One of the advantages/disadvantages Hilary had was that she and Bill had the Democratic party by the balls - not because Bill was so prestigious, but because he had raised so much money that they couldn’t afford to say No to Hilary.
Now Trump has raised $30 million, much of it from small donors. That’s something like three times as much as Sanders, and Trump won’t have to spend nearly as much in the primaries. Also more than Obama raised in the first quarter of 2007.
Of course, Hilary spent a billion dollars on her campaign and lost. But that was to Trump, and now he is the incumbent.
I haven’t been Bernie’s biggest supporter (though I’m starting to come around) but I get what he’s complaining about. Look, the fact is that he’s a political megastar now and I think he’s accepted that. His success and wealth don’t fundamentally change his message. And I don’t think people with simply 1 or 2 million in the bank were really ever his target. It’s the billionaire class, the plutocrats, the ones who have disproportionate influence that he’s after. And it’s not as though he hates them, he just wants them to pay more for things that the rest of us could and should have in a nation that’s this wealthy.
I remember making fun of the far-right (I thought at the time) Trump factionists, and his seemingly poor fundraising at times, and his supposedly tiny chances in 2016… I’m amazed that anyone still thinks they have any right to confidence as to which candidates in a large and diverse field are likely to win, and stronger in the general election.
Cheers to your confidence, and I’ll treat it in the same way I should have treated my own confidence in 2016!
No, you make a good point, and I just said the same thing in another thread. Alberta just got over its four year nightmare because four years ago the right splintered and split all its votes in the belief that the NDP could never be elected in Alberta. We paid a heavy price for that, to the tune of over 100,000 jobs and 60 billion dollars of debt.
Three years ago, the media gave Trump huge coverage because he looked to be about the worst face of the Republican Party, and it backfired.
In the age of social media, it seems anyone can be elected if the stars align just right.
We don’t care at all about Obama. We idol worship Obama.
Talk amongst yourselves.
Meanwhile, in the real world where we actually live, there is a robust argument among the center-left and the left. Both sides generally credit Obama with intelligence, more honesty than yer average politician, and personal decency. The left criticizes him on issues ranging from immigration policy to drone strikes to timidity on health care reform, while the center-left sees all these positions as pragmatic.
If there’s a circular firing squad, people like Nancy Pelosi need to quit firing on the left, need to come together with us to take action. She needs to quit dividing the left by denigrating our policies as unfeasible and denigrating our politicians’ wins by saying a glass of water could’ve won their districts.
But of course I don’t expect her to do so, because she holds her beliefs sincerely, and she is of course doing her job by expressing those sincere beliefs. I might think she’s wrong, but I don’t in any way begrudge her from holding up her end of the debate.
Meh, the declining influence of ex-presidents is in no way specific to “the left”. It’s not like Republicans these days give any shits about what the ex-Presidents Bush have to say.
In fact, Obama arguably remains far more influential and listened-to among progressives in general—including European progressives, who tend to be considerably to the left of American ones—than either President Bush is among today’s conservatives. Look at the rock-star reception he got at the Berlin event mentioned in the OP, for example.
Seriously. And the attack dog Sanders hired, David Sirota, deserves his nickname:
(from your link)
Nice that Sanders sent a ‘be civil’ email one time. But his choice to hire Sirota tells the real story.
I wish Bernie Sanders would reconsider his decision to proceed with his campaign this way. I suspect he loses more adherents than he gains, when he empowers a genuine bully like Sirota.
Republicans have this philosophy (started by Reagan and Bush) that ex-presidents should stay out of politics as a form of noblesse oblige to the next president, who they felt should not be burdened by being second-guessed by ex presidents. The Bush family in particular felt strongly about this. The Democrats have not felt the same way.
This. I think it would be a great mistake for Democrats in general to abandon a robust willingness to disagree with and criticize one another. I don’t say that some Democrats don’t sometimes carry their combativeness too far, but even that is better than trying to impose a rigid ideological conformism where intra-party dissension is viewed as some form of treason.
We shall see. I’m just hoping you guys can hold it together for one freaking election before you fly apart into a civil war for control of the establishment. Don’t, for the sake of the gods, allow this thing to spin out of control wrt progressives verse the establishment. I don’t want to be sitting here after the next election stunned and talking about the Dems, once again snatching defeat from the slavering jaws of victory…
The younger Bush has stayed pretty quiet since leaving office, but by that time he was pretty universally regarded as an embarrassment to his party, in addition to not having anything very interesting to say anyway.
So nah, the idea that Republican ex-presidents have been “staying out of politics” out of some ideal of decorum is basically conservative spin.
But that’s not what’s happening. People are having the disagreement, and then when it counts, progressives are giving in to the demands of moderates. We’re not flying apart.
I didn’t think it would change your mind. But since you posted that it would change your opinion, I thought I’d post it.
That whole issue with David Sirota was long and played out elsewhere. It’s another instance of Bernie Sanders being unable to control things people do.
Bernie Sanders broadcast to everyone publicly that he’d like people to be civil. If that’s all it took for people to behave the way other people want them to, then it was done.
Well, they can be pretty heated disagreements, but no, you aren’t flying apart…yet. I worry that you might, with so crucial an election coming up. I’m not a Democrat, so I have very little to say about it (I can’t even vote in the primaries in my state). I don’t want progressives to give into the moderates, or moderates to give into the progressives…it’s healthy for debate in a political party. I just don’t want a civil war for the soul of the Democratic party when we all need you guys to present a united front and take back the presidency.
Well, it’s not up to me personally. But this attitude is, once again, an example of the massive imbalance in expectations of rationality and integrity applied to the two sides of the political spectrum.
Republicans melt down into a toxic rat-king of cynical greed and cognitive dissonance, deliberately destabilizing the functioning of government as a self-serving power play under the banner of an ignorant malevolent buffoon, and you just shrug. Democrats engage in genuine principle- and policy-based intraparty disagreements that risk impairing liberal voter unity to even the slightest extent, and you scold vigorously about how irresponsible it would be for us not to “hold it together”.
It is about time that non-Trumpist non-liberals stopped assuming that it’s the unquestioned responsibility of the nation’s concerned, rational, reality-based, public-service-minded Democratic “Mom” to protect the family from being destroyed by the delusional rampages of sociopathic looter Republican “Dad”. Go straighten out the folks on your own side before you come bleating to us about how badly you need us to save you from the party that you allowed to lapse into such pathological dysfunction.