Challenge him to a fist fight. What else? :rolleyes:
I would expect him to debate Biden the way Biden has debated people like Sarah Palin and Rand Paul, with passion and heart. I think Biden’s empathy is a good contrast. Biden sucked early on in large part because his handlers thought he could just talk about electability and hide from the TV cameras. I think the real Biden is coming out now.
Given his diminishing capability to speak clearly and articulately, I think the “real Biden” is going to be problematic.
If America is leaning towards a moderate democratic candidate, and it appears that they are, Buttigieg is an ideal candidate to contrast against Trump. Far superior to any moderate in the current field. Sanders would be a great contrast too, but he has baggage that I fear would make moderate dems stay home and that difference will not be made up by any new voters he claims his revolutions is bringing to the voting booths.
But you and I both know: he’s not going to drop it. He’s not going to drop it because to drop it would mean compromising on principle. It’s essentially losing virtue in his eyes, and more importantly, that’s how his wide-eyed supporters who see unicorns and rainbows view it as well. That pretty much guarantees he won’t get shit accomplished if he becomes president, and that might even guarantee that he won’t get elected. Worse, that might guarantee the loss of the House. I will repeat: his ideas, his ideology, and his “Let’s turn America into Norway” double down posture aren’t as popular as he thinks. He is intensely popular within one wing of one political party - everyone concedes that. But he needs people outside his party to win this election. I will support him in the general if he wins the nomination because he’s not Trump, but I hope I’m wrong about everything I’ve just written.
Bernie has run a much better campaign than Biden has, no question about it. Biden’s handlers made a tactical mistake in trying to ignore his competition early in the race, which is probably why Biden has appeared to be lacking in enthusiasm. I think the real Biden came to life last night. It’s a shame it took this long. I hope it’s not too late, but it might be.
Buttigieg can’t win - he needs to drop out of the race. We can’t make this country accept him. We might make this country accept Biden.
That said, I hate to waste Bernie’s energy, and the Democratic party’s leadership really needs a good swift kick to the balls. Instead of complaining and fretting about Bernie’s rise, they need to figure out how to incorporate some of his platform into their own.
That’s a hell of a campaign slogan: Vote Bernie! He’s so crazy you know his proposals won’t pass Congress!
Great. So, I don’t want his domestic policies, but I should vote for him because they won’t get passed. I also think he has a terrible record on foreign policy.
Take his Russian sanctions policy, or policy that there shouldn’t be sanctions:
“Sanders routinely voted against sanctions bills, and even opposed the Magnitsky Act — named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer tortured and killed in a Russian prison — which is used to sanction individual human rights abuses. In 2017, the Senate passed new sanctions against Russia and Iran by a 98 to 2 vote. Sanders and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) were the only two senators to vote against sanctions. (“The Senate’s Iranian sanctions legislation imposes new restrictions on Tehran’s ballistic missile program, also aiming to punish Iran for supporting terrorism and human rights violations.”)”
If we are going to just give up and let the Russians win, I’d just as soon let the Republicans left holding that bag than some guy who only decided to become a Democrat recently to run for president as a Democrat.
I’m in agreement that the US shouldn’t always assume moral high ground relative to Russia or other regimes and applying sanctions can backfire where negotiations might otherwise be appropriate. But the Magnitsky Act is a particularly important piece of legislation that supports efforts to fight corruption, the kind of corruption that empowers Russian kleptocrats and gets his opponents killed, which makes Sanders’ opposition to the bill problematic.
Methinks you’re voting for the centipede. What’s your slogan?
They were using the terms ironically. Snopes has determined the claim be “mostly false”. George Will is a right-wing anti-Bernie crusader.
Bernie is not only an inflexible ideologue, he’s also a poorly-informed ideologue:
Zakaria goes into some interesting detail on how the Scandinavian countries corrected out of Bernie-fantasy ideas on running an economy, into ideas that actually made prosperity and progress possible.
But the biggest blow-to-Bros are the facts about taxation:
(same source)
These facts might make for some interesting questions to Bernie at the next debate. I’m guessing that they would come as a complete surprise to him. But, then he doesn’t appear to be interested in interacting with reality—preferring ideology.
(My emphasis in all quotes.)
Look at the expeditures relative to the GDP in this post.
Still think Bernie is “uninformed”? And look at the consequences in terms of crime, gun violence, incarceration rates, recidivism rates, and general population health and life expectancy.
Sure Sweden has adapted, and so has Canada, and so will many of Bernie’s policies. But he does absolutely stand for something, and has all his life: social justice and fairness of opportunity.
Snopes is lately turning into a left wing advocacy board and too often picks out ways to meaninglessly distinguish things to make criticism of the left be mostly false while criticism of the right gets no such probing treatment.
Anyways, this article is a good example. It takes the statement that Bernie honeymooned “at the height of the cold war” and lampoons it by noting that June of 1988 was not the height of the cold war. So what? That is nitpickery of the finest order.
What the article glosses over, but that is discussed in the newspaper article is that Bernie chose sister cities in Nicaragua and the Soviet Union. He specifically sought out a Soviet city to be partnered with Burlington so “we can break down the barriers and stereotypes that exist between the Soviet Union and the United States.”
He doesn’t say how evil the Soviets are. He doesn’t condemn them. He puts the Soviets and the United States in parity and that our disagreements simply needed broken down and that we, by visiting with them, could cast aside our stereotypes of them. For a guy that supposedly disdains communism, he sure is cozying up to them.
And far from being a scheduling conflict, Bernie is the one who negotiated the date for the trip and also, likewise, chose the date of his marriage. It wasn’t like he worked for a corporation that sprung a business trip on him the day after he paid non-refundable deposits on a wedding hall. If the idea of going on a honeymoon in the Soviet Union seemed terrible to him, he could have chosen different dates. When you choose what day to get married and you choose travel right after that marriage, most people call that a honeymoon.
The Bernie camp can hand waive all of this away but it goes right to the heart of the accusation that the guy is a communist. Burlington, VT was not going to end the cold war. It was simply a desire on Bernie’s part to be closer to a system that he at minimum wanted to look into further. Maybe he can wear a button that says “I am not a communist” but when he has taken active steps to become closer to communist regimes, he will have a hard time convincing people otherwise.
I’m not disputing the idea that US spending on various aspects of the economy could be improved, and that other nations (such as Canada) offer instructive examples that could be beneficial to Americans. I’m a progressive. I believe that stuff. I believe that the data fully supports the idea that such changes would be constructive.
Nor am I disputing the idea that Bernie stands “for something,” or even what the something is.
What I’m saying is that he’s going about it the wrong way. He’s going about it in an authoritarian, ignore-the-data way. And if he got the nomination and managed to get elected (which seems unlikely to me), I believe he’d be remarkably ineffective in achieving his own goals.
His views are, too often, not well-informed by facts—as with his ‘Scandinavian countries’ talking point. He is often inflexible, adhering to ideology in defiance of reality (and one of his biggest blind spots is human motivation and response to incentives—he appears to believe that such things can be mandated by government fiat).
As I’ve said many times, if Bernie is the Democratic nominee, I’ll vote for him.
But I really hope he isn’t.
All of that is meaningless without also knowing how much richer the top 10% are in the USA vs Denmark. Could be a fair criticism, could not, we need more context.
Thanks for mentioning the Zakaria column. I found it very interesting. I’m not sure if Bernie himself goes around extolling the virtues of specific Scandinavian countries, but a lot of his supporters sure seem to.
So, school vouchers and no minimum wage? Regressive taxation? I don’t see that as a big plank in the Sanders platform.
And what about the billionaires Bernie hates so much?
It seems like Scandinavia is riddled with billionaires with no (or little) inheritance tax. I wonder if the Bernie-Bros know about this?
Sherrerd, great post (#1130)! You’re so spot on about Bernie’s preferring to interact with ideology than reality. Related is his insistence on how poorly everyone is doing other than those at the very top, which would have been more in sync with reality in say 2009 but today is way off (although in the wake of the coronavirus I suppose that may change soon).
It’s so similar to Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. These old lefties grew up with one kind of vision for socialism, it went out of style decades ago, they never changed, and now it’s like some kind of “retro” thing the kids love–but it never evolved and adapted with the times.
I have been reading George Will since the 1980s, when he had a column in the back of every issue of Newsweek. I know exactly who he is. I also know that he is an anti-Trump crusader as well, and that PolitiFact is a more authoritative source than Snopes (which, as UltraVires pointed out, has–like the ACLU–evolved from being an honest broker to just another left wing advocacy org).
Furthermore, my American Heritage 5th edition is very straightforward in its definition of the word “honeymoon”:
“1. A holiday or trip taken by a newly married couple. 2. A newly harmonious period in a relationship.” That’s it.
So what you’re counting on is that your average 55 year old married white swing voter in the Milwaukee suburbs is going to look at all this and say “Bernie and his wife took this trip immediately after their wedding, we’ve got video of shirtless Bernie drinking vodka and singing worker solidarity songs with his Communist hosts, they have called it their ‘honeymoon’ multiple times, PolitiFact says it indeed was a honeymoon, but since now that he’s running for president he says they were being ‘ironic’, all of the preceding will now be erased from my memory”? 
I had a similar thought, but what you are implying here goes too far. I suspect it’s probably true that Denmark has less extreme inequality than we do in the US, and that this at least in part explains the disparity. But even if that’s so–even if it explains ALL the disparity–there’s still a social impact on having the tax burden distributed so differently between the countries. You have probably seen that email forward about a dinner check being divided up based on the diners’ incomes rather than just equally, or based on what they ate. I would never want government to be funded based on a “poll tax” (every American gets a tax bill for 1/328,000,000 of the government’s budget), and in fact I’d prefer a more progressive tax system. But we can’t pretend it doesn’t have any cost in terms of social dynamics for individuals at the top to be paying for the majority of the government vs. just a plurality.
I wrote the above before reading that Scandinavia has more billionaires per capita than we do! Wow. Hard to understand the no minimum wage: is it just social/economic pressure, combined with a robust safety net, that props up wages, I guess?
I am sure that trump appreciates the support you are giving him- unwittingly I am sure.
But why bash bernie? Are you trying to convince people here to vote for trump?or who?
Even if you are pushing for say- Warren or Biden- you’re not doing them any favors.
He must’ve heard you: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/01/buttigieg-dropping-out-of-presidential-race-118489
I want to see Sanders win because I can’t wait for people to come crashing down from St. Bernie’s cocaine socialism high.
American exceptionalism seems to have infected my fellow progressives in that they think that in a country of 330M people, the bulk of the tax burden for UHC, free college, etc.can be foisted on the billionaires and corporations.
You do realize that Bernie has been bashing the other candidates and painting them as corrupt stooges of a military-industrial oligarchy far more strenuously and consistently than anyone bashes him?