What exactly do you mean by this? Are you saying Obama could have accomplished more but didn’t? I just want to make sure I understand your point.
My point is that Obama spent eight years doing his damnedest to reach across the aisle. He believed in it. It’s inherent in his 2004 keynote speech that made him a national figure. He ran on it in his 2008 campaign. When he won, he “looked forward, not back” and didn’t try to embarrass the GOP with all the evils, up to and including torture, that they’d implicitly endorsed with their support of Bush right to the end of his term, despite the reality that we needed, and still need, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with all that shit. And it was implicit in his policy choices, from making the ARRA (stimulus) smaller to make it more GOP-friendly, to making his final Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, the most GOP-acceptable person he could find without betraying his own party.
And how did the GOP respond?
So my contention is that we’ve seen how Mitch McConnell responds to a Democratic President who bends over backwards to reach across the aisle. In spades, doubled and redoubled, at the grand slam level.
The notion that Biden will try the same approach, and somehow it’ll work this time, Mitch McConnell will not be the Mitch McConnell that he’s been since January 2007, including throughout the Obama presidency, is MAGICAL THINKING.
A Presidential candidate has to have three sets of plans:
- A plan to win the nomination and the election.
- The plans for the legislation s/he’d get through Congress if the stars aligned and made it possible.
- A plan for getting that legislation through Congress once s/he’s won.
Some candidates are grappling with the challenge that #3 represents, others aren’t. Biden’s plan is the Magical Unicorn plan of he’ll reach across the aisle and McConnell magically won’t be the McConnell he was while Obama was President, back in the pre-Trump era that Biden wants to take us back to.
What Banquet Bear said about ‘gaslighting.’ The term comes from the 1944 movie and the play it was based on.
And surely basking in the awareness that if he becomes President, his plan for getting these changes through Congress is to have a beer with Mitch McConnell who will then magically agree to none of it.
I get your point about partisanship, but what would the other progressive candidates do to get legislation past McConnell’s GOP Senate majority that Biden wouldn’t?
I could be wrong, but I read his comments as a message to voters that if you want Washington to improve, we have to change the tone of the discourse first, and that maybe they should factor that when voting. And yes, where possible, where political stars align, work together, or at least convince some fence-sitters to vote across party lines. I don’t think Biden’s under the impression that he alone can change Washington just by being nice and trying to back slap Mitch McConnell.
Yes, I know exactly what “gaslighting” means.
Pretty sure that every candidate running realizes that even with a slim D majority, let alone with an R one, the only path to getting anything done is getting as close to all the D senators voting for something and a few Rs too.
Everyone of them promising pink unicorns that fart sprinkles either know that they cannot deliver or are delusional, and know that anything that does get done will require bipartisan cooperation and to some degree and compromises. Or nothing gets done and you sanctimoniously blame the other side while nothing changes at all. But you stayed pure in the Holy War.
To me Trump and Biden represent two different negotiation schools of thought.
The Trump school, one that some of the Far Left seems to endorse, is position for the extreme crazy, demonize the other side, and then the other side, theory goes, meets part way as you win and they lose. In reality that does not work so well.
Biden is more the build relationships and discuss and sell the solution as win win side of the spectrum. Doesn’t always work either.
I do not endorse the Trump school and in my professional life have found the Biden approach works more commonly. When it comes to the heavy lift of getting enough Ds to stay on board and getting a few Rs to come over I think Biden and his approach has the better chances than anyone else running. He has the most experience with the Party of No and he may be right that post-Trump a few more R senators will see their best self-interest in trying to appear bipartisan.
I also think, as a practical matter, that that approach is what more voters, especially in the general election, want to vote for.
If the Dems fail to win a Senate majority, they (and therefore we) are all screwed.
The nominee, whoever s/he is, will have to emphasize that if you’re voting for her/him, you need to vote for Dems up and down the ticket as well, because it takes both a President and a Congress to make things happen.
But if the Dems get to 50 in the Senate, then things diverge. Some candidates (e.g. Warren, Inslee) are already out there, selling the notion that the filibuster has to go.
Others (e.g. Biden, Sanders) would keep the filibuster in place.
One plan needs 50 Dems to pass key legislation. The other plan needs 50-52 Dems plus 8-10 Republicans.
Mapped back to the Obama years, that means no stimulus, no Obamacare, no Dodd-Frank, etc.
Again, recent history…
It’s hard to see how the Dems come out of next year with more than 52 Senators. So we’re talking about winning over the eighth most moderate GOP Senator. Go look up who that is, and how winnable s/he is, and how likely to go against Mitch.
Unless there’s a pretty large revolt within the GOP ranks, Mitch is the guy Biden will have to win over.
We’ve got plenty of recent history as examples to demonstrate the futility of all that you suggest Biden might have in mind. It comes down to: you’re ascribing magical powers to this guy. He doesn’t have any special sauce that will succeed where Obama failed.
If he comes out in favor of killing the filibuster, that would change the game: Biden would be a viable President, instead of a candidate consigning himself to failure in advance. But that’s what it would take.
Then you might should use it correctly.
Apparently people who think, “if I do the same thing over and over again, maybe I shouldn’t expect different results the next time I do it” are being “pure in the Holy War.”
I know I’m coming into this late (hey, I had a busy weekend) but in reading over this thread, I’ve gotten back, at least in part, asahi and DSeid on this. Weigel, at the very least, severely misinterpreted Biden’s words. And by that, I mean on the order of misinterpreting the phrase “He was bent on seeing her,” not to mean “He was eager to see her” but as “The sight of her doubled him up!”
:dubious:
For better or worse, journalists still have hella power in this country, and one of them tweeting something about a presidential candidate carries a lot more weight than, say, a Doper. If the Post does indeed have such a policy, they need to have a come-to-Jesus with Weigel, and I mean yesterday. The mainstream press already has major credibility problems with a large portion of the public they ostensibly serve; now is not the time to dig the hole any deeper.
(Sorry if this is all obvious stuff. I have only half a cup of coffee in me.)
If you believe that then you want to have the D standard bearer to be the one most likely to have Senate coat tails in particular in states that are possible D pick ups … states in which the pitch of bipartisanship in particular sells the best …
Hmmm. Who do you think fits that best?
Dunno. Who’s strong in Maine, Arizona, Montana, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa?
Kamala Harris, maybe? Yeah, she’s probably the one you mean.
Then it is likely we are all screwed, because this is rather unlikely to happen. Not likely this term and not all that likely on average because of the respective demographics of the two parties. This is putting aside the likliehood that even with a bare majority, your priority of climate change is probably not going to be a major focus IMHO - U.S. political society at large just doesn’t seem to be there yet*.
If the only way forward you see is control of the presidency plus majorities in both houses of the legislature, then I think you are in for perpetual heartburn. The way politics tends to whipsaw in the U.S. this is never likely to happen for anything more than two-four year stretches, if then. And most anything that is done can be undone.
- I should note that I mostly agree with you it is very important. I’m living with the increasing impact out here in CA. But I think few are willing to take any economic hit to do that much about it, since it is very much a slow-boiling-of-frogs moment.
And CO.
I’m willing to hear her case that she has what it takes to do it. I started out this cycle with high hopes she’d make that case well and maybe yet she will! Hearing her before the cycle I thought maybe she had the goods. It could happen.
Biden has the current data behind him that he’s the one to best do that, so far he is the one who is strong there, but that could change. He holds the position until someone else makes the convincing case that they could do it as well or better. Yeah, maybe Harris.
If you really think her, what leads you to the conclusion that she’d have coat tails in those battleground states? I’m listening. And really I’d love to be convinced.
I knew the answer you were fishing for, but I certainly don’t get the connection. When people talk about how Biden’s got a better chance in the general, they talk about PA and the Midwest. But there’s only one possible Dem pickup in that region in 2020, and Biden’s not exactly burning it up in Iowa. So I threw out another name that seemed to make at least as much sense. Harris might help out in the Western states (AZ, MT, CO) because she’s not an Easterner, and she might help out in NC and GA by virtue of being African-American.
That’s all I’ve got, but it seems to make as much sense as anything Biden has to offer in that group of states.
General election polls nationally are generally considered meaningless more than 300 days out, and the same is surely true of state polls, so other affinities would be about all you’d have to go on, this far out.
Biden polls higher with Black voters than she does by a wide margin. He, and that I will work together for compromise message, by polling, sells very well and in particular appeals to those voters needed to tip scales. Snapshot right now is not predictive but does show him as popular in those states and of course nationally.
Again snapshot. Maybe Harris can build. But the data is nonexistent that her being of CA would translate into coattails in MY or CO. she is behind him in her own home state and hard to blame that on less name recognition.
We’re talking about the general election. I’m sure either one of them would poll well with blacks in a general election.
How Uncle Joe’s mad negotiating skillz gave away the expiration of the Bush tax cuts.
I remember this from the time (end of 2012), other than the inside stuff of course. All the Dems had to do was let the Bush tax cuts expire, and then they’d be in a position of strength, in a position to offer their own set of tax cuts, focused on the middle class and the poor, but putting the rich pretty much back where they were in 2000. Plenty of outside observers saw this; I can’t take credit for any special insights.
Unsurprisingly, Harry Reid saw it too:
And somehow the Democrats blew it again. What happened?
I wondered at the time how the Dems managed to fuck that one up. Didn’t wonder about it indefinitely, because of course the GOP’s response to the Dems’ caving was to force further fiscal emergencies, like the debt ceiling crisis in the summer of 2013.
Well finally we agree on something: I agree that he needs to kill the filibuster. Maybe he’s being coy about it. I don’t think it’s really a political issue until the Dems with both the WH and Senate - and preferably win the Senate with more than 55 Senators.
He can’t kill the filibuster. For some reason, some people thnk the Senate will follow the president’s orders on that.
I think it’s obvious that we mean under the right circumstances (i.e. Dem majority).
You pretty explicitly said that, so yeah that’s obvious and doesn’t change anything I said. The President doesn’t decide Senate procedure and getting rid of the filibuster will not be decided by a President.