He and other pragmatic Democrats have to learn the lessons of the failed 2016 Stop Trump movement and act NOW, decisively. Here is the gameplan:
Shrill, hysterical, boring, off-putting, and a gift to Donald Trump. That’s the ‘Never Bernie’ “movement” in a nutshell.
Realistically, the only chance suit-and-tie Dems have is to pray that Sanders has a stroke (that’s not what I’m praying for, btw, just to be clear). What Dems need to understand is that Sanders is a grassroots movement that is pretty much perfectly-timed. This is not the season for “moderates.”
But, all is not lost. There may be ways for Dems to have Sanders work with less radical economists and aides - people who can say “Okay, you want M4A, but let’s prepare for what happens if it doesn’t get past Mitch McConnell (which it likely won’t).”
You know, I usually think of the “Democrats snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” as hyperbole. But here we have a moderate Democrat endorsing a Republican’s plan for how Democrats can keep their party from emulating the Republican outcome in 2016.
Their outcome, lest we forget, was winning the election.
This would be pretty hard to satirize.
I don’t think fear of where batshit evil Trumpism has taken us should force the non-deplorable majority in the U.S. to limit what candidates or policies we believe are best for the country. If it’s a milquetoast “never Trump” candidate this time, what about next time, and the time after that? It’s not just Trump, it’s the people who voted for him, and they are not going to vanish. At what point do civilized people stop being just defensive about what they want for this country?
Nobody knows if Bernie can win, the polls show that it’s not the foregone conclusion that many people suggest. I kind of want to find out at this point. At least we’ll be going into the election with something to gain, rather than just trying not to lose. The objection that even if he wins a Republican Senate won’t cooperate with him is ridiculously bogus. Are people under the impression that the Republicans will do anything other than continue to fuck the process of government with any Democrat in power?
Trump is not a typical President by any standard. In 2020 our primary goal should be getting Donald Trump out of office. We should be choosing the nominee who has the best chance of defeating Trump - and that means we should be choosing a nominee who can win over swing voters. I don’t feel Sanders is that candidate.
That said, I disagree with the OP. I would not want to see Obama or anyone else stepping in at the last minute and changing the rules in order to pick a nominee.
My thought exactly.
Tea-bag party who? What conservative principles?
The GOP went full retard behind Trump and hasn’t looked back since. Mitch McConnell looks like he hasn’t missed a single good night’s sleep in years, while Nancy and Chuck look older and more frayed at the edges every day.
It’s time the Democrats took a page out of the GOP playbook and lined up behind their nominee, no matter who. Dance with the one that brought you, instead of pining at home on prom night for the one that got away.
We developed a political system that favors Republicans. A Republican candidate can come in second place in the general election and be declared the winner. A Democratic candidate cannot.
That’s true–but that’s only part of Trump’s winning formula. Trump spoke a message that included some voters who felt shut out of the process, and although he’s a goddamned fraud, that helped him win. Sanders is speaking to those same voters about economic issues in a way that Bloomberg isn’t, that Biden isn’t.
And you can be really fucking sure that if Obama swoops in to save the day, that’s gonna backfire. And you can be really fucking sure that Obama knows that, and that’s why he’s not taking Slacker’s crackerjack political advice.
There is nothing special about Trump. Trump is just a stupider version of Reagan without the folksy charm.
From the article this strikes me as a feasible idea:
South Carolina is obviously a crucial state and if the party can mobilize behind Biden in this manner that could push him over the top and give him momentum for Super Tuesday.
I strongly disagree. While I loathed Reagan’s politics root and branch, and thought he was a smarmy reactionary liar, I still didn’t think of him as a sin against nature, a purely evil force focused upon the ruination of every single thing I hold dear.
Sanders simply isn’t odious enough to justify Obama coming out to slam him, so the most we could expect is a polite endorsement of another candidate.
And the author of that article sounds like a well paid consultant but he ignores the winner-take-all aspect of Republican primaries making lessons from Trump’s win difficult to apply to Dem 2020.
There’s no doubt Obama keeps his mouth shut publicly, but he can do some behind the scenes work. Would Klobuchar like an Obama appearance in MN? How about Obama’s name on a fundraising email?
It’s much harder with the damn Billionaires. But, if there’s some really ugly dirt out there, I’d be threatening to see that it gets leaked.
And it’s time to get all the ugly Bernie shit out NOW!!!
Weirdly, I agree with you on this Sanders matter. I’d like Biden to lead the charge, because he’d be a good sacrifice; bad blood between Biden and Sanders won’t mean nothin.
There’s definitely some stuff in Sanders’s past that none of us can predict how it’ll affect the general. If it starts getting discussed now, we’ll be able to make a better prediction.
I’d love for Biden to come both guns blazing at Sanders, with that weird sex article from the eighties and the Sandanista connection and the Moscow connection. They’re all pretty cheap shots, but bring them on, let’s see how Sanders navigates it.
What, both of them?
You’re thinking that politics is a one-dimensional continuum, and that the “swing voters” are folks in the middle, who could lean slightly in one direction or the other for the right candidate. But politics is not only many-dimensional, it’s topologically nontrivial, and the “middle” that you’re looking for either doesn’t exist, or is already in the Democrat-no-matter-what category. The people that Trump managed to pull into his coalition to bring him to victory aren’t the folks in the moderate middle: They’re the folks who want someone extreme, and don’t care in what direction. Sanders can win those voters back. Biden can’t.
Yeah pretty stupid argument by that author, but what do you expect from omeone who was a mastermind behind Jeb Bush’s communication campaign?
Let’s accept the premise, which as RTF has pointed out here many many times is historically correct: a clear leader out of the gates in Iowa and New Hampshire will very likely be the nominee. Okay, maybe something huge can be done to stop it, but likely would fail.
So play out the possibilities -
It works and by way of huge unified “establishment” efforts, “all in”, to nominate someone else, “someone else” wins. Result is decent segment of potential Democratic voters who are correctly feeling that the establishment disenfranchised them. Bad.
It doesn’t work. Well if you were fearful that Sanders was a losing bet before that tactic has made that bet much worse. Worse. And the more likely outcome.
Fight the fair fight according to the rules as established and circle the wagons around whoever wins. If the voters (or more precisely their elected delegates at the convention) pick Sanders then it may be a less likely win (IMHO) and a poorer outcome for the Senate (IMHO) but that is the way the process works and we have to play that dealt hand the best we can. All alternatives to proceeding like that are worse.
It’s incredibly risky because it would be pretty divisive. But I am getting a little sick of Bernie supporters acting like it’s all already out there. Maybe some SuperPAC can run a push poll in South Carolina.
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Are you aware of Sanders’ past association with the Socialist Workers Party?
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Are you aware of Sanders’ essays on women’s sexuality?
Yes, Bernie is actually popular, especially with young people, Hispanics, educated people, and people who are fed up with the current system. He inspires enthusiasm and energy. He has policies that will seriously improve people’s lives…
…And he is the ONLY Dem who will beat Trump according to the latest poll.
So the Dems better act fast if they want to lose this election. What they really need is a dull, same-old status quo establishment candidate like Biden to destroy enthusiasm and turnout. It’s the only way to hand the White House back to Trump for another four years. :rolleyes:
I must disagree with OP/quoted article in terms of timing and who should it be up to. *** If*** for some reason the establishment felt they needed to cut Bernie at the knees, the deadline was not before South Carolina votes, it was before Iowa failed to. And it should have been/be done by any of his strong contenders, not involve calling for Obama/Carter/Gore/Reid to step in as a “council of elders” to “save us”.
Establishment wanted to make it clear you only had “Real Democrats” running? Establishment should have changed the rules on 9 November 2016 to make it so. Did not. The Elder Statespeople of the party have no mandate to act as a Privy Council to save the people from themselves. And after the issues last time around, the last thing the DNC wants to be seen doing is preselecting winners and losers rather than being arbiters of a fair contest. THAT is a losing play.
I don’t know if in any other major democracy you can have just anyone do a walk-on and say “hey, I want to be the next [Labour/PSOE/CDU/FN/BQ/PRI] leader” w/o putting in time on the bench. Yet both US parties allow that and it happened to the Republican Party in 2016. Like the establishment Republicans pre-2016, their comparable Dems pre-2020 were too busy thinking “this weirdo will flame out once real voting begins, then I can harvest his enthusiastic votes; all I need is to outlast him and praise him when he leaves, not beat him and piss them off”. Why they’d think that of someone who had such a good showing last time around as Sanders, you gotta ask them. But once the voting begins, too late for that strategy, time to run to WIN.
Just look at the Nevada debate. Everyone decided to go full tilt at Bloomberg, who was not even running in Nevada or SC, and when not, the putative centrists went after each other. You think that getting a harrumpf from Obama or Schumer is going to have ANY effect on them between now and SC? or Super Tuesday? All the response they’ll get is “Why weren’t you out there directly supporting ME in Iowa/NH?”