N/m, read your reply wrong
In fairness, they both have stronger resumes than Mayor Pete, though. Charisma and ability do matter, but they don’t come from ethnicity or orientation. Obama won with charisma and ability, not with blackness, for instance. It isn’t as obvious how much charisma and ability Abrams has, and O’Rourke hasn’t shown much of them in his campaign so far.
Yes, of course, the GOP loves the constant attacks on the frontrunner, so that no matter who it is, we end up losing to trump.
Well that’s hardly fair - O’Rourke and Abrahms are both failed gubernatorial candidates during a blue-wave year… who led very competitive campaigns, one against a well-established incumbent and one against an obvious cheating fuckstick, both in deep red states. Yeah, they lost - but that they were even close is wild.
No one ever said politics is fair.
It may not be fair. But it doesn’t have to be stupid.
I like Abrams a lot and think she’s got talent that eventually will have to be acknowledged. But she and Beto both have the same vulnerabilities: not much experience on the national scene, and a record of losing—no matter what the ameliorating circumstances—that will cling.
They could each be plausible in the VP slot. But these are not the people to be pushing forward as our standard bearer.
As far as ripping down Biden: I think that’s stupid, too.* Or at least, stupid if you want to get rid of Trump. Smart, otherwise.
*As my posting record will show I am not in the tank for Joe. But I’m not going to do the work of the GOP/Kremlin by doing my best to paint him as unelectable, either.
Biden is just my guy as I think he can whup trump. Politics wise, others are good, and youth, etc, yes. But attacking him is just giving votes to trump.
I agree: the last thing we need is Trump winning the Dem primary, too. That would be a disaster!
Yeah.
I can understand advocacy such as ‘my favored candidate has a detailed policy on the gun issue that I think could win over a lot of moderate voters’ or ‘my favored candidate has such-and-such a record on winning elections in red or purple districts’ and the like.
It’s true that implicit in such advocacy is a sort of ‘my favored candidate is better on this than all the other candidates’—but what isn’t in such advocacy is ‘here’s how the Trump campaign can put together a really effective attack on the eventual Dem nominee.’
Wouldn’t it be useful if we could avoid that? (Rhetorical question.)
How about “my favored candidate is one of the dozen-plus candidates who isn’t showing possible early signs of senility”?
I hate to break the news to you, but Faux News has already noticed this.
Non-rhetorical answer: no, it doesn’t matter because, big surprise, the Republicans have people who already know about this shit.
Shocking! We all assumed they were twiddling their thumbs waiting for a nice polite Dem primary to wrap up.
Well, Biden as a “gaffe machine” has been talked about for, what, forty years? So why weren’t people talking about his supposed “senility” when he was a Senator? (And VP and all the rest of his life?)
It’s an attack that’s doubly absurd when you look at Biden’s prospective opponent, Donald Dementia Trump. (Again, I am not in the tank for Biden. I’m just of a mind that doing the GOP’s work for them by attacking individual Dems is stupid.)
Why help Republicans?
I guarantee you that Democratic foes of Bernie have come up with lines of anti-Bernie attack that the right wouldn’t have thought up on their own–and the same is probably true for Biden and Harris and Warren and all the rest.
Why help Republicans? Let them muddle along with their dim little mental powers.
Yeppers.
Do we have any evidence that suggests that our debates on this board affect anything outside of here?
Besides, they’ve got a massive permanent campaign infrastructure of think tanks and ideological nonprofits. They’ve got people whose full-time jobs it is to come up with shit to throw at people on the left.
We’re really not going to make a difference, one way or the other.
Meanwhile, Warren seems to be getting a lock on the position of being Biden’s only serious rival. In the last three A-rated polls (Quinnipiac, SurveyUSA, Fox News), all since the last debate, she’s been at 21, 19, 20. Sanders is fading, Harris is back down in the single digits, Mayor Pete’s back in the low single digits, and nobody else seems to be emerging from the scrum at 2% and below.
In the words of Dylan, “Things should start to get interesting right about now.” At the next debate, Biden had better be ready to defend his role in the 2005 Bankruptcy Act, because Warren will be ready to wrap it around his neck.
I wasn’t thinking of this board when I wrote post #669. I was thinking of ‘Democrats and other anti-Trump writers and speakers, wherever they may be writing or speaking,’ roughly.
Many find it to be enjoyable and fun to rip down candidates who stand in the way of their own favored candidate. And there’s a certain feeling of righteousness that settles in as one goes about those attacks. The rationale comes readily to hand: ‘I’m helping by pointing out how vulnerable the front-runner will be in the general election.’
The attendant complacency validates the activity. At least it does if one isn’t in the habit of self-reflection. As Feynman said, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.
As I’ve posted more than once, I’m not an advocate for Biden. There are quite a few lines of attack against him that I could be posting about here, on Twitter, and elsewhere. It’s easy enough to do.
That doesn’t make it smart or useful, if the goal is to get rid of Trump.
Agreed. Warren is the only one positioned to overtake him when the shit gets real.
I don’t think the personal style attacks on Biden are what he needs to be afraid of. He needs to fear this becoming that two person fight with Warren in which it becomes a real meaty debate of ideas for the future and thinking on your feet. She would dominate in that. I don’t think she will do a Harris-like holding him to account for past votes because it goes against her brand. She will instead contrast her having ideas with plans for how to make the future better and work to convince voters that she is as electable as Biden is or more on her strengths, not because of his weaknesses.
Will any of the others try to tear her down before that?
Actually, it quite obviously does make it smart and useful. The job here isn’t to make sure Biden or any other candidate comes out unscathed from the primaries. It’s to see who can weather the coming storm. Pretending this shit doesn’t exist until next year is not smart. Biden’s old fogey gaffer shit needs to be addressed and overcome, not ignored.
Highlighting schisms in the party is stupid but that’s not what Biden’s age, Warren’s electioneering, or Buttigieg’s newbness is about.
Agreed – if opponents are going to be successful against Biden, it will be his record as a senator from 2000 to 2008 that will be the soft target. And there’s a lot to choose from.
So you’d agree that all the focus on Hillary’s emails and Bengazi and Vince Foster and speeches to Wall Street in 2015 and 2016 were “smart and useful”…?
Have you dropped a gasket? Of course that’s all bad stuff for Clinton and it probably helped sink her (except Vince Foster, come on). But you are contending that it would have been better if that had all been ignored in the primaries and would have either been unmentioned or less effective if it only got brought out in the general.
And it is a different situation now completely. In 2016, it was always going to be Clinton. This time there’s an actual choice to be made.