Bernie Sanders outraised every other Democrat in North Carolina

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/17/our-revolution-4.html

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Hey American Democrats - I’m on the right over here in the UK, so there’s no reason to pay much attention to my views on this - but please pick someone credibly centrist to put up against Trump! Sanders will scare middle ground voters his way, and I rather fear an examination of some of his previous views won’t help that. I’m sure he’s a lovely man - but pick someone who has a shot of beating him pls…

North Carolina? Fundraising in one southern state that has a primary in the middle of the season is now a bellwether?

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I read this thing three times trying to figure out a correlation between Democratic fundraising numbers in one quarter in 2019 and the ultimate flippability of a red state in the 2020 election … but finally realized my first mistake was assuming logic where there is none.

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Both of them? Bwahahahahahahahah…I crack myself up sometimes.

He’s too old. He’s a socialist. He’s unelectable. - and other reasons given for not supporting the best person for the job most popular thus most electable candidate.

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Don’t forget genuinely thinking he’s not the best person for the job, if only because his policy proposals have always been way more vague than, for example, Elizabeth Warren’s.

This implied “If you don’t think Bernie is the Best, you’re stupid or dishonest” thing does not win him and his supporters any favors, you know.

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I get it. There are all sorts of people who don’t think he’s the best for the job but I’m not one of them. Not being interested in favors I’ll happily continue to support him by calling it like I see it.
Your argument that his policy proposals are too vague really misses the mark IMO. Executives who give detailed plans are the worst sort of leader. I prefer a leader who gives broad goals and enables those who work under them to hammer out the details. Trusting your people is a mark of a good leader. Kennedy didn’t say we need to develop the missile program until we had a 310,000 lb capacity launch vehicle, a lunar lander, and a return vehicle. No, he said we should go to the moon.

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Seriously? Favors? You think the vast majority of people support candidates because they expect a job or a yo-yo?

No, but I think that the vast majority of money supports candidates because of the expectation of quid pro quo …

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Um, no. That’s been precisely the thinking of Democrats since I could vote and even when it works, it doesn’t really work at all. Whether or not Bernie is the eventual nominee, he has pushed the needle left so effectively that there is actual enthusiasm in the progressive base and all of the other nominees of more are saying things they would have been pilloried for 4 years ago. I’ve never seen anything like it. Not even close. And if you think that a centrist has a better chance over trump, I could point you to mountains of polling and, most recently, Bernie’s Fox News(!) town hall that say the exact opposite.

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I think perhaps you read too much in to that. It was a direct response to

By way of clarification; no, I do not think people support candidates in hopes of getting a job or even a yo-yo.

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Question: When are the other Democrats running for POTUS going to show up on Faux News and hand their asses to them?

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It’s still more than 500 days until the Dem Primaries.

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Yes, at this stage in the game fundraising has more to do with name recognition than anything else. At this point in the 2008 election cycle many Americans hadn’t even heard of Barack Obama.

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(Granted, Doc Brown is a known Bernie supporter)

bernie-sanders-christopher-lloyd

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Theoretically, that’s what the primaries are for.

PS: Unless you are familiar with the US political system (and – not strange to say – its politics), primaries can get very, very nasty.

Your party is directly responsible for killing >120,000 disabled people in the UK, but sure, we want to hear what you have to say about compromise and scaring the “center”.

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This is true in another way. Many people want their leaders to have all the answers, so politicians have to pretend that they do. When they inevitably fail (because the world is complicated, politics are fractured, etc.) people are disappointed and look for a new savior. Lather, rinse, repeat.

If politicians could be honest and get elected, they would say that many of the problems that we face are very complicated and they they will try to solve them using high level approach A (with the details to be fleshed out by the agencies responsible for implementing them), but that solution A may not work and then we’ll move on to high level approach B.

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