Definitely my cynicism, then 
When I hear stuff like that even today, unless they have a specific track record on this sort of thing (which I don’t think he had in 96?) my immediate reaction is always “great, so what are you doing to make it happen?” Big part of why I could buy it when Bernie said $15 minimum wage and not when Hillary said it (Or was it $12? I remember she had to pull out some minimum wage talking point in response to Bernie.)
She pulled a George Osborne.
A “living” wage, but not an actual living wage
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Maybe it doesn’t matter, but I think it’s often the other way around: I support xyz, but I can’t admit that until the court of public opinion won’t crucify me for doing so.
I think a lot of politicians compromise their ideals that way thinking, well, if I say I support gay marriage, even if I promise not to do anything about it, I won’t get elected, and I’ll be better for the cause than the alternative.
So, basically, they’ve internalized the platform you are ranting against.
In this example, the B.O. quote sounds a lot like a rhetorical device: Like me, you can oppose gay marriage and still oppose this amendment.
That’s maybe a more convincing argument than: I am all for gay marriage, but even if you think it is wrong, you shouldn’t ban it in the constitution.
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That actually raises an interesting point: are dogwhistles always bad? Should the not-far-right have more of them? I guess “marriage equality” might barely qualify as one, but it’s certainly nowhere near as indirect as the big ones.
What are you on about? The Democratic platform was clearly not “We’re not the Republicans, hurr-durr, vote for us, derp herp.” How do I know? Because it’s still posted here: https://www.democrats.org/party-platform
And, for kicks, here’s a re-cap of the platform drafting process, which included Cornel West, Bill McKibben, Luis Gutierrez, Randi Weingarten and Keith Ellison as voting members.
https://ballotpedia.org/The_Democratic_Party_Platform_and_DNC_Platform_Committees,_2016
Raising the federal minimum wage a mere 106% may not count as “something” in your book, but it’s not nothing. Supporting card check and opposing right-to-work? Not nothing. National paid family leave? Not nothing. Increasing taxes on earners above $250,000 to pay for Social Security? Not. Nothing.
Which is to say nothing of all the very real, very important programs the Democrats pledged to defend in their platform, like CFPB, EPA, DACA, SNAP to the USPS, as well as continuing reforms in the Justice Department to reform systemic biases in prosecution and sentencing. That may be mere “status quo” window-dressing for an edgelord like you, but for the very real people who depend on trivialities like pre-paid debit cards to buy food (OMG gross, amirite), that’s fucking EVERYTHING.
Also, crack a goddamn book once and a while, and you might find out that there are larger systematic forces that determine how many people you get to vote for, that have nothing to do with the ideological positions of the parties involved.
Even that neoliberal sellout Noam Chomsky went so far as to write an essay laying out exactly why you should vote for the less-bad candidate: https://chomsky.info/an-eight-point-brief-for-lev-lesser-evil-voting/
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You don’t force a severely depressed person to get out of bed by threatening to throw a bucket of water over them. From personal experience it doesn’t work, I just lay in a wet bed. I wanted to die before, and I wanted to die after. The discomfort of the cold water barely registered. If you want to get them out of bed you treat the depression and give them some hope for the future.
Likewise, you won’t get an alienated group to vote for you if they don’t have something to vote for. Telling them the alternative is worse won’t work, they are already at the point of not caring anymore.
Alternatively, just admit that you don’t want to offer anything for the left wing vote and stop blaming us when you lose our support.
And I am very aware of the welfare issues, being on disability benefits myself.
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It was also clear that they were less interested in screwing over LGBT people than the Republicans were (for example, Obama’s predecessor tried to amend the Constitution to ensure gay people couldn’t get married). So when the political climate made it possible to get same-sex marriage laws passed Obama didn’t stand in the way, nor did he appoint Federal Judges who were likely to do so.
Sometimes voting for the least-worst candidate really does lead to positive results.
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…and then they run the wife of the person who cemented the idea of Democrats as Republican-Lite. Which gets back to my complaint above about how the platform is fine. It’s not what I want but I’m never getting what I want, I’ve accepted that considering how I’m probably far left for France.There are 2 significant parts to the platform: do I buy into this platform first, and second, do I trust the people being elected to implement this platform. The Democrats can run on exactly the platform I want all they want, but do I trust them to implement it? No.
But the fact that they’ve put together a platform that I can see voting for might hint that they’re starting to see the problem, they’ve done half of the work. Now they just need to either get people with reputations that make me think that they’d fight hard to implement the platform or they need to find new talent and make sure that they get that reputation. And hey, BB tells me that there are plenty of candidates who might fit that bill trying to run in 2018, often against the kinds of Democrats being complained about here. Good on them. Especially when the Republicans can’t be bothered to primary someone against LITERALLY THE ONE TIME LEADER OF THE POLITICAL PARTY LITERALLY CALLED THE AMERICAN NAZI PARTY.
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You’re a fool if you trust any of them, regardless to party affiliation.
Rich politicians do not have the best interests for the well being of the masses at heart, only their own opportunistic tendencies.
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Who on earth was making a “bucket of water” argument? As I stated before, the Democratic platform was not a list of things Democrats aren’t, it’s full of positive proposals that would have improved the quality of life for most every american. You may not have heard about these positive proposals, because the press was more interested in showing you the empty podium where Trump would surely debase himself further than showing you a HRC speech to organized labor.
In fact, press coverage of actual policy on either side was fucking abysmal, remember that the next time someone prattles on about how vital and important the fifth estate is.
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Whether or not you trusted the Democrats to implement their platform was rather beside the point, given that Republicans held and still hold majorities in both houses of Congress. If anything, that makes all the grousing over ideological half-measures even more ridiculous; even if Hillary really stuck to her guns and went with the lower $12 minimum wage, there’s no chance in hell a post-Hastert congress would have given Democrats even a compromise win. Republicans are dead-set on their political nihilism at this point, the only solution being complete removal from ruling majority.
Which brings us to the other, less-mentioned fantasy spun up by our progressive betters; that Bernie was going to have HUGE coat-tails that were going to render the Republican majorities moot, spurring the secret Socialist politicians of West Virginia and Nebraska to run for Congress and win ushering in a golden legislative age. …At least until 2018, when 1-in-3 people who voted for president completely forget about the other half of elections and let the Republicans walk back into power on the strength of old rich voters who can afford to turn out no matter what. The fact that HRC actually out-performed progressive standard-bearers like Russ Feingold and Zephyr Teachout doesn’t seem to have taken the wind out of the sails of coat-tails truthers, but at this point I would expect nothing less.
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I see that in the exact opposite direction. The Republicans aren’t going to give Democrats even a compromise win, so why the aren’t you fighting for what’s right in the first place? That’s what convinces people to vote and you’re never going to build momentum forward if you campaign on a good platform then, knowing that they’re not going to agree with you anyway, give them as much as you possibly can just so that they can say no. Go in with a good platform and stay on that platform, then no, you won’t be able to get anything done until you have a majority, but you’re building the sort of credentials that you need to get that majority and they wouldn’t have let you get away with your win even if you were being “reasonable.”
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That’s a very rosy and unrealistic portrait of what happened. You’ve been misled.
In 1996, Barack Obama was running for state senate. His most viable opponent spectacularly self-destructed and Obama’s team had the rest (including the incumbent) removed from the ballot on signature technicalities, so he was essentially unopposed. Thus it was completely safe to favor gay marriage, which would help establish him as a progressive candidate in the minds of liberal white voters. So when he was interviewed by a gay newspaper he was all for it. This wasn’t any sort of bold or risky stance and he was (very effectively!) fighting to achieve political power, not fighting for gay rights.
Later he basically admitted it - when he flipped back to “his personal religious beliefs” as a Presidential candidate, he came right out and said it was a strategic move intended to win votes.
And when he flipped back again, later, “after much personal evolution” it was in response to polls showing that our campaign for marriage equality was working.
I don’t think Barack Obama is anti-gay or evil. But he has consistently used support for gay rights and marriage equality as a manipulative tactic to get voter support and his own views are clearly as flexible as required.
Now that is a very realistic view of what actually happened. Well said.
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I heard. I repeatedly refered to Hillary’s own campaign site over other less trustworthy sites and it was depressing. It was work-to rule liberalism. It was an arrogant assumption that because Bernie Sanders had lost while promising old style social democracy, all his supporters would fall in line and vote for her. Given that all her policies were to the right of what they wanted and she wouldn’t change them, what was there for them to vote for? Nothing. She tried using the threat of Trump, the threat of the bucket of water, someone to vote against, and it didn’t work.
Hillary and her campaign team fucked up big time and we are all suffering because of it. It wouldn’t have taken much to tip the electoral college in her favour (I remember seeing figures of fewer than 30,000 voters in the closest states would have won it) but apparently it was too much to compromise her ideological purity. Third way politics is a disastrous failure, yet people still cling to it as if it is the only thing that will work.
Next time, can we have a candidate who knows how to meet someone half way? Someone who knows how to offer hope for the future, not business as usual politics? Until you have that all you are doing is effectively demanding that those severely depressed people get out of bed and insulting them when they don’t and they are lying in their wet beds. It won’t work, they are past caring about that.
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Given that you posted the original quote, you misled me. Thank you for that?
Sorry! I will accept the blame. I forgot I have a very complete inside view of both the Obama campaigns and marriage equality efforts. It’s easy for me to see this particular picture.
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Well, that’s a ridiculous statement on its face. Feel free to continue. Not interested.
I mean, not necessarily. I want to say that @Medievalist lives in the chicago area, and so being involved in the campaigns or knowing people involved in the campaigns isn’t horribly far fetched .Especially if the “both Obama campaigns” is referring to partly or wholely to senatorial runs.
No, I’m not in Chicago. But I helped raise a young man who door-to-doored in six or seven states for Barack Obama and now holds a state level Democratic party position. He’s literally got an Obama tattoo, no lie. He won a scholarship by writing about Obama, again not kidding. I see him once or twice a week and we talk politics (we have different viewpoints).
As for marriage equality, I was involved in the “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign for a couple of years - certainly in no position of authority or responsibility, but I am justified in saying I saw it from the inside. We went to Christian churches and convinced the congregations that Jesus did not want them to stop gay people from getting married, it was very effective.
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