You can’t just, like, pass legislation that federally mandates people to act less overtly racist. You have to win their hearts and minds and slowly, gently – nay, tenderly – show them the error of their ways through kindness and love.
Oh I agree, and we already know they’ll blame institutional democrats because (as Lego rightly notes) that’s who they see as the “real” enemy.
She needs to say a lot more of this. The important “radical” message is something like, “Our job is to lead the country to aspire to the great things that can fix our nation. Those goals need to be things that will work and that will help those who need it. If politicians want to stand in the way of good ideas and hard working Americans, then my job will be to fight for every inch we can get. But that doesn’t mean we should set our goals so low that all the politicians and their donors are already comfortable with them. People struggling to pay off their debt, to afford their kids’ education, or even to afford a trip to the doctor need us to do more, and they deserve someone who will fight for them.”
Yglesias makes or at least implies an interesting point about Bernie’s approach to racial issues. By repeatedly making it about economic equality and class warfare, he avoids couching his policies in terms that can be seen as handouts to minorities. That means that in the general, his policies can be appealing to both working class minorities and to working class whites. It means that he doesn’t have to balance policies that are favored by latino voters against ones favored by black voters and worry about one or the other feeling particularly slighted. It does mean that leaves some popular progressive positions on the table, but when it comes down to it it seems like a choice between the guy who will help economically and be a bit of an open question on social justice should be no-brainer compared to the guy who will be actively terrible on both sides of the coin.
That said, the fact that Trump is pandering to black voters says to me that his team thinks they can use Bernie or Buttigieg’s weakness there to gain an edge in some places that matter. Suppressing or flipping a little of the black vote in PA would make it very hard for the Dem nominee to win (unless it somehow alienated the white vote across the Rust belt- but it won’t because it’s such obvious pandering). Hopefully those voters will see through it, and in an ideal world, they will be energized by it. Someone trying to buy your silence should really make you want to be loud.
After a bit of digestion:
Buttigieg and Sanders sort of held position. It felt like Klobuchar was slightly on the rise. Warren’s positions felt like she was debating like an edge candidate like Yang and Steyer, which was i feel like a bad impression.
Basically these debates are trying to make the case that the candidate is capable of ebing the candidate, imo, more than their policy positions, and in that respect i think everybody but Biden did fine - i feel like Biden’s modus operandi at this point is literally “I have the African-American vote” but dares not say it that explicitly. At times Biden seemed animated, at other times he felt his age. Sanders shows the fire and anger his constitutents want to see. Buttigieg seemed like the neo-liberal option, the Tony Blair sort of hero college educated and finance Democrats are desperate to win, combined with a boyish and endearing “Mr. Smith goes to Washington” vibe. Klobuchar seems like the process candidate, someone whose goals are specific proposals and bills, procedures and back-room dealing and a very conventional and dependable and with specific goals and specific solutions. Warren felt in very subtle ways to have shrunk a bit - her leaning so hard into the “i’m the anti-corruption candidate” felt like subtle repositioning from a place of weakness, the same way Steyer - who i feel endearingly doesn’t seem to care if he wins - is the climate change guy, or Yang is the UBI guy. Marking out a corner feels more like political desperation and triangulation, while Biden and Buttigieg and Sanders and even Klobuchar felt more like the actual candidates.
Nobody knows what to do with Hispanic voters, frankly - with such a Midwestern/Northeastern slant, it’s just not a living issue for them. They have to remind themselves not to forget African-American voters. Sanders still lumps “black and brown” into that minority box that old white guys do, even if he’s doing so in order to make policy to help them. Asian-Americans barely get a name check, and Native Americans are of course nowhere to be seen.
I think the complaints about party disunity may end up being true if the party heads can’t come together after the primary season is over behind a single candidate. Democrats have a lot more heavy lifting to do to win - that’s the difficulty of representing everybody else. Right now, i don’t see any candidate with a machine capable of doing that heavy lifting. There’s that old Russian fable of the Swan, Pike and Crawfish all trying to pull a cart and not getting anywhere. If the Democrats are going to win they need to get the Swan, Pike and Crawfish constituencies to all pull in the same direction.
I think Waypoint Radio brought up this issue recently as a reason why they preferred Sanders over Warren. Let me see if I can find it. Here we go:
That anyone thinks an inability to compromise is a good thing in a politician blows my mind. One need only look at Bernie’s legislative record to see what that gets you.
Honestly though it’s a bit silly, my personal ranked choices would go something like
Yang - smart, long term thinking
Steyer - smart, animated about climate change
Buttigieg - the Democratic version of the all-American
Warren - smart, detailed
Klobuchar - the veteran legislator
Sanders - the fires do not burn low in November
Biden - default is the best fault to have
…
Bloomberg - it’s a two party system, are you going to vote for a third party Klang?
That’s mine, except I’d switch Sanders and Biden, I think. But honestly, with either of them the VP might be the POTUS sooner rather than later.
Thank you for saying this. The phrase at been at the front of my brain a lot during this primary process. In a perfect world, presidential elections would be ideological purity tests but we don’t live in that world. The stakes here in the real world are way too high for us to be behaving like a bunch of libertarians who live in a delusional world of pure theory and ideology.
I mean this is crazy pants, right? Warren is his example of someone who is ceding ground now?
According to the Bernie stans on reddit, her position (they use the word retreat) on health care is proof that’s she’s really just a Republican after all.
/rant. Spoiler because I may have written mean things about someone’s chosen candidate, read at your own risk. This is just frustration and/or gloom bubbling over and it’d probably be better if I took Tom’s advise and not post it. But it felt cathartic writing it so I’m sharing the misery for anyone with similar feelings.
Summary
All of the candidates are flawed. Biden’s running a tepid I’m-the-most-electable campaign while getting few votes. Warren has questionable political instincts. Bernie with his insufferable twitter army. Both are too radically left. Pete’s sell out to the donor class has turned him into a walking Inspirebot spitting out meaningless platitudes. Klobuchar insists she can work with Republicans. (And how’s she going to do that, threaten to throw office supplies at them?) Bloomberg helped Pat Toomey get elected in PA.
Yet Klobuchar, Pete and Bloomberg are lauded by the press, the donor class, and self-styled realists for being sensible moderates and the only ones who can beat trump. I guess eight years of perfectly sensible moderate governance by Obama with a promise of more of the same from Clinton and rewarded with the election of a proto-fascist racist asshole is really just evidence that America wants sensible moderates.
But none of this matters because now the conventional wisdom is no one can beat trump anyway. We may as well just cancel the fucking election and be done with it.
.
@MrGrumpy you’re hiding too much stuff behind spoiler tags lately, P&R is made for walls of text so just go for it!
Question for someone who knows better: what are Steyer’s flaws, beyond the fact his polling sux?
:( I’m trying to be considerate of others. Maybe I’ll just self edit more instead.
I’ll bite on Steyer, nb these aren’t my observations rather things I’ve read:
- He’s a billionaire and that makes him axiomatically evil
- He’s wasting his money on a vanity campaign and he’d be better served using that money helping down ballot Democrats
- He’s a try hard courting the African American vote but ending up sounding cringy (I’m not certain if it was a slip of the tongue or not but at one point in the debate he did use the phrase “the blacks.” )
- He was sucking up to Sanders
It’s well said.
It is, indeed, crazy pants.
This is what kills me about Bloomberg too. Imagine if Steyer and Bloomberg put these sorts of resources into taking back the senate, let alone state houses.
The thing is, they got plenty of extra money to do that too.
And really, a lot of Bloomberg’s campaign at this point actually is attacking Trump.
They’re all very unsure about Bloomberg. At this stage, where the nomination is still up for grabs, they’re not especially happy he’s throwing money around. It seems so unlikely he’ll win but it’s like they can’t figure out where this idiosyncratic candidate might throw a wrench into things and can’t really figure out what to do about it.
Yup, no reason they couldn’t do both, and if they’re serious about winning the presidency it would self-evidently be in their own interests to do so.