Election 2020

[Econoline]

I think the definition of "lack of appeal" is the crux of the problem ("appeal???" to whom?)...regardless of what Abe said...

[Joe Guy]

I think the definition of "lack of appeal" is the crux of the problem ("appeal???" to whom?)...regardless of what Abe said...

I meant lack of appeal to the voters. As in the candidate's ability to get voters to believe they have the ability to accomplish what they want to do.

[Crackpot]

Warren has the same problem Hillary Clinton has: They are poor campaigners. They lack the ability to communicate “empathy” (not sure that’s the right word for it) while speaking large scale.

I am reminded of Clinton’s “breakdown” during the 2008 campaign for that brief moment we saw the humanity behind their polished facade and she received a bump in the polls because of it. Unfortunately we never saw a him of that again.

I don’t know if it is a purposeful “deletion” on their part to avoid a charge of ”feminine weekness” but their ability to campaign has suffered for it.

[Guinevere]

:roll

“Poor campaigner” is just an excuse for outright misogyny. Because Joe and Bernie are so damn good at it ....

[Scooter]

Yeah, it's hard to swallow that inability to communicate empathy is the problem when all Bernie does is scream at everyone.

[BoSoxGal]

Warren had very large crowds who stood in line for hours after her rallies just to meet her in person and get a selfie - and she stuck around for hours to do it, happily.

But yes, the bitch was just unlikable.

[RayThom]

Biden/Klobuchar... 2020

Klobuchar/Buttigieg... 2024

[Crackpot]

Bernie has a hard time getting much more than 35% of “his own party” and I doubt his appeal is wide enough to spread. And Joe? All he’s got is charisma. Both Clinton and Warren are policy powerhouses but that doesn’t change the fact that they don’t broadly come across a likable or relatable. Is this more important for female candidates possibly maybe even probably but saying “That’s not fair” or “that’s misogynist” isn’t going to change that current reality even if it’s true.

If I had to guess Warrens biggest downfall was being a piss poor liar. Being well versed in policy she knows there are going to be financial impacts caused by what she’s selling. She may think the impacts will be relatively small and worth it in the long run but she knows it will cost. And the lie showed when she said it wouldn’t. She’s not the “True believer” Bernie is that allows him to ignore reality “for the greater good”. (That being the major reason I can’t support him)

To win an election you have to go beyond the rallies and connect with the masses if you can’t do that you’re sunk.

[ex-khobar Andy]

In one sense I don't disagree with this sentence of CP:

Warren has the same problem Hillary Clinton has: They are poor campaigners. They lack the ability to communicate “empathy” (not sure that’s the right word for it) while speaking large scale.

I haven't felt the slightest tinge of empathy from Biden - and maybe a tiny bit from Sanders. Biden seems just artificial to me - he will say whatever he thinks is necessary to get elected. (But let's never forget that he would be a thousand times better than the current 'occupier' of that position.) I've never forgotten that he was busted for plagiarism in 1988. Yes it was 32 years ago and people change but some things are disqualifying. Again - his lifting of a Neil Kinnock speech (and my memory is long enough to say - if I were going to steal a speech I wouldn't start with Kinnock who is and was equally an opportunist with no discernible ideals of his own) is as nothing compared with the crimes/idiocies/inanities of Trump. Much as I would love to see Warren or Sanders as President, I think a realistic assessment is that Biden has an 80% chance of beating Trump in November while Sanders or Warren has a 50% chance. Like it or not but Warren laid herself open to the Pocahontas thing. Trump will pound on that - unfairly of course - but she did declare herself as American Indian in 1986. Maybe someone was looking for evidence of diversity in hiring and pressured her to do so. But she should not have done it. Sanders - to me the main argument against him is that he's not a Democrat and is using colors of convenience. Trump will pound on that. "The party is so weak they had to go outside to find a candidate!"

'Empathy' is overrated. I didn't disagree with the idea (2000) that George Bush was the kind of guy you could have a beer with. I don't (or at least didn't) doubt it. Plenty of people I can have a beer with but whom I would strongly discourage from running for president. Bill Clinton was an asshole to his wife and yet, I think, largely an effective president.

[Big RR]

:roll

“Poor campaigner” is just an excuse for outright misogyny. Because Joe and Bernie are so damn good at it ....

Good at it? No, but Bernie can whip up a crowd and sell his "vision" in a way that no other candidate in this race since the beginning can. Of course, many don't buy that vision, which is why I think he cannot win. Joe has a tough time whipping up crowds, because even if you like it, it's hard to be enthusiastic for vanilla ice cream; whether that can win remains to be seen. I am not that optimistic.

I wouldn't mind a Biden/Klobuchar ticket, but I don't see it a slam dunk to defeat Trump

[Econoline]

Andy, I disagree regarding Warren: the "Pocahontas" thing was a moldy nothingburger that didn't matter much to anybody but Trump and the MAGA crowd; IIRC none of the Democrats running against her for the nomination even brought it up. Furthermore, since she was a native of Oklahoma I find it entirely credible that there were family stories of having "Indian blood" somewhere in their history.

No, what did her in was the Medicare-for-All dustup, in which she was goaded into becoming much too specific much too soon (as if there was any chance at all of that detailed a proposal making it through the campaign and the legislative process unchanged). She gave ammunition to all sides with that: to the right (SEE? THE NUMBERS DON'T ADD UP EVEN IF THEY DO ADD UP!!!! ALSO, TAAAAAAAAXES!!!1!!!11!!!!!) and to the left (SELL-OUT!!! CORPORATE SHILL!!! SHE'S ABANDONING BERNIE'S PERFECT PLAN ALREADY!!!)...and absolutely NOBODY, not even those who appreciated that she had worked long and hard on her plan, was convinced that it would become law with every detail intact.

[Guinevere]

:roll

“Poor campaigner” is just an excuse for outright misogyny. Because Joe and Bernie are so damn good at it ....

Good at it? No, but Bernie can whip up a crowd and sell his "vision" in a way that no other candidate in this race since the beginning can. Of course, many don't buy that vision, which is why I think he cannot win. Joe has a tough time whipping up crowds, because even if you like it, it's hard to be enthusiastic for vanilla ice cream; whether that can win remains to be seen. I am not that optimistic.

I wouldn't mind a Biden/Klobuchar ticket, but I don't see it a slam dunk to defeat Trump

Uh, you completely missed the sarcasm in my comment about Bernie and Biden. They aren’t particularly good campaigners. But that criticism only seems to get leveled at the women, and is regularly used as an excuse for outright misogyny.

[Bicycle Bill]

Now that the board's back, I'm finally able to post these.  The owner of these two videos have blocked them from being embedded so you can't just click-and-play but will have to second-click to go to the YouTube site — but I still think it's well worth it.

The singing portraits may be a little creepy, but you should be able to deal with that in order to get the underlying message.





-"BB"-

[BoSoxGal]

Interesting FB post making the rounds of social media:

[Joe Guy]

Uh, you completely missed the sarcasm in my comment about Bernie and Biden. They aren’t particularly good campaigners. But that criticism only seems to get leveled at the women, and is regularly used as an excuse for outright misogyny.

I don't know how you've missed all of the criticism of Joe Biden. They accuse him of being too touchy feely, a stutterer, making frequent gaffes and being slow, old and white. Sean Hannity says he is showing symptoms of Alzheimer's. Bernie is accused of pushing a socialist agenda that will bankrupt the country and being physically fragile - and it's often pointed out that he and Biden are old and white and will probably die before either could finish a second term.

No prejudiced thinking there....

[Guinevere]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... p2GAtnDFSw

‘All of Warren’s virtues were recast as vices in the public eye.’
A woman cannot be elected president. If that statement was not true when Elizabeth Warren announced her intent to run, on New Years Eve 2018, it has become true now. With her exit from the race, the last serious female presidential candidate has now dropped out, and what was once a historically diverse field has narrowed to two very old white men, the former vice-president Joe Biden, 77, and the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, 78. The next president, it is now assured, will be a man. Again.

The bruising contest has left the party divided and rancorous, with the result being that no matter who the Democratic nominee is, he will face not only the formidable resources of a moneyed Republican opposition, but also intense internal enmity within his own party. The internal factionalism and wild hatred within the Democratic party makes either candidate, be it Biden or Sanders, much more likely to lose in November. And the advanced ages of both of the two remaining major candidates means that even if one of them wins the presidency in November, it remains a real question whether they can feasibly run for a second term. And so, win or lose, the long, contentious and often hateful Democratic primary cycle will be repeated in four years for the 2024 cycle, further fracturing and handicapping the party, no matter what.

All of this could have been avoided if the media and the electorate were less blinded by cynicism, sexism and fear and more willing to see Warren for who she was – the most capable, competent and kindest candidate in the race.

As a woman, the Massachusetts senator always faced an uphill battle of double standards and misogynist resentment. She had to be competent but not condescending, cheery but not pandering, maternal but not frumpy, smart but not haughty. As she rose in the polls last summer and fall, she came under the kind of scrutiny that male frontrunners are not subjected to, and faced skepticism about her claims and character that male candidates do not face.

This is the fate of a lot of women who come close to attaining power, and empirical data backs up the phenomenon: writing in the Washington Post, the Cornell philosopher Kate Manne cited a 2010 Harvard study that found that women are viewed more negatively simply by seeking office. “Voters view male and female politicians as equally power-seeking, but respond to them quite differently,” Manne writes. “Men who seek power were viewed as stronger and tougher, while power-seeking women provoked feelings of disgust and contempt.”

As a result, all of Warren’s virtues were recast as vices in the public eye. Her impressive credentials and superlative intellect became out-of-touch elitism. Her joyousness and enthusiasm were cast as somehow both insincerely pandering and cringingly over-earnest. This kind of transformation of neutral or positive character traits into negative ones is not something that happens to men in similar positions. Sanders can aestheticize his practiced cantankerousness for laughs and sympathy without anyone asking if its a put-on. Biden can use slang from the 1930s without anyone ever questioning whether the ostentatious folksiness of his “no malarkey” messaging might be just a tad affected. But for Warren, every smile was interpreted as a sign of concealed hatred, of secret, nefarious motives.

Her policy efforts, too, were cast as a repudiation of her principles rather than as steps toward realizing them. Her attempt to transform Medicare for All from a symbolic rallying cry into a substantive, workable and affordable policy change that can be made in our time brought, paradoxically, accusations that she was less serious about the policy for trying to make it a reality. Her plans to break up tech monopolies, repair the damage to black wealth done by historic redlining policies and reshape massive federal spending projects to make them environmentally sustainable were all cast as signs of duplicity and lack of commitment to her stated values. Meanwhile, male candidates who did not have substantive plans to implement such policies were believed, largely uncritically, when they told the public that they would put them in place.

In this race, men’s statements – about who they are, what they value, what they would do as president – have largely been taken at face value, even when male candidates have made false or exaggerated claims or contradicted themselves. But Elizabeth Warren was never given the benefit of the doubt. Her flaws and missteps were magnified, and interpreted in ways disproportionate to their significance, while comparatively greater mistakes by male rivals were all but ignored. When she referred to her father as having worked as a janitor, a days–long news cycle asked why, if he was really a janitor, her brother had once referred to him as a “maintenance man”. That these are effectively the same did not matter: the irrelevant non-story was interpreted as a sign of her constitutional untrustworthiness.

Warren was said to be not really running for president, but running as a spoiler; not really happy to meet voters, but shamelessly pretending with her long selfie lines; not really committed to economic inequality, but merely devoting her life to it as some sort of long con. None of these accusations made much logical sense, but that didn’t matter, because they were backed up by the force of feeling – a very strong feeling, held by many men and women alike, that a woman seeking power and status just can’t be trusted.

The epistemic philosopher Miranda Fricker calls this tendency to disbelieve women, and to believe powerful men, “testimonial injustice”: the harm done to speakers when prejudiced listeners discount their credibility. Women face testimonial injustice in particular when they challenge or contradict men, as cultural tropes that depict women as conniving, scheming, and selfish can be mustered to make her seem less credible, him more believable. Fricker doesn’t apply her concept of testimonial injustice to gender conflict exclusively, but it is an obstacle that many women recount in their own experiences of gendered injustice: the sense that they cannot be believed, that they cannot achieve equal credibility and moral footing with men in the minds of their peers, that they will always be assumed to be either stupid or dishonest. Branded as dishonest even as she told the truth, duplicitous even as she kept her promises, Warren faced testimonial injustice on a huge scale, and it ultimately doomed her campaign.

Which brings us to the real moment, I think, that effectively killed Warren’s chances at the presidency: not the botched communications rollout of her Medicare for All plan, as many pundits have said, but her conflict with Sanders. In January, CNN reported that Warren and Sanders had met privately in late 2018 before announcing their candidacies, and that Warren had told close associates afterwards that Sanders had said something rude, inconsiderate and sexist to her: that he did not think a woman could defeat Donald Trump. Sanders says that’s not what he meant, but the two candidates’ accounts of the conversation are not incompatible. When Warren confirmed the report, the story both pointed to the troublesome misogyny of Sanders supporters and incited it: they began a gruesome, hateful and organized attack against Warren and her supporters. They called her a liar. They called her a snake, and made excessive use of the snake emoji. The online conversation veered from the typical competitive snarkiness into something darker and more hateful. Many of the things Sanders supporters said in response to this incident were deeply sexist and deeply cruel. A few of the things they said were threatening.

In the aftermath, it became difficult, if not impossible, to say that you believed Warren about the conversation: any public statement of support for her or belief in her account was met with fierce harassment. Perhaps this is why few of them were made. The public consensus quickly became that she was lying about the conversation with Sanders, and that he was not lying. It is plausible, to me, to think that a white man in his late 70s, comfortable in his privilege and out of touch with his time, said something condescending and sexist to a woman in private. I find Warren’s account more plausible than the alternative offered by Sanders’ supporters, that a woman invented the story and leaked it to hurt an innocent man. But to those that make it, the feasibility of the accusation is not important. What is important, again, is that the accusation is backed up by feeling, the feeling that Warren owes something to this man, that she betrayed him, that she can’t be trusted.

What happened to Elizabeth Warren is proof that women’s lives are still constrained and narrowed by sexism, that women’s talents and ambitions still matter less than men’s.

Many people believed Warren was lying when she said that Sanders told her a woman couldn’t be president, and in politics, what gets believed is effectively indistinguishable from the truth, whether or not it has any bearing on fact. Maybe this is why powerful men, given so much credibility and so much benefit of the doubt, seem to have a strange power of pronouncement. They declare that a woman is deceitful and people stop trusting her; they declare that a woman is unelectable and people stop imagining the country she would shape; they say, even allegedly, even third-hand, that a woman can’t beat Trump, and people nod along, believing. And then they vote for a man.

Warren events became famous for the selfie lines, the sometimes hours-long rally-after-the-rally in which waiting voters and supporters could chat with campaign reps about the candidate, talk to one another about the issues they cared about and ultimately get a picture with Warren herself. By the time she dropped out, Warren had taken more than 100,000 of these pictures. The events developed a particular ritual, and one aspect was what Warren did when she met a small girl: she would kneel down to the child’s eye level and offer her a pinkie promise. “I’m running for president, because that’s what girls do,” she would tell them, and then ask them to remember.

The message to the children was that women can do anything, that when they grow up their talents won’t be ignored, their intelligence won’t be mocked, their horizons won’t be narrowed because of their sex. But if anything, Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy proved that this is not true. There is no way for a woman to be enough to overcome misogyny – there is no amount of smart she can be, there is no amount of good she can be, there is no point at which she will be so overpoweringly hardworking and so obviously qualified that people who do not want women to have positions of prominence and authority will have to give her one anyway. What happened to Elizabeth Warren is proof that women’s lives are still constrained and narrowed by sexism, that women’s talents and ambitions still matter less than men’s.

I don’t think that Elizabeth Warren lied very much during this campaign. I don’t think she lied about her principles, or her policy agenda, or about Bernie Sanders. If she ever lied, it was to those little girls.

[Lord Jim]

One thing is very clear at this point based on the available data from the first 18 contests...

When it comes to whose theory of the case for electability over Trump (which absolutely must be the animating consideration for this cycle. Any other consideration, ideological, sociological, policy positions, etc. pale in significance compared to this imperative) one of the remaining candidates arguments are being borne out in nearly every respect, while the other's is an epic fail...

Biden has argued that he can reassemble and motivate the key elements of the coalition of voters (African Amercans, college educated suburban women, etc.) that resulted in the Dems retaking the House in 2018, and both turnout numbers and exit polling in state after state bear out that he is correct. Indeed, there's substantial evidence that he is also breaking into key Trump groups like white men without a college education (overall he leads Sanders in this group by 11 points based on the exit polling conducted thus far.)

Sanders, on the other hand, has tried to argue that he would be the strongest candidate with working class folks, (a position not supported by the data) and that he will somehow make up for the drop off in support from moderates by some sort of huge increase in "the youth vote"...

This idea that the yoots would start turning out to vote in record numbers (I've seen data analysis that suggests that in order to defeat Trump, they would have to turn out in numbers greater than the percentage of African Americans who voted in 2008 for Barack Obama to make up for the moderates and anti-Trump conservatives who would not vote for Sanders...I suggest that anyone who believes that is going to happen is as delusional as the most hardcore Trumpanzee) has turned out to be a complete bust...(Which comes as no surprise to me...)

When challenged about this, Sanders is fond of reaching back to the badly flawed Iowa caucuses, where he points out that there was in fact a modest up tick in young voter participation over 2016...

There's a reason he has to go back that far to try to make his argument. The reason is that in not one of the subsequent 17 state contests has this proven to be true, and there's absolutely no reason to believe (since it's never happened) that the yoots who didn't vote in the primaries will suddenly magically show up for the general election...

So it seems to me that based on the considerable volume of data now available, and regardless of what you think of him based on any other criteria, or what other candidate you would have preferred, if your prime concern is removing from office the greatest threat to our constitutional system and the rule of law since the Civil War, (and shame on you if it isn't) then you really must support Joe Biden...

And furthermore, you should support his getting the delegates needed for the nomination as quickly as possible so as to provide as much time as possible to unify the party. For this to happen, we need to see a string of primary results so bad for his prospects that even someone as bull-headed as Sanders will conclude he has no path forward (something he refused to do in 2016, taking his "crusade" all the way to the convention.) Hopefully this can be achieved by the end of this month...

The first step in accomplishing this is a decisive (hopefully by double digits) victory for Biden in the Michigan primary tomorrow...Combined with more decisive defeats for Sanders in other up coming Midwest primaries (like Ohio and Illinois) as well as the crushing defeats he looks likely to suffer in the south (Especially in delegate rich Florida, where he trails Biden by 30-40 points) will hopefully convince all but the most delusional of the Bernie Bros that the game is up....

[Guinevere]

We shall see if the cult of Bernie will back down. Cory Booker’s endorsement of Biden was released this morning Kamala Harris’ yesterday (both two of my top candidates, fwiw). Both will appear with him in Detroit today and campaign for him in Michigan today and tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the Berners (at least on Twitter) are in full-on establishment conspiracy theory, attack anyone who comes out for Biden mode. They are so insane, they went after Bernie’s lead surrogate AOC on Sunday, when she had the temerity to express minor amusement with Lizzie’s SNL appearance.

[Big RR]

Well, while I agree there is a "cult of Bernie", I don't consider myself a member, but I must admit I like many of his positions a lot more than thise of Biden. For example,I would like to see MEdicare for All eventually (a single payer system is the only way to effectively control costs), but it has to be sold to the public and implemented in stages, and Bernie refuses to do this--he just wants to bluster on and assumes that the people will eventually accept it. Compared to Bernie (or Warren for that matter) Biden seems to be a business as usual caretaker. sure he would be better than Trump (who wouldn't?), but any changes would be incremental.

That being said, I think that is what most of the voters want; they don't want to see major upheaval, just a stable system steered away from Trump, et al. And because beating Trump is the only important objective, I will cast my lot with Biden as he has the better chance in beating Trump (but then what do I know; I thought Trump had no chance in the last election).s

[Bicycle Bill]

The message to the children was that women can do anything, that when they grow up their talents won’t be ignored, their intelligence won’t be mocked, their horizons won’t be narrowed because of their sex. But if anything, Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy proved that this is not true. There is no way for a woman to be enough to overcome misogyny – there is no amount of smart she can be, there is no amount of good she can be, there is no point at which she will be so overpoweringly hardworking and so obviously qualified that people who do not want women to have positions of prominence and authority will have to give her one anyway.

True enough, but if you were to turn the clock back twenty years you could have said the same thing about a black person trying to become president.  Then along came the 2008 election and history was made — and history repeated itself in 2012.

So while it may be somewhat true that it is difficult for a woman to overcome misogyny, I don't believe that is the sole reason why Warren (and Klobuchar, and Harris, and Gabbard, and the others) were not finding traction and had to admit their chances — this time, anyway — were non-existent.  And history bears me out on this one too.  In 2016, a female did emerge as the front-runner after the primary battles and WAS nominated by one of the two major parties.  And the record shows that this female DID receive a plurality of the popular vote.  It's just that a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, hate-filled son-of-a-bitch rat bastard was able to motivate enough OTHER racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, hate-filled son-of-a-bitch rat bastards in enough states to skew the electoral vote and render the voice of public opinion moot.

So one needs to accept the fact that there are a large number of the afore-mentioned rat bastards out there who will vote that way in private, despite what they may say or do when in public.  And unless the Democrats can find someone, ANYONE — male or female, straight or gay, young or old, white or black (or brown or yellow or green or purple with pink polka-dots) — who can draw more people to the polls to vote for that person than the Rat King who is currently in office can draw to his support, we can do nothing but prepare ourselves for another four years of rule by vermin.

-"BB"-