Election 2020

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BoSoxGal
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Re: Election 2020

Post by BoSoxGal »

Mayor Pete raised $7 million between January 23 and March 31 - not too shabby!

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren is struggling to raise money for her campaign and her finance director just left. Is she just persoanlly unlikable, or what gives?

Consider this piece:
THE SLATEST
Ongoing Struggles of Warren Campaign Provide Yet More Evidence That Voters Are Full of It
By BEN MATHIS-LILLEY
APRIL 01, 20198:34 PM

Democratic primary voters. What do they want?

In March, majorities of Democratic voters told Morning Consult that what they wanted out of a presidential candidate was someone who had decades of political experience but was under the age of 70. A majority said they wanted a “liberal” candidate, but a majority also said they wanted a “moderate” candidate. Taken together, this poll would suggest a preference for someone who is liberal, but not, like, crazily so, and experienced, but not too experienced. A similar NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that Democratic voters said they would be particularly enthused to support a female candidate and/or a black candidate and particularly unenthused about voting for someone over the age of 75 or a socialist.

There’s also a lot of data about which policies Democrats support. A majority of Democratic voters told the New York Times and SurveyMonkey in February that they would like to see higher taxes on top earners, with 75 percent supporting one particular proposal to levy a 2 percent annual wealth tax on fortunes greater than $50 million. In a November 2018 Gallup poll, the issues most often identified by Democrats as important to them were health care, gender equality, and wealth inequality. Around the same, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey more narrowly focused on issues that had been in the headlines found that health care and “corruption” were the most important issues to Democrats. The same poll found that within the subject of health care, the issue that mattered most to Democratic voters was cost. When Kaiser asked about what kinds of costs were most concerning, the issue of “unexpected medical bills” came out on top. (For what it’s worth, Kaiser didn’t break responses to the cost question down by party. A January 2019 poll commissioned by the advocacy group Protect Our Care, though, found that 84 percent of all voters would support a policy that would cut down on unexpected bills, so it stands to reason that such a crackdown would also have traction in the Democratic primary electorate specifically.)

When it comes to how political campaigns are conducted, sizable majorities of Democratic voters say that corporations and other large donors have too much influence. In May 2018, for example, 77 percent of Democrats surveyed told Pew that they favored the enactment of laws that would further restrict the influence of such donors on the electoral process.

Now consider some known facts about Elizabeth Warren, presidential candidate. She’s been working in politics since 1995, but she’s only 69. She has a record of liberal policy accomplishments but explicitly defines herself as being more moderate in her economic philosophy than ascendant “Democratic socialists” like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She launched her 2020 campaign by promoting a comprehensive anti-corruption plan and has instituted groundbreaking rules to prevent large donors from influencing her. One of the things she’s most well-known for is cracking down on fine-print consumer abuses like surprise medical bills; she actually came to prominence in part for her work on the subject of medical bankruptcies. The 2 percent wealth tax thing was her idea. She is, additionally, a woman.

Despite all this, Warren has been able to raise so little money for her campaign that the New York Times wrote a big story about it, and she’s stuck in fifth place in the polls, well behind two frontrunners who are well past age 75 and male. One of those frontrunners is the most donor-friendly Democratic candidate in the race and the other is a self-declared socialist.

Voters: You can’t trust them
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RayThom
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Election 2020

Post by RayThom »

I like Warren. The issues she cares about have always resonated with me. Until some months ago I considered her a front-runner or, at least, Biden's choice for VP. (But now, even Biden jumping into the mix appears to be diminishing day by day.)

Unfortunately, I feel Warren is bleeding heavily from the wound she created as she shot herself in the foot. Her "Native American" heritage claim was never proven satisfactorily, yet she became overly passionate trying to defend it -- without success. She started to sound desperate to me. So, what was once a small flesh wound has become a partial foot amputation.

At this point I feel she'd do best dropping her bid for POTUS and stay in the senate where she can serve the better good.

Of course, I'm waiting for the more serious "debates" to happen so I won't be kicking any decent Democrat to the curb too soon. However, I have become more and more optimistic and enthusiastic about Pete Buttigieg chances and I truly feel he would do best in revealing Trump's myriad inadequacies and flaws in subsequent debates. Not to mention Pete's more important ability to grasp and articulate his position on real -- not fake -- issues.

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BoSoxGal
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Re: Election 2020

Post by BoSoxGal »

Why is Joe Biden so far ahead in the polls? Is it just Obama nostalgia?
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Re: Election 2020

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Name recognition, at a guess.
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Re: Election 2020

Post by Joe Guy »

BoSoxGal wrote:Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren is struggling to raise money for her campaign and her finance director just left. Is she just persoanlly unlikable, or what gives?
Warren lack wampum.

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Election 2020

Post by RayThom »

Joe Guy wrote:... Warren lack wampum.
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How?
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Re: Election 2020

Post by Econoline »

The Media Gaslighting of 2020’s Most Likable Candidate
Elizabeth Warren has proven over and over that she’s a charismatic figure. Why do we keep casting her as a nagging schoolmarm?

Sady Doyle

Mar 22

At CNN’s town hall event on Monday, the American people saw something we’d been told was impossible: Elizabeth Warren winning over a crowd.

The Massachusetts senator took aim at a variety of subjects: the Electoral College, Mississippi’s racist state flag, the rise of white nationalism. Always, she was met with thunderous applause. Even a simple Bible verse — from Matthew 25:35–40, about moral obligation to the poor and hungry — prompted cheers so loud and prolonged that Warren had to pause and repeat herself in order to make her voice heard over the noise. Yet this was the same woman the media routinely frames as too wonky, too nerdy, too socially stunted. But then, Warren has always been an exceptionally charismatic candidate. We just forget that fact when she’s campaigning — due, in large part, to our deep and lingering distrust for female intelligence.

Warren is bursting with what we might call “charisma” in male candidates: She has the folksy demeanor of Joe Biden, the ferocious conviction of Bernie Sanders, the deep intelligence of fellow law professor Barack Obama. But Warren is not a man, and so those traits are framed as liabilities, rather than strengths. According to the media, Warren is an uptight schoolmarm, a “wonky professor,” a scold, a wimpy Dukakis, a wooden John Kerry, or (worse) a nerdier Al Gore.

The criticism has hit her from the left and right. The far-right Daily Caller accused her of looking weird when she drank beer; on social media, conservatives spread vicious (and viciously ableist) rumors that Warren took antipsychotic drugs that treated “irritability caused by autism.” On the other end of the spectrum, Amber A’Lee Frost, the lone female co-host of the socialist podcast Chapo Trap House, wrote for The Baffler (and, when The Baffler retracted her article, for Jacobin) that Warren was “weak” and “not charismatic.” Frost deplored the “Type-A Tracy Flicks” who dared support “this Lisa Simpson of a dark-horse candidate.”

Casting Warren as a sheltered, Ivory Tower type is odd, given that her politics and diction are not exactly elitist. Yet none of this is new; the same stereotypes were levied against Warren in 2011, during her Senate campaign.

Strangely, the first nerdification of Warren was a purely local phenomenon — one which happened even as national media was falling in love with her. Jon Stewart publicly adored her, and her ingenuity in proposing the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau a few years prior earned her respect among the rising populist wing of the party. Her fame was further catapulted when a speech — a video of Warren speaking, seemingly off-the-cuff, in a constituent’s living room — went viral. “Nobody in this country got rich on his own, nobody,” Warren proclaimed, pointing up the ways entrepreneurs benefit from publicly funded services like roads and schools and fire departments.

“First-time candidates don’t usually articulate a progressive economic message quite this well,” the Washington Monthly declared. The New Yorker called it “the most important political speech of this campaign season.” That enthusiasm continued throughout Warren’s first Senate bid. Writing for the New York Times, Rebecca Traister noted that “the early devotion to Warren recalls the ardor once felt by many for Obama.” (Obama himself famously echoed Warren’s message — “you didn’t build that” — on the 2012 campaign trail.)

Locally, Warren prompted a much different discussion, with scores of Massachusetts analysts describing her as stiff and unlikable. Boston-based Democratic analyst Dan Payne bemoaned her “know-it-all style” and wished aloud she would “be more authentic… I want her to just sound like a human being, not read the script that makes her sound like some angry, hectoring schoolmarm.” In a long profile for Boston magazine, reporter Janelle Nanos quoted Thomas Whalen, a political historian at Boston University, who called Warren a “flawed candidate,” someone who was “desperately trying to find a message that’s going to resonate.” In that same article, Nanos asked Warren point-blank about her “likability problem.” Warren’s response seemed to stem from deep frustration: “People tell me everywhere I go why they care that I got in this race,” she said. “I can’t answer the question because I literally haven’t experienced what you’re talking about.”

There’s an element of gaslighting here: It only takes a reporter a few sources — and an op-ed columnist a single, fleeting judgment — to declare a candidate “unlikable.” After that label has been applied, any effort the candidate makes to win people over can be cast as “inauthentic.” Likability is in this way a self-reinforcing accusation, one which is amplified every time the candidate tries to tackle it. (Recall Hillary Clinton, who was asked about her “likability” at seemingly every debate or town hall for eight straight years — then furiously accused of pandering every time she made an effort to seem more “approachable.”)

It’s significant that the “I hate you; please respond” line of political sabotage only ever seems to be aimed at women. It’s also revealing that, when all these men talked about how Warren could win them over, their “campaign” advice sounded suspiciously close to makeover tips. In his article, Payne advised Warren to “lose the granny glasses,” “soften the hair,” and employ a professional voice coach to “deepen her voice, which grates on some.” Payne seemed to suggest that Elizabeth Warren look like a model and sound like a man — anything to disguise the grisly reality of a smart woman making her case.

Warren won her Senate race, and the “schoolmarm” stereotype largely vanished as her national profile grew. By 2014, grassroots activists were begging her to run for president; by mid-2016, CNN had named her “Donald Trump’s chief antagonist.” She’s since given a stream of incendiary interviews and handed the contemporary women’s movement its most popular meme. All this should be enough to prove any candidate’s “charisma.” Yet, now that she’s thrown her hat into the presidential ring, the firebrand has become a Poindexter once again.

The digs at Warren’s “professorial” style hurt her because, on some level, they’re true. Warren really is an intellectual, a scholar; moreover, she really is running an exceptionally ideas-focused campaign, regularly turning out detailed and exhaustive policy proposals at a point when most of the other candidates don’t even have policy sections on their websites. What’s galling is the suggestion that this is a bad thing.

Yes, male candidates have suffered from being too smart — just ask Gore, who ran on climate change 20 years before it was trendy. But just as often, their intelligence helps them. Obama’s sophistication and public reading lists endeared him to liberals. And just a few days ago, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg was widely praised for learning Norwegian in order to read an author’s untranslated works. Yet, Warren is dorky, a teacher’s pet, a try-hard Tracy Flick, or Lisa Simpson. A “know-it-all.”

The “schoolmarm” stereotype now applied to Warren has always been used to demean educated women. In the Victorian era, we called them “bluestockings” — unmarried, unattractive women who had dared to prioritize intellectual development over finding a man. They are, in the words of one contemporary writer, “frumpy and frowly in the extreme, with no social talents.” Educators say that 21st century girls are still afraid to talk in class because of “sexist bullying” which sends the message that smart girls are unfeminine: “For girls, peers tell them ‘if you are swotty and clever and answer too many questions, you are not attractive,’” claims Mary Bousted, joint general-secretary of the U.K.’s National Education Union. Female academics still report being made to feel “unsexual, unattractive, unwomanly, and unnatural.” We can deplore all this as antiquated thinking, but even now, grown men are still demanding that Warren ditch her glasses or “soften” her hair — to work on being prettier so as to make her intelligence less threatening.

Warren is cast as a bloodless intellectual when she focuses on policy, a scolding lecturer when she leans into her skills as a rabble-rouser; either way, her intelligence is always too much and out of place. Her eloquence is framed, not as inspiring, but as “angry” and “hectoring.” Being an effective orator makes her “strident.” It’s not solely confined to the media, but reporters seem anxious to signal-boost anyone who complains: Anonymous male colleagues call her “irritating,” telling Vanity Fair that “she projects a ‘holier than thou’ attitude” and that “she has a moralizing to her.” That same quality in male candidates is hailed as moral clarity.

Warren is accused, in plain language, of being uppity — a woman who has the bad grace to be smarter than the men around her, without downplaying it to assuage their egos. But running in a presidential race is all about proving that you are smarter than the other guy. By demanding that Warren disguise her exceptional talents, we are asking her to lose. Thankfully, she’s not listening. She is a smart woman, after all.
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Re: Election 2020

Post by Lord Jim »

BoSoxGal wrote:Why is Joe Biden so far ahead in the polls? Is it just Obama nostalgia?
I think a large part of that is a reflection of the polling that shows most rank-and-file Democrats rating nominating a candidate who can beat Trump above "ideological purity"....

Biden is one of a small (very small, given the mad dash to the left that is going on with so many of them) group of declared or likely Democratic candidates that based on what I currently know I would definitely vote for over Donald Trump...(As opposed to not voting or voting for a third party/independent candidate. NEVER Trump.)

Under normal (ie, non-Trump) circumstances, all of these candidates would be too Liberal for me to support, (hell, Biden is so weak on defense that he even opposed the Bin Ladin raid) but against Il Boobce, right now I could support:

Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Hickenlooper. (Though while I don't disqualify him on ideological grounds, thus far I have found the former Colorado Governor very disappointing. In a couple of interviews I've seen, he seems to be something of an idiot...)

Then there is one I have definitely determined it would be impossible for me to vote for; Tulsi Gabbard..(As I said before, she has views on defense and national security that are virtually indistinguishable from Rand Paul's)

Then there is another small group that I haven't definitely ruled out (only because I don't know how much worse Trump will get between now and the election) but who I almost certainly could not vote for, and wouldn't vote for if the election were held today:

Sanders, Warren, Harris, Gillibrand and Booker...

All five of those have embraced Sanders' "Mandatory Medicare For All" abolish-private health insurance proposal, (or as I like to call it "The 13% Solution"...in honor of the 13% of the American people who support it...)

The absolute least likely for me (after Gabbard) are Sanders and Warren, a pair of strident class warfare demagogues (personally, I don't see whipping up hatred, fear and resentment towards people who have more than you do to be a noticeable improvement over whipping up hatred, fear and resentment towards those who have a different skin color than you do ...) they understand economics about as well as Donald Trump, and they would take a meat axe to defense spending...

Harris isn't quite as bad as those two, but she really seems to be leading the charge to out-Bernie-Bernie with the size of her Goodie Supertanker...(Most recently, she added a 315 billion dollar payoff to the NEA )

Gillibrand and Booker are two that based on their records prior to getting in the race I might have put on my "possibly support" list; but while they are not genuine doctrinaire leftists like Sanders Warren and Harris, they are pandering so hard to the left-wing base, it's apparent to me they don't really have any convictions at all...

Right now my "Possibly support" list contains one name; Beto O'Rourke...(for me the jury's still out on him...it depends on how much pandering I see....)

Then there is a HUGE list of declared and possible candidates, about whom I simply do not know enough to form an opinion one way or the other (With this many candidates, I just haven't had that kind of time...What the hell is an Andrew Yang?)

It's early days, but I have to repeat that I remain very discouraged by what I see going on in the Democratic race overall, with so many candidates racing to the left...

If the Democrats nominate an abolish private health insurance, tax raising, defense slashing, law and border enforcement bashing candidate in 2020, they will lose millions of voters who delivered them the House majority in 2018 and probably hand re-election to Donald Trump...

(And since given the field and the amount of pandering to the left going on I rate the prospects of a candidate like that winning the nomination to be at least 50%, for me it makes getting Trump out before the election all that more urgent an imperative...)

If a candidate like that is nominated, as Joe Scarborough correctly observed, for a lot of folks in the large political middle, "I don't like Trump, but we survived four years of him and I think we could survive four more better than we could with Sanders" will become a powerful argument...

Words can not really begin to express just how uninspired and unimpressed I have been thus far with Howard Schultz, but if the Dems nominate someone like Sanders or Warren, he may start to look like Douglas MacArthur to me...(Assuming Trump is the GOP nominee)

Frankly in my view, if the Dems decide to impose a hard-left versus Trump choice on the electorate, the only hope of bringing Trump down would be a credible third party or independent candidate who had the gravitas to be able to attract enough center, center/right and center/left voters to gain at least the mid-thirties to high-thirties plurality of the vote in enough states to win an Electoral College majority...

I don't believe this is an un-doable thing (the number of votes needed would certainly be there for the right candidate to pull it off) but I seriously doubt that Howard Schultz is The Guy...

If he could attract the financing, ( a big "If"; 100 million to get on all the ballots... given the way the two major parties have rigged the system against independents, you need a lot of cash to fund signature-gathering and pay top lawyers to carry out legal challenges... and another at least 500 million for a the general election) John Kasich could definitely be The Guy...

If Kasich is able to launch a credible independent bid, (and given how serious and smart he is, I don't think he would get in unless he felt he could attract the dollars to run credibly) I wouldn't even be giving thought to any of the Democratic contenders against Trump; I'd be all-in for John...
Last edited by Lord Jim on Sat Apr 13, 2019 7:31 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Election 2020

Post by MajGenl.Meade »

Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Hickenlooper
Sound like new villains for Guardians of the Galaxy III
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Re: Election 2020

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or infectious diseases that have been eliminated by vaccines.

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Re: Election 2020

Post by BoSoxGal »

LJ, I honestly can’t comprehend how someone who recognizes the danger Trump poses to our democracy as you do could even contemplate not voting for whoever the D nominee is (it won’t be Tulsi Gabbard) or voting 3rd party.

All other policy concerns aside, Trump must go. Period.
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Re: Election 2020

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His vote is meaningless, considering where he lives.
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Re: Election 2020

Post by Scooter »

So was yours, and it will be again.
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Re: Election 2020

Post by Big RR »

BoSoxGal wrote:LJ, I honestly can’t comprehend how someone who recognizes the danger Trump poses to our democracy as you do could even contemplate not voting for whoever the D nominee is (it won’t be Tulsi Gabbard) or voting 3rd party.

All other policy concerns aside, Trump must go. Period.
I tend to agree with Jim (in principle at least, not to his choice of candidates); IMHO at some point you have to ultimately cast your vte FOR a candidate, not against another. And while I think you have to balance your dislike of a candidate with the damage the alternative could bring, it is a tough claculus to determine who to vote for. With Trump I am inclined to vote for pretty much anyone against him, but I can understand some may see the same equation tipping slightly in favor of a third party or nonvote, much as I have done in several elections in the past. We should not just be placid consumers voting for whomever the dems (or repubs as the case may be) deign to dish up for our vote--sometimes we do have to push back.

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Re: Election 2020

Post by Jarlaxle »

Scooter wrote:So was yours, and it will be again.
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Re: Election 2020

Post by Econoline »

He may very well be right about both of them, but Krugman's assessment of Sanders seems to me to be more accurate than his assessment of Biden. ( I loved the line, “Sanders, by contrast, doesn’t do bipartisanship. He doesn’t even do unipartisanship.”)
  • The Trouble With Joe and Bernie
    Neither man seems ready for harsh political reality.


    By Paul Krugman | Opinion Columnist | May 2, 2019

    It’s still very early, but Joe Biden has emerged as the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Bernie Sanders is in second place, although he appears to be fairly far behind, and one poll shows him in a statistical tie with Elizabeth Warren. So what should we think about the men currently leading the field?

    Well, I have concerns. Not about electability, a topic about which nobody knows anything. Never mind what today’s general election polls say: What will polling look like after the inevitable Republican smear campaign? The answer to this question depends, in turn, on whether news organizations will cooperate with those smears as gleefully as they did in 2016.

    No, my concerns are about what will happen if either man wins. Are they ready for the political trench warfare that would inevitably follow a Democratic victory?

    The trouble with both Biden and Sanders is that each, in his own way, seems to believe that he has unique powers of persuasion that will let him defy the harsh reality of today’s tribal politics. And this lack of realism could set either of them up for failure.

    Start with Biden, a convivial guy who has maintained good personal relations with Republicans. All indications are that he believes that these good personal relations will translate into an ability to make bipartisan deals on policy.

    But we’ve already seen this movie, and it was a tragedy. Barack Obama took office with a message of unity and bipartisan outreach, and a sincere belief that he could get many Republicans to back his efforts to revive the economy, reform health care, and more. What he faced instead was total scorched-earth opposition.

    And Obama’s belief that he could transcend partisanship nearly sank his presidency. Crucial months were wasted trying to devise health reform legislation that could attract Republican support; Obama’s signature achievement happened only because Nancy Pelosi’s heroic efforts dragged the Affordable Care Act across the finish line. He was willing to make a “grand bargain” with Republicans that would have undermined Medicare and Social Security, deeply damaging the Democratic brand; he was saved only by the G.O.P.’s total intransigence, its unwillingness to contribute a single penny’s worth of tax increases.

    The big concern about a Biden presidency is that he would repeat all of Obama’s early mistakes, squandering any momentum from electoral victory in pursuit of a bipartisan dream that should have died long ago.

    Sanders, by contrast, doesn’t do bipartisanship. He doesn’t even do unipartisanship, refusing to call himself a Democrat even as he seeks the party’s nomination. But what Sanders appears to believe is that he can convince voters not just to support progressive policies, but to support sweeping policy changes that would try to fix things most people don’t consider broken.

    That, after all, is what his Medicare for All push, which would eliminate private insurance, amounts to. He is saying to the 180 million Americans who currently have private insurance, many of whom are satisfied with their coverage: “I’m going to take away the insurance you have and replace it with a government program. Also, you’re going to pay a lot more in taxes. But trust me, the program will be better than what you have now, and the new taxes will be less than you currently pay in premiums.”

    Could those claims be true? Yes. Will voters believe them? Probably not. Polling shows that support for Medicare for All falls off drastically when people are informed that it would eliminate private insurance and require higher taxes.

    You might try to rationalize the Sanders position by saying that Medicare for All is an aspirational plan, and that in practice he would be willing to accept a more gradualist approach. But that’s not what his behavior suggests. On the contrary, Sanders has conspicuously refused to support measures that would enhance Obamacare, even as a temporary expedient.

    For Sanders, then, it seems to be single-payer or bust. And what that would mean, with very high likelihood, is … bust.

    We’re not talking about right versus left here. The Democratic Party has become much more solidly progressive than it used to be, and that will be reflected in the policies of any Democrat who makes it to the White House. The issue, instead, is whether he or she will be willing to face up to the harsh realities of today’s politics.

    Democratic candidates in the next tier of the current race seem to get it. Warren’s proposals are very progressive, but they’re also incremental, and even her fairly radical ideas, like her proposed wealth tax, poll well. Anyone who watched Kamala Harris at Wednesday’s Barr hearing knows that she has no illusions about the state of partisanship.

    Biden and Sanders, however, come across as romantics. Biden appears stuck in the past, when real bipartisanship sometimes happened. Sanders appears to live in an imaginary future, where a popular tidal wave washes away all political obstacles. Neither man seems ready for the tough fights that will follow even if he wins.
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Re: Election 2020

Post by liberty »

Joe Guy wrote:
BoSoxGal wrote:Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren is struggling to raise money for her campaign and her finance director just left. Is she just persoanlly unlikable, or what gives?
Warren lack wampum.
It is pathetic that she is ashamed of who she is and wants to be another race or ethnicity. Is that not indicative a psychological defect?
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Re: Election 2020

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liberty wrote:It is pathetic that she is ashamed of who she is and wants to be another race or ethnicity. Is that not indicative a psychological defect?
. . . said Temüjin
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Re: Election 2020

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Re: Election 2020

Post by Lord Jim »

A few quick comments on some of the other candidates...

After seeing him interviewed recently, Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts has moved off my "don't know enough about them" list and on to my "definitely could vote for him over Trump" list...

Since he's from MA, I naturally assumed he'd be a strident lefty, 8-) but he's actually a quite reasonable and thoughtful fellow...(for a center/left type...)

Speaking of strident lefites from Massachusetts, I see that Elizabeth Warren has rebounded somewhat in the polls, (from the low to high single digits)...

From looking at the overall numbers, it appears she's done this mainly at the expense of Sanders... (who probably didn't do himself any favors even with a lot of Democratic voters...who support restoring voting rights to convicted felons after they have served their sentences...with his loopy proposal to restore voting rights to incarcerated terrorists, serial killers and and child rapists...)

Warren seemed to be casting about on almost daily basis for some high-profile issue to stand out from the pack with; tossing out one after another after another (if it's Tuesday, it must be Let's Break Up Google Day) without doing much to move her numbers...

She finally seems to have found at least some traction and success with her decision to become the first (and so far only) candidate to call for the formal opening of Impeachment hearings against Trump...

Speaking of desperate candidates, I have to say that I've been happy to see the two biggest panderers in the race...Kirsten Gillibrand and Corey Booker...mired in the 1-2 percent range...

I'm obviously not a hard left type, but if you truly believe in that stuff you might as well go with a candidate who genuinely shares your philosophy rather than a moderate liberal who has suddenly and cynically discovered their "inner progressive" because they believe it's politically expedient for them to do so...

Speaking of shrinking candidacies, I think I'll wrap this up with a few words about Beto O'Rourke...

Poor Beto has seen his poll numbers tank down into the low single digits as he has been hammered on two fronts...

He's been displaced in the media by Mayor Pete as the "New Thing" candidate, and knocked down by Biden's strong start with voters looking for the candidate with the broadest appeal to beat Trump...

I don't really see a path back for Beto; he may want to consider dropping out and taking on John Cornyn for the Texas Senate seat...

So that's my take...

As always; fair, balanced, and unafraid... 8-)
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