All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Tendrin]

We don't know that it's a W yet. It's dangerously close. Trump needs to either overcome an 7500 vote gap in Nevada and then stay the same everywhere else and he wins. We are actually in a shitty spot right now. Also we already lost a gerrymandering battle, we already lost any court or fillibuster reform, any chance at a relief bill, any real legislation over the next few years.

It's a W. Look at everything Trump did with *just* the presidency and you know it's a W. Let's not undersell pushing the dangerously autocratqic fascist out of office and demoralize ourselves because of what we didn't win.

Banking your strategy on a repeat performance of something everyone else just watched happen seems like a *really dim idea*, and Sanders failure to grow his coalition and hyperfocus on his own, weakened base seems to have been a strong error in judgment. Sanders' inflexibility has been a mark against him before, and his inability to make inroads to the voters who he needed to win a Democratic primary is on him.

I actually like Sanders a fair bit but he surrounded himself with some of the worst campaign staff I've ever seen to've blown it as badly as he did.

[The Overlord]

I mean, sure, a bunch of people who weren't going to win and had no viable path forward could have stayed in. Sanders' actual strategy was to badly hope that none of them did the sensible thing they ultimately did. They were trying to win the nom the same way Trump did, without bearing in mind that everyone had just seen that four years ago.


This ignores the high profile roles of Sanders-friendly members of the party machinery.

Like whom? Who runs the positions of power in the Dems: Tom Perez, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, etc. They are all cut from the same clothe.

Run Kamala Harris. Who else?

I am not sure she has what it takes to fight GOP fascism. I think she is cut from the same Third wave clothe.

Take the W, dude. It's not a sure thing that Bernie would have gotten it. The W matters. As a member of the left, we have to understand that we're not a majority.

Trump is a symptom, he is not the disease. Ultimately I think this is a shallow win, yes its good Trump is gone, but Trumpism remains, Trump barely lost, he did not suffer some mass reputation, he likely would have won if not for Covid-19.

Keep the protests going, Biden winning should not be an excuse for people who were woke to go back to sleep now that Trump is not President, Biden won due to Trump mishandling an massive disaster, that Biden won due to once in a century event is not comforting.

This is winning one battle, not winning the war. Take the W, sure, but it should be seen as a weak victory, not an excuse to go back to sleep.

Sure, he didn't get an electoral landslide that we all wanted, but I think you're fundamentally underestimating Trump.

I think Hillary and Biden underestimated Trump. Will someone like Tom Cotton be underestimated if he gets chosen?

[numberthirty]

Harris didn't do a thing in the primaries and it looks like she made zero impact as a VP pick. Not really interested. Said before Biden should have just thrown progressives a bone on this

Yeah...

Setting aside that I personally feel like moving AGs(and their ilk...) further up the chain is going in the wrong direction, she brought exactly "Nothing..." to this gopher rodeo.

[numberthirty]

What pick Sanders? And lose him the black vote. And choose another old dude as a heir and a spare as opposed to someone younger to complement him I.e. the formula for the presidential ticket in the modern era?

That almost lost to Donald Trump in the middle of a pandemic.

Probably time to flush that formula down the nearest toilet.

[Mister Mets]

I mean, sure, a bunch of people who weren't going to win and had no viable path forward could have stayed in. Sanders' actual strategy was to badly hope that none of them did the sensible thing they ultimately did. They were trying to win the nom the same way Trump did, without bearing in mind that everyone had just seen that four years ago.


This ignores the high profile roles of Sanders-friendly members of the party machinery.


Run Kamala Harris. Who else?


Take the W, dude. It's not a sure thing that Bernie would have gotten it. The W matters. As a member of the left, we have to understand that we're not a majority.

Sure, he didn't get an electoral landslide that we all wanted, but I think you're fundamentally underestimating Trump.[/QUOTE] It's going to be hard to imagine Democrats running anyone but Kamala Harris in 2024, assuming Biden opts not to run for reelection at 81.

She will be the first woman elected to national office. She would be the most prominent African-American candidate, which will help in key primaries. She'll have establishment support, positive media coverage and an identity politics argument.

I doubt most of the Democrats with the cache to run for national office want to make the statement of running against sitting Vice President who is a woman of color.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

It's a W. Look at everything Trump did with *just* the presidency and you know it's a W. Let's not undersell pushing the dangerously autocratqic fascist out of office and demoralize ourselves because of what we didn't win.

Banking your strategy on a repeat performance of something everyone else just watched happen seems like a *really dim idea*, and Sanders failure to grow his coalition and hyperfocus on his own, weakened base seems to have been a strong error in judgment. Sanders' inflexibility has been a mark against him before, and his inability to make inroads to the voters who he needed to win a Democratic primary is on him.

I actually like Sanders a fair bit but he surrounded himself with some of the worst campaign staff I've ever seen to've blown it as badly as he did.

Wait until the final result. We should learn from 2016 and 2000.

Biden actually performed worse than Hillary just so you know. He lost every Democratic. Voter turnout across the board being up due to mail in probably saved him. Hopefully Biden wins, but he won in probably the worst way possible where he's going to be fighting wars every day. His campaign had a horrible strategy and basically lucked out that a pandemic happened.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

We are both. Our republic is represented by our legislators. Our democracy is represented by our voters.

This is a good example why the Founding Fathers are 18th Century dudes with little advice or value to offer to problems today.

For people of the 1700s, especially the aristocratic set of the Founders, democracy meant Ancient Athenian democracy where citizens (who remember were a minority of Athens -- men, property owning, living in a community) physically gathered and voted on laws and stuff. It was as a specific word with a specific meaning. The word republic meant Ancient Rome i.e. where you had representatives elected from a limited suffrage and so on. When the founders argued against democracy they had a broader, specifically historical, specifically philosophical, understanding of it than we do today. Democracy and Republic came to be considered interchangable during the French Revolution and the word evolved its current usage in the course of the 19th and 20th Century.

This canard of "America is a republic not a democracy" was introduced by far right nuts the John Birch society and it was specifically in protest against the Warren Court...and believe you me it was code for white supremacy and anger towards rights expanded to African-Americans. Anyone who says "America is a republic" is sub-rosa doing free propaganda for that. If you didn't know, now you do.

As a member of the left, we have to understand that we're not a majority.

I wouldn't say that, because majority of the population favors Democrats and Bernie's policies and other ideas are popular with people, even if as a candidate he might not be successful. There's a reason why the Republicans when they had their trifecta didn't take away the ACA because social welfare programs once instituted are very popular and impossible to do away with. If the current SCOTUS vote against the ACA believe me you will see a Dred Scott like uproar. In Florida, they voted to increase the minimum wage on ballot which was popular across the spectrum there.

The thing is that a) Candidates matter, b) Parties matter. It's not just about ideology and plans, platforms, and agendas. Bernie Sanders is someone people respect and like, nobody really hates or dislikes Bernie, it's just that there's a perception he might be too nice a guy to be a Commander in Chief. That tacky HRC ad about the "phonecall at midnight". Tacky but not inaccurate. It's hard to imagine Bernie Sanders in that role and voters look for that in their leaders. On a functional level, you have to ask the question why Bernie Sanders even wants the Presidency since that office has bigger direct leeway in foreign policy and only indirectly in domestic policy, which is what Bernie cares for more. My feeling has always been that Sanders can do more good making the left viable in the mainstream and setting the path forward for other progressive candidates. If not for Bernie, would AOC have made it, and the other progressive candidates that we see coming in?

The left needs a certain small c-conservatism where they improve their gains but consolidate what they have and don't go all-in just yet. The left stands to lose far more if Bernie Sanders lost heavily in the general election (which happened to Corbyn in UK) or you know if he became President but failed and became a one-termer. If Biden wins, Sanders gets none of the blame for the election being so close, he gets some of the credit for rallying behind Biden, the Squad increase their numbers in the House, and he ends up landing on his feet.

Absolute Meme Hulk.jpg

[BeastieRunner]

Was AZ just called for Biden? It is solid blue on my map now.

Sorry I was doing birthday stuff if I missed it before.

[numberthirty]

Was AZ just called for Biden? It is solid blue on my map now.

Sorry I was doing birthday stuff if I missed it before.

Was the birthday stuff fun?

[The Overlord]

What pick Sanders? And lose him the black vote. And choose another old dude as a heir and a spare as opposed to someone younger to complement him I.e. the formula for the presidential ticket in the modern era?

Trump made gains among the black community this time:

https://www.vox.com/2020/11/4/215379...ers-exit-polls

Harris seemed to have done jack in that respect.

This is barely dodging a bullet, not achieving a gigantic victory and this ''by the skin of your teeth'' win was due to very unusual circumstances.

The formula has failed, it's time to try something different. We may have got rid of Trump, but Trumpism remains, this should be a learning experience, not an excuse to go back to sleep.

We shouldn't Trump and his ilk monologize economic populists messages, giving that ground to Trump gives him an instant huge advantage. We do not need another 1992 Bill Clinton ''The era of big government is over'' style Democrat.

[JCAll]

Again, I don't think anyone should take this as a glowing review of the Democratic Party. They got no ground gained in Congress and if Biden holds on to win (which I think he will but it's still not a guarantee), then it's going to be by the skin of his teeth.

Something that flew mostly under the radar is that most of the areas in the US hit hardest by Covid-19 were emphatically pro-Trump with the election results. That should tell us how the US feels about the pandemic and how it's being handled.

I'm not saying Democrats should lose a ton of sleep over it, mind you. But they shouldn't take this as the ultimate victory either. There is still clearly a substantial portion of the US who don't connect with left-wing ideology. Had the pandemic not have happened there's no question in my mind Trump would have won.

One of the reason those Pro-Trump areas were the hardest hit by the plague was BECAUSE they were so Pro-Trump. Not just did they follow his terrible divisive advice, but they regularly attending his rallies putting themselves and others at risk of infection. Remember those rallies, he was holding 4 or 5 a day by the election. We haven't even seen the fallout from that yet, and I doubt they're going to stop going forward.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Was AZ just called for Biden? It is solid blue on my map now.

Sorry I was doing birthday stuff if I missed it before.

Possibly. I hope so. My map always had it blue but the last batch of votes put it in doubt. They were supposed to release new results for it around 9 MST

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Trump made gains among the black community this time:

https://www.vox.com/2020/11/4/215379...ers-exit-polls

Harris seemed to have done jack in that respect.

This is barely dodging a bullet, not achieving a gigantic victory and this ''by the skin of your teeth'' win was due to very unusual circumstances.

The formula has failed, it's time to try something different. We may have got rid of Trump, but Trumpism remains, this should be a learning experience, not an excuse to go back to sleep.

Harris added nothing to the ticket. If anything you could say that the "Kamala is a cop" attack actively hurt the black vote here

[Tendrin]

T

I wouldn't say that, because majority of the population favors Democrats and Bernie's policies and other ideas are popular with people, even if as a candidate he might not be successful. There's a reason why the Republicans when they had their trifecta didn't take away the ACA because social welfare programs once instituted are very popular and impossible to do away with. If the current SCOTUS vote against the ACA believe me you will see a Dred Scott like uproar. In Florida, they voted to increase the minimum wage on ballot which was popular across the spectrum there.

In terms of identification, we are not a majority by any strretch of the imaginatqion. Doing a better job of connecting left-leaning ideas with left-leaning in the first place, alongside actual personalities and parties, is important, but we have a lot of work to do there, and voters are still pretty skeptical of things that smack of 'socialisn'. This is improving, but it's not something thatq's going to change swiftly, and sizable minorities are actually fairly skeptical of it too, and I say that as a pretty lefty person whose politics align pretty left of center ... in Norway :P

The thing is that a) Candidates matter, b) Parties matter. It's not just about ideology and plans, platforms, and agendas. Bernie Sanders is someone people respect and like, nobody really hates or dislikes Bernie, it's just that there's a perception he might be too nice a guy to be a Commander in Chief. That tacky HRC ad about the "phonecall at midnight". Tacky but not inaccurate. It's hard to imagine Bernie Sanders in that role and voters look for that in their leaders. On a functional level, you have to ask the question why Bernie Sanders even wants the Presidency since that office has bigger direct leeway in foreign policy and only indirectly in domestic policy, which is what Bernie cares for more. My feeling has always been that Sanders can do more good making the left viable in the mainstream and setting the path forward for other progressive candidates. If not for Bernie, would AOC have made it, and the other progressive candidates that we see coming in?

Not gonna really disagree here. Parties member, and aesthetic and personality matter too.

The left needs a certain small c-conservatism where they improve their gains but consolidate what they have and don't go all-in just yet. The left stands to lose far more if Bernie Sanders lost heavily in the general election (which happened to Corbyn in UK) or you know if he became President but failed and became a one-termer.

I agree fully with this.

[Mecegirl]

I will also say that I have less sympathy for Bernie's losses because Obama came out of nowhere. Unlike Bernie, Obama didn't have a long career in the House before moving to the Senate. You'd think he'd have a strong enough relationship from caucusing with the Democrats as an Independent to sway the parties mind. Meanwhile Obama swaggers in, ends up going toe to with Clinton, and wins. The "establishment" had little reason to favor him over Clinton.