I read this last night. It seemed pretty spot on to me. It summarized the appeal of Sanders a little better in context than I have been able to do recently. It’s a good reminder of what’s at stake if we just get complacent and accept token achievements like “first female president” instead of a good female president (like I think Warren would be).
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I don’t blame politicians for their supporters, but I do think it’s worth blaming them for their employees and organization. As uninteresting as horse-race politics and campaign organization news is, it is worth paying some attention to as a test of their ability to assemble and run a large organization. If they have a hard time assembling trustworthy, competent people for a campaign, then why would we think they would magically do a better job at a much higher, larger, and more complicated level? It’s not sexy, but being the manager of a vast unelected bureaucracy is pretty much the job description.
This reminds me of when Republicans mocked Obama as being a “community organizer.” I thought, “Uh, he’s going to community-organize you right out of the white house.”
As for blaming people for what their supporters do, I think it’s inevitable that if you are seriously running for president some of your supporters will be heinous, horrible people. I mean, you are planning on literally having tens of millions of people vote for you, I don’t think there are any screening criteria in the world that could let in tens of millions of people and not let in some brutal assholes.
But if this was Joe-the-asshole-who-happens-to-like-Clinton then we wouldn’t really know the story of how it got started. If we know the story traces back to a nameable group, then we can infer something about Clinton from that group, even if we can’t say she’s accountable for their actions. Sort of like how Trump is the choice of “white nationalists” and “race realists” and such. I can’t blame Donald Trump for the ideas of people who support him, but it’s not a coincidence either.
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Also if you’re good enough at coin tosses you can actually fairly regularly make it land however you like.
As an over 40 under 50 pinko, I only have one thing to say…
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Can we move past the coin tosses?
I haven’t managed to look through all the posts here or in the Sanders thread, but there are at least two myths that need to be put to rest:
- Hillary did not win 6 out of 6 coin tosses, she won 6 out of at least 12.
- The coin flips did not award any state delegates, and Hillary’s margin of 4 state delegates over Sanders (corresponding to one pledged delegate advantage at the convention) was not affected by any of the 12 coin flips.
The six out of six story is so absurd, because the media is still portraying it like it’s true, and I saw things like WaPo’s article on the improbability of it after I had watched videos of Sanders winning a flip.
According to CNN, there were 7 flips digitally reported in precincts that used the the Microsoft app. Of those, Clinton won 1, and Sanders won 6 (one of them vs O’Malley).
CNN reports that it is unknown how many other precincts used flips that weren’t reporting them via the app. There are six videos of Clinton winning flips, so there must be a minimum of five not reported on the app, so we have at least 12 flips. I don’t know whether the video of Sanders winning one above is one of the seven that were reported.
As for point #2 above, I keep seeing people here say things like “If Sanders had won those coin tosses, he’d have won Iowa!”. Regardless of the fact that it looks like Sanders may even have won more flips than Clinton, that’s a misunderstanding of the way Iowa’s ridiculous delegate system works.
The individual precincts were electing county delegates. Each of the 1,781 counties has at least one, generally more, delegates at stake. There are around 11,000 county delegates, of which coin flips decided 12 or so. There are only 1397 state delegate equivalents. Each county delegate is therefore approximately one-tenth of a state delegate (depending on the specific county). So even if Clinton had won 6 out of 6, this is the difference of around 0.6 state delegates — not enough to change the result at all.
Ok, done. I’m still donating to Sanders, in case anyone wonders where my loyalties are, but these myths are really annoying, especially as the media keeps getting them wrong too.
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You mean Rand “mansplain’” Paul? Did he drop out (thank godess)?
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Which one? Isis?
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cut that out right now… we have enough of that in other threads thankyouverymuch.
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It turns out the true story - that there were at least a dozen coin flips but we don’t know how many and Sanders may have won more than Clinton or fewer but we don’t know and the coin flips may not have decided anything anyway - is kind of hard to believe.
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Discordia. This is the BBS.
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Since we’re talking about (maybe) 1 state delegate out of (apparently) 4,763, who cares?
Aren’t superdelegates already pledged to Clinton (and indeed, the whole concept of superdelegates) far more of an issue?
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It’s not hard to believe that there were at least a dozen coin flips. Did you see how the Iowa caucuses are conducted? This is a vote where people are putting up hands and shuffling around the room. Nearly half the caucuses didn’t even use the app for reporting and just phoned in the results. Many, many, many of the 1,781 precincts did not video-record the event or, if they have, did not upload the video to YouTube yet.
The only source that anyone had for the six-out-of-six story was that they found six videos of coin flips going Clinton’s way. It wasn’t an “official” number in any way. Then there was a video of Sanders winning, that had been overlooked. Then there’s the count of the flips that were reported via the app.
None of this is remotely unbelievable given way that these caucuses are run.
As for whether 6 out of 11,000 precinct delegates doesn’t decide anything anyway, I’m not sure what’s hard to believe about that. Except that everyone here seems confused about what a precinct delegate is.
Anyone, actually! 
Rand Paul is a horrible jerk and would have made a horrible President, but he was the only candidate in his party who seemed to think “stepping up the foreign bombings and the domestic spying” wasn’t the best solution for all that ails America.
I can’t name anyone in on the GOP side I could stomach as President, but it seems like the only ones left may all be even worse than the ones dropping out.
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Rand Paul is in completely the wrong party. He’s not quite his dad, but his policies just don’t fit with the Republican base. Or the Democrat one. He had some of the few positions that I liked in amongst the Republican candidates. Sadly also some of the worst ones.
I guess there’s just no real point in being the Libertarian Party candidate. Plus then you don’t also get to be a Senator - assuming he hasn’t already screwed that up by trying to run for two positions at once.
I saw something today suggesting he’d actually lost a lot of votes to Sanders.
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Darn, I wanted so much to see how well a Paul-Clinton race would be responded to here at BB.
I thought it might be interesting, too.
Mindysan33: thank goddess.
daneel: Which one? Isis?
renke: Discordia. This is the BBS.
Honestly, watching this election cycle, I cannot deny that God is indeed a crazy woman, and even She is probably shaking her head over all this.
Hail Eris!
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How can any being stay sane after watching the circus that is this election cycle?
