The 15% in the middle (Conservative Democrats - who tend to be pretty liberal - there aren’t a lot of true Conservatives (by U.S. standards) in the Democratic Party) is worth more than the 19% at the end. While some of the liberals will go vote Green - losing a vote for the Democrats, the conservative Democrats could go vote Republican - gaining the GOP a vote. That would be poor strategy.
She’s smart. She’s not an idealogue. I don’t feel like she puts ideology above science. She isn’t demonizing people. She has more than one speech.
For me, Citizens United is about the 50th most important thing going on. I feel that people are pointing to that decision to try to explain the world in places where it makes no sense (just as we Democrats often point to gerrymandering to explain things like losing Senate races. That also makes no sense). There is both too much money in politics and money has less impact than people with no money want to believe. Feet on the ground matter more than money in the bank. Let’s not act as if we’d win if only the other side couldn’t put as much money in without us actually, you know, going to the polls.
Recently one of my uber liberal friends posted that its important to elect Bernie because Wall Street is the root of all our problems.
Wall Street has been quite good to me, personally. You know what is more important to me. Racial issues. Reproductive rights. Public education. Separation of Church and State.
Go ahead and tax the rich. I’m all for Universal Health Care. Regulate the banks. Repeal Citizens United. But Wall Street and Citizens United have only a passing relationship to what I think our biggest issues are.
If you’re extremely generous with your definition of “almost tied”, maybe.
And it will do that by actually *making *progress, not with empty inflammatory speeches that only make it harder and can only damage the party’s credibility as progressive. As already discussed, Clinton can do that and Sanders cannot.
Conservative democrats are mostly just socially conservative, pro-religious democrats. I do not think they would switch to the republican party and abandon their economic views.
Of the 3 groups that make up the democratic base, conservative democrats identify with the democratic party the most. However they were also the group most likely to vote for Bush in 2004.
I believe the word is “antidisestablishmentarian.”* (Same number of letters, but spell it that way and you get one more syllable out of it.)
*Originally coined to denote British opponents of disestablishing the Established Church, i.e., the Church of England.
Yeah, I hadn’t finished coffee yet and left out a few letters. I’m not the best speller in the world to start with.
Are you sure, because I know a whole lot of fiscal conservative, social liberals in the Democratic party.
I think that’s true of a lot of the African American vote - when the issue is abortion or gay rights. But I doubt that is true for the Suburban soccer moms.
I still lean left just as much or more as i did when i was young, that has nothing to do with supporting Bernie over Hillary. My political bias has not changed, only my understanding of how things work and what politicians can and can’t accomplish.
You’re correct. A history of public service helps but he hasn’t shown that his ideas are workable or that he can come close to achieving them. When I listen to Obama or Clinton speak on policy, I get the feeling that they have looked at the angles and know their shit. I get the feeling that they’ve thought about how it can be achieved. I don’t get that feeling from Sanders. He makes me think he’s a great ideas man, not so much in the execution.
So, right or wrong, my experience in watching Sanders had led me to assume that.
Look how well the Tea Party worked out.
It’s not a movement yet. It’s very easy to be passionate and energetic during a presidential campaign. It remains to be seen just how many of the Sanders supporters are committed to actually working for change in the long term.
You’d have to be an idiot or completely naive not to see the problems Bernie points out. But even getting a start on solving them will require more than just rah-rah.
I don’t think of him as an ideas man. That suggests, to me, someone who is thinking of new things, new angles.
To me, Sanders is proposing old ideas. There’s nothing wrong with old ideas, mind you. If they are good ideas, they can be a thousand years old.
I’m a right-of-center Republican who is voting for Clinton so probably have a different viewpoint than the typical Sanders supporter.
This doesn’t factor into it for me, Hillary was first lady in the 1990s, I’m one that doesn’t actually give Bill a huge amount of credit for the good economy of the 1990s. I think he worked with the Republican House in ways that were good for the economy, but I don’t believe Presidents control the economy. I think they can more easily harm the economy than help it, in fact I think the former is very easy but actually being able to “make the economy better” is, I think, largely outside of the power of the office of the Presidency, or any political office. The 1990s economic boom was largely because of technological and global economic trends, not because of any one politician and certainly not because of Hillary Clinton.
These issues aren’t big to me, I would like to see more healthcare reform but this isn’t a significant reason for my support of Clinton.
This is a major one for me–I don’t believe in sweeping changes, and in fact I think we have a system of government intentionally designed to stymie and frustrate sweeping changes. I view this as a good thing (I have and do rant about some failures in our form of government, but the various barriers it has to sweeping changes are not one of them.)
I’d say this is also a reason I support Clinton. Additionally–I don’t agree with Sanders on the “single issue” with which he is most identified. I think if you look at the worst actors in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis it was not actually the “Big Banks”, it was actually entities like Countrywide Financial, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns–very important financial firms but not ones that actually meet the definition of “big banks”, believe it or not. The big banks, which I think are vaguely defined but I’ll go with defining them as banks with more than a trillion dollars in assets are: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, CitiBank. After Citi the next biggest bank is nowhere near a trillion in assets–it’s U.S. Bank at $417bn. Goldman Sachs, the much maligned investment bank is at $134bn. While I think Goldman bears less blame than several of the firms that either failed or were acquired to save them from failures (Bear, Lehman, Morgan Stanley) they bear a lot more blame than any of the “big banks” listed.
The simple reality is that while the big banks did have their toes in the water, they were not the real culprits of the 2008 financial crisis. Bernie’s arguments also ignore the significant role that government policies played in creating an environment that actually incentivized the poor behavior that lead to the rogue financiers doing what they did.
Additionally I think Bernie has ignored the importance of the ratings agencies, without which the culprits could not have created the asset bubble build on fraud that they did.
The simplistic and incorrect view Bernie has of the particulars of the 2008 financial crisis are a major part of why I’d never support him. But also note I’m a right of center Republican, I would never seriously consider any socialist candidate. In fact Hillary is far too left for me in a perfect world, but I don’t live in a perfect world and I do not believe in wasting votes on third party candidacies or in not voting, so I view it as a binary choice between Trump/Cruz and Hlilary, and I’ll be voting for Hillary.
This doesn’t impact my support of Hillary at all.
And despite the best original intent not be a “‘tell me why you support Clinton so that people can tell you why you are wrong’ thread”, down that rabbit hole the thread goes …
Ah well.
In any case Wesley, it was a good intent. And I think you may now understand why some of us think so highly of Clinton as the best person for the job and what some of us find as less attractive about Sanders as a candidate and as possible president.
It is understood that you disagree. And that some of us disagree with your disagreements and we can go back and forth telling each other why the other is wrong.
Thanks for the attempt to create a thread that would not be another let’s each tell each other why you are wrong and perceive each other as frothing because we think differently than each other thread. It held together for a bit anyway!
Yeah, historically (like up until the early 20th century or so) the military upper leadership was also generally the elites of society. This was true back to Rome and true of most of the history of Europe as well–albeit in Europe the upper military leadership was typically nobility but not royalty (aside from the rare King who was also a good military leader in his own right), and often they were non-heir sons who were sent off to lead armies so they didn’t sit at home sulking too much about not inheriting the ancestral estates.
I’d say around the time Eisenhower was going through West Point is when you started to see a shift in the type of families whose sons went to the academies and ultimately high military office. Eisenhower himself was of generally middle class background, and while a few of the guys who had careers around the same time as him (such as Patton) came from more patrician upbringing his less-connected, middle income background was definitely the standard background for most generals of the 20th century. I think too the 20th century saw the first time when being of high rank in the military also was a completely full time job, aside from periods of outright war many of the higher ranking officers of the 19th century spent significant time away from the military to attend to personal affairs, business interests and etc. It is much easier to build a base of political involvement and support in those ventures, when you’re actively engaged in your military job it is much more difficult. Also, since the end of WWII it’s been largely expected that military leaders be politically neutral, and not seem to endorse or be endorsed by one party or one side. That too I think has limited and will limit the ability of top generals to break into politics like they once did.
I’m not remotely a leftist, but I’ll say that I think this effect is exaggerated. Because I see no reason to believe it will be lasting, particularly because his support is made up of a lot of people who historically have very short attention spans when it comes to politics. I do think on many issues the country will continue to move leftward–as it has done under Obama and as it will do going forward regardless of who is President. On social issues I actually think a Republican Presidency with a social conservative firebrand like Cruz could see an extreme hastening of public opposition to social conservatism.
But here’s the thing, as a guy who will never vote for a social dem (I’d be more of a Christian Dem type in terms of European politics), the worst thing about Sanders if I was a progressive is that he’s using leftist rhetoric from the 60s. Europe had people who used that rhetoric in the 60s too–and they actually largely changed the political system there and won elections. What has happened since is those leftists have “grown up”, they’ve realized some of their more “pie in the sky” ideas actually didn’t work, and almost all of the left parties of Europe are much more favorable to business than Bernie is. Many of them have also taken part in reform of entitlement systems when it turned out the ones they built were just not sustainable.
By advocating for an “immature” form of leftism I think Sanders hurts the cause, he’s correct that Europe has done okay with social democrats in power, but they’ve done so because once they actually attained power they changed with the times and in response to how things worked out there, Bernie appears to have adopted their ideals in the 1960s and has never paid attention to what happened afterward.
I think this is dangerous rhetoric because it’s the same thing the Tea Party uses. As a life long Republican let me assure you that a rabid wing of your party, that requires “ideological purity” or bust, who eschews compromise, is bad for your party. You should be happy, not unhappy, that the progressive wing of the party is not so organized or structured. I also think you’re frankly wrong that Democrats once elected just “choose corporate interests.” I think you ignore that they choose a “balance of interests” and that often times there is tremendous overlap between corporate interests and the interests of most Americans who work for corporations.
It is more organized than OWS, which was not organized at all. But it’s not that organized, and certainly not built to last. The biggest problem is Bernie is actually very egotistical and very unwilling to share attention or power. In his long career in Congress he’s never significantly aided or worked with any progressives, instead choosing to make a name for himself by being that “firebrand socialist from Vermont”, largely unaccountable to anything else because Vermonters were happy to keep reelecting him. In this very election Bernie has been notoriously unwilling to do much of anything for progressive candidates at any level, he’s entirely about his own efforts. He’s a 74 year old man, a movement that is based solely on him and not about building up multiple independent power centers is not sustainable.
Part of why the Tea Party was able to succeed in putting 40 odd people in Congress is because it was a movement about ideas (bad ones, but still ideas) and not about one person.
How? That lurch did not happen just because Sanders is a such a good agitator.
Well, I don’t know about that. We’re not talking about Boomer hippies who eventually found out they had to work for a living and then found out they could actually do that and make good money; times have changed, the economy has changed, and now we’re talking about a generation that, in its 30s, will still be struggling with the same problems that radicalized them in the first place.
Boomer hippies faced the recession in the 1970s - when they were in their 30s. I remember that one. It was horrifying. I don’t think today is much different than the yesterdays and its short sighted to think it is.
Yeah, the latest generations have never had to wait in gas lines. But as far as an existential threat, I’d have to say that last decade’s financial crisis has it all over the '70’s.