Worked out great last time, didn’t it?
If everybody’s as petulant as that, yes we are.
Oh don’t get me wrong, people need to get out and vote for whoever the democratic nominee is.
It’s just that Biden is a terrible choice for that job, precisely because he’s utterly uninspiring and directly insulting to a key democratic constituency that is disproportionately likely to not vote. He’s a terrible candidate - especially against Trump.
Do you believe that, if Biden is the nominee, Barack Obama will stump for him?
Yes.
(I also think Obama is very likely to stump for any nominee.)
I wouldn’t say that she won handily; she had a much closer race than anyone anticipated, and Bernie’s campaign was able to deliver lasting damage.
I don’t disagree. What I’m saying is we really don’t know who we have in the field just yet. We might have a breakout candidate or two but we probably won’t know how strong the field is, and how strong Biden is, until around October or November.
I think he’ll stump for the nominee, but he won’t stump for any individual candidate until the nominee is clear.
He’s popular in the industrial Midwest, he’s inspiring plenty of people (at the moment) based on the utter domination he’s showing in the polls, and he’s popular with African Americans. Those are what matters, not your “rumblings” of some brain-dead purity ponies staying home.
But, hey, I give you 9/10 for histrionics.
I completely endorse every single word of this post. Bravo.
Seriously, if Biden is the nominee, the Democrats will not retake the Senate, no meaningful legislation will pass, he will not appoint a single judge, and his entire term will be spent just trying to confirm his cabinet appointees. His naivety about the supposedly dormant Republican desire to embrace bipartisanship makes me want to tear my hair out. It’s easy to imagine the Turtle holding open 2-3 SCOTUS seats as well, at which point blue states will just consign themselves to openly ignoring future SCOTUS decisions (a practice I think they should already be following, but I digress).
You’re right.
What doesn’t matter, apparently, is global warming.
Because Biden’s gonna come up with some ‘middle of the road’ response to global warming that people like his adviser on climate matters, Heather Zichal, board member of fracking giant Cheniere, are OK with.
And he won’t even be able to get that through Congress because Mitch McConnell isn’t going to have any ‘epiphany’ and will filibuster it.
And Biden thinks the filibuster is great, and if you can’t get 60 votes in the Senate, you obviously weren’t persuasive enough, or something. So tough luck, planet, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
For all practical purposes, this is the Primary To Save the Earth. Call me a purity pony, but I’m biased towards stopping global warming before it hits the self-perpetuating feedback loop.
I’ll probably check out somewhere around mid-century, but my son could live to the beginning of the next one. Most days, I try not to think about what sort of world he’ll spend most of his life in. But some days, I have to. And I will not settle for a political win that’s a climate loss, because that’s no win at all.
If we postulate that McConnell will filibuster anything to do with climate no matter if he is majority or minority leader, then what does it matter what stance the Democratic nominee takes? We can nominate the purest and greenest advocate of climate change mitigation there is and turn off the voters who are just trying to put food on the table, or we can take a measured approach and try to win the election. Put another way, we can try to get everything done and guarantee that nothing gets done, or we can work to get something done even if it’s less than ideal.
I mean… apparently you’re right, but I legit do not get it. This guy has a consistent record furthering the war on drugs and mass incarceration and still defends his abysmal crime bill. He was good friends with a bunch of old-school racists. His record on desegregation and busing is pretty awful as well. Then there was the whole Anita Hill thing, although that was more “shitty sexism” than “shitty racism”.
So I don’t get it. I legitimately do not get why black people would support him over… Basically anyone else. His record on racial justice is among the worst among the Democratic contenders (maybe Buttigeig’s is worse, hard to gauge). I have to wonder - how persistent will that be?
You think Inslee or Beto or Buttegieg or Bernie or…you fill in your favorite here… will have a better time getting something passed through a Republican Senate than Joe Biden? The guy who has actually gotten things passed through a Republican Senate AND House? That’s laughable. If nothing else, Biden is the guy who has the ability to actually get something past these GOP assclowns, even if it’s incremental. I’d rather have incremental progress than the backwards slide we’ve got now, or a complete standstill we’d have with someone less experienced at horse-trading and arm-twisting and deal-making. You can wish for a Green New Deal all you want, but it ain’t gonna happen in the current political landscape, no matter who’s president.
The current Republican Party is fundamentally a fascist party opposed to democracy. This is the logical outcome of their financial dependence on the ultra-wealthy, who demand that they enact policies which can’t win democratic support. If this party continues to win approximately half the elections, our democracy is doomed.
If the GOP keeps the Senate in 2020, absolutely no decent legislation will pass for the next two years, no matter who the President is. It doesn’t matter if we are proposing the total restructuring of our economic system or the most modest reforms imaginable. The idea that Biden might somehow be able to “compromise” with Mitch McConnell in order to get anything done is ludicrous.
Biden seems to be pushing this narrative where Trump just landed in a flying saucer one day and somehow took over a party which had previously been run by public-spirited, patriotic Americans committed to bipartisan compromise. Surely he’s not stupid enough to actually believe these things, right? He remembers Merrick Garland. He remembers the GOP refusal to cooperate with the financial bailout in 2009.
So if he’s not stupid, he must be lying because he thinks it’s what “swing voters” want to hear. But lying to voters never works in the long run. If he’s elected, the GOP will obstruct him to the best of their abilities and he’ll have nothing to show for it come re-election time.
Know any black folks that you can talk politics with? I do. The views expressed on certain topics might just surprise you. Especially from the older crowd.
my guess is people are thinking Biden is Obama version 2. Otherwise I can’t figure out why he’s so popular. And maybe it’s a reaction to Trump having zero political experience before taking office so now they want a guy with 40+ years in DC.
Yeah, you don’t get it at all. Black voters are Democrats in the general and pragmatic in the primary. They’ve been voting for imperfect white guys for the (eta: almost!)entirety of the country’s history. They don’t expect a racial equality warrior to ever win the presidency. So they want a guy who is generally going the right direction and will actually win the general. As a demographic, they’ve learned that a revolution is not going to happen, unlike the impatient and untrustworthy millennials who rumble about sitting on their asses if the perfect candidate doesn’t appear. I would bet Bidens eulogy for Thurmond bothers them a lot less than it does angry young white men, like yourself.
It’s true that not all black voters are very liberal. One example is the issue of gay marriage , when CA voted to ban gay marriage in 2008 the black vote was 70% to ban gay marriage.
The latest PA pollscould hardly be better for Biden. He smashes Trump by 53-42. Sanders beats Trump 50-43 and Warren 47-44. Harris is 45-45.
Some Democrats may be moving left but most Democrats want above all to win and if these numbers don’t change , they will think long and hard before choosing anyone else.
So why did those untrustworthy black people sit on their asses in 2016 rather than turning out to vote for Clinton? You remember 2016, right? That was the election in which Millennials turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote Democratic, even though their preferred candidate didn’t get the nomination. Well, at least White, Asian and Latino Millennials did…
nm