Democrats 2020

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

If external factors such as establishment endorsements didn't effect elections, then why have any endorsements at all?

CNN and MSNBC were also very eager to declare victory for Biden after calling Bernie supporters brownshirts and alluding to the Holocaust as well as continuing a false Castro narrative. After, of course, constantly inserting anti-progressive bias into debate questions...

It's definitely had an impact.

So, I stand by my previous statements that Bernie will lose because he faces an insurmountable uphill battle. Pundits and other influence peddlers will magnify losses of Sanders and gains of Biden along the way. For example, Sanders may have won big in California but it's not getting the same kind of coverage...the delegate difference overall is small. But Biden is king.

At least Sanders has provided a modicum of left pressure as Biden has copied some of the policies to a lesser effect. Sanders actually effected a lot of position changes and helped to grow a movement which is why The Nation endorsed him.

Now, Biden will lose to Trump. And even if Biden could win, he will not stop the environmental emergency in its tracks.

So I don't know what the point of watching any of this was.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Joe Biden mixes up wife and sister in Super Tuesday speech - CNN Video

Ouch!

Maybe that's how he can get the redneck vote.

 

[PyramidHead]

If external factors such as establishment endorsements didn't effect elections, then why have any endorsements at all?

CNN and MSNBC were also very eager to declare victory for Biden after calling Bernie supporters brownshirts and alluding to the Holocaust as well as continuing a false Castro narrative. After, of course, constantly inserting anti-progressive bias into debate questions...

It's definitely had an impact.

So, I stand by my previous statements that Bernie will lose because he faces an insurmountable uphill battle. Pundits and other influence peddlers will magnify losses of Sanders and gains of Biden along the way. For example, Sanders may have won big in California but it's not getting the same kind of coverage...the delegate difference overall is small. But Biden is king.

At least Sanders has provided a modicum of left pressure as Biden has copied some of the policies to a lesser effect. Sanders actually effected a lot of position changes and helped to grow a movement which is why The Nation endorsed him.

Now, Biden will lose to Trump. And even if Biden could win, he will not stop the environmental emergency in its tracks. So I don't know what the point of watching any of this was.

The point was to prove Lenin right yet again

 

[Horatio Parker]

This.

I see so many Bernie supporters complaining about the DNC screwing Bernie again. If you don't have the votes, you don't win.

Votes don't exist in a parallel static dimension, they are influenced by media coverage and perceived momentum, and how much each vote matters is a consequence of the electoral system that assigns victory based on them. There are many levers the DNC is pulling to kneecap Bernie, because he is their enemy. My question to those who doubt this is why don't you think they would do so? If they see him as a threat, which they do, and they have the advantage of a coordinated national organization and a sympathetic media, why on earth wouldn't they use that advantage?

Do you truly think politics is about who gets the most votes? And you call Bernie supporters delusional!

Point remains, Sanders failed to broaden his base.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

If external factors such as establishment endorsements didn't effect elections, then why have any endorsements at all?

CNN and MSNBC were also very eager to declare victory for Biden after calling Bernie supporters brownshirts and alluding to the Holocaust as well as continuing a false Castro narrative. After, of course, constantly inserting anti-progressive bias into debate questions...

It's definitely had an impact.

So, I stand by my previous statements that Bernie will lose because he faces an insurmountable uphill battle.

He lost Massachusetts. And it is worth noting that the moderates were winning the largest aggregate over the progressives from the start in Iowa. And to make matters worse, Southern Democrats don't vote like New England Democrats, as in the South, Sanders' positions appear further to the left.

Pundits and other influence peddlers will magnify losses of Sanders and gains of Biden along the way. For example, Sanders may have won big in California but it's not getting the same kind of coverage...the delegate difference overall is small. But Biden is king.

California is a big win, but Texas was a huge loss. Sanders remains unable to get the African American vote. Biden absolutely crushed Sanders in several states with the African American vote. Sanders held with Latinos in Texas, but it just wasn't enough.

And the entire, new wave of voters coming out or young voters coming out, once again doesn't happen.

At least Sanders has provided a modicum of left pressure as Biden has copied some of the policies to a lesser effect. Sanders actually effected a lot of position changes and helped to grow a movement which is why The Nation endorsed him.

Now, Biden will lose to Trump. And even if Biden could win, he will not stop the environmental emergency in its tracks.

So I don't know what the point of watching any of this was.

I think Biden can win... and I thought Sanders could win. Biden can go toe to toe with Trump, all the while being able to answer questions about Government coherently. And I would note I think the surprise was Biden was able to pull this off. I think he is the first guy to not finish in the top three in the first two primaries and have a chance.

Bloomberg proved that $500 million will get you above 10% easily.

This.

I see so many Bernie supporters complaining about the DNC screwing Bernie again. If you don't have the votes, you don't win.

Votes don't exist in a parallel static dimension, they are influenced by media coverage and perceived momentum, and how much each vote matters is a consequence of the electoral system that assigns victory based on them. There are many levers the DNC is pulling to kneecap Bernie, because he is their enemy. My question to those who doubt this is why don't you think they would do so? If they see him as a threat, which they do, and they have the advantage of a coordinated national organization and a sympathetic media, why on earth wouldn't they use that advantage?

Do you truly think politics is about who gets the most votes? And you call Bernie supporters delusional!

Point remains, Sanders failed to broaden his base.

Sanders broadened his support among Latinos. The broadening of his support among African Americans was overstated. And most importantly, the base didn't bring new people out.

Sanders is helping to steady the Democrat ship a bit, but the Democrat voter, on average, wants someone more moderate.

 

[TV and credit cards]

I’m reading, the markets are up today due to Biden’s momentum. If investors are comfortable with Biden perhaps the “good economy” won’t have the effect Trump hopes for come November.

Time for Putin to roll up his sleeves. Buckle your seatbelts. Shit’s fittin to get real.

 

[Elixir]

I’m reading, the markets are up today due to Biden’s momentum. If investors are comfortable with Biden perhaps the “good economy” won’t have the effect Trump hopes for come November.

Yeah, I hope Biden's memory enables him to cite chapter and verse on the facts of both the Obama and the Trump economies, but I have my doubts. The facts would be damning if Biden can get them out there...

Time for Putin to roll up his sleeves. Buckle your seatbelts. Shit’s fittin to get real.

About time. He hasn't had to break a sweat for one second so far.

 

[Treedbear]

...
I think Biden can win... and I thought Sanders could win. Biden can go toe to toe with Trump, all the while being able to answer questions about Government coherently. And I would note I think the surprise was Biden was able to pull this off. I think he is the first guy to not finish in the top three in the first two primaries and have a chance.
...

I'm still bewildered by how voters swung from Biden to Bernie over just two days. So my opinion might not amount to a hill of frijoles. But I still think Trump will wipe the floor with Biden just like he did with his Republican rivals in the 2016 primary debates. Biden gets addled when he gets excited. And Trump is an expert. The only way to combat that is by citing facts without being off by a factor of 1000. Bernie would have a good chance of keeping his wits. Bloomberg too. Actually Bloomberg might have the best chance of making Trump step in his own shit.

 

[Elixir]

Trump will wipe the floor with Biden just like he did with his Republican rivals in the 2016 primary debates. Biden gets addled when he gets excited. And Trump is an expert.

I think intensive debate prep can fix that.
Trump gets REALLY excited when confronted with facts, and the facts are not on his side. While facts have never been on his side, there are a lot more facts in play now than in 2016. Also not on his side; Trump is a moron and Biden isn't. So I call it pretty even, since Trump is a practiced con artist, liar and nickname generator. Trump will be reduced to repeating a few lines from his Senate goons' phony investigations into Biden. Which will sound credible to the droolers in his base, but few others after the fifth repetition and non-responsiveness to proof that it's all BS.

To this day I believe that had Hillary Whirled around and screamed "get away from me, you creep!" when Trump was gooning over her shoulder in whichever debate that was, or if she had stayed on the puppet thing - maybe burst out laughing when he went all nopuppet, made the moderator shut him up and then read off the evidence... we wouldn't be worrying about Donald Trump today.

 

[Treedbear]

Trump will wipe the floor with Biden just like he did with his Republican rivals in the 2016 primary debates. Biden gets addled when he gets excited. And Trump is an expert.

I think intensive debate prep can fix that.
Trump gets REALLY excited when confronted with facts, and the facts are not on his side. While facts have never been on his side, there are a lot more facts in play now than in 2016. Also not on his side; Trump is a moron and Biden isn't. So I call it pretty even, since Trump is a practiced con artist, liar and nickname generator. Trump will be reduced to repeating a few lines from his Senate goons' phony investigations into Biden. Which will sound credible to the droolers in his base, but few others after the fifth repetition and non-responsiveness to proof that it's all BS.

To this day I believe that had Hillary Whirled around and screamed "get away from me, you creep!" when Trump was gooning over her shoulder in whichever debate that was, or if she had stayed on the puppet thing - maybe burst out laughing when he went all nopuppet, made the moderator shut him up and then read off the evidence... we wouldn't be worrying about Donald Trump today.

Well that's just it. You need to be a quick thinker when confronting Trump. Biden is prone to quickly back down as he repeatedly demonstrated in the current Dem debates. He timidly cut himself off mid sentence rather than go over his alotted response time when the moderators even blinked at him. And besides, Trump doesn't deal in facts. Just innuendo. To the average voter and even with the moderators that's enough these days. Fake news will be his defensive tactic. If Trump isn't confronted by a barrage of unquestionable facts it will come down to who displays the better temperament.

 

[Copernicus]

If external factors such as establishment endorsements didn't effect elections, then why have any endorsements at all?

CNN and MSNBC were also very eager to declare victory for Biden after calling Bernie supporters brownshirts and alluding to the Holocaust as well as continuing a false Castro narrative. After, of course, constantly inserting anti-progressive bias into debate questions...

It's definitely had an impact.

So, I stand by my previous statements that Bernie will lose because he faces an insurmountable uphill battle. Pundits and other influence peddlers will magnify losses of Sanders and gains of Biden along the way. For example, Sanders may have won big in California but it's not getting the same kind of coverage...the delegate difference overall is small. But Biden is king.

At least Sanders has provided a modicum of left pressure as Biden has copied some of the policies to a lesser effect. Sanders actually effected a lot of position changes and helped to grow a movement which is why The Nation endorsed him.

Now, Biden will lose to Trump. And even if Biden could win, he will not stop the environmental emergency in its tracks. So I don't know what the point of watching any of this was.

The point was to prove Lenin right yet again

View attachment 26425

And then there followed decades of a corrupt, brutal, murderous dictatorships in which party members lived high off the hog and exploited the masses. Lenin didn't predict that, so you can't say he was proven wrong about it. Clearly, you prefer Communist exploitation over capitalist exploitation.

 

[Politesse]

Biden isn't a natural idiot, but I am very concerned about his current state of mind. He's always been one to stick a foot in his mouth now and then - part of what elbowed him out of the presidential race twice before - but seriously, confusing his wife and sister? Announcing himself as a candidate for the Senate instead of the White House, accidentally? If this were a TV show, it might be sort of darkly amusing to watch these two confused old men trying to debate each other, but this isn't a TV show and much is at stake in the outcome. My god, there are children in concentration camps, and the "liberal" party for our country is playing out like a sick joke. I was kind of calm about it last night, having kind of expected something like this ever since the Hunter Biden affair surfaced, but I relistened through Joe's rambling victory speech last night as I was getting ready this morning, and a familiar dread and depression started crushing over. I do not think this will end well. I am feeling very down about how all this will go. I am not a "never Joe". I voted for him in a previous primary even, in 2008. I will vote for him again if he is the nominated candidate. But... there's a time and a place, and he was already considered an older candidate even back in 2008, let alone now.

 

[lpetrich]

PyramidHead's Lenin quote is real: PRRK: Bourgeois And Proletarian Democracy by Vladimir Lenin - "Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor."

Datelined Super Tuesday: Why Is Tulsi Gabbard Still in the 2020 Presidential Race After Better Polling Democrats Dropped Out?

Last month, Gabbard told reporters that she hadn't discussed dropping out with her campaign.

"I know that our path forward lies in continuing to be able to reach out directly to voters and deliver our message about how I'm the best candidate to defeat Trump in November," she said.

Some pundits have suggested that Gabbard is staying in the race in an attempt to angle for a position at Fox News. On Saturday, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang said on CNN, "She already said she's not running for Congress anymore. She's got a different agenda."

"What's the agenda? To be a Fox contributor, isn't it? I mean, I don't have any information, I'm just assuming—that's where she appears," CNN anchor Anderson Cooper replied.

Cooper isn't alone—last month, his fellow CNN personality, Bakari Sellers made the same accusation, asking "Why is Tulsi still in? How long is this Fox News audition?"

Gabbard has denied that working for Fox News is her motivation, saying that Sellers is "wrong."

"I wish Bakari would actually listen to what I'm saying, listen to my call for an end to regime change wars, to end this new Cold War nuclear arms race and instead to invest our taxpayer dollars towards actually serving the needs of residents and voters here in South Carolina," she told The Post and Courier.

I think that TG could have a great career at Fox News as a token brunette.

 

[Ford]

Biden isn't a natural idiot, but I am very concerned about his current state of mind.

I'm not terribly concerned. He's been a gaffe machine for awhile, but I don't know if it's necessarily getting worse. It's just the same old Joe.

Trump? Here's an interview he did in 1980:

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9c45q5kPt0[/YOUTUBE]

Lucid, seemingly intelligent (at least regarding the New York real estate market), and smooth. Now here he is from 5 years ago:

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elhyo-_fR0E[/YOUTUBE]

Rambling to the point of incoherent. Not just an occasional verbal misstep. That's a significant decline. When he has to read a speech from a teleprompter (which he always does on more serious issues or when he needs to apologize for "very fine people" remarks), he's got all the verbal skills of a middle school kid reading in front of class.

 

[rousseau]

As long as [literally anybody else] goes senile after Trump is no longer in my life, I'm ok with that. A dead cat would be a better president than Trump.

 

[ZiprHead]

Biden isn't a natural idiot, but I am very concerned about his current state of mind.

I'm not terribly concerned. He's been a gaffe machine for awhile, but I don't know if it's necessarily getting worse. It's just the same old Joe.

He's had a stuttering problem since he was a child. I think a lot of his gaffes are because of that. Concentrating more on getting the words out right instead of concentrating on the right words. That's a luxury non-stutterers take for granted.

 

[lpetrich]

Ilhan Omar on Twitter: "Imagine if the progressives consolidated last night like the moderates consolidated, who would have won?
That’s what we should be analyzing. I feel confident a united progressive movement would have allowed for us to #BuildTogether and win MN and other states we narrowly lost. https://t.co/lAj2mhI3GR" / Twitter
Referring to Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar quitting just before Super Tuesday while Elizabeth Warren stayed in the race.

How Elizabeth Warren destroyed Mike Bloomberg's campaign in 60 seconds | US news | The Guardian

Barely two minutes into the debate in Las Vegas on 19 February, and ignoring a moderator’s question, Warren turned to Bloomberg.

“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against – a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians’,” she started off. “And no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.”

And she wasn’t done there. Warren went on to eviscerate his record on his less-than-transparent tax returns; on harassing women; on the racist legacies of his stop-and-frisk policing program in New York; and on redlining poor neighborhoods.

The whole thing lasted for less than a minute, but reframed Bloomberg as not just a billionaire trying to self-fund his way to the top, but someone who shared Trump’s moral failings.

The next two hours only got more heated, with the rest of the presidential candidates following Warren’s lead.

When I posted about egotistical billionaires with a history of racism and sexism, someone here pointed out that Trump may not even be a billionaire. That could well be the case, but he likes to give the appearance of being one.

So now the Democrats only have four candidates:

• Left: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren
• Centrist: Joe Biden
• Eccentric: Tulsi Gabbard

 

[Derec]

Ilhan Omar on Twitter: "Imagine if the progressives consolidated last night like the moderates consolidated, who would have won?
That’s what we should be analyzing. I feel confident a united progressive movement would have allowed for us to #BuildTogether and win MN and other states we narrowly lost. https://t.co/lAj2mhI3GR" / Twitter
Referring to Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar quitting just before Super Tuesday while Elizabeth Warren stayed in the race.

What she fails to appreciate is that Sanders and Warren are very different types of progressive. He a classical class warrior. She the woke, intersectional, identity politics, radical feminist. They only seem close if projected onto a one-dimensional political spectrum.

How Elizabeth Warren destroyed Mike Bloomberg's campaign in 60 seconds | US news | The Guardian

With second wave feminist politics of personal destruction.
Bloomberg made a mistake of not going after her just as hard. On her lies for example. She isn't an Indian. She wasn't fired for being preggers. Her father wasn't even a janitor.
Then he should have gone after her (and Bernie) on their idiotic proposal to ban fracking. Or have taken her to task about so-called reparations.

When I posted about egotistical billionaires with a history of racism and sexism,

I do not see nothing about Bloomberg that was racist and/or sexist. Not politically correct? Yes. Unacceptable to hyperwoke elements of the Democratic Party? Certainly. But those things would have made him a better president, not worse. It would also have made him a better general election candidate in my opinion. A big part of Trump's appeal has been the backlash against the very political correctness that Warren had become the poster girl for.

• Left: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren
• Centrist: Joe Biden
• Eccentric: Tulsi Gabbard

Really two candidates. Warren will probably quit within a day or two, and even if she doesn't she in unlikely to win any further delegates. And Tulsi is just a joke at this point.

 

[Derec]

Sanders is helping to steady the Democrat ship a bit, but the Democrat voter, on average, wants someone more moderate.

Moderate is good, but after all these primaries the best the Democratic establishment could come up with was Joe Freakin' Biden, the pinnacle of mediocrity?
We really need to rethink the nominating process, because it is clearly broken.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Sanders is helping to steady the Democrat ship a bit, but the Democrat voter, on average, wants someone more moderate.

Moderate is good, but after all these primaries the best the Democratic establishment could come up with was Joe Freakin' Biden, the pinnacle of mediocrity?
We really need to rethink the nominating process, because it is clearly broken.

But who is "we"? The nominating process is an internal matter of each party, at least in the US, so it would be up to the members of the Democratic party. And for now, they're voting for Biden and Sanders in that order.