I love Bernie! Were I not in my fifties and were he not married with kids and grandkids, I’d want to have his babies!
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Still, we do get to watch one left/progressive candidate lose in the primary every four years. America!
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Riiight. The “most leftist” since FDR except for Humphrey, Carter, McGovern, and Gore.
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Fair. It’s weird, Gore was actually one of my favorite candidates on many fronts - he was a total dork, was obsessive about promoting the internet in its early days and pushing the government online, and was more vocally concerned about the environment than any other candidate I can think of. Sadly his wife had to try to legislate morality with the PMRC, and we wound up with one of the strongest run of the Greens against one of the most environmentalist Dem. candidates we’ve seen in a general (to the point that environmental groups were pointing to Gore’s environmental policies as better than the Greens).
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Well as soon as all of those “as long as…” circumstances are met I’ll reconsider my stance on free trade.
You and those aligned with you on this issue get all of your pie in the sky ready and I’ll bring my fork and my support.
I wonder if you ever criticize someone’s argument when it’s predicated on a bunch of hypothetical assumptions like yours just was.
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That article makes it sound like the quote block is attributed to Clinton. I’d recommend adding a sentence above the block quote to say something like ‘Bernie said…’
What’s disappointing about this is that there’s no signal that the Democratic leadership is seeing the possible loss.
They just see a (fairly easy) win. They don’t NEED to make concessions to the progressives, they’re going to win this without them because even if they give the progressive NONE of what they want, the progressives will still vote for Hillary over Trump in a hot second.
I - God Help Me - almost want Trump to git gud. I almost want him to steal Bernie’s ideas and use them against Hillary, to use his ability to spout batshit things to say the things that people want to hear that the Democrats think they can’t actually say. The more he can make Wasserman-Schultz freak out about his potential presidency, the more she and Hilary will realize that they need to pay more than lip service to the Progressive base to actually beat him.
At the moment, it’s too easy for them to say, “Pfft, what are you going to do, let Trump be president? We both know that ain’t happening. Just give up on your dreams already.”
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Every state’s a little bit different but in mine, our candidates at the presidential level have to be the nominated candidate of one of the two (or occasionally three) recognized political parties or get a certain number of people to sign a petition in order to allow an unofficial or unrecognized party candidate to be counted at all.
I can:
- Vote who I’d like and not have it counted
- Vote for who I can tolerate for lack of better options
- Stay home / vote for everything except the presidency
- Run for present myself?
But I can’t meaningfully vote for Bernie. Unless he gets a certain percentage of votes in my state, my state won’t even tally his votes. If I am literally throwing away my vote for president, Bernie’s got a few other people* to beat still.
*Who I also can’t meaningfully vote for.
That’s not even counting the electoral college. In most states, it doesn’t matter who I vote for president. It matters who most of the people in my state vote for. With the total gutting of the VRA, my state probably isn’t going to swing (slightly) left like it did in 2008.
So Hillary will get my vote in the hopes that I can help wrest control of my state from the Tea Partiers for two years. At which time the democrats will fail to show up again—what election? we got another two years before one of those!—and the state will go back to the Tea Party.
It’s that way every four years. This guy just didn’t leave his clown gear in the trunk this time. At some point, we have to do something other than just vote for the lesser of two evils all the time.
I’m not saying the solution to this morass is to vote Bernie. Cuz it’s not. Even in the best case scenario (which is never going to happen without a time machine), that’s four years of Slightly Less Weevil Than The Other Less Weevil™. It’s time to foment for ranked voting as the minimum solution to Lesser Weevils.
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Of the party he chose to join and run for the nomination of.
If he wants to now run as an independent - don’t go to the convention & release his delegates.
It was his choice to run as a democrat after a lifetime as an independent. The guy plighted his troth.
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I’m honestly not sure what you’re talking about here. Clinton has made multiple moves to try to court progressives, and continues to do so. I feel like some people are not paying attention to what Clinton’s doing or saying, but what Bernie-or-bust centered sources are saying about what she’s saying. She’s been steadily somewhat left in both her platform and her rhetoric. She’s reaching out to Elizabeth Warren, Robert Reich and others. She’s dropped support for the TPP. She’s embracing higher taxes on the rich to fix Soc. Sec. She’s started talking about mechanisms to reduce college costs. She’s now promoting a Medicare expansion and a public option to take more steps towards single-payer. She’s actually talking openly about how income inequality is a serious problem the Federal gov’t needs to address. She’s talking about the need to raise the Fed. minimum wage further (though she supports 12, and doesn’t endorse 15, she said she’d sign it if 15 passed). There’s other moves as well. Should she do more? Sure. Are there some areas (like Wall Street) where she’s not going to ever be enough? Sure. Is she doing nothing? No.
I’m pretty dubious the left will abandon her as well. She’ll lose a vocal minority, and there will always be Trumpite sock puppets screaming that she’s not far enough to the left, but as time’s gone by the Bernie-or-busters have been dwindling in some polls (not others, it’s hazy), but this is still June - the conventions, debates, and main events for the general haven’t started yet.
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I’m pretty convinced she could personally burn down Goldman Sachs headquarters and equitably distribute all its money to the poor, and some Bernie supporters would still sniff and say “But she didn’t even sow the ground with salt.”
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Nice scenario but then where would she gets her bags of money for speeches?
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Precisely my point. Whether or not a person is their candidate has no bearing upon whether or not they are my candidate, or somebody else’s. Our investment in either party should not be assumed. Assuming the parties primacy as a de facto influence could be counter-productive to many if not most people.
But it did have everything to do with whose candidate he wanted to be.
It’s a normal behavior for former politicians and other notable figures to leverage their positions/fame to give talks and get paid handsomely for it. While the whole speaking fees business is gross, when you’re effectively a speaking rock star, people pay a lot for the shows. She’s nothing unique there, and she gets paid less than some. Sanders also got paid for speaking engagements, but he got like $2k, so it’s way less gross.
She put most of those speaking fees into her charity, which does a lot of work on reforestation, helping impoverished farmers in Africa, renewable energy projects around the globe, and other things. While there’s some funny financing of the Foundation, it does actually do a lot of charitable work. Of things about her I have strong criticisms of, that one’s isn’t awesome, but it’s fairly low on the list for me.
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I think it’s a bit of an issue that she’s gone from being a former politician to back to being a politician. Normally it’s just distasteful that ex-Presidents, Prime Ministers get rich on speaking fees, but as an active politician there are genuine conflict of interest issues. I would still like to know what she said in those speeches.
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So how much did Sanders or other candidates get in speeches?
What was in her speeches again? Oh yeah.
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$1,867.42 last year. You don’t get a lot of Clinton for that.
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It might pay for a pair of her shoes?
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Yeah, that’s definitely a negative. She’s taken a lot of money from Wall Street in terms of campaign funds and those speeches, though the campaign funds are more of a concern to me, since those are designed with an expectation of a quid pro quo since they pay for something that directly benefits the candidate in a tangible way, while the speeches were dumped into a charity that probably also creatively trickled over, but isn’t as explicit of an apparent conflict of interest. I have no expectation she’ll be reigning in Wall Street, and I don’t think there’s anything she could possibly say that would get me to trust her there.
Some people who attended them gave recaps, and their recaps sounded like what you’d expect, Clinton talking like she was a Wall Street insider doing a rah-rah speech for how awesome their work was. The content’s separate from being paid which was what you’d noted. Her platforms pretty thin on anything substantive finance-reform wise (there’s more than you’d expect if you look, but I doubt she’ll deliver much, esp. with Congress being what it is). If Progressives are a single issue camp and Wall Street is their only issue she’ll never win any. Some are, though not all. Those who are seem to me to be ignoring that the Congress won’t let anything happen there even if a Pres. pushed very, very hard.
