What’s weird about Kennedy is that Kennedy led a lot of the deregulation efforts in the Senate. I’m not sure what exactly Kennedy didn’t like about Carter’s policies. Given that Kennedy couldn’t even explain why he wanted to be President, Kennedy probably just felt it was “his time”.
Sanders is an Independent (and a Socialist Party member when he was in the House), not a Democrat, so no, he won’t be running as a Democrat, and therefore no, he isn’t a legit contender.
Would love to see Bernie run. Not that I support him, but he would sure get underneath the skin of Hillary. That be good sport to view.
Sanders/Warren '16!
He still could run for the Democratic nomination. The American party system is very fluid, with no dues or membership cards or expulsion mechanisms. If David Duke says he’s a Republican, he’s a Republcan; if Lyndon LaRouche says he’s a Democrat, he’s a Democrat.
I recall a Q&A with Ralph Nader I attended during one of his presidential runs – he told me he was not a “member” of the Green Party, even though he was running on the Green ticket.
From In These Times, an argument that Sanders should make a third-party run. No existing party is specified, the idea is that the candidacy might call it into existence, like Perot and Reform.
Quixotic, but worth thinking about.
We need a four party system: progressives, centrist(Democrats), Republicans, and Tea Party.
Left, center, right, and far-right? How on earth would we need that?
OK, OK, you can also have Communists or Greens, but you gotta pick one.
Pssst! Over here! The point is to split the Tea Partiers off from the main elephant herd and lure them into a killing-zone. That is, it makes it easier for FEMA to round them up for the death-camps, just use their voting registration. The only way Real Americans can defeat this wicked plan is to not register to vote!
It’s fine to have two parties if the intraparty squabbling is at a fairly low level. When it gets cutthroat, and if it’s happening in both parties so as not to disadvantage just one side, then maybe it would make sense for each party to split in two. A four party system could actually make sense and introduce some real competition in states and districts that keep on sending the same parties to Congress. That way you can have progressive vs. corporate Democrat in blue districts and corporate Republican vs. Tea Partier in red districts. We already get that in the primaries of course, but that’s a tiny slice of a district’s electorate.
Of course in real life this will probably never happen because as soon as one party actually does this, the other party will pull together in the interests of getting an easy win. And progressives have a long history of just sitting down and shutting up because they fear the right more than they want the left to win.
Just like the Teabaggers held their noses while pulling the lever for Mitt Romney?
It’s one thing when you compete and lose and then come together as a party. The Democrats have a history of actually kneecapping progressive options to put forward the more electable candidate. And progressives put up with it.
Got an example of a progressive that was kneecapped?
Again, in 2012 the un-Romneys came out of the clown car one by one and each was more conservative than Romney, and each was cut down- some by their own missteps and some because of Romney’s carpet bomb negative ads. So they kneecapped conservative options to put forward the more electable candidate. And conservatives put up with it.
Well, I don’t see how Sanders is an extremist. That a lot of people do more or less shows what’s actually wrong with the American electorate…
I don;'t think Sanders is an extremist either, he just calls himself one, whether intentionally or not. But to be honest, he seems well to the right of your average left-wing European politician to my eyes, and might even be a little to the right of Liz Warren.
Sanders is cool. But he only reads from Que-cards (while the other rich cunts have professional speech writers for every interview) and is thus unable to provide variety. When you’ve seen one interview with him in the last 3 months you’ve seen them all.
I’m from ze Socialist paradise of United Scandinavia and we have some problems, us too. But frankly most of them stem from de-regulation x.X
Biggest impact of someone like Sanders is to help the winner portray themselves as more moderate, by shifting one end of the spectrum further to the extreme.
Apparently there are leftists who view Clinton as “center-right” or the like. These people are either delusional or are playing a semantic game (most likely the latter). But even for the more rational people, the candidacy of a more extreme person can only help the front-runner, as above.
The general point is true, but not so applicable in this case. The problem Kucinich had was that there were multiple credible candidates running at the same time as him, and he therefore had a very hard time being taken seriously by mainstream people. But this time around there’s a dearth of Clinton alternatives, so anyone else in the ring will attract a lot of attention. Unless more mainstream candidates enter the ring, I would expect Sanders to attract far more attention and support than Kucinich did.
FTM, Joe Lieberman was never actually a member of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party, but was re-elected to the Senate under their banner.
Where would you place her, then? Bill was center-right, certainly – we can tell because he governed from that position for eight years. What do you see that makes Hillary any more leftier?