I actually unfriended someone yesterday because of their endless Bernie posts from crazy sources.
Interesting article on how Sanders is still wasting taxpayers money by receiving secret service protection. This egomaniacal shitbag really has no shame.
Just taken out of context with the knowledge that we’re talking about a presidential candidate, how many people would correctly guess who dalej42 is talking about?
Though I’ll vote for Hillary, Bernie has an ethos and ideas that I often agree with in principle.
But something, rather ratty in me, is concerned about electing elderly leaders. Yes, Clinton is only 5-6 years young but she’s closer to the average age of elected presidents (which is about 55yo). Sanders is older than Reagan when he was elected and would be almost 80yo at the end of one term.
Does candidate age play a role in your voting?
It plays some role, yes, although less this year than most because the three strongest candidates were all frankly much older than the norm. Hillary, Trump and Sanders would all either be very close to being the oldest person elected President for the first time, or the oldest. It’s not mentioned as much, but Trump also would be older than Reagan was when he was inaugurated in 1981. Trump would be 237 days older than Reagan was on inauguration day, Sanders would have been 1,977 days older than Reagan on inauguration day, and Hillary will be 262 days younger than Reagan was on inauguration day.
I’ve nothing against the old having a role in politics, Benjamin Franklin did some of his most significant work as a Founding Father when he was in his mid-70s, and he was 70 years old by the time of Lexington and Concord (he went on to live til the age of 84 and seems to have kept his faculties til the very end.)
However I will say at the end of the day, it’s the voters who must decide what is too old. We had a lot of younger alternatives on the Republican side–Cruz, Rubio, Bush (a little younger anyway), Kasich. The Democrats had a remarkably small field this year of viable candidates (Hillary’s machine and party support frankly scared most of the rest away), but if age was a concern Martin O’Malley likely would’ve done far better than he did. The voters know how old Hillary, Bernie and Trump are, and they were the most popular three candidates. The voters in 1980 (of which I was one), knew how old Reagan was. I considered that back then, but I couldn’t in good conscience vote to renew Carter’s (the worst President of my lifetime) stay in the White House.
The modern Presidential campaign is among the hardest, if not the hardest, things to go through in the world. You give public appearances every day for upward of a year, multiple times some days. You must debate a dozen times or more (there are far more primary debates now than when I was younger, although the general election debates have stayed more or less the same, although the 80s was a low point in terms of total number of debates.) Constant press conferences, interviews etc. There’s no “front porch campaign” like McKinley ran 115 years ago, where his surrogates did all the heavy lifting while he remained dignified and rested at home. The extreme scrutiny and the essentially mandated continuous public presence, I think, gives voters ample opportunity to decide if a candidate is addled or insufficient to the task due to advancing years.
I unfollowed several. Same with rabid Clinton haters spreading Karl Rove’s lies.
Age itself–not really, given that one person at 74 can seem pretty frail while another can seem healthy and vigorous. (Sanders has struck me as a bit closer to the ‘frail’ end of the continuum, but then again he has been working long days and weeks during this campaign.)
My age-related question with regard to Sanders is more along the lines of this: why did he wait until he was 74 to run for President?
It’s not as though he was new to politics–he’s been a professional politician nearly all his life.
It’s not as though he was new to the national scene: he came to Congress nearly a quarter-century ago.
It’s not as though he just recently racked up some notable achievements with which to grab the electorate’s attention–there hasn’t really been anything new from him in recent years.
And as far as passion to oppose other candidates is concerned:
It’s not as though this is the first Presidential election in which a major candidate took money from One-Percenters (among them Wall Streeters…Horrors!!) That’s been going all for decades. Since Sanders came to Congress, ALL the Democratic candidates for President have taken money from Wall Street sources.
It’s not even as though this is the first Presidential election in which a major candidate BOTH took money from Wall Street AND voted “yea” on the 2002 Iraq Resolution--------John Kerry, Democratic nominee in 2004, did both.
…It’s pretty close to being moot, now. But I’ve never been able to shake the suspicion that Sanders was being opportunistic in exploiting that residue of misogyny that always lurks somewhere in the American soul. I can’t otherwise explain Sanders’ failure to take on those other money-taking Democrats in all those years in which he himself was a younger man.
It’s also worth pointing out, regarding the superdelegates, that this is a “be careful what you wish for” argument. This year it was the outside-the-mainstream progressive candidate who seemed to be getting screwed by the superdelegate system (he wasn’t, given that he lost the pledged delegates by a sizable margin, but never mind). But that has little to do with Sanders being a progressive candidate; it’s mainly about Sanders being an outsider candidate.
It’s real easy to imagine an outsider candidate with the political leanings of a Jim Webb or a Joe Manchin, a libertarian-lite candidate perhaps, deciding to run for the Dem nomination with little support from party leaders, against a progressive who is very much a party insider.
With superdelegates, in this scenario, the progressive has a good shot at the nomination even if the outsider’s campaign takes off. Without superdelegates, though, the outsider might well win, pulling the party to the right and ticking off the progressive wing. Many of the same people who are now excoriating the superdelegate system would be wishing ardently that it could be restored. Fixing things that aren’t necessarily the problem is a tricky business.
For whatever it’s worth, possibly nothing, my wife would tell you that she finds the Sanders campaign more than a little misogynistic, and she believes it starts with Sanders himself. I’m not sure I buy it, but I will admit that as a female she may be more tuned into such things.
I’m curious why. Aside from the fringe articles he wrote in his youth, I haven’t noticed any evidence of misogyny.
Well, we’ve been told by Hillary’s campaign that “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” and Gloria Steinem has told us that younger women aren’t supporting Hillary because “When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie”.
That might explain it. Or not.
Well, his finger wagging and constant interrupting during the debates might lead people to think he’s misogynistic.
However, I think he’s just an egomaniac with a messiah complex. He’s absolutely convinced that the he’s right and that no one should ever disagree with Bernie Sanders.
The Congressional Black Caucus has issues with Sanders’ proposal to eliminate superdelegates from the primary process:
You’ll be exactly the same when you’re his age. 
Trust me-- I’m almost there myself!!
My impression is that the claims of misogyny are just political rhetoric put out by Clinton supporters and possibly the campaign itself. The silly “Bernie bro” meme, for example, had to have been invented by political consultants.
Are there any Sanders supporters who are supporting him because they’re misogynists? It’s a big country, no doubt there are some, but I don’t think it’s the vast majority or even a significant minority. If Elizabeth Warren had run instead of Bernie, the majority of his supporters probably would’ve supported her.
A lot of the “Bernie or bust” crowd are young idealists who refuse to vote for anyone who isn’t their ideal candidate. They’re still at the age where they’re convinced that they can make the world what they want it to be if they simply refuse to compromise.
It’s a number of things.
She was very bothered when he called Planned Parenthood an “establishment organization” when they didn’t endorse him; she looks back at the history of the struggle for reproductive freedom and thinks this is the sort of thing that can only be said by someone who “doesn’t get” women’s health issues.
She saw an element of sexism in the debates, interpreting Sanders’s frequent interruptions of Clinton and his finger-stabbing toward her as an attempt at diminishing and intimidating a much smaller woman.
She found the whole “Clinton is unqualified” thing to be not only bizarre but saw it as something that men often say about women when they want to be dismissive of them (she showed me at the time a couple of articles that drew this conclusion, sorry no links), and she points out (and this goes to something that Sherrerd was saying) that Sanders has not used the term “unqualified” to describe Obama, or Kerry, or other male Democrats with the same baggage and positions.
Now, I am dubious about some of this stuff. I think the PP response had little to do with women’s health issues; I think it was Sanders feeling entitled to the support of all “progressive” organizations and unable to avoid lashing out at those making a different choice: not specific to PP, then, or women’s issues, but simply an expression of the way he views the world. I think the same of the “unqualified” comment–it’s a Sanders-style scorched-earth remark born of frustration and perhaps desperation, and not aimed specifically at a woman: he just happened to have a female opponent. As for the debates, I think Sanders is in general an interrupter and a finger-waver; I’m not convinced he would do it less in debates against a male opponent, though I do agree it might be interpreted differently. I do suspect that there’s some interpretation going on here where my wife is concerned, something we all do: first she decides that she dislikes Sanders for real and genuine reasons, then she interprets his actions in negative ways to add to the dislike. And of course once you start interpreting Sanders’s actions through the lens of sexism, it’s easy to see it everywhere.
But she’s a smart woman, and thoughtful, and she’s experienced some of this dismissiveness herself, and so I’m not inclined to dismiss her interpretation altogether (and worth pointing out is that our grown son in general agrees with her). And I will say that she got one thing right here. We saw a headline halfway through the primaries that said something like “Only one candidate has no women among their ten highest paid staffers–guess which one?” I said “Trump, of course, and if somehow not Trump, then Ted Cruz,” but she said, before reading the article, “No, it’s gotta be Sanders,” and she was right.
I agree with your wife. I saw all of those things as well - and as a woman who spent my time in corporate America - I’ve seen versions of all those power plays used against me and other women - but they are almost never used against men - regardless of how provoked they are, or how stupid the other man is being, they don’t get the patronizing condensation. And most of my liberal girlfriends saw it too.
Women do tend to be more attuned to it. And men, even men who know better, don’t tend to notice it. http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2015/03/19/google-chief-blasted-for-repeatedly-interrupting-female-government-official/
What exactly does he say here that you disagree with?