Said it before, and I’ll say it again: I think Bernie is a great senator. I hope he has a few more terms left in him. I wish him well and hope he recovers. And I seriously hope he’s not who the Dems put up in 2020.
At 80, I think we need someone younger as POTUS. We have that whole “needs to be over 35” rule, and I think we need a “needs to be under 65” rule.
Why is it okay to discriminate against people under 35 because they may “lack experience”, but it’s not okay to discriminate against people over 65 because they may “have dementia”. See current POTUS for example…
Hopefully everybody (or most everybody) can be this reasonable. To continue or not continue should be the decision of Senator Sanders. It is a decision only he can make.
It’s great that everybody has such faith in him. It’s also not a betrayal if he decides that the risk is too great.
Also: if Senator Sanders does decide to continue and wins the nomination, know that this will be used against him, the same way Clinton’s pneumonia was used against her. I am not saying “don’t nominate” I am saying “be prepared for the inevitable, and get ready now.”
I’d say that if he withdraws because of his health’s impact on his ability to do the job, that’s probably the best endorsement for his character I could imagine.
I feel like there’s an interesting analysis to be done of Turmp’s tweet sluice on that point. I get the sense (somehow) that he’s focused on Biden and pointedly not any of the other Democratic potential candidates. If that is the case, I’d be very curious to know why.
I always had an intuition that Turmp doesn’t want to directly engage with Sanders. Next to Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, Turmp can make out like he’s the common-touch white guy from Queens, but next to Bernie, Turmp just looks like the prissy, humorless, ignorant version of that. And I think he’d be right; if you put Bernie on stage at a Turmp rally, I think he might get a lot of that crowd on his side.
As for Warren, he did attack her in the past, but only because he genuinely thought saying “Pocahontas” was clever. But she has clapped back at him pretty effectively a number of times, and he really doesn’t like it when people don’t cower from him (see also: Nancy Pelosi).
Or, I dunno, maybe his advisors told him Biden would be the candidate and he shouldn’t waste time on the others.
I just read up on this a week or two ago: he had not one but two aneurysms, as well as a pulmonary embolism. (Only one of the aneurysms leaked, but the other still required surgery.) So, yeah, he dropped out in 1988.
(I had an aneurysm last fall so I’m recently noticing, or re-remembering, when other people have had them: Patricia Neal (who had three), for example, or much more recently, Joni Mitchell.)
(EDIT: also Larry Willis)
Oddly polling has shown that 30% of Sanders supporters have Joe Biden as their second choice, while 28% have Warren as their second choice. But then, Warren is the most popular second choice for Biden supporters.
That’s really counterintuitive. I would have guessed that a majority of sanders supporters would jump to warren or mayyybe like a mayor Pete, but not Biden. I guess that shows how weird politics is and how much is probably based on superficial characteristics like personality and name recognition. (And maybe next white guy in line for some people sadly)
Which doesn’t make sense to me. If you actually support Sanders’ and Warren’s proclaimed positions, Biden should be a sad consolation prize only voted for in a general election if he unfortunately won the primary. It makes only slightly more sense than the absurdity of Sanders supporters who went to Trump in the general. I guess there is a weird subset of voters who don’t seem to pay attention or don’t award votes based on actual stated positions.
Shamefully, that (or at least the candidate being male) is very important for a lot of Berniebros. In 2016 a lot of them were ignoring perfectly good reasons to oppose Clinton based on policy and going straight to misogynistic language about her.
I’m kinda sick of the Berniebro phrase. It doesn’t describe Bernie fans I know and the crowds at events I’ve been to are not at all bro-y. But seriously who the heck are these 30 percent whose second choice is Biden? Can’t be the same people who opposed Clinton on ideological grounds. There has been a bit of warren criticism happening on the far left about her distant past or funding. But if that’s your thing you wouldn’t care for Biden either. I dunno, I think you gotta chalk this up to the fact that a certain percentage of voters in general are voting on superficial characteristics of candidates.
Well, so much for him. No way could I support him now. He’s given way too much evidence that he’d die in office and leave us in the hands of his VP pick. There is no other Demo I would support at this point except Warren, and I think the chance that Bernie will get the nomination and name her as running mate is so low it can’t be measured.
Heart sugery isn’t a big deal? Sanders is old enough that he can pop off from a heart attack or a stroke at literally any minute. They’re putting duct tape on a hole in a very rusty hull.
For me it describes a certain small but loud-mouthed subset of white male Sanders supporter I’ve encountered on-line (two names on this BBS come immediately to mind – one long-banned but still occasionally attacking Cory on Twitter for not being faithful enough). They’re effectively brocialists who have chosen Sanders as the head of their personality cult. They’ll brook no criticism of Bernie, and are more than willing to throw PoC and women under the bus “because it’s all about economics and class struggle, ma-a-a-an”.
I agree, with the most important superficial characteristics being that the nominee needs to be male and, preferably, white. They rationalise this by claiming that’s the only kind of Dem candidate “independents” and “moderate centrists” will vote for (“and we need them to win, right?”), but it’s a thin pretext masking bias that they’re ashamed to admit they themselves have.
