Reagan was senile, Bernie is not, that simple. Can the ageist bullshit.
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If Bernie gets the job, I will root for him to stay upright for as long as possible. If the next Democratic president had a Supreme Court nominee as old as either, I would be very concerned.
Ginsberg has the job, and when she leaves it has a huge impact on the country.
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But by the content of their character?
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She’s already in her position, and we want her to stay as long as possible (2020 isn’t too far away, at this point).
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- Ginsberg wasn’t 79 years old when she started the job.
- Ginsberg is one of nine SCOTUS judges, so an entire branch of government doesn’t grind to a halt if she becomes incapacitated.
- In many ways the Presidency is a more physically and psychologically demanding job than the court. A Justice needs a calm cool head to consider arguments, but they don’t need to run political campaigns and host state dinners and manage international diplomacy and negotiate delicate legislation and be ready to lead the country in the event of a war and a thousand other stressful jobs.
- Ginsberg just took six weeks off for medical reasons. That wasn’t a huge deal in the Judicial branch, but it would be in the White House.
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I do actually think RBG should have retired early and been replaced by someone younger. I guess the left was foolish to not play Supreme Court hardball when they held the Senate and the Presidency. We would not be in quite so bad a position right now if they did.
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Sigh. So it’s six more years of Trump, then.
My grandfather was one of the sharpest people I knew at age 77. Then, a few years later, he wasn’t anymore. It was heartbreaking to watch him slide into senile dementia but it wasn’t unusual. Biology is a bitch.
People who make it to age 87 without significant physical and cognitive decline are the exception, not the rule. I like Bernie, I voted for Bernie. I’m just not blinding myself to the basic reality that he may not be up for one of the most demanding jobs on the planet.
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Good for him and good for the Democratic party. The more left/farther-left voices speaking out, controlling the conversation, taking the spotlight away from the dip-shit in office the better.
The old republican party is pretty much dead or are neo-liberal democrats and what you have left on the right is the fascist wing of the party and those incumbents being blackmailed by it. And what do they have to run on? Racism and fear, the old-school fascist playbook. They’re already soiling their pants over AOC. Multiply that by whatever the field ends up being and they’re heads will start exploding.
At the end of the day there will be just one Democratic candidate but, until then, they’ll all be speaking, shouting, pummeling these regressive policies.
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Centrist Democrats are always free to abandon their purity tests and move back left where they belong.
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^ This.
Not being an American, I always puzzled over the Bernie-hatred. Most of it, like the early posts in this thread, seems completely irrational. The point of him standing in the primaries to ensure the rest of the field are measured up against the coherent progressive platform he represents. If he ends up beating the strongest, most diverse field the democrats have ever offered, surely that’s strong evidence he’s the right person to fire up the democrat base to run against Trump. To suggest otherwise is to suggest the democrats should (once against) fight an election with their hands already tied behind their backs.
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“Centrists” will vote for whomever the Dem candidate is, correctly recognizing that Trump’s defeat is the most important issue in the 2020 election. The same cannot be said for Bernie-bros, who will once again doom us out of spite if Bernie doesn’t win the primaries.
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Except if he doesn’t beat them, he’ll cloud up the entire party’s election campaign in conspiracy theories once again. And that’s after he’s fucked over progressives in the party by dividing the left wing vote.
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Ageism is judging someone’s appeal and popularity with their age as the primary lens.
What I’m hearing here (from myself included) isn’t that. It’s practicality. It’s concern that someone who’s already quite old would be the oldest person ever elected to the presidency in 2020, and that they quite simply may not make it through four years of grueling public office. I think a fiery old guy would make a great President, personally. But I’m concerned Bernie’s running mate will be more important than he is.
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I largely agree. And I support the chorus of Progressive voices steering the conversation to the Left. However, there is nothing that requires Bernie to run to make his voice heard. Obviously, he has amassed a base of support for his ideas, and the Democrats are all well aware of it. I think the problem with Bernie at this point is that, just like Hillary, he has amassed a lot of baggage, fairly or unfairly, which impacts the way he is perceived by the electorate. His opportunities lie in pushing legislation, or perhaps in a Cabinet position, but not in higher elected office.
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If you refer to Bernie’s complaints about the role of superdelegates in the 2016 primaries, it’s a little hard to argue they were “conspiracy theories” given that the party has indeed changed the rules in acknowledgement of the criticisms:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/25/politics/democrats-superdelegates-voting-changes/index.html
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Most Bernie Bros are women of color.
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No, I don’t refer to that. I refer to the idea that Sanders only lost because the DNC conspired against him in some mysterious way, that the fact he trailed Hillary somehow didn’t happen or was illegitimate.
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I don’t know about that. Remember, the vast majority of the electorate doesn’t pay attention to granular daily news. Some of them pay attention to debates and talk show appearances/tv punditry. Once this race really gets some heat on it, no one will be taking about anyone else who isn’t running.
Except AOC, maybe. I really think she could be a queen-maker this cycle, but she is riding a star that comes around once in a generation. And, critically, she credits Bernie with igniting that star.
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I’m in wholehearted agreement on THAT point, at the very least.
I suspect the enthusiasm he generated in a two-person race will be significantly diluted in a 15-person race where 12 or so of the other candidates are already essentially on board with Bernie’s policies. I’m hopeful that a competitive primary will put more pressure on those 12 (or so) candidates to make nuts-and-bolts explanations of how those policy proposals will work–my biggest knock on Bernie in 2016 wasn’t that he didn’t have good ideas but that he didn’t seem to think it was important to explain how he’d get them done, which made me skeptical about his ability to get them done at all.
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