Yeah, the “moderate” Democrats running away from ACA and Obama as if they’d never heard of his platform did not save their skins in 2010. Might as well have gone hard for a fullthroated ACA and would have lost just the same while accomplishing more.
Well… Here are what HRC’s words were:
The audience flat cold stopped listening at “right, Tim”. These people understand being put out of business, they don’t understand going into a different one: for them “coal miner” or “oil field crew” is part of their identity and saying you’ll stop being one is viewed as an attack. Outside the big city limits, the perception that you are being told “change who you are” is quite unwelcome.
When that audience heard “we’re going to provide programs to prepare you for jobs in green energy”, they heard “we’re going to make you become someone else and try your luck and see if you even get into some entry level job in some newfangled thing that you don’t understand, run by nerds”. So they bet on the one who mendaciously assured them “you won’t have to change anything and I’ll make sure you come out all right”.
He did so in such a way that it seemed like a spontaneous, defensive, ass-covering maneuver under the pressure of the moderator’s question. Not a good look, IMO.
Yeah…and they are fucked because they could not see past doing only one thing.
In the past there used to be elevator operators. People who literally ran an elevator up and down. Imagine a candidate telling them that the new, automatic elevators are coming and they need to re-train into a different job.
Candidate-B says, “Nah, I will fight for your jobs and stop those automatic menaces!”
So they all vote Candidate-B but guess what? Candidate-B could never save their jobs. The new tech comes in and they are all out a job and there is no safety net in place and they are screwed.
But hey! At least Candidate-B got that they were elevator people who never wanted to be anything else right?
Michelle Lujan Grisham, governor of NM, might be a possibility too. I’ve seen a few people mention her elsewhere online, but I admittedly don’t know much about her beyond what Wikipedia tells me. She’s a Latina, which may help with Biden’s “Latin problem.” And picking her wouldn’t affect the Senate numbers at all.
This was my takeaway as well. And I fully acknowledge this wasn’t always true in the past. But for any reasonable person, this debate has to wipe away any serious claim that Biden has lost it mentally.
This take didn’t age well.
I did expect (and at least hope) that this was the way it was going to go down. Instead, Bernie just couldn’t help himself. Fucking asshole.
You seem to be missing the point. It was actually a great rebuttal, because it was what Bernie said to Dobbs–that he was a little skeptical about immigration because “they’re tak’n 'r jawbs!” Which is, as Biden noted, a Republican trope:
You deserve credit for acknowledging this. My 20 year old son, as diehard a Bernie supporter as you’ll ever meet, is realistic about this as well. He’s pretty disappointed in the vast majority of his generation that didn’t get out behind Bernie, even if the ones who did vote were overwhelmingly behind him on a percentage basis.
LOL, right? I said something similar to my wife: “Looks like they have finally managed to fine-tune whatever injections they are giving him so they’ve got the mix just right.”
Whaaat? It sounded very firm and decisive to me, and I’d be willing to bet a lot of money it was decided on by him and his team well in advance of the debate as a way to make news.
This is my pick. In addition to being a Latina, I really like that she has both executive and congressional experience, an ideal combo to be ready to step into the job of president right away (this was something I liked a lot about Jay Inslee as well).
But Kolak is right that it’s not a bad bet to predict Klobuchar. I’d be good with that too. Tammy Baldwin would also work. I don’t think it will be Harris or Abrams.
Are you kidding? They got a bit testy, but it was all on policy and record. And they both committed to all out supporting the other, should they win. That’s not the kind of attacks that the Bernie advisors wanted.
The most telling exchange, for me, was about Social Security. Bernie accused Joe of pushing to cut it (“cut” here also including “partly privatize”). Joe tried to explain to Bernie what it means to have something *on the table *during negotiations, but Bernie (though I love his ideas, and hes an important gadfly) doesn’t know “real legislating” from a hole in the wall.
So, Joe was substantively better in that exchange…BUT Bernie produced a sound-bite that can be used to fool some folks into thinking that Joe is a threat to Social Security. WHY? What in earth was the point of Bernie doing this? What can ANYONE gain by tossing a few thousand critical votes among elderly Pennsylvanians (e.g.) away from the Democratic nominee? Push Joe a little on climate change or subsidized child care, maybe even TPP (though I disagree with that one), fine… but Social Security? What is this, 1997? How pointless and stupid.
Because Bernie has a few narcissistic tendencies of his own.
Don’t get me wrong - like you, I think Bernie’s an important gadfly. In fact I think Bernie and Joe are in a position to complement each other. But what should be clear is that Sanders would be a terrible president. Sanders is a movement guy, but he’s not an executive. People need to know the difference.
People attack Biden for his attempts to reinvent himself, and to be real, I think the criticism is accurate: Biden was, at one time, a more conservative democrat than he is now. But that’s what I like about someone like Biden: he changes with the times. He understands that the party has shifted, particularly among younger voters.
And what Sanders doesn’t get is that while the party has shifted, the party and indeed the country has a long way to go before it is ready to embrace the kinds of changes he seems committed to. I want the guy who can get shit done, not the guy who falls on his own sword and achieves nothing. The country, the world needs that.
Sanders supporters poo poo the ACA, but guess what? It’s vastly better than what existed before and it made a real difference. Standing ground on a public option would have meant that absolutely nothing changed.
The Paris accords: again, not perfect and well short of what we’d ultimately like to have, but far better than what existed before, and more to the point, it was the first meaningful global attempt to address the problem in an ambitious way. Yet it’s not clear what Sanders would propose other than ideas that would get his entire party thrown out of power within 2 years.
Biden said that he’d (a) have a woman VP and (b) put a black woman on the Supreme Court. This suggests to me that (a) won’t be a black woman and (b) is intended to help soften that blow for people who were expecting Harris or Abrams.
Nate Silver of 538 commented that Biden has been consistently around the median of the Democratic party over the years. So when the party shifted more conservative, so did he, and now that the party is shifting more liberal, so is he.
Which is kind of reassuring for me as a liberal, since it suggests he isn’t going to revert to the politician he was in the '90s so long as the Democratic Party doesn’t go back to what it was in the '90s.
It sounded very firm and decisive to me, and I’d be willing to bet a lot of money it was decided on by him and his team well in advance of the debate as a way to make news.