It was a legitimate question to ask. I don’t think Bernie Sanders himself is to blame, so I disagree with the suggestion that Sanders is individually winking and nodding at misogynistic trolling, but I think that Sanders’ campaign does attract the conspiracy theory crowd, and the reason for that is that Sanders is running a simple-minded campaign, with simplistic dumbed down messaging strategy for people who are as dumb as bricks - and I think Pete is right to point out some of that.
Not that it will change anyone’s minds, and not that the media will pick up on any of that. But I like that Pete’s putting up that bookmark so we can refer back to it later.
I’m cautious about reading too much into one debate performance, but the optics and the timing were horrendous for Mayor Mike. Getting attacked and looking strained is one thing, but in his first night in the octagon, Warren kept scoring double-leg take-downs and he couldn’t stop her. Mayor Pete and Bernie got in a couple of pops while he was down to boot, but it was Warren who made him stammer and stumble over his answers.
Part of Mike’s appeal was that he was going to be the guy who’d take it to Trump on the airwaves and on the debate stage. Bloomy might still win the air war, but he looked very weak in front of the camera
And here’s an even bigger problem with last night’s debate: this time, 30 million people were watching, and they were tuning in to watch him. And that’s the Mike Bloomberg they saw. He didn’t look like a New York tough guy last night.
Kind of a shame that he showed some shame, isn’t it? (I know, it wasn’t much shame; let’s not quibble.) But if he didn’t show any at all, the Dems would rightly bounce him out and on his way in a New York minute.
To me this was something of a cheap shot, given that Bloomberg said it thirty years ago. Tasteless, sure, but nothing from which you should draw definitive conclusions about how Bloomberg feels about women.
For me, it’s much more important to see what is in the non-disclosure agreements, for which Warren was definitely justified in bringing up.
That wasn’t my argument. Obfuscation, complication, distraction, whatabout, and irrelevancies are all barriers to understanding. Each poster thinks they are clearing up something but it looks like babel. And the whole point is that we are too confused? Yes we are. We are making ourselves that way.
Do you think that 10 diffferent stories about how a billion dollars can get spent by a fictional person helps democrats understand something?
He didn’t really strike me as showing shame at all; he looked highly uncomfortable as the questions were rolling off of Warren’s tongue, fully aware of what she was getting at, but completely unprepared for the way in which she delivered it. Warren was putting on a prosecutorial clinic, and Mayor Mike was in the hot seat.
Had Mike actually said “You know, yes, I said those things at a time in my life and career when I was less aware, and I’m sorry for it.” Then he could have come out and followed it by saying all the hokey about how his corporate culture treats women well and all that. But it was a combination of a) his defiance and b) squirming his way through Warren’s interrogation that really made Mike look weak.
I do think he partially recovered when he started going on the offensive, especially with his attacks on Bernie. The most famous socialist line was a good one.
What’s the value in explaining how much a billion dollars is?
It’s not enough that taxing billionaires pays for healthcare.
Everyone knows that billionaire means “wealthy and powerful beyond my imagination”
So what’s the value in quantifying it? Just to attack Bloomberg? Attack him on his failures (like stop and frisk) not on his successes (having amassed a fortune.)
Respectfully, I’m not sure if you have read it carefully, because the majority of entries/quotes have no bad language at all. Oh, there are jokes about blowjobs and the vanity of women, no doubt. At least they come off a jokes to me, YMMV. Here are other typical entries:
On balance, there is a lot more about business, capitalism, and how he was running his company back then, than there is crude jokes and the like.
Okay, but I’m saying it was a typical debate soundbite used to get a visceral reaction, rather than prove any actual point about Bloomberg.
Which is, from a different direction, what the ‘GOP did’ in 2016 (though actually the elected GOP was at first panicked at the notion Trump could be nominee). As you say, there was a small but non-negligible % of Obama-Trump voters, which is hard for most people fairly far to the right or left, in traditional terms, is get their heads around.
I agree Sanders would do that to some degree, appeal to certain voters in an unconventional way, not a matter so much of whether they want ‘socialism’.
However, there are still probably a lot of voters who don’t like Trump, but don’t think the times call for a ‘transformation’ and specifically don’t buy relatively hard left basic concepts at the root of Sanders’ worldview that he doesn’t sugarcoat (eg. everyone’s money is really the public’s, the public will decide how much they deserve to keep, and take the rest).
I mean both could be true. Exit polls of a Sanders v Trump race might show surprising pockets of strength for Sanders in terms of binary decision and/or turnout in surprising groups…and a big weakness in ‘middle of the road’ (conventional left/right terms) voters and very high energy in right of center (again conventional terms) voters and Trump wins, maybe by enough to carry away the Democrats’ House majority. Or shuffle that around, theorize higher (conventional) left energy for Sanders, and write the analysis of Trump’s decisive loss to Sanders, or Trump or Sanders squeaking to similar electoral vote victory as 2016. All are possible IMO but harder to see how a more conventional Democrat could lose badly, and Sanders might.
I’m not the one to whom this question was addressed but… I think the point is that when Warren and Bernie are attacking “the billionaire class”, it’s not “the guy who started the pottery factory down the road and now had 50 employees” or “the town doctor” or “the richest guy in town, who everyone looks up to” or (almost certainly) “you, Joe the Plumber, if you work super duper hard and end up running a chain of plumbing businesses”. It’s an entirely different category of nearly unimaginable wealth.
It is pretty easy to not really grok how exponentiation works, and just view a billion as a somewhat larger version of a million.
But then what? “Oh my goodness, I had no idea he could hire a million people for $1000! Now I know he’s reeeeally rich”. I guess if you are just trying to illustrate how far away he is I would tell people that they could win $100M/year for the rest of their life and wouldn’t catch up to Bloomberg’s current wealth.
