I’m not. I’m holding him to the exact same standard I hold others too. perhaps a bit more visibly since he was, you know, the President. But if my Senators were going around doing the bank circuit making more cash than I’ll see in several years? I’d be holding them to the fire too.
You mean your ex-Senators right, people not currently in office and in the private sector?
Yes, although the only one of those recently is Mark Kirk whom I expect to disappoint regularly there.
Oh, and Barack Obama. That guy was the previous ex Senator.
I don’t hold people in office to the same standards as those out of office. I’ll rake them over the coals for the stuff they did leading up to their elections and generally trying to get a public office, but today Obama is not my President. He’s a private citizen who speaks very well taking money for a speech which is his right to do and there’s nothing really nefarious about it. This is not some nutball fringe group. This is Wall Street. Right or wrong, that group is still important to our economy so long as we remain a generally capitalistic country.
I am way more interested in what he says to that group and will hold him accountable accordingly.
You assume I don’t hold a deep and unabiding loathing for anyone who engaged with those fuckstains!
Barry O’s obviously topical at the moment due to the above-linked news story, in the same way that Clinton’s subservience to the Wall Street masters was relevant when she was running against Comrade Sanders who wanted to, if memory serves, deep-fry the lot of them in his secret blend of 11 herbs and spices.
But if it makes you feel better, here’s a hearty FUCK YOU to, hmmm. . . Thierry Henry!
During HRC’s campaign, when she was getting particularly beaten down for her connections, I felt that the only way out was owning it instead of the painfully awkward sidestep;
She was campaigning to become the President of the United States, not just the downtrodden. If some wealthy people saw value in her message of raising everyone up (yeah, I know - reaching) and they wished she succeeded, she’d take all the support she could get. Wealthy people are not all self-interested jerks, after all. Some care about their common man and work to make everyone’s lives better. Some others simply aspire to be better people, and perhaps supporting her campaign was the first step in that direction.
But no. She just kept dodging, and it hung like one of many albatrosses around her campaign’s neck.
That’s a good WaPo article that hits the nail on the head with working class voters flipping their votes in 2016. In the months since the election I think it’s come out that more than anything else, this is the segment of the voting population that handed Trump the win. If you look at the key battleground states that everyone thought would fall to Clinton that fell for Trump instead, it’s not his rural or alt-right base that flipped those, it’s these everyday working class voters who either flipped from Obama to Trump or simply stayed home and didn’t vote (when they voted Democrat in the previous two elections).
In December, I hated every single Trump voter with the fire of 1000 suns. Today, the more I see written about this particular segment of Trump voters, the more I can understand and sympathize. It’s a matter of Situation vs. Circumstances. From 2008-2016 the situation in America overall had vastly improved. The housing, automotive and banking crisis’ were in our rearview mirror, the economy was steadily improving year to year, unemployment numbers were down, gas prices were down, interest rates were low, basically life was a lot better day-to-day for the average middle-class family with two incomes, kids, a house and a dog. Clinton represented more of that same improvement and success. Who wouldn’t vote for more of the same?
The answer is people with circumstances that were counter to the general situation, and the Democrats vastly underestimated the number of people in those circumstances, especially in battleground states. I’ve seen story after story about people who were directly impacted by plant closures, layoffs, reductions, medical expenses, cuts to programs they depended on, etc. whose personal circumstances were made worse from 2012-2016. These people did not share the success of the rest of the country, often through no fault of their own, and their outlook in the year or more leading up to the election was bleak at best. More of the same for these people meant more years of being left behind, forgotten, unemployed and unable to support themselves and their families. In a situation like that you look for anything, no matter how slim a hope, that might change your circumstances. I believe a lot of these people didn’t actually like Trump, but given the choice between More of the Same and Something Different, they rolled the dice on Something Different. They most likely would have voted Republican no matter who was up against Clinton, because they believed they needed a change in their circumstances that they just were not going to get by voting for her. Over the past months I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t really blame them, even if I think that in the back of their minds they knew Trump was terrible.
My hope is that now that it has become obvious that Trump may actually be WORSE than “More of the Same”, these folks will swing back to the center and vote in 2018 and 2020 for either Democratic candidates, Independent candidates or at worst far more moderate Republican candidates. There is no flipping the Trump base we read so much about, the people that are literally just so stone cold stupid that they vote and support Trump even while he pulls the carpet out from under them, but I also don’t think those people make up enough of a voting block to keep him in power. It’s these people who flipped or abstained in 2016 that gave Trump the votes he needed to win the battlegrounds and swing the EC, and those people will be the first to abandon him as it becomes obvious that he’s not going to change things for the better for them and is, in fact, making things worse.
The challenge for the Democrats and Independents is to find and run Congressional candidates for 2018 and a Presidential candidate for 2020 that appeal to these people, then back them up with a message and a plan that also appeals. It will help that Trump will stall or even drive down the economy by then, so they need a message of economic growth and inclusion that speaks not just to the middle class who was doing well and is now worried, but to the working class who has been struggling the whole time.
Hint : Elizabeth Warren, despite being a fantastic senator, is NOT the person the Democrats should be looking to in 2020 unless they want a repeat of the Clinton defeat.
Because I am a Democrat. It seems pointless for me to really care about reform in the Republican party, especially when they are basically proud of being corrupt.
Clinton was our last presidential candidate, and Obama the previous Democratic president, so of course they matter to the party. When/if the next Democratic pick for president is tied at the hip to wall street, I will complain about them too.
Because Bernie would never ever ever not in a million years take money from rich people for doing not much. Obviously.
… But wait, hold on a second. Do we actually know that?
No, we do not. That’s because Bernie has refused to release his tax returns. For some reason. Unlike Obama and Clinton when they held public office.
And Bernie is holding public office right now, unlike Obama who is a retired dude in private life who as such doesn’t need to explain anything to anyone.
But I forgot. When you’re as noble and pure and perfect as Bernie, accountability isn’t necessary. Accountability is only for the Clintons and Obamas of the world.
Bernie’s hardly perfect. Dude is soft on guns and really weirdly cagey on women and minority rights. But he’s about as close as we’ve come to a true leftist running for President with a real shot at it, so I happen to be a fan.
Yup, no one who supported Bernie at any point has ever criticized his actions or choices at any point. And totally no one cared about his tax returns either. It was one look at the mad professor hair, and all concerns vanished.
Fundamentally disagree with this point.
They need to appeal to the persuadables and the far larger number of people who didn’t vote.
People who voted for Trump (or any Republican) because they thought “something different” would be better are at best willfully ignorant. More people voted for Clinton (nearly three million) than the 100,000 people spread across three states who didn’t. Seems to be strategically unsound to forego the larger voting block in order to appeal to a much, much smaller one (not to mention appealing to them effectively means lying.)
You’re not quoting or reading the entire paragraph there. I didn’t say they need to appeal ONLY to that subset of voters who are disenfranchised with the Democratic party, I said they need to present a candidate and a message that appeals to BOTH the larger voting block that stayed with the party and the smaller block that defected or tuned out altogether, costing Democrats those key states. Otherwise you will see the exact same result come 2020.
It’s not necessary to lie to anyone to be effective in reaching the people the Democrats need to return to their base. The message for 2020 should crib something from the Trump Campaign’s appeal in 2016, namely a focus on internal American issues over external ones. People in this country, from successful but worried Middle Class two-income households to working class people struggling with the loss of manufacturing and mining jobs to rural Americans worried about the loss of their very way of life to low income urban Americans looking for a way out of the cycle of poverty all want to hear the same thing, that someone in government has an actual plan to focus on Education, Infrastructure and Economic Development for the betterment of all Americans. Trump’s insistence that we all step backwards in time to Make America Great Again is ridiculous and untenable, and people will see that by 2018. Present a plan that moves forward, through Education reform, a giant Infrastructure investment and jobs retraining initiative, and a focus on all levels of the economic structure, not just giving more money to rich people and corporations and hoping it trickles down, and people will take notice.
No matter what, I can’t sympathize with handing the presidency of the United States to a gross incompetent who consorts with racists and operates like a two bit con man. That more than 5% of the electorate cast ballots for this buffoon is IMO a permanent stain on the American people if not on democracy generally.
You sure about that? This disenfranchised group seems just as likely to choose someone who gives them others to blame. That’s a lie. Yes we can do more. Yes there is still more we can do for this group but if they’re looking for an easy button and a target, they’re only going to get that from a GOP, because it’s a lie which gets votes.
You’re right about a particular segment of Trump voters disenfranchised from government entirely, but I’m discussing the group specifically talked about in the article, which is people who voted for Obama in 2008/2012 who then voted Trump or didn’t vote at all in 2016 because of their disenfranchisement with the Democratic message of 2016. That particular group seems less interested in blaming immigrants, minorities or “liberals” for their troubles (because often they fall into one or more of those categories themselves) and more interested in simply improving their immediate circumstances.
It all boils down to Democrats having lost quite a bit of influence with the working class, once the backbone of their party, because of a perceived shift in the priorities of the party. The American dream is to be able to move up the class levels, or, failing that, at least give your children the opportunity to do so. #MAGA is a direct appeal to that which the Clinton campaign failed to successfully counter. The Democratic message for 2018 and 2020 must return to these roots and appeal to the #1 issue that affects every voter : their own personal economic opportunity.
I don’t think there are actually that many “flipped” Obama/Trump voters. Many people who claim they are are misremembering who they actually voted for; more people remember voting for the winner in each election then actually did. Counties that flipped from Obama to Trump I attribute to different populations voting: Obama brought out a lot of disaffected black voters who wouldn’t have otherwise voted, while Trump brought out a lot of disaffected white voters who wouldn’t have otherwise voted (this is why the polling was so far off; polling tends not to measure the voter who skipped the previous elections, since they are considered unlikely to vote). In both cases the motivation was seeing their racial identity validated.
There were a lot of “dropped” voters; voters who voted for Obama who didn’t bother voting this time. Some of that was the Democratic candidate; some of that was Republican-introduced polling restrictions.
There are poor struggling people in overwhelming blue cities too. They just don’t get a million hot takes written about how important they are because their electoral votes don’t matter.
Every single non-deplorable Trump Democrat I talked to felt that way.
They said “we don’t care either way about trans folks in bathrooms, things just didn’t get better for us under Obama, while they got better for the rich. Hillary is more of the same and just as crooked as Trump.”
I have no problem with tricking these folks into thinking economic justice programs will only benefit them.
Democrats will need to be the better populist demagogues from now on. Otherwise, they’ll lose. I don’t think we’re going back to the era where facts can stand up to feelings and tribalism.