3075

Buttigeig also has the military thing going, which I don’t think has ever hurt anyone with Republican voters.

I do wonder if he’ll get Swift Boated though, since he wasn’t a ground pounder. He already seems to have the awe shucks, I didn’t do much over there thing down to avoid it.

3076

That’ll be the friendliest attack Republicans will throw at him should he start appearing to be a front runner. They will dredge up all the worst stereotypes about gay men and we’ll long for days that Republicans were so civil the worst they said about an opponent was that he wasn’t actually a war hero.

3077

I doubt they’ll go that far openly. Even Republicans know that open attacks on him for being gay will disgust a large number of people - it’s not going to sway voters who would otherwise have voted for him, and may well move some voters out of the Republican camp. In the same way that no one was going off directly on Obama being black - instead, we just got the stupid shit about birth certificates and such.

Instead, the old men and women will just rant about it to each other in private, and a little too loudly at the local Perkins.

You are right that it will be a problem for him, but they won’t do it openly. I suppose you are right that we’ll get a bunch of “he’s soft, not a real man” type of bullshit. One would hope that the fact that he actually went to Afghanistan, as opposed to engaging in tax fraud, will help with that.

3078

There’s a decent number of Sanders voters who are Sanders-only , they are into Sanders cult of personality. If Warren starts beating Sanders in polls, she will bleed off a good bit of Sanders’s support though

Sanders would get nearly all of Warren’s support, but I don’t think Warren would get all of Sanders’s support.

There were a good number of folks who wanted Warren instead of Sanders in 2016. I was one of them.

3079

A fair number of them are also extremely anti-Trump, which is a bonus.
I know a couple, they’ll go hard for Bernie to the end, but they aren’t gonna vote Jill Stein or stay home this time.

3080

Being pro Soviet in 1981 is… Not a good look.

3081

I don’t give a shit what Bill Kristol says about anything forever.

3082

Well the article is from the Washington Post.

3083

But there are a lot of swing voters who do care (not about Kristol but about having a Soviet flag)… Against anybody except for Trump, that would stop me from voting for Bernie, along with other stupid stuff he has said.

3084

This isn’t new, is it? I thought this came up back before the last primaries.

3085

If Sanders gets the nomination and then Trump hammers him with the flag thing the concentrated irony will devour the universe.

3086
3087

New poll - go Liz! go Pete!

3088

I have a feeling this primary is going to end up surprisingly normal, with Biden in the favorite role, and Warren in the Jerry Brown/Bill Bradley role.

3089

We’ll see. The longer Biden is a real force the less incentive there is for Bernie to drop out. He can continue to shake things up as long as he wants.

3090

Neat way to keep track of the horserace 👉

3091

Promising news for Mayor Pete. As an aside I saw Pete on the Meet the Press, it was a short-interview. Stylistically, he seemed very button up, a little too robotic. Substantively his answers on how to deal with Iran (mostly) were perfectly fine.

3092

LATime has a good piece up on Inslee:

3093

It would be awesome if Inslee could get to the point where he has a legitimate shot. I doubt he can but we need someone out there pointing out that all the other issues amount to “arranging deck chairs on the Titanic” next to climate change. I hope he has some good moments in the debate.

3094

In the big picture this is true and yet if we do not regain control of US politics, re-balance the courts, undo voter suppression and gerrymandering, protect voting rights, enforce the rule of law, etc. etc. we won’t have any kind of chance on climate change.

I understand it’s a nasty contradiction and also many have used that as an excuse for inaction on the climate for years, but it’s still true.

The key is to re-establish a functioning democracy while also maintaining a focus on climate change.