Dems 2019: Dem Hard With A Vengeance

This is the original interview writeup:

“We can’t be only upset with Trump. … His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was,” Omar says. “And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.”

(emphasis mine)

This doesn’t feel like it’s coming from someone in the same party as Obama. It just comes across as outright nasty about him. Indeed, consider her comments on the tea party and it almost feels like she’s really more interested in winning in the democratic party than winning in the country. Which would fit the profile. As does attacking the media in a tweet for accurate reporting.

I’m in the same party as Obama, and I supported him, but I’ve said many times that his drone policy was outrageous, and I’ve also said that if the Republicans had really wanted to impeach him, they could have done it because of his policy of killing innocent bystanders using flying killer robots; and specifically for using one to kill an actual American citizen not on the field of battle or actively engaged in armed insurrection against the US, without any judicial process at all; and they would have been right to do it.

To me your comment reads very differently to what Omar said. You come across as a friend who very strongly disagrees with a specific policy. She doesn’t, instead focussing on drawing an equivalence between Obama and Trump. Obviously this kind of thing is always going to be subjective and you can argue about exactly what she meant, I’m just giving my take.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t use the word murder? But it is/was murder. And in that particular case the equivalence is warranted; it was Obama’s embrace and expansion of GWB’s drone policy that makes it all but impossible to criticize Trump’s further expansion of it.

That’s most of the Dems rights now, especially on the progressive side. This is the fruit sown by the DNC in 2016 by putting their thumb on the scale. I’m not saying they gave the election to Hillary (she would have won anyways), but doing what they did convinced a ton of progressives that the Dem establishment is the enemy almost as much as the Republicans.

Omar is kinda wildly out there, I do see her as the Dem equivalent of the Tea Party in a way AOC isn’t.
She’s an actual radical, and I would probably vote against her in a Dem primary at this point. I think she goes too far.

Coming back to that interview, here is the paragraph just before:

As she saw it, the party ostensibly committed to progressive values had become complicit in perpetuating the status quo. Omar says the “hope and change” offered by Barack Obama was a mirage. Recalling the “caging of kids” at the U.S.-Mexico border and the “droning of countries around the world” on Obama’s watch, she argues that the Democratic president operated within the same fundamentally broken framework as his Republican successor.

You can argue about whether Obama actually campaigned as a breaker of the existing framework or whether desperate progressives simply projected that on him; but you can’t deny that in office he chose to operate within the current bounds of acceptable policy rather than break them. We believed he meant to end endless war, but instead he doubled down in Afghanistan because the establishment told him he had to. We believed he would stop the callous killing of the war on terror, but instead he expanded, because the establishment told him he had to. We believed he would side with people over banks and corporations, but instead he sided with banks, because the establishment told him he had to. These failures are not like the ACA vs single-payer because, in these areas, he was the decider, not Congress. So she is entirely right in this criticism.

What’s problematic about this is that it feeds the inherently dishonest take perpetuated by the right wing that criticism of Trump’s actions regarding how he handled immigrants on the border is hypocritical, because “Obama did it”.

That’s not accurate.

Under Obama’s administration, children who came to the border alone we put into containment facilities.

Under Trump, they took families arriving at the border and intentionally separated children, putting them in containment facilities. What’s worse, they actually said, to the public, that their stated purpose for doing this was to create a situation that was so bad as to serve as a deterrent.

Omar is doing no good by drawing an equivalence here.

Fair enough, but that comes down to how many children you put in cages, and why you put them there. No one should be putting them in cages.

I don’t think she’s drawing an equivalence. In any event, anything that calls attention to the extent that many established policies are bad no matter who is in power is probably a good thing. You don’t get forever war if only one party is prosecuting it.

No, it absolutely isn’t. All existing data we have suggests completely the opposite.

Twitter and your friends at work aren’t the real world, part 3,297

A new Gallup poll finds that former Vice President Joe Biden holds an 80% favorable rating and 9% unfavorable rating among Democrats. This topped all other current or potential 2020 presidential Democratic candidates.

Obama is still a rock star to Democrats throughout the nation. His favorable rating stood at an astounding 97% among Democrats in a CNN poll taken last year.

Everyone’s main priority is defeating Trump, but that’s what driving the willingness to go hard in the primaries as well- there’s a feeling that not going with their preferred wing will open the door for Trump.

Also, I’d say I had a favorable of Biden, but I’d fight hard to keep him out of the nomination.

I don’t know why Omar isn’t just taking ownership of what she said and expanding on it a bit more fully & eloquently, rather than going into attack mode.

All the points she made were valid (though how much weight you put on them differs), and I don’t personally see any false equivalence.

To me it reads more like people shouldn’t settle for a polished ‘Presidential’ President simply because they look, sound and feel good particularly when compared to actively terrible presidents. Actual policies should matter, and in that respect there is an awful lot that can be said about Obama.

Also, is the saying “get away with murder” not a thing in the US? Over here it’s a fairly gentle phrase that can be used to describe a kid as much as an adult.

It is, although sometimes I suppose context matters.

The Dems right now look a lot like the Atlanta falcons in the Super Bowl against the Patriots. Big lead, no way they could lose. But they did. The question is was it the Falcons strategy that allowed the Pats back in the game or did the Pats change something to allow them to come back and win?

In sport usually playing it safe when you lead is not a good thing. I am not sure that translates to politics.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. How have the Democrats blown anything? The first primary is almost a year away.

I see the Dems as the Falcons with a big halftime lead. They shouldn’t lose in 2020, everything says that really can’t happen. But…

Why do you think that though? Are you implying that Omar’s antics/comments are going to cause the party ruin somehow? Or are you referring to something else?

Yeah, using a sports analogy for the primary/general election process is pretty impossible to do. Implying that we’re at the late stages of the game right now – just barely less than a year before the primaries even begin – makes a bad analogy even worse.

You are correct…but I’ll do it anyhow. We aren’t at the Super Bowl yet, it is still preseason where all the talk is about 3rd string quarterbacks, “can’t miss” rookies, who will make the cut and lingering unsigned free agents. While there are foundations being laid as to making it to the Super Bowl there are so many games to be played that all of what is talked about and most of what is actually done will be forgotten and made irrelevant.

The sports analogies don’t work well at all, despite the press also covering them that way. As polarized as the country is, probably 90%+ of likely voters have made up their mind (I haven’t seen polling on this yet, but that seems reasonable). It’s just a question of who shows up in the dozen states that matter.

This isn’t an athletic competition – it’s a contest for attendance.