Except is was made ahead of time as a campaign promise. It won him some votes. Enough to turn the election? Maybe maybe not. Clinton’s election turned on at least a dozen shoulda coulda wouldas may have altered the outcome. But if he had lost, then it wouldn’t have mattered at all.
No more so than simply nominating her would have done. You can’t cater to the racists, they aren’t going to vote for you anyway.
Only if you only look at the most superficial bits, and ignore everything else. But you are right, there are many Americans who can’t see past the headlines, and are easily swayed by poor arguments based on optics rather than substance.
We can do one of two things, cater to them, or try to educate them. Maybe you are right that they can’t understand anything more than two words at a time, and will be turned off by the words “black woman”, but having that low an expectation of voters makes it not even worth trying to save our country from far right authoritarian rule. If the average voter is as stupid and disengaged as to be turned off by this, then maybe we should just go ahead and abandon democracy.
The people whining about that didn’t seem to care when Reagan, Bush Sr., and Trump announced it ahead of time.
If there is one group that I could give a flying fuck about politically, it’s the racists. They can fuck right off. The vast, vast, vast majority of them aren’t going to vote for my preferred candidates no matter what the candidate says or does, so I certainly don’t see the point in trying to cater to them. Hell, if catering to them would win more elections, I’d still tell them to fuck right off.
I’m perfectly fine with the remaining racist stragglers who happen to not yet be far-right Trumpers moving over to that tent, if they actually exist. Again, they can either stop being racists or fuck right off.
Biden had his own base to fire up and I say it worked. It got him in office. And there shouldn’t be anything wrong with saying we want a qualified person who also brings her wealth of experience as a black woman in this country.
You know that the average voter is probably one step above special education, right? Profoundly ignorant and abysmally stupid is pretty much par for the course in my experience. I mean, they vote for the best looking or tallest candidate in many cases.
2/25/2020 - Biden makes a pledge to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court at the CBS News/Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate in Charleston, South Carolina.
2/26/2020 - South Carolina representative and civil rights legend Jim Clyburn endorses Biden.
2/29/2020 - Biden wins South Carolina primary. Convincingly.
This is the last primary before Super Tuesday and Biden’s win changes his campaign’s trajectory and gives him Joe-mentum heading into Super Tuesday.
Recall that Biden had a foot out the door after the first three contests. Fourth place in Iowa. Fifth place in New Hampshire. A distant second in Nevada.
This big win changed everything and without it Biden loses the primary and Trump wins the general in November.
Pledging to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court is the smartest political decision Biden ever made.
Afghanistan: Clearly mishandled. But we could also blame Carter, Reagan, Bush1, Clinton, Bush2, Obama, and Trump.
It is the economy stupid.
Whatever your views on any particular political subject, if the economy is in the crapper at the next election. He will lose.
I was a fan of Bush1. But the economy was faltering. There was the whole “no new taxes” thing. the Fed raised rates. Bam!!! Clinton gets elected.
I long for days we can make fun our President for being “prudent”. I don’t think Presidents have control over the economy. I think that about Rs and Ds.
I’m sure there was a plan but it was thwarted by a collapse much faster than anticipated. I’m sure buried deep in the vaults of the Pentagon there’s a plan about what to do if a flying saucer lands on the Mall and Michael Rennie steps out.
It gives mid-level officers something to do while they’re learning the ropes of higher command. The rainbow plans codified after WWI covered just about any scrap we would have found ourselves in, and those are the famous ones.
To my recollection, Bush never pledged to nominate a black Justice to the Supreme Court and never said that he nominated Clarence Thomas because he was black. He maintained that he chose him because he was the most qualified for the position.
Whatever. If we’re having to “educate” voters to do basic, non idiotic stuff like not be racist and whatever other things we’re talking about here, then it’s pretty clear that we’re dealing with absolute lowest common denominator stuff here, and just about anything above a middle school education is “elitist” and “insulting”. I mean, most people don’t even know enough about our government to understand that presidents aren’t dictators, and that people like state attorneys general can’t do things like defend the state borders. Or that a Representative is one of 435 people in the House, not someone with a particular amount of power. And so on… General ignorance and stupidity (as evidenced by the complacency by which so many are ignorant) is a huge problem for our democracy.
Fundamentally, the Democrats need to worry less about educating people as to why they’re wrong in thinking whatever they’re thinking, and more about educating them in the fact that the world isn’t such a scary place as they’ve been led to believe. 99% of the Republican propaganda is aimed at making their flock feel insecure and scared- that their conception of “America” is going to go away, that their power to affect things that impact them is going away, and that what they’ve worked hard their entire lives for is going to be taken from them.
It’s fear and insecurity, plain and simple. You don’t assuage someone’s fears by telling them that their fears are wrong- you don’t tell a kid that they’re silly and stupid for worrying about monsters in the closet, you open the closet, you give them a flashlight, and you tell them you’re right there in the next room.
So we (the non far-right) need to figure out how to do the same thing on a huge scale- how to validate their fears, and gently point out that they’re illusory, without wagging fingers about racism, wokeness, LGBTQ rights or any of that stuff. All that the right wing and anyone undecided hears when that stuff is brought up is someone telling them that their beliefs are wrong, and telling them it’s their fault. Which turns people right off from the larger message.
The Republicans already have a lock on those voters. If you want to say that Republican voters are a step above special ed, then I think that you are insulting the many special ed students who do their best with what they have to understand the world and live full and productive lives.
The average voter though, well, they are average.
The problem there is that the Republicans do their damndest to prevent any of that edumacashun stuff from going on. And they have been successful over the last few decades of blocking a fair amount of information about the government and how it works. It’s not that the voters are stupid, it’s that they have been intentionally been kept ignorant by those who benefit from keeping them ignorant.
Right, that’s their flock. Catering to those people is never going to win, they’ve already been cult programed to the point where they are willing to take the side of a plague against that of their fellow humankind in order to spite their enemy. They are willing to die themselves in order to inflict even the smallest harm upon their political rivals. You can’t fight hate like that, and trying to cater to it won’t do anyone any good.
Right, that’s called education, exactly that you just said was worthless. People are scared about things they don’t understand, and there are two reactions to it, either learn about them, so you are no longer scared, or attack them.
Illuminating the object of one’s fears should cause one to have less fear of it, which is why the Republicans want to ban flashlights(in this analogy, anyway).
But that’s the thing, it’s not the left that’s going on about racism, wokeness or LGBTQ rights or any of that stuff, it’s the right that is attacking on those grounds.
If you see someone being beat up by a bully, and you try to stop that bully, is it you that is obsessed with the target of the bullying?
The problem is is that there is not amount of slight criticism or education that can be done without that exact reaction. If I point out that someone said something that is hurtful in a racial context, they get offended that I called them a racist. If I tell someone that other’s don’t have the advantages that they do, then they get all in a huff that I am blaming them for racism.
What is left of the message after you’ve stripped everything out of it?
Basically, all you have left is to fight fear with fear. Point out to the public the consequences that they will experience if the Republicans are allowed to carry out their agenda. And sure, that’s what the Republicans are doing right now with fearmongering over CRT and COVID tyranny and the homosexual agenda, but, if as you said appealing to their better natures doesn’t work, then all that is left is to scare them into fearing and hating their political rivals as much as they are hated and feared by them.
I don’t know if I want to live in that country, but I suppose that’s what we get.
I should apologize and clarify. I mostly agree with your assessment and k9bfriender’s response. My answer was mostly directed at "You know that the average voter is probably one step above special education, right? Since I work with SA kids, I found it (and still do) a pretty harsh statement, akin to saying “most voters are retarded” or somesuch. I should have been more precise with my choice of words in my disagreement.
How do I say that the average voter on either side is flat out stupider than we give them credit for? Special ed wasn’t a particularly good choice on my part for a shorthand to try and get the concept across. Maybe George Carlin’s quote is more applicable:
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
The trick as I see it is to appeal to those people. They’re not high information, and they’re not high mental horsepower. They likely vote largely on emotional issues of the moment, and fear is probably high on their list- economic, social, etc…
It doesn’t matter if the Democratic party isn’t demanding people be woke, they’re not decrying it, and Democratic politicians often support wokeness and woke causes. And make no mistake, just because AOC is only a congresswoman from NY, it doesn’t mean that what she says isn’t assumed to be the de-facto party position. I mean, we have the Texas governor campaigning for the primaries and defending against the “Green New Deal” is one of the 3 things he specifically mentions in his TV ads. In Texas. So people perceive that as a threat.
The Democrats need to get the idea across that stuff like the Green New Deal isn’t going to require more taxes, less service, or higher prices. And if they can’t, it’ll be a hard sell. And if the Green New Deal isn’t part of their platform, they need to slap a muzzle on AOC and other rogue Democratic politicians post haste. Having Bernie say one thing, AOC another, and President Biden a third means that the message gets muddied and worse, makes the party look shambolic and ineffective. If you’re not already decided, are you going to want to vote for the party that is organized and everyone’s on the same page, or the one where everyone just says and does whatever they want, and holds up bills, etc… for no good reason? I mean they should have slapped Sinema and Manchin with some sort of formal punishment, and written their districts out of bills for that sort of stunt. Completely unacceptable by my lights. Again, this sort of thing makes the President and the party look ineffective and weak.
Biden meanwhile is in the unenviable position of having to negotiate within his own party, rather than driving it forward along his own vision. Again, weak and ineffectual. Which isn’t his fault per-se, but rather that some parts of the party are acting like cats to be herded, rather than lining up to move stuff forward.