No, you don’t think Biden is a joke candidate so don’t play the little internet argument game of turnabout. Biden’s a former Veep and 30+ years as a Senator, currently leading Yang by over 25 points. Yang is a crank who got some luck in his professional career. Seems like a nice enough guy, personally. But his VAT and UBI plans are quite objectively full of shit.
30 years as a senator for Biden, so what did he do during that time when he was just 1 of 100 people? He was never the senate majority or minority leader. He won re-election a bunch because Delaware is a very Blue state. What did he do as VP besides go to funerals for Obama? Pretty much any running mate would have won with Obama.
Outside of Cheney, he was probably the most active Veeps in your lifetime. And that’s a distraction tactic. Veeps aren’t joke candidates. Long time Senators aren’t joke candidates. People leading by double digits aren’t joke candidates. Just give your problems with him, don’t be silly and try to throw my words back at me. It’s dumb.
There is so much wrong information here.
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1972 Delaware wasn’t solid blue and DE wasn’t solid blue until around 1992 or so, maybe later.
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Biden kept Robert Bork off the Supreme Court. Reagan went too far with the Bork nomination and thus Bork needed to be blocked.
He was Senate Judiciary Committee and Foreign Relations Committee chairman.
He wrote the Violence Against Women Act which included the first and only federal assault weapons ban to date.
He was a leading voice in the Senate to scrutinise George Schultz (secretary of state) and therefore successfully getting congress to vote on overriding Reagan’s veto on Apartheid sanctions. The only time in the 20th century a president had his veto overriden.
He introduced the first ever senate bill on Climate Change (the first congressional hearing was by another future Vice President, Al Gore).
As Vice President he was in charge of overseeing the Recovery Act. He was the point-man to the Governors and especially the Mayors of cities like Detroit that went bankrupt.
Those are all pretty damn big things.
Someone like Bernie has been in congress for 28 years but what’s his record — seven bills he has co-sponsored have passed, three of which were to name post offices.
There is one person running who has got more bills passed that they wrote than Biden and that’s not anyone in the top four.
That person is Amy Klobuchar.
If you want someone who has a track record of getting things done rather than just talking, but is not Joe Biden, vote Amy.
And the subject of experience is weird in this primary.
You got Pete who is getting ripped on for a lack of experience but while he may only be a Mayor, and that too of a city of just 100,000 residents, that’s 100,000 more people that he is accountable to than Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer. Both of whom were on that debate stage when Pete was being slammed.
Why was Biden never a senate leader?
Wow Biden wrote bills! Very impressive. I guess nobody else in the Senate did that. Or the House.
I will tell you something else he did - he screwed up the Clarence Thomas hearing with Anita Hill. And guess when he decided to apologize for that screw up? This year, an amazing coincidence.
Also I think the Democratic field is very weak this year and Biden having only 25% support is not much. If he was such a good candidate he would have much higher support this year.
Why? Compared to who? Is it impossible for you to put some kind of substance behind your assertions? I say yes because there is no objective measure of what level of polling he “should” have right now.
George H W Bush was not a stupid person. He knew that it would be almost impossible to prevent Thomas from being being confirmed to the Thurgood Marshall seat and it put a lot of senators in a jam. Vote for Thomas or risk not having a black justice on the court.
Biden’s time is past. He isn’t nearly as sharp as he once was, and he regularly inserts his foot quite far into his mouth. His popularity, such as it is, is accounted for by name recognition among old farts.
Yang has lots of fresh new ideas, some of which are straight up genius. You all know about UBI, and I’ll admit it is unlikely to happen. Democracy Dollars, which is his easy fix for the money in politics fiasco, is my personal favorite. Human-Centered Capitalism is a close second.
Is UBI really a new policy? Isn’t it just a newer version of an incomes policy or negative income tax? Similar ideas like that have been kicked around since post WW II.
The Yang campaign raised $1.3M on 12/31/19 and $4M between Christmas eve and the end of New Year’s eve.
From Eric Ming from the campaign:
The original goal was $3M and was supposed to be a stretch. The day before the deadline when the goal looked likely to be met, they added another $500K to the goal. In the last few hours, they asked if $4M was possible, and it was.
This was a neat map of where the donations came from in the last hour of donating – all over the country. Nice reference to the song.
Yang’s book, The War on Normal People made it to the NY Times bestseller list on New Year’s eve as well.
Lots of energy around the Reddit sub right now. There are 7K members there as I type this. Generally, there are 2-3K members live on average. During the last debate, it was 10K.
Yang was at 5 events in New Hampshire to ring in the New Year. They had to add a 6th when there was overflow from one of them.
From Yang’s stump speech. UBI has been around since the founding of the country. It was proposed by Thomas Paine. Later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a big proponent. Richard Nixon pushed for it and got it passed in the House twice, but it died in the Senate because the Democrats wanted it to be more generous.
UBI has been around since way before that. Here’s a video on UBI from Dec. 2017.
Universal Basic Income Explained – Free Money for Everybody? UBI
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
This video is not related to Yang’s plan.
Yang started on the UBI train in 2014.
I can’t speak for Mr. Duality, but I think he meant that the ideas are new to the current political scene.
I happened to catch a Tom Steyer ad the other day. I usually avoid them by either streaming or watching shows on my dvr, but was actually watching something live and couldn’t avoid it this time.
There was a segment which was taken from one of the debates, and Steyer was saying words to the effect: On day one I’ll institute policies to counteract climate change. Fine. But Yang was standing next to him, and as soon as Steyer said the “On day one I will…” part, Yang turned toward him and got this ecstatic look on his face. It read to me like he wanted to do things “on day one” too. But it was such a weird expression…very true believer-ish and creepy. But the ad put me off both Steyer and Yang. They are the kind of people who are the “boss” and have done things their way.
I don’t want another CEO type who’s coming to save us. I want someone to work with people and not dictate to them.
I think Democracy Dollars is completely fresh. Not so sure about others.
Andrew Yang’s campaign raised $16.5M for Q4 2019.
Last night, Yang put out a tweet that he was happy to announce the Q4 results, but he didn’t give the number. The Yang Gang were joking the Yang was trolling them since everyone was eager to see the number. Yang meant that he was putting out the Q4 number to the press that night. lol
One of the first recipients of the Freedom Dividend in New Hampshire that Yang gave out of his pocket was ending the year and sent this message to Yang.
I’m excited to hear more about how the other recipients of the Freedom Dividend are doing.
Yang congratulated Julian Castro on a good run.
In a weird twist, MSNBC reported on the lack of polls in December in early states for the 2020 election. Steve Kornacki reported that there were only 4 polls in all of December 2019 in the early states and none of them were qualifying. In December of the last election year, there were 14 polls, according to Kornacki. He gave the reason that polls are expensive and it’s harder to get people on the phone since people don’t have landlines and don’t pick up their cell phones. The piece had nothing to do with Yang. Yet Yang is one of the only people to benefit from more qualifying polls in December, so I’m sure Kornacki knows that. There would be no reason to add the qualifying part if no one had the chance to qualify with more polls. I’m guessing that clip will be running around twitter, being shown to the DNC. Some people are offering to pay for the polls, saying that it’s for democracy’s sake.
The December debate was the first one I watched. Never knew what a Yang was before.
I was impressed with how articulate he was. Impressive.
Not meaning to thread poop, but I would be proud to have any of the democratic candidates on the ballot. Unlike the current WH occupant, all were great speakers.
I have no idea what the economies of scale are for polling organizations, but I wonder if having two campaigns to poll made it more economical to commission polls in Dec 2016? Also, impeachment polls weren’t an issue in 2016.
Ann Selzer doesn’t name the YangGang specifically but we know who she’s referring to with their pressure to do more polls.
I like the (sarcastic) suggestion in the comments:
“You should ask [the callers] what they want the result to be and start with that.”
They’d probably approve.
I said it a long time ago, possibly in this very thread, but man oh man he really is the Ron Paul of 2020.