So you think that “Sanders fucks dead children while shooting up?” is an equally plausible accusation as “Clinton is a liar and an opportunist?”
Well said!
So, so wrong.
Who’s to say Trump wouldn’t call Sanders a liar and an opportunist? Do you really think Sanders is so righteous that every volley of mud would just slide right off?
This is what I meant about Sanders being an unknown quantity in a general election. I don’t know his career well enough to know what the GOP will unearth. I doubt anyone on this board does. The Pubbies will find what they need and make up the rest. He’s soft on terrorism. He thinks the US should apologize for trying to lead the world. He wants to raise taxes on ordinary people in order to turn the US into Switzerland. He spends his time in the Senate sponsoring bills nobody pays attention to. He wants to tell you what doctor you can see and what treatments the doctor can give you. He wants you to trust him because he thinks he knows better than you. He doesn’t have the guts to stand up to Russia or China. He’s a pacifist (read: weakling). He has a government program for everything and all of it is going to come out of your pocket despite what he says about soaking the rich, and by the way, don’t bother trying to start a business since President Bernie will nab every dollar you make as soon as you make it. Sanders is jealous of rich and successful people and wants to grind them down, like all his liberal supporters do. And that’s just the fairly normal and predictable shit I’m thinking up sitting here on my couch.
And if Sanders tries to nuance his way out of these attacks, then Little Nemo is right — Trump can start measuring the drapes in the Oval Office.
Matt Taibbi discusses a Trump-Sanders matchup: [INDENT]You will find union members scattered at almost all of Trump’s speeches. And there have been rumors of unions nationally considering endorsing Trump. SEIU president Mary Kay Henry even admitted in January that Trump appeals to members because of the “terrible anxiety” they feel about jobs.
“I know guys, union guys, who talk about Trump,” says Rand Wilson, an activist from the Labor for Bernie organization. “I try to tell them about Sanders, and they don’t know who he is. Or they’ve just heard he’s a socialist. Trump they’ve heard of.”
This is part of a gigantic subplot to the Trump story, which is that many of his critiques of the process are the same ones being made by Bernie Sanders. The two men, of course, are polar opposites in just about every way – Sanders worries about the poor, while Trump would eat a child in a lifeboat – but both are laser-focused on the corrupting role of money in politics.
Both propose “revolutions” to solve the problem, the difference being that Trump’s is an authoritarian revolt, while Sanders proposes a democratic one. If it comes down to a Sanders-Trump general election, the matter will probably be decided by which candidate the national press turns on first: the flatulent narcissist with cattle-car fantasies or the Democrat who gently admires Scandinavia. Would you bet your children on that process playing out sensibly?
In the meantime, Trump is cannily stalking the Sanders vote. While the rest of the GOP clowns just roll their eyes at Sanders, going for cheap groans with bits about socialism, Trump goes a different route. He hammers Hillary and compliments Sanders. [/INDENT] Trump knows that Sanders is harmless, not even worth attacking now.
Reading some of this thread (Bernie voters might just stay home! Oh no!) makes me wonder if some people think that the Dems should have nominated Ralph Nader in 2000, because Gore lost votes for not being liberal enough.
First of all, the author is 'an attorney, writer of children’s books, and a social policy Ph.D. student." Maybe he’s a true Renaissance man but I see the article as nothing but a wordier version of the copy and paste spam that Bernie Babies like to flood the comments sections with.
Head to head polls of hypothetical match ups in the general election are useless. It’s like trying to predict the weather for Christmas Day on the 4th of July.
Obviously some Sanders supporters will stay home or vote 3rd party. Many of them, however, always do this. They have such rigorous standards of ideological purity that no mainstream politician could meet. I suspect that even if Bernie did get the nomination, some of them would turn on him like they would if their favorite Indy band finally had a hit.
You sound plenty smart, and not taken in by political punditry and campaigns.
I don’t think it’s very useful to point out “There are some people who would vote for Sanders over Trump, but for Trump over Clinton”. Yes, of course there are some such people. There are also people who will vote for Clinton over Trump, but will sit out Sanders versus Trump, or for any other permutation. What you really want to know is how many people there are in each such category, and that’s not a question that can be answered by anecdotes.
Vox has a piece on this very subject, if y’all are interested. It’s more a summary of the arguments than an argument in itself, but it does quote a couple of authors who argue that general matchup polls have no predictive value at this stage of things.
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Visiting the Soviet Union and Cuba, during a time when the Soviet Union was massacring children and Cuba was torturing and murdering political dissidents is gravely immoral and will be pointed out as such in any hypothetical political campaign. Trump is going to call Bernie a socialist–but he’s also going to call him a Soviet-loving Communist. Over and over again. There is no evidence Bernie will survive those labels, and in response to righteous indignation Trump will just repeat himself over and over again–righteous indignation has no effect on Trump whatsoever.
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Clinton certainly has some skeletons in her closet but so does Trump, as you concede, for that very reason that one is largely a wash.
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The idea that Bernie is going to be able to force Trump into an “issues” discussion is ludicrous, Trump has ignored any attempts to do that for months now. He is shameless and has no problem just repeating his spiel again and again.
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Trump is campaigning on tax cuts for everyone, they’re going to be yuuge, a large portion of the electorate will never listen about Bernie’s tax plan once they hear “largest tax increase in American history, applied to all tax brackets.” Walter Mondale was never able to explain his tax plan in a way that mattered because people turned him off the moment they heard he was raising taxes for everyone.
At the end of the day I think both Democratic candidates would likely win, I think Hillary would win more comfortably and Sanders is a far greater risk of actually losing. But I think Trump is so divisive and disliked that he still wins over the weaker Bernie.
Most importantly though Hillary will be a vastly better President than Bernie Sanders, and that’s why she deserves support in the primary.
Exactly–Hillary is treating Bernie with kid gloves. She knows that if she gets too nasty it will alienate some of his voters and they may stay home in November, and she knows with her demographic advantages she doesn’t have to play mean to grind out a delegate win. In a competitive Democratic primary Bernie’s numbers in hypothetical general match ups would already look way worse than Hillary’s.
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Bernie is a much better choice if the intention is to get the President and Congress to work together. Bernie has the skillset to create a workable compromise. Good government is based on the ability to compromise.
Hillary will use Executive Privilege to hide her actions from the public, and Executive Acts and Executive Orders to ignore the will of the duly elected representatives of Congress.
Not being a politician, Trump is used to working with both parties but as an outsider. He’s used to getting things done but he likes to get them done his way.
I fear that many Americans are not smart enough to hear a rebuttal to “socialist socialist socialist!”. Bernie explaining himself will have the same effect as Hillary rebutting everything Trump says.
What I find interesting is how low both of the Dems’ polls will dip with continued and repeated attacks. Here is where I think Clinton has an advantage. Who is unfamiliar with Clinton? She’s been in the public eye for decades. No attack will be new, and she’s repeatedly faced each one of the attacks over and over. The general election will not be the first time the public hears about Benghazi or Whitewater or Lewinsky. Likely, the people who aren’t voting for her now were never going to vote for her anyway. So her polls will dip, but not that much.
On the other hand, many are unfamiliar with Sanders. He’ll need to cross over to get some moderates and independents, and many of them will be hearing about his plans for the first time. To them, repeated calls of socialist or high taxes will be more damaging because that sets the narrative. His polls will dip more than Clinton’s under withering scrutiny, I think.
What I’m most concerned about is the coalition Sanders has built. Sure its big and impressive, but they rely on younger voters who are not always consistent in their voting habits. If he can get them to come out to vote consistently, even in the midterms, then I’ll believe the hype. But they are still the group least likely to vote
Uh, seriously?
The whole key to Sanders’ appeal is that he doesn’t compromise. The primary reason Sanderites hate Clinton is for the compromises she’s made to get where she is, which in their eyes equates to someone without integrity.
For real, can someone provide a cite illustrating Sanders’ great facility for compromise and winning over people with views opposed to his?
I’d like to know what, specifically. Everyone says Hillary has ethical issues but I never see any of them well documented or explained.
Everyone lies to some degree, but what important issues has Clinton lied about?
If you’re proposing that Sanders is some mythologized version of George Washington who has never told a lie I think you’re being incredibly naive.
If you’re saying being an opportunist is bad then that disqualifies everyone–including Sanders. Any involvement in elected politics necessitates some level of opportunism.
Why did New York raised and Chicago educated Bernie move to Vermont to start his political career? Maybe he liked the scenery, or maybe because he knew his politics would play there and likely no where else in the country. Why has Bernie during his Congressional career signed legislation that contradict with his current policies? He’s either “evolved” on all of those issues, or he was being an opportunistic pragmatist sometimes when deciding on what to vote for.
So, doorhinge really wants the Democrats to nominate Sanders.
We thank him for his concern! Given his posting history, most of us will do the opposite of what he recommends.
To me the most concerning thing about Sanders supporters is they consider compromise to be an ethical lapse. Our system of government was designed with the knowledge that people would hold deeply incompatible beliefs, and would be forced to compromise on them.
While our system has some structural defects (in my opinion) compromise isn’t one of them, it’s rather the lack of a good way to break up the log jams when they do occur. A lot of Sanders supporters I’ve talked to really also like to blast the “two party system” and say if we had a multiparty system they could vote for politicians who were ideologically pure.
I don’t have a big problem with multiparty systems, but I will say that compromise is also intrinsic to those. So yes, in Germany you can vote for a Green Party candidate and their rhetoric will be more unapologetically green than any Democrats because they don’t have to appeal to 50%+1 of the population to win elections or have a seat at the table. But when they then participate in coalition governments, with parties that have different positions on some issues, that’s no different than a form of compromise, so I don’t really understand the idea that it’s feasible or even desirable to promote a theory that “good politicians are the ones who never compromise on their beliefs.”
It’s also worth remembering that, during The Decider’s reign, the left complained endlessly (and rightly) about his authoritarian, “my way or the highway” approach to working with the opposition. Compromise seemed like a pretty good idea then.
I’ll give you one thing that really made me think differently about her is her conversation with defending that accused rapist. Straight from her mouth. I know some aren’t bothered by that, explaining it off a ‘lawyer talk’… but not me. I’m sorry.
There are threads here which list Hilary’s ethical problems… they can’t all be just conservatives conspiring against her. I know they make much out of nothing all of the time, I just DON’T believe people who say she doesn’t have these ‘ethical issues’. Or at least potentially.