save thousands a year. Getting the former acknowledged could save millions.
And, I at least am not concerned that Bloomberg won’t step down when his term is done, so, though regrettable, it might even save democracy once we get to 2024. Bloomberg is way, way, way down on my list, but he’s above Darth Cheeto.
@18, ooooooh, he “acknowledges” climate change, whoopdi do. There is a difference between saying that something is bad and actually doing something about it, and considering that half the country goes to sleep when the president has a “D” next to there name then it will likely mean that nothing gets done. And reducing private gun ownership while giving the state carte Blanche to brutalize it’s citizens is nothing to brag about. At best he’s a slightly different flavour of oligarch. They are the fucking same.
I’m trying to be ready for every possibility I can think of with respect to primary and general elections. It’s useful to have answers for lots of very passionate people. I’m even somewhat ready for a hypothetical second Trump win. I tell Trump voters on facebook that nothing changes in terms of my political behavior so the hooting about T2020 might as well stop. I’m still practicing confronting bigots and irrational partisans. I’m still calling out disparaging characterizations about groups and people.
If Bloomberg gets the Dnom I hold my nose and vote, and shame places B and T are bad, and shame Trump, and shame Rs and Trump supporters where possible, and I shame America, and…
And use this as an opportunity to have the D candidate confront things they should. I shamen Bloomberg into removing the NDAs and he gets to practice real actually becoming supportive and letting the people he hurt speak while he listens.
Sanders has some writing when he was young I’m interested in his explanation for. I can see he’s not the same person but he need to learn to do this. He also gets grilled on OWS, torture…
I haven’t looked at Warren closer yet. I’m processing a lot.
Shaming Trump and supporters is still going to be a priority but I’m taking this social gadfly thing seriously.
Re: pipefitter @ #14…
That’s what was said about Clinton and Trump, as–at least partially–a result, we got Trump. Do you really want to go down that road again?
Yeah, uh, Warren has now flip-flopped on Medicare For All, superPACs (her dark money superPAC is apparently spending more than any other candidate’s campaign on Super Tuesday ads), and superdelegates. It’s becoming more and more clear that a lot of her progressive positioning was just a pose. (She’s also said that she wouldn’t give any regular delegates she might win to Sanders to avoid a contested convention. In other words, like all the other “real” Democrats, she prefers Trump to Sanders. God I am beginning to actively hate the Democratic Party.)
Before I commit to a particular candidate between Warren, Sanders, and Steyer (my charmed circle) I want essays on race and feminism based on these two songs that get me worked up into a pretty angry break shit frenzy:
https://youtu.be/k6MlwT1lBk0
https://youtu.be/HNZymIIAUJk
If these songs frazzle the candidate beyond cogent response they aren’t to my liking. Good luck…
“Excuse us for the news. I question those accused. Why is this fear of black from white, influence who you choose?”
@21 the guy was a literal Republican who endorsed Bush and has recently backed Republican Senate candidates. There is no fucking difference.
Warren opposes Medicare for All and has a SuperPAC. It’s Bernie all the way.
Given that it’s a primary, and this is the time you’re supposed to be picky, I’m going to vote for the one that isn’t an ex-republican that is by their own words a “capitalist to [their] bone”.
That’s news to me, but assuming you’re correct, that’s a dealbreaker for me. I’ll support no one but Sanders now.
Okay, can someone please justify the “Warren opposes Medicare for All” claim?
I can’t find a single news story stating that she’s retracting her plan, and her campaign website still has M4A up as the only plan she’s endorsing. WTF is going on?
@28 At the last debate she was joining in the “how will you pay for it” nonsense that the moderators and other candidates were attacking Bernie with. Her proposal for “Medicare for All” makes no sense: she wants to split it into two legislative pushes, first a public option, then the real deal of single payer after the 2022 midterms when the democrats will probably have lost the Senate or House. This means she essentially only supports the public option- there’s no reason to not just pass it all at once. The other thing is that her plan to pay for it involves a head tax rather than Bernie’s sensible payroll tax.
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/02/26/warrens-increasingly-desperate-health-care-messaging/
so… the Warren critics are just lying about M4A. Got it.
President Warren would not succeed in getting Medicare for All. President Sanders could succeed. That’s my point.
then don’t say, and I quote:
If you flat out lie, you destroy your credibility and then people won’t listen to your critiques of the actual substance and/or format of Warren’s proposals.
You’ve flat out lied. Do you want to apologize, explicitly stating that you knew you were saying something false, and attempt to start over? I believe in second chances, but if you can’t actually admit you straight up lied, then we never get to the point where we have any reason to believe you’ve given up on lying, thus we’ll never be able to trust anything you might say in the future.
So, do you want to own up to flat out lying, apologize, and start over?
I seriously doubt Warren’s commitment to Medicare for All. However, what stated was incorrect and not an accurate description of what can be proven. I apologize for making an incorrect statement, I should have phrased it better to show what I meant. I lied, and I am sorry.
Now to start over. As a Canadian, I have grown up with single-payer healthcare and it disturbs me on a deep level that so many Americans die every year because they cannot or will not seek care because of the cost. Bernie’s campaign is such a ray of hope in the darkness, a last off ramp from a future hellscape of fascism and climate collapse that I get fired up when the topic of the primary comes up. I truly believe that he must win the White House for America to improve in time to avoid catastrophe, and it deeply worries me to see people still considering voting for Warren instead. She is a liberal technocrat at heart, and we need a revolutionary. When she said at the Vegas debate that the candidate with the most delegates at the convention should not necessarily get the nomination, she condoned stealing the nomination from the voters’ democratic decision. It is bizarre to see people still support her when her campaign has no chance and is just a spoiler for Bernie at this point. Please vote for Bernie, we have so little time left before the climate bomb goes off.
Other reasons to not support Warren:
Awful electoral record indicates that she would be a weak candidate:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/elizabeth-warren-electoral-track-record-2020-democratic-primary
Poor theory of change and political strategy:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/09/the-prospect-of-an-elizabeth-warren-nomination-should-be-very-worrying
A history of misleading statements and bad policy opinions:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/why-criticize-warren
Settling for a shitty means-tested system that will provide a public option for a very small portion of the US until she maybe-kinda decides to push forward after her third year of presidency, all the while stressing that her plan will allow people to continue to choose alternative systems on the campaign trail, seems like a pretty solid renunciation of the actual core tenants of medicare for all, which is to establish a single-payer system and outlawing private insurance.
‘Opposes’ was overly strong, but there’s pretty solid reasons to question her commitment to the actual intent of medicare for all. A system with an arbitrary age and income ceiling for coverage is by and large what we already have.
@35 Thanks for backing me up. I dun goofed, she doesn’t oppose M4A per se, but I doubt it would get done under her administration.
@ Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden, #28
Warren has stopped saying M4A as much, but last I saw her plans are still ultimately M4A. I really wish she hadn’t shied away from saying it, because I believe doing has been at least partially responsible for her drop in the polls (CNN’s overt sabotage during debate #4,917 was probably more damaging, however).
I also wish she’d respond to the endless disingenuous “how will you pay for it?” nonsense with something like “the same we pay for our endless wars.” It’s not a substantial answer, but the media flat refuses to allow her to give substantial answers. A verbal slap would serve better than Warren continuing to pretend the media is asking the question in good faith.
Honestly, the way the moderators of the debates desperately try to ignore that she’s on the stage during the debates (except for when they want to ask her slanted attack questions), and the way the media pretends she wasn’t there in their post-debate coverage, tells me that the people with the money are utterly terrified of her. As well they should be.
@binaryfission (30) — As a Canadian, I’m not nearly into the nitty gritty details of the individual plans as other posters here. But is there any chance that Warren’s delay to 2022 is more due to existing contracts with insurance companies and/or drug manufacturers, than to simply putting off the promise simply to lie on the podium?
As for her getting money from SuperPACs, I’m willing to cut her some slack. Without knowing the details on the terms and conditions she agrees to with them, and the understanding that not doing so might have led to a forced withdrawal from the campaign process due to lack of funds, it might just be the lesser of two evils. Bernie deserves a lot of credit for staying strictly with public donations, considering how it was viewed as impossible before he did so for the 2016 elections. But it would be more difficult if he was battling under Warren’s poll numbers.
That is, assuming I’m not missing some important details here.
@37 If wealthy people are so scared of her, where is all her SuperPAC money coming from? Also, her campaign does court wealthy donors:
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/18/big-democratic-donors-elizabeth-warren-2020-071333
She also received plenty of friendly media coverage months ago when she was polling better, but now she hasn’t done better than third in any contest so far so it’s not surprising that they don’t take her seriously. Considering how they lost their minds when Bernie won Nevada by a huge margin, I think the real threat to wealth and power is him.
@binaryfission55:
Thanks for what you said. I know that can be hard and that too many people are unable to simply retract something when it’s shown to be untrue. Kudos to you for doing it, and now that you’ve done it it’s entirely in the past for me and I’ll happily listen to anything else you have to say on the topic the US election without prejudice or distrust.
As for this:
You probably know as it has been pointed out many times that Bernie did not suspend his campaign or concede to Clinton when she had locked up a majority of elected delegates in 2016. While she hadn’t yet reached the magic number, that was only because superdelegates exist. Bernie didn’t say, “Well, Clinton has sewn up 51% of elected delegates and using superdelegates to take the nomination from her is anti-democratic. Thus I’m suspending my campaign.” Nope.
He continued his campaign when the only possible way he could win was anti-democratically through superdelegates. Now, I hate superdelegates, but let’s not pretend that Sanders did not use them to his advantage last time or that Sanders took a principled stand against superdelegates putting him over the top when he’d lost the popular vote by millions and the pledged delegate vote by almost 400.
I, too, wish Warren took the principled position, but neither do I have any respect for Sanders’ position that anti-democratic superdelegates are an acceptable way for him to win the nomination when he was behind, but a travesty of justice this time around when he’s ahead. I also think it’s shitty of him to switch his registration back and forth from Independent to Democrat every two years. He’s blatantly switching party registration solely for political, power and money advantages that shift depending on whether he’s running for President or Senator.
This doesn’t mean his word is no good or that he’ll never live up to his principles (I think he’s been doing far better than most politicians at just that for a good long time), but if you want to argue this specific issue, it doesn’t reflect well on Sanders at all. It reeks of opportunism rather than principle. Unfortunately that doesn’t make him worse than Warren on the issue, but it sure as hell doesn’t make him better.
I get that, I do. And I don’t have anything against anyone that wants to vote for Sanders. Not only that, but the fact that he can inspire such hope in people speaks well of him.
I understand some of why you might say the first, and I think I understand quite well why you say the second. Nonetheless, I’m not sure this is true. We need change to actually happen, and while Sanders is great at getting support from people outside of DC, he’s made very few friends inside of it. In order to pass legislation, the new president is going to have to have strong and powerful legislative allies willing to work hard and sacrifice their own priorities if necessary to get things done. I don’t know anything about the culture of Capitol Hill, but I do know that reports say that Warren has more friends and gets more done.
This is a double edged sword, because it indicates an increased risk of being captured by the system – of being insufficiently revolutionary. But it also indicates that on those issues where she applies herself, she can (apparently, if reporting is true) better draft and pass legislation than Bernie can. If Bernie has the best ideals and values and principles, but enacts only 10% of them, while Warren’s ideals are half as radical, but pass half the time, then Bernie offers less than half the actual legislative change that Warren would deliver.
These aren’t meant to be actual calculations, just a conceptual example to show that having the most revolutionary agenda doesn’t necessarily translate into the most positive change. It takes work, it takes a cooperative congress. For the vast majority of the 260 million or so USians old enough to vote, we’ll never in our lives have a deep enough understanding to make reliable predictions of who would actually pass the largest number of radical laws and / or the laws that are the most radical. We’re taking our best guesses here, and while the critiques of Warren are valid, they are no more reliably mathematical than the hypotheticals I’ve posed above.
In other words, you’ve got your opinion about what would be the best for the US and the world, but how do I know that’s true? It would seem to depend on a foresight I simply don’t have.
From Porivil Sorrens:
And yet this is Bernie’s proposal as well: arbitrary age categories that shift year by year as we move towards universal coverage, with changing income ceilings for those not in covered age groups until eventually all age groups are covered and the income ceilings are no longer applicable.
back to binaryfission55:
You have many more readers than myself, of course, but if that was directed specifically at me and not at everyone reading the thread then you should know that I don’t have a vote in the Democratic primary, just the general election.
as for your other info about Warren, I’ll probably read it when I have a bit more time. I’m off to do other things just now.
Thanks for the chat.
cd
@38 I doubt existing contracts matter. If they did, wouldn’t she have said so? Jayapal’s M4A bill takes pretty much everything into account, all one needs to do is pass it. It seems to me that she’s just scared of fighting the medical industrial complex, or just believes that more complicated plans are better (they aren’t).
Regarding the SuperPAC, if you can’t raise the money to stay in the moral way, then drop out. If she really believed in the policies she’s fighting for, she’s realize that she has no chance and is just harming the odds that Bernie, who she supposedly shares many policy beliefs with, get the nomination. There can only be one nominee, even if people sitting on the Sanders/Warren fence try to forget it.
@binaryfission55:
Well, her wealth tax applies only to those with more than USD$50,000,000. I’d say people with more than $1m in home equity and $1m in retirement portfolio/ investments are pretty damn wealthy, and that’s only $2m, not $50m, but it’s also possible for a 60-year old DINK couple working unionized jobs in a lot of urban areas where it was possible to buy a home quite a while ago, then have urban property values escalate quite a bit. Obviously it’s uncommon (or we wouldn’t call it wealthy), but this upper 0.1% of blue collar families isn’t really the demographic she’s challenging. She’s challenging the corporate owner class and especially the 100-millionaire and up class.
I think that there can be a combination of a minority of 100-millionaires that believe in a restructured economic system that spreads the wealth more equitably through society and the people that are very wealthy but untouched by her wealth tax you could probably find enough donors to keep a few superPACs going.
Of course, this is speculative, I’m not saying I know the sources of those funds, just that there are such people as George Soros, so it is possible to cause a lot of fear in the 100-millionaire and up class while still having at least a few sources of superPAC money available to you.
I really don’t get this. I find it anti-democratic. If she believes she’s the best person to accomplish these goals, then staying in isn’t a bad thing. Yes, it’s a bad thing if a progressive doesn’t get the nomination, but the argument applies equally to Bernie. If neither can get 50% without the others’ supporters, then either one could drop out to guarantee that the other gets 50%.
You have explicitly pro-Bernie arguments. Why not rely on them instead of a mere anti-democratic assertion that Warren is bad for even trying?
Yes, and I think that is also bad. I think her ‘meh you get fixed, watered down ACA coverage until I hypothetically decide to push for more three years later’ plan is worse, however. Ideally, they wouldn’t start making concessions to republicans in congress before they even get to the bargaining table, but I’ll take whichever one runs on a further left platform – which, given that one is a lifelong socialist and one is a capitalist-to-the-bone ex-republican, makes the choice pretty clear for me.
Porivil Sorrens:
With you until the last part, “and outlawing private insurance.” That’s not the idea. With our current 65+ Medicare, now and for the past several decades, there exist many private health insurance plans which act as a “supplemental” form of coverage, which people can purchase if they can afford it. This is a huge industry; the core of 65+ Medicare has nothing to do with outlawing that industry.
With M4A, there will be an expansion of what is covered, in addition to extending that coverage to everybody in the country. But the goal isn’t that supplemental plans need to be banned. The idea is to raise the floor of coverage so it applies to everybody, because everybody has a right to it.
HidariMak:
That doesn’t excuse it. She should understand that her funds and support from non-SuperPAC sourcs have dried up. The lesser of two evils is dropping out of the race to help your progressive ally Bernie. That’s because his chances of getting a delegate plurality are now way ahead of Warren’s.
Even after a fairly big drop in the last few days, the 538 forecast currently gives these odds for Sanders and Warren….
Plurality: Sanders 63%, Warren 0.6% (Biden 31%, Bloomberg 6%)
Majority: Sanders 33%, Warren 0.1% (No one 51%, Biden 15%, Bloomberg 1%)
That’s nothing to sneeze at. There are margins of error, they could be wrong, but not that wrong.
Of course, the dropping out plan (if she has a plan for that) assumes that she really is a progressive ally of Bernie’s. If you assume that her plan is to go as far as she can, no matter the cost and in spite of her stated (and unprincipled) opposition to SuperPACs, which will make Sanders’ nomination that much harder, then it actually makes some kind of sense. Not that it’s “good” or “less evil” but that it would be a comprehensible choice.
It also certainly doesn’t make sense, for anyone who’s still trying to imagine her as Sanders’ VP or whatever. Maybe it used to be your dream ticket for the presidential race, but at this point it’s only a memory of an old dream.
Crip Dyke:
Well, you are repeating the establishment spin, that much is true.
There was no contested convention in 2016. He apparently did entertain the idea of getting some superdelegates to support him, as any candidate would given those rules, very late in a close race between two strong candidates (not what we’re seeing currently). This was after a long campaign, after winning 23 states and close to half the vote, while the party establishment took every opportunity to push hard for Clinton and against him (whether or not it’s fair to say that anything was “rigged”). The single largest and most delegate-rich state, California, along with 5 others, voted on June 7, then DC ended the primary season on June 14. Very much unlike this time around.
Also, consider how the power dynamics are very different here. You have the big machine which makes the rules, and the little guy who understandably has to play the game the machine made as best he can. After losing, he tried hard to make the system more democratic, despite what the establishment machine wanted, and at least we can appreciate that (among other things) the superdelegates aren’t relevant in the first round delegate count.
Anyway, the machine is the problem here, and it’s absurd to focus your criticism on the one person in this whole clusterfuck who’s been opposing it. It’s like blaming somebody for defending themselves against the cops, when the real issue is police brutality. “Oh, they said it was going to be a peaceful, non-violent protest, but look at this five-second clip of them pushing back against a police thug who was beating them into submission.” It’s really not a good look, assuming you care about the bigger picture at all.
And what did actually happen in the real world? His campaign did effectively end a month before the convention and he officially supported Clinton there. At the convention, what actually happened in the real world is that Sanders got 42.5 superdelegates and Clinton got 572.5 superdelegates. Maybe you didn’t know this information — why didn’t you, if this is what your complaint was supposed to be about? — but you should definitely take it into consideration that one is more than 13 times larger than the other. And you should know which candidate that actually was in the real world.
After the convention, what happened in the real world is that he went out to campaign for her and against Trump in the general election, in 40+ events, whereas Clinton had only done something like 8 or 10 to support Obama after conceding to him. Can we look forward to that kind of support for Sanders, coming from any of the other big candidates this year? I strongly doubt it.
@Crip Dyke:
Warren has basically said “Medicare for All is something I won’t try to implement at first, it will be something to push for later”. (Specifically, not until at least year 3 of her presidency, should she be elected.)
I know you and other Sanders skeptics accuse Sanders supporters of being naive, but how naive do you have to be to look at at an ambitious and extremely detailed set of plans, so detailed that it includes a timeline which assumes the passage of bills on a specific timeline (as Warren’s does), and not come to the conclusion that it is an unworkable pipe dream? Warren obviously knows that her plans — the ones her supporters are so fond of claiming are more realistic because they are more detailed — are probably not going to be supported by all Democrats (can you imagine Joe Manchin voting for any change to healthcare which doesn’t make private insurers richer?), and will most likely be dragged out even if the Republicans don’t block them entirely. Since she’s presumably smart enough to know that, it means her timeline is a lie and “we’ll deal with that later” is code for “I’m not going to do this”, and she’s counting on her supporters being too thick-headed to realize it. The stock market knows this is true — the minute she announced that she was going to wait 3 years to push for Medicare for All, back at the end of 2019, health insurance stocks surged.
Warren’s superPAC isn’t just a superPAC, by the way — that would be bad enough, since she originally was vocally opposed to superPACs in general, and, like Buttigieg, retracted that opposition the minute she had one on her side. It’s a “dark money” superPAC which has not disclosed its donor list and won’t do so until after Super Tuesday.
I still remember that Warren was one of the only Democrats who actually tried to do anything to make things better for the public at large under Obama, and I respect her for that. The problem is, her efforts were undercut by the party itself — Obama and the more closely DNC-affiliated members of Congress (like Debbie Wasserman Schultz) specifically worked with Republicans to undercut Warren’s consumer protection agency, so that it had no legal teeth and could enforce essentially nothing. She currently seems to be trying to curry favor with the very people who undercut her in the past — she has said that she won’t give her delegates to Sanders to avoid a contested convention (which she would lose anyway), and supports the idea that a contested convention should be used to give the nomination to Sanders, even if he just barely missed the 50% mark and her support would put him over the top. Is she a fool, and doesn’t realize that she’s specifically aiding the Biden/Bloomberg contingent? Is she a traitor, deliberately trying to do so? I would still hold my nose and vote for her if she gets the nomination (unlike Bloomberg/Biden/Buttigieg), but I am coming to despise her as a politician.
Agree on both Warren and Sanders. Unfortunately, Warren has contributed to this derogatory mentality herself, by saying something like, “If you need a mess cleaned up, call a woman.”
I was responding to comment #5, forgot to tag.
Some more of the real world, as opposed to what you wished the party was like, unfortunately:
If that doesn’t torpedo “superdelegates help the party keep Real Democrats™ in control” arguments, I don’t know what does.
Legalized bribery is his job, and he mostly helps Republicans, so … when do we get to the part where that’s okay??
Oh, right, we don’t. More where that came from….
Sure, whatever, sounds great. Money is speech, so I guess that’s a whole lot of democracy we’re seeing right there. We can all be very proud of that.
Notice how none of those people are even running. This is still fantasy football time, but did you think or hope that Warren was at the top of the list? Does Warren herself really think she’s at the top of the list? Or is all of it just wishful thinking?
@45
Okay, sure, but banning private insurance from covering anything that would be covered by M4A was a part of the 2019 M4A bill and has been repeatedly brought up by Sanders since.
From section 107,
Sure, they could offer coverage for things that aren’t covered by M4A, but this would still effectively dissolve private insurance as it exists today.
Sure, it’s just that we don’t need to make middle- and upper-class people any more paranoid than they already are. We’re talking about good coverage for everybody, but rich folk’s money will still allow them a ton of healthcare-related privileges many won’t have. This is important for the “M4A isn’t actually that radical” and “this is a capitalistic/socialist plan for a mixed economy, not a purely socialist one” parts of the argument, which our opponents have such a hard time understanding.
Right, my point was that “Medicare for a few means tested groups, private insurance for everyone else” is an entirely different plan than “Medicare for literally everyone, and private insurance can’t compete with it.”
@18: I at least am not concerned that Bloomberg won’t step down when his term is done
Well, he actually has form in that regard — he had the NYC constitution changed specifically in order to allow himself to run for a third term.
@consciousness razor: Are you aware that Sanders was (by conscious invitation) deeply involved in the rewriting of delegate rules for 2020?
@a whole bunch of people: Don’t Panic. (Also, make sure your have a towel handy.) There will be much more interesting electoral discussions next week. Preferably wait until at least Thursday so that (1) we have the actual results (most of them, anyway), not exit polls, and (2) those who should drop out have had a chance to do the decent thing.
I certainly am, and that’s why I said the Sanders camp successfully pushed for superdelegates to be taken out of the first round, making them irrelevant for a candidate with a majority. That’s a good thing. It’s not everything, but it’s something.
Other Dems pushed against it, and because of them, we couldn’t get superdelegates removed entirely from the process. That’s a bad thing.
So, there’s “involved” in a positive democratic way, and there’s “involved” in a negative anti-democratic way. Do you not understand the difference, or do you not care?
They’ve had decades worth of chances to do the decent thing. I’m not holding my breath until some arbitrary day next week. (California’s and Texas’ totals will probably take much longer, by the way.)
@consciousness razor:
<
blockquote>Anyway, the machine is the problem here, and it’s absurd to focus your criticism on the one person in this whole clusterfuck who’s been opposing it. It’s like blaming somebody for defending themselves against the cops, when the real issue is police brutality.
<
blockquote>
Yes, I agree it’s the machine that’s the problem here. That’s why I never brought up the issue and would never bring up the issue. Someone else was criticizing Warren for not immediately conceding and for at least contemplating the idea that superdelegates could put someone over the top.
The point of my post isn’t that Sanders is bad or to call out Sanders, the point of my post is that focussing the attention on Warren instead of the DNC and the process more generally is bad. You don’t fix the process by blaming Warren. And it’s not like Warren is a demon from hell and Sanders is perfect.
You’re taking my comment completely out of context to make it seem like it’s a response to Sanders. it’s not. It’s a response to binaryfission55. My point is closely related to, though not exactly the same as, your point. My point is that it’s the system; this isn’t something to lay at the feet of any candidate, so people should stop making all the criticisms of the system into criticisms of Warren (or any other single candidate) specifically.
Making criticisms of a bad system into criticisms of a single candidate is not only unfair to the candidate, it distracts from the system’s failings and makes it seem as if only we got rid of that one candidate everything would be fine.
It’s not about Warren. It’s not about Sanders. There’s probably no one single perfect way to attack the system, so both Sanders’ and Warren’s actions can be criticized, but doing that won’t help anything. It’s the fucking system.
@The Vicar:
1) I’m not a “Sanders Skeptic”. I like Sanders. I am appropriately uncertain about predicting the future and telling people that I know right now whether a Sanders presidency or a Warren presidency would be better for the USA. A lot of factors will go into that. I am humble enough to admit that I cannot know all current factors or to predict even one future factor.
2) I don’t know that i’ve ever called a Sanders supporter naive. Can you point to a single occasion in which I’ve done so, or are you just assuming I agree with everyone who isn’t me who has ever said a critical thing about Sanders?
1) I consider all M4A to be “an unworkable pipe dream” (though I would say “unpassable”) so long as Republicans control the Senate. That doesn’t mean I won’t fight for both M4A and flipping the Senate, however.
and 2) “If you make plans, you’re just dreaming. If you make no plans, you’re much more likely to actually get things done in the real world.” Is that your assertion? Because that’s a really, really stupid assertion.
1) I’ve given up on listening to people tell me what Warren “basically said”. Provide a link to what she actually said and that’s fine, I’ll take that. Or tell me that your impression is X, and I’ll take you to be telling the truth about your impression (which is different from taking it as truth that Warren actually did/said X). But when people take, “I personally don’t think her plan is very workable,” and render that, “Warren opposes M4A” then it gets to the point where I’m not very confident in the ability of people to faithfully paraphrase. I’m not telling you what to do, and I’m sure other people won’t have any trouble believing you. And in this particular case I have access on my own to documents to support your paraphrase, so this one individual paraphrase works. I’m just telling you for the future that while this paraphrase checks out, I may not take your future assertions about Warrens words or actions very seriously without a link.
2) Saying, “I have a timeline, and M4A is not first on the timeline, it slots into year 3” is not the same as saying, “I oppose M4A.” I have not here defended Warren’s timeline. Nor have I said that I believe she’s even 51% likely to pass M4A (much less guaranteed to pass it).
All I did was stand up and say that being insufficiently whatever about M4A is not the same as opposing M4A.
I guess it comes down to whether or not you want to make your decisions based on true things or made up things. I confronted the statement “Warren opposes M4A” not because I’m a huge Warren partisan and certainly not because I’m a “Sanders Skeptic”. I confronted the statement “Warren opposes M4A” because it is, in fact, false.
Aren’t you embarrassed to be coming after me for doing nothing more on the M4A issue than asking for a link to back up a suspicious claim and then calling the claim (NOT made my Sanders, btw, but just by a commenter) false because it was … actually false?
Getting back to the posters. Interesting that the candidates both have somewhat similar poses but with different styles.
The Warren poster sort of looks like it might be a movie poster for a glossy mag or subway station. Sanders captures that updated, old school, politics/concert vibe. IMO, the Sanders one is the stronger one graphically, though Warren’s is probably stronger on messaging.
Hard to ignore the Sanders one.
Look out fascist bullyboys, Sanders gonna drop a mic on your ass!
The question is whether Warren will fight for it, not you. And she won’t.
You think she makes plans? Is it the one early on which was Bernie’s plan, or the later one which was like Mayor Pete’s (if you can even call it a plan)?
It should be pointed out that this later plan is a plan to change plans eventually, if other plans go accordingly in the 2022 midterms (where her own position wouldn’t be at stake). That is, those plans are such that someday we’ll have some Democratic Senators, who right now nobody knows and nobody is talking about, who aren’t like her and will put their own careers on the line, to (finally) do the right thing and support M4A.
That’s “a plan” I guess, in the same sort of way that “maybe the invisible hand will solve our problems” is a plan. That is, it’s really not a good plan.
Some reporting from last November:
Some Progressives Are Suddenly Really Mad at Elizabeth Warren
Saagar Enjeti: Warren loses HALF her support after bungled M4A rollout
Saagar is really frothing in that video, because it’s so infuriating. I’ll also note that he does identify as a (non-typical, non-establishment) conservative, believe it or not. But please get past all that and just listen to what he and Krystal are saying.
Also worthwhile on its own is the clip of her from 2012 shown in the video (starting at 2:30). You wanted her ideas in her own words, and there they are. That is how she responded to the dreadful “accusation” that she supported a single-payer system, like the whole idea was fucking toxic. So do you really think her whole worldview changed? And then it changed back again? And it’s going to change again in a few years? That’s just ridiculous.
To be clear, this was way before her apparent “flip” to supporting M4A early in this campaign, which itself was before the flip back to not-M4A. And then the promise we’re supposed to believe is that she’ll push for it eventually, on the condition that other nameless politicans instead of her (who don’t agree with her about this) will actually be the ones to lead the way.
Enjeti is absolutely right that she has just put up one facade after another. At some point, it becomes so abundantly clear (to everybody but her most diehard supporters) that people simply cannot trust such a politician to follow through on any of their supposed “plans” no matter what they may be.
Messed up the second link:
Saagar Enjeti: Warren loses HALF her support after bungled M4A rollout
@consciousness razor:
Are you determined to take me out of context? The point isn’t whether I think that. The bit you’re responding to is me responding to The Vicar saying it’s a bad thing that Warren has a detailed plan.
The planning was The Vicar’s premise. The whole bit about Warren being someone who engages in detailed planning started with The Vicar, not me. I was criticizing The Vicar’s conclusion that Warren was bad because she engaged in planning. I think that’s a stupid conclusion.
But if you think that Warren didn’t engage in planning, why are you criticizing me instead of criticizing The Vicar? Why do you prefer attacking me over simply correcting the record, which you could do by gently informing The Vicar that their premise was incorrect?
It’s almost like you care more about winning an argument with me than you care about what is being said by whom.
I’m sure my sense of humor doesn’t come across in writing sometimes. But you may notice that my comment didn’t just contain a single rhetorical flourish and nothing else.
For what it’s worth, you were putting that quoted assertion into Vicar’s mouth, although it wasn’t what Vicar “basically said.” It did seem like you were buying into the idea yourself.
In any case, I was just being snarky. So I don’t know … maybe just relax, laugh, move on to something with a bit of substance.
My fault then. Thanks for clarifying.
I dunno maybe the Public Enemy vibe queued some serious attitude on my part but how do the candidates rate on fear of a black planet as expressed in backlash against Kaepernick‘s principled stance that cost him a job? Jesse frickin’ Ventura wasn’t afraid to express his nuanced yet supportive Vietnam veteran’s opinion on that.
And Pussy Riot. Yeah that’s still relevant given their personal connection to an authoritarian shi(f)t in their home country. They represent a canary in a coal mine we should heed. And their beautifully expressed punk anger inspires me.
Public Enemy and Pussy Riot should be front and center amongst Dems at least somewhat left of center. Who amongst our candidates could do better than awkward discomfort when confronted with hardcore out of accepted bounds black and feminist anger? Contain that dissonant bad vibe quick! We might scare the Midwest.
Don’t know if this adds context, but Sarah Silverman and Dick Van Dyke will also be hosted at the rally.
Sanders has a range of supporters in the music world:
https://music.mxdwn.com/2020/02/27/news/public-enemy-radio-to-perform-at-upcoming-bernie-sanders-rally-in-los-angeles/
The poster is a grabber.
I really don’t understand everyone saying that Warren needs to stop it before super Tuesday. She had low numbers of support right now, but so few primaries have been completed, it’s ridiculous. After super Tuesday, we will know how much support each candidate has from at least somewhat representative primaries. Then start calling for Pete and Elizabeth to drop out. Obviously Biden’s supporters will call on Pete to go and Sanders’ supporters calling on Elizabeth.
#60
Blatant strawman is blatant. Stupid overly detailed theorycrafting doesn’t count as credible planning.
#65.
Warren has no realistic path to recovery from her current state.
And her political career may be permanently damaged by this poor primary showing, as the current polling shows her getting bodied in her home state by Sanders!
Planning has to start somewhere, and if you’re wise and flexible it evolves with more and better information. You might consider Warren’s positions to be in the proposal stage prior to the public comment phase. That’s how planning works. It’s also an indicator of the breadth and depth of her grasp of subject matter
Also despite her odds, whatever she accumulates in support, whether a little or a lot, amounts to influence at the convention and position following the election. It’s still in her interest to hold out, play the long game, and try to fulfill her obligations to her supporters.
Contrast that with Trump, the polar opposite.
Speaking of “the breadth and depth of her grasp of [the] subject matter,” I will partly blame her terrible advisors, and partly her for listening to them. That’s as charitable as I can be to her at this point.
Warren’s Increasingly Desperate Health Care Messaging (with more good links in the article):
Also related to the plan, back in November when the details were released:
Warren’s Perpetual Medicare Head Tax Is Unworkable and Bad
Another good one from the same site: Comparing Warren’s and Sanders’s Child Care Proposals:
If you’re too lazy to read it all, it outlines six problems:
1. More complicated bureaucracy that will make it harder for the poor.
2. The program won’t even save families that much money anyway.
3. The user fees have weird, inegalitarian, pointless effects on various types of families.
4. The fees “defeat the income-smoothing purpose” of providing such benefits.
5. The fees discourage use of the service, for no reason, when it should be encouraging.
6. The fees don’t even raise that much money.
To quote the other article again, I would say it is “the opposite of what a technocratic wonk would do and simply is awful on the merits.”
In other news, her SuperPAC isn’t totally dark anymore…. Apparently some neoliberal oil/gas/fracking people, along with who knows what else. But we’re not supposed to know about it until most people have already voted.
….
Does anyone want to try to fit all this onto a snazzy poster? Maybe a billboard?
Well, I certainly am lazy, but points taken.
I’m sure somebody would be willing to try to work it on a poster. It would be an interesting design problem. Not a billboard though, too much of a drive-by.
68.
She is endangering her soi disant ideals by hanging about in this campaign, as her sub-viability campaign increases the risk of a brokered convention, and the resulting implosion at the polls.
@Crip Dyke:
So, uh, you forgot how to use Google? I found Elizabeth Warren’s “not for 3 years” admission (and mention of the stock jump) immediately with “Warren medicare for all backtrack”. Here’s the first link in the list of results; it’s not even behind a paywall so go crazy.
As for talking about her “plans”: every person I have seen say that they support Warren over Sanders has said it’s because she has everything planned out explicitly whereas he’s supposedly just hand-waving. (That’s not really very accurate, but it’s the apparently universal impression.) If you’re a Warren supporter who would be willing to back Sanders as a second choice and don’t think that, then congratulations — you’re the first out of about 50 that I’ve talked to who doesn’t say that. Go buy a lottery ticket, because you’re beating the odds.
And yes, actually, not having a super-detailed plan is a good thing. I want the most extreme person to be the negotiator, but I recognize that passing anything at all is going to be a negotiation. It’s a trite but true saying that “no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy”. I don’t expect that we will get everything Sanders promises to try to do if he is elected. I very much doubt that even if the Democrats take the Senate we’ll get even a few items in the list, because the Democrats are largely scum these days, particularly in the Senate. What is important is that Sanders — unlike Barack Obama — will actually use the bully pulpit to push Democratic Senators in the right direction. Warren, on the other hand, is a technocrat who keeps reiterating to the press and on the debate stage that she is a full-fledged capitalist and supports the market — not somebody who really wants single-payer in the first place, in other words.
Anyway, in the wake of the South Carolina primary, Warren has now come out and said that she actively desires a contested convention. Since that means that she specifically does not want Sanders to get 50+% of the delegates, you can realistically put only one of three interpretations on that:
She believes that, having staked out a position as the “real” Democrat closest to Sanders, the superdelegates will snub Sanders in her favor, despite the fact that (if current projections hold true, which of course they may not) she is forecast to lose every single state and end up in 4th place at best, and even lose to Sanders in her home state. I have no idea what the average Sanders supporter would do if she’s given the nomination over his head via back-room negotiations, but I, personally, would have a really hard time pulling that lever. (Moreso if, post-nomination, she moves rightward. She’d need to have a VP who is to her left if she wants my vote after such a maneuver.)
She believes that the Superdelegates will award the nomination to Biden, Buttigieg, or Bloomberg, and that they will choose her as VP in hopes of shoring up the progressive side of the party. If this happens — and it really seems more likely than #1, given her bad performance at the polls so far — well, I’m not voting for any of the 3 regressive Bs, no matter what, and I don’t see a point in enabling them by supporting down-ticket races, either. I consider that Biden in the White House would be as bad for the public in the medium and long term as Trump, just in different ways — the TPP would do more damage in the long run than Trump has managed to do so far, just for a start, and Biden is just the asshole to push for it — and the same goes for the other two. (Also, Biden and Bloomberg both would pardon Trump, no question about it to my mind.)
(I have to admit, I have been wrong for 4 years — I thought Hillary Clinton was the worst possible person that the Democrats could plausibly run for President, and that they would have done better with almost anybody else. That’s because I didn’t think Biden was going to run and regarded Bloomberg as a Republican. Funny how both parties managed to hit the bottom of their respective barrels and then somehow kept going deeper. I am widely regarded as unduly cynical, and yet my worst failures involve somehow managing not to be cynical enough to match reality.)
Warren has been lying all along about being a progressive, and genuinely wants Anyone-But-Sanders to win, even if it means Bloomberg and the probably second term for Trump. I keep telling myself that this is unlikely — but she lied about not using superPACs, she just Tweeted about how sanctions against Iran are the wrong way to deal with things after voting for those specific sanctions, and in the past she lied about her ethnicity on official forms, and her definite, stated, this-is-not-theoretical positions include repeated support of the PATRIOT Act and support of both Israeli and Indian Hindu ethnonationalism, so telling convenient lies for her own benefit is a tactic she resorts to and she definitely holds at least some incredibly terrible positions. It isn’t actually impossible that she’s been faking it all along and was good enough to fool us all.
(Note: for whatever reason, the forum software ate the numbers I had as the possible constructions on Warren’s behavior. #1 was the paragraph beginning “She believes that, having staked out”, #2 was the paragraph below it, and #3 was the final paragraph. I’ve never seen a forum before that chopped off numbers like that — IIRC, we also can’t use the “ol” tag here to number things automatically. Boo hiss.)