I think foolsguinea’s analysis is refreshing and important. There do seem to be quite a few folks who want “change” but could vote for a Dem or a Rep. Many of them are conservative-leaning and support Trump now, even though they disagree with many of his New York moderate-liberal policy positions. Others are moderate-liberal types who admire Sanders’ conviction over the same-old-same-old of Clinton. Others are very low-information voters who are swayed by personality and gut feelings. “Seekers” seems like a good word for them. You know, like your cousin who was a Moonie, or your great-uncle who wanted to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
You have some cogent critiques of Clinton as a candidate, but you lose credibility when you keep f#%*ing that “indictment” chicken.
One more thing about foolsguinea’s “seekers”: They are the folks least likely to understand that the Congress passes laws, not the President. They understand this even less than the idealistic, educated, mainly young Sanders supporters do – and that’s saying something. (There is overlap between these groups).
A show like Agent Carter is likely to undercut any idea of using communism as a smear. In it, accusing someone of being a communist sympathizer is clearly a tactic bad guys use to force good guys to shut up.
Hollywood has push that meme for years, including Trumbo most recently. I don’t think that moves the great central mass of American public opinion. Not when it comes to people like Bernie. It’s one thing if someone who is just liberal is called communists, but when they show a clear affinity for actual communist countries, it’s not a false accusation.
Is it possible for a rational American to look at some specific action by a communist nation and say “hmm, their approach to this is better than what I see at home” ?
Cite?
No, conservatives thought he was a RINO squish, but Republican moderates recognized his broader appeal.
Of course they did: Attorney General Jack Conway won 44% of the vote.
I’ll try again. The Republican Gubanatorial candidate was against medicaide expansion. Conway was for it. Medicaid recipients had no problem with Obamacare. But they didn’t vote. They didn’t lack electoral alternatives. What they lacked was a union with the sort of GOTV efforts we had 50 years ago. Counties with the highest proportion of Medicaid recipients voted for a Governor who swore he would attack Medicaid.
You can’t blame the Democrats when they wrote a deal offering basically free money to the states, and the Republican ones turned it down. That’s silly and I assume Bernie grasps that. The Affordable Care Act was a solid piece of legislation which was fought tooth and nail by the Republicans. Passage was an act of hard work and political courage. And today insurance companies can no longer yank away your medical care just because they found a case of acne you had years ago that you didn’t disclose to them. They used to do this: it was called “Rescission”. Now they no longer can. The scope for shopping around for the best deal has also increased, now that pre-existing conditions are no longer an issue.
Those who seriously designate the Affordable Care Act as a tweak are making a callous argument. Progressives celebrate the extension of insurance to 15 million additional Americans and let’s not forget the establishment of a framework that can be extended further. I doubt whether you can find any health care expert that would characterize it as a tweak. As for “Arcane banking stuff”, we’re here to fight ignorance. Dodd-Frank (as in Barney Frank) addressed Too Big to Fail and worked far better than reform advocates feared.
Taking it over 4 congresses, you are probably correct. But Johnson had solid Democratic Majorities. Obama didn’t: the practical veto-proof majority persisted for less than 200 days IIRC. Again you are basically blaming the Democrats for Republican policies which is terrible history and naive politics. I’m happy to say that Bernie is better than that though. So methinks you should vote for him and I mean that. Because down the road there will be some leftish bozo with an equally appealing song and dance but who lacks Bernie’s political chops. And I’ll be urging folk to stay the hell away.
Progressives certainly have their work cut out for them. It’s going to involve a lot more than one President.
The Dems played nice with Obama: he is an instinctual conciliator and would have been amazing in a 1970s context. He offered grand deals, but Mitch McConnell had realized that bi-partisanship disproportionately benefits the party in power. So the GOP’s Senate leader would have none of it and he said so. Just as McConnell has opposed campaign finance reform tooth and nail. Hillary has no illusions. I expect her to be open to compromise while wielding a stick in one hand and a hammer in the other. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
Citations are important. It’s not just about slamming people: they permit us to evaluate claims.
Here’s the spreadsheet that was linked to in the article. The first thing that pops out is that Americans are the most ignorant about public affairs relative to other advanced countries. So American males get worse scores than females from all other OECD countries barring Canada. Where it’s a statistical tie between US men and Canadian women (or so I guess - it’s within 1 percentage point anyway. Speaking of statistical significance, the Guardian article had no discussion of it unfortunately.)
So US men got a score of 34% while US women got a score of 22%. That’s not small. But I’m not convinced that it’s large enough to drive the sort of effects you were asserting. I suspect sports knowledge and celebrity knowledge would show a far bigger gap.
I know! I was in the arguments on this board on health insurance six years ago. And between trying to end rescission, and expanding Medicaid, PPACA was a net good, moderately conservative bill, and I would have voted for it! All the while grumbling that we should have paid attention to expanding supply and raising the cap on medical residents,* and* that the Democrats shot too low by not keeping socialized medicine off the table, but I would have voted for it.
But you’re doing the bait and switch. The bottom quintile can’t afford private health insurance, with or without rescission. That was why single-payer–Medicaid–was the right solution for them. And that was lost.
The Democrats decided to follow the Chuck Schumer line and play to “the middle class”–but the middle income range got a different solution than the poorest quintile, so they lacked the buy-in for the single-payer expansion (that is, Medicaid expansion)–and it fell apart.
Sorry, Bernie’s right on this one. Except, of course, that he’s still not talking about increasing supply–that is, investing in training of professionals to overcome the physician and nurse shortages.
And we’re back to electoral politics, where the Democrats have failed miserably since 2010. The Democrats lost Congress. They still haven’t gotten it back, and Hillary says she won’t get it back. You’ve had five years to get an anti-gerrymandering movement going. Are you? This is liberal learned helplessness.
And yes, I am voting for Bernie, because he’s doing what Nader should have done back in the day. And look, he should be able to get 30%-40% of the delegates if you let him, and thus win progressives a seat at the table in the Democratic Party going forward. I don’t want concerned strategic-thinking Democrats telling young progressives not to bother showing up to the primaries; I think that’s destructive to the party.
The bottom quintile got the Medicaid expansion. That was won. The problem was that too many (not all) Republican governors wouldn’t take the money from the federal government. As things worked out the share of uninsured plummeted from 18% to about 12% as of a year ago.
The public option was yanked away by Republican solidarity against compromise (via the filibuster) and Lieberman.
I agree with Sanders that single payer would be best if we were starting from scratch. But it doesn’t make sense to re-litigate this: the fact is the public is loss averse and a small number of people being somewhat worse off counts for a lot more than a large number of nonvoters being a lot better off.
Again though, to move the Overton Window, Bernie has to secure vote shares above, say, 20%. I hope that moving forward he gets a few more invites to Meet the Press et al.
But my claim had two dimensions: gender AND age.
I assume then that young men and young women show an even starker contrast. Do you see that in the spreadsheet data?
Dude, you just insulted Bernie’s base, which is in fact young college-educated women, by calling them stupid. They want their children to get a better deal on college than they did, and you accuse them of chasing boys.
You said you’re only voting in the Democratic primary to keep Bernie down, and will otherwise vote for Cruz. You use sexist arguments straight out of National Review.
I’d tell you to give it up, but instead I’ll say this: Please continue this line of argument, so I can point to it as evidence that the HRC base are sexists and crypto-Reaganites too! 
You do understand that I am a hardcore Democrat and not a Republican whatsoever, right?
Yes, unfortunately. I wish we could trade you and others like you for the TRUMP hardhats.