Trump’s actions probably help a lot more.
It is Clinton’s decision whether she wants to give Sanders supporters reasons to back her. It is their decision whether it’s enough. This is always the case, with all candidates in all situations.
She has made some gestures in this direction, including after New York and last night.
Nonsense.
No, she’s just not as far out there as Sanders. Clinton doesn’t want the Koch bros to run elections any more than Sanders does. But she does play the game. And until the rules change, you have to.
I’ll grant that she probably tailors her message to her crowd. Because politician.
I don’t think she changes her beliefs, I think she changes what she emphasizes in order to sway opinion.
Sanders has failed. He had no potential to do anything but shift the conversation to the left, which is awesome, and I’m glad he did it. Sander’s wins were in small states with no minorities, he’d never have a chance in a general, because the GOP wasn’t attacking him yet. Again, I supported him. But I never had much hope he’d actually get the nom. If he did, I’d certainly have voted for him in the general.
And if you think Clinton will be barely distinguishable from Bush II, you’re letting your passions get ahead of you. You can’t seriously believe that.
That’s probably a good thing, since Bernie never had a chance.
I hope you don’t have a young daughter. Because nonsense like that is what could lead her to growing up in Cruz’s America, with his SCOTUS judges ripping away the gains of the last century. A GOP lock will mean women’s rights, gay rights, religious minority rights, are going to be rolled back as fast as they can get the ink to dry.
She’s not actually that corrupt. That’s just histrionics.
I’m not morally wrong for pointing out how someone is irrational. Cutting your nose off to spite your face may feel great while you’re doing it, but at some point, a bumblebee is going to fly into your face-hole and make you regret it.
Voting for Clinton gives them “90% of what they want”? According to whom?
They don’t want everything that Sanders wants; they want specific things, a lot of which Clinton won’t give them. Go to the next Sanders rally, and tell them, “Clinton will give you 90% of what Sanders wants - just not free public school tuition, single-payer health care payable by the rich and day traders, or any significant reform that takes away from the 1%,” and see where that gets you.
I still think Sanders’s best shot at reform is to concentrate on getting Representatives and Senators friendly to his ideas elected, even if it means replacing existing Democrats. This shouldn’t be that hard if the “Bernie Bros” come out in force in November - and this has the added advantage for Clinton of reminding them that pretty much anything they do concerning Congress is meaningless if the President is a Republican.
To be clear, as explained in post #97, I accidentally left a portion of Lobohan’s quote, from post #93, at the end of my post when I meant to delete it. Since I had closed the quote tags, it appears as if it’s part of my quote. So the part you just quoted originally was said by Lobohan. I reported my post #95 and asked a moderator to delete that portion of the post.
The rest of my post, the part I wrote, agrees with you. Saying Clinton and Sanders represent 90% of the same thing is ridiculous. There haven’t been two primary candidates further apart in decades.
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The idea that you can evaluate candidates in their entirety by the seeing what their checklists are on the issues is obviously flawed. If some random guy filled out a political questionaire the same as Clinton, but he was completely insane and rash and stupid and a liar, would you say “hey, vote for him, his stated positions match up 90% with what you want”?
No, you’re voting for a person. You’re voting for judgment. You’re voting for honesty, and integrity.
Different candidates will also have different priorities. What if gay rights is your #1 issue, and while one candidate technically gave the right answer on a survey for gay rights but has no intention of doing anything about it, the other one is super passionate about the issue and makes it a centerpiece of their campaign? You should vote for either interchangably, right? Because they both gave the same answer, you’re getting the same thing.
I doubt that Sanders and Clinton match up 90% on the issues, and I think that’s a ridiculous thing to take for granted. But even if that were true, you could still think those 10% of issues were important. Or that you think Clinton is just giving lipservice to some of those ideas with no intentions of pursuing them. Or that she’s lying about her belief in some of the issues and you believe she’ll actually act against your interest. Or that while she has the right opinion on abortion, you don’t trust her to be the person in charge when she gets woken up at 3am to a false alarm about ICBMs coming in. Or a thousand other reasons that separate real candidates other than some sort of political values checklist.
It’s especially ironic and dishonest since the attitude of Bernie is “OMG HE’S FAR TOO RADICAL TO GET ANYTHING DONE!” while simultaneously saying “oh Clinton has all the opinions he has anyway.” - He’s totally radical, and she’s totally not, and yet you should vote for her because she has all the same opinions as him!
Your condescending attitude towards people who don’t swear allegiance to a political party is going to be part of the reason that the “BernieBots” reject your candidate when you need their support, and it will disenfranchise an entire generation to your political party. And you will have deserved every bit of it.
I think you may have the wrong end of the stick. There’s nothing wrong with being a partisan Democrat. There’s nothing wrong with preferring Bernie to Hillary. At the end of the primary, only one of them can win. That’s going to be Hillary. We can either piss and moan about how much more wonderful Bernie is and perhaps for a lot of us, Bernie aligns more closely with our own agenda. But he didn’t win. So the time has come for all of us to drop the minor differences that we might have and unite to defeat Trump. Everything else is secondary to defeating Trump. I agree that Hillary is a flawed candidate, but I think the flaws are more with her being a terrible public speaker and politically clumsy than it is with her being corrupt and evil, because I don’t think she is either of those things. She’s generally on the right side of the issues. I agree she was painfully wrong on Iraq and in retrospect the Libyan intervention led to a failed state. But there is nothing that she could do wrong that wouldn’t be 1000 times better than what Trump or any Republican would do. The winner of this election will appoint at least 3-4 justices to the Supreme Court, it is well worth tolerating Hillary’s shortcomings to deny Trump this opportunity.
There is absolutely something wrong with being partisan. It’s a major component of what is toxic and wrong with our politics. It makes you more concerned about your team winning or the other team losing than doing what’s right. It clouds your judgements and introduces biases.
I accept “lesser of two evils” arguments as being pragmatic, but partisanship is absolutely and inherently negative. You should come to your conclusions about who you support based on judgment of the actual people and issues at stake, and not because you’ve found a team to root for and you’ve decided loyalty trumps judgment.
You speak as if you don’t remember 9/11. You really want to compare the atmosphere 13 years ago in the aftermath of the worst single atrocity ever committed on U.S. Soil to now? Get superior all you want, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t actual intelligent people who supported the war for reasons other than “WAR! KILL!” Give me a BIG break.
Wow, are you a republican? “9/11 happened, we have to invade Iraq!”?
I was on these very boards talking about how 9/11 was allowing our government to use the frenzy following it to commit great acts of evil, both to its own citizen and the rest of the world. Do you want me to dig up some specific examples from that time period?
The politicians of that era were often evil - it’s not like they wrote the Patriot Act on the spot, they had it written up just waiting for the day when something terrible happened so they could use the public irrationality to push it through - or simply spineless and/or stupid. Which was she?
Really? “Remember 9/11? That’s why Hillary voted for Iraq” is as dumb as any Republican supporters in the war. 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq and it was a monumental blunder at every point, and everyone knows it.
Is that what you want in a president? Someone who says "Oh shit, we got attacked by some radical terrorists, none of whom had anything to do with Iraq. Time to go ahead and knock over that country to the tune of hundreds of thousands killed, trillions lost, and an entire country’s reputation trashed. And I thought I might’ve been just a touch hyperbolic when I said her presidency would be like a return to the Bush years. Apparently that’s just fine with her supporters.
We want our presidents to be better than that, don’t we? That’s the lamest excuse for her behavior I’ve ever seen.
Off the top of my head in 2016:
Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
Jim Webb and Bernie Sanders.
Ted Cruz and George Pataki.
Like it or not, the choice is between Hillary’s judgment and Trump’s. It isn’t between the guy we may wish we had nominated and Trump, it’s going to be Hillary.
We have to agree to disagree on the goodness of partisanship. From my point of view, one party is pretty much in sync with my beliefs and values while the other not only isn’t in sync with me, they’re actually an evil entity. In this climate, partisanship is not a choice, it’s a necessity for preserving the republic.
Partisanship is not simply supporting an entity. It’s voluntarily submitting to your biases. It’s choosing to view new information in terms of what is favorable for your side or disfavorable to the other. You can support the democratic party without being partisan. Embracing partisanship is the opposite of skepticism, reason, and dedication to understanding the world as it is.
There is no enlightened reason to submit yourself to partisanship. It is a deliberate clouding of your understanding of the world, a deliberate application of biases to what you believe. It’s falling trap to the appeal of making the world a simpler place, where you can simply believe, and stay loyal, rather than informing yourself and using your own judgment.
Do you not understand that’s how your counterparts on the other side view the situation exactly? It was their partisanship that put them in a position to think that way. It was their partisanship that caused them to put themselves into an echo chamber where Fox News can decide what it is they think. It was their partisanship that let them think that unquestioned loyalty to their party is a “necesity for preserving the republic”
Classic black-and-white thinking. Whatever, go vote for Trump for President if you want. Enjoy it.
Nothing I could possibly say will convince you, short of agreeing absolutely. Sorry, no can do.
Where are you getting that? I may be the most persuadable person on this board. I have no partisanship or fixed loyalty. My prime intellectual goal is empirical skepticism. You could easily convince me, if you actually had a good argument. And I have indeed actually changed my opinion about very big things during my time on this board strictly on the merits of the arguments and data presented.
You clearly do not have such an argument, and so that is your cop-out.
Sometimes partisanship is the least bad option, in my view. Considering the present state and positions of the Republican party, ensuring they lose is absolutely “doing what’s right”.
This is the best reason why you should support Hillary Clinton if she is nominated, in my view – the alternative is so, so much worse. If, by not voting, you increase the likelihood (by however small an amount) of a Trump or Cruz presidency, then in my opinion you have hurt America. I can’t think of a good reason to hurt America, in however small a manner.
Partisanship as a tactic is different from partisanship as an end. Too much of the partisanship now is merely the goal, stopping the functioning of government by causing partisan gridlock. We need vigorous competition, but we also need a decision at the end of the day and that requires a compromise when an overwhelming victory does not occur. It’s supposed to be a competition that results in the best decision attainable for the greater good, not necessarily the ideal, but to keep the ship of state afloat. We can move on to fight again the next day. It’s a never ending season, neither side should ever win completely. Partisanship has brought us to a standstill because the participants act like children, unable to play by the rules, settle on what the rules are. Worse the argument is more now about the rules, and never to make them fair, but to rig the system for one side. Our choices are between lesser and lesser evils because all reasonable people have been excluded from the process. The intention to serve the people has disappeared in order to serve extremism.
Don’t assume it’s the other side’s fault here, the only non-partisan part of this is the agreement to disagree on every issue and allow our problems to grow and multiply.
I suspect that’s what’s going to happen in November. Bernie’s supporters will stand there looking at the ballot, realizing there’s a chance Trump could win if Hillary doesn’t get the votes, and put their X next to Hillary’s name. Hillary will win and a rather loud sigh of relief will be heard coming from the* entire *world.
Bernie’s desire to remain in the campaign so his views can make it into the Democratic platform is a poor excuse. He’s rolling in money left and right. Why stop the cash flow? There’s at least 3 more months of campaign paychecks (undoubtedly high) for his advisers too. I’m betting they advise remaining in the race. Wall street tactics.
Heh prove a negative using data. Yeah, good luck with that.
Intellectual skepticism based solely on an opinion. Ohhhkay, bud. Sorry, it’s not on me to disprove your total assertion. It’s on you to prove it. See, I’m the skeptic here.