Trade your ideals for the chance at increased political power while devotees say you’d never ever do that? True that.
Yes, if “maintaining your ideals” in this instance means never getting elected president and thus seeing your plank/platform never enacted at all, or, delayed by decades. Idealism is often a recipe for getting nothing as opposed to something.
I’m not even a Bernie supporter, but he was taking the only logical path he could take.
What ideals is he trading in, exactly? I don’t really see any that he’s giving up, other than perhaps the label of “independent”. He’s still the same dude.
It’s cool if people want to handwave or excuse it. I just laugh when supporters gush that he’s Constant as the North Star.
I’m pretty sure he could just BE a Democrat.
It’s not like the Democrats kicked him out or anything. He chose to join when running for Prez, then chose to leave when he lost the nom, now he’s choosing to join again.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say he could choose to be a Dem whenever he wants, but he doesn’t WANT to be a Democrat. He just wants to use the Democratic Party machine to get himself elected President.
It’s a free country, so he can try and do that, and I’m free to think he’s a miserable shitbag for doing so.
But again, those aren’t ideals. Those are labels. He’s not shifting his positions on anything that actually matters in any meaningful way. He’s not compromising on Medicare for all, he’s not dropping the “socialist” label. He’s simply running under the party that best fits his ideology, which is basically all you can do in a first-past-the-post system if you don’t want to sabotage those closest to you and empower those furthest from you with a bullshit, vote-splitting third-party run (Ralph, Jill :mad: )
No, it’s not all you can do. As stated above, you could actually join and support the party for real instead of becoming an opportunistic political lamprey. If those were “just labels”, why did he continually insist that they didn’t apply to him throughout his career? He obviously felt they had actual weight to them being just being words. And the idea that he didn’t damage those “closest to him” with his primary “we were robbed” bullshit is nonsense.
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He wants the support of the Democratic party. He wants access to mail lists, access to money, access to volunteers, to the party machine.
Those things have been created over decades by Democrats who build the party - and continually build the party (Republicans do the same thing)
He’s showing up late to the pot-luck, having brought nothing (maybe the personal gas station size can of Pringles), and stands next to the shrimp puffs Carol brought shoveling them into his mouth while drinking the expensive microbrew brought by Justin - and when people look at him funny, he blames Carol for not sharing and Justin for being selfish. Then he tells everyone at the party that they are corrupt and worthless and he is a better person than they are and makes fun of them for their bourgeois shrimp puffs and microbrews.
He has *never *chosen to join. This year, he’ll have to or he won’t get the nomination, by party rule.
But when Dems had power, they pushed through the biggest social program since the Great Society, and only by the skin of their teeth. The fact that other problems remain unfixed is a reason to vote for Democrats, and not for losers like Sanders, Stein, and Nader, who only serve to help Republicans win.
Maybe if by ‘more moderate’ we’re talking someone like Kamala Harris and not Joe Biden, who would spend his Presidency and the rest of his life afterwards wondering why his mad negotiating skillz never got him anywhere with Mitch McConnell.
You’re not going to have a political revolution - not unless the country’s in a dire situation, and even then, there’s no guarantee that a revolution would be a net benefit. You either accept that the Democrats are better than the Republicans and live with incremental progress, or you get anything but incremental regression that the Republicans promise to give you.
Simply having a president in office who can reverse Donald Trump’s sinister executive orders would be enough to justify a Biden presidency. But beyond that, one of the worst attributes of Trump and one of the most dangerous consequences of his presidency and the GOP congress is that we live in a time of intensifying polarization, which is lethal to democracy. Biden is 100% right: you may not like your nemeses but in order for a democracy to function, you have to work with them (and sometimes around them) to keep delivering the goods to the people. Since we became addicted to the politics of playing to the political base, collective confidence in our institutions has seriously declined to a very dangerously low level. We should embrace the candidate who stands up for core principles but is willing to occasionally offer acceptable compromises in the short term to get something passed.
What would FDR have done against Trump?
I will vote for Biden in the primary. I believe some people who voted for Trump must vote for the Democrat, and rural voters will be turned off by the “Socialist” label from what we were taught as children about Communism and Socialism. I would love to see Sander’s ideas be implemented, but I don’t believe he can be elected.
It’s looking like long odds that he even makes it out of the primaries.
I kind of doubt it myself. Plenty of other - and more electable - fish in the sea.
I do have problems with calling a candidate electable, or not - it’s self-fulfilling. Elections have been won by people who were originally labeled unelectable, but caught on somehow. *Trump *was unelectable until the day he was elected.
That said, it’s a primary criterion, probably the main one, this time, however one defines it or who it’s applied to.
I think Biden’s positions are electable; whether the man is electable remains to be seen. I worry he may not be as time elapses.
Not all Democrats are the same.
This thread is full of partisans pretending that the Dems are a monolith.
Not all Democrats are the same.