Trump lowering the bar such a stupefying amount should not be sufficient for Biden to get a pass now.
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I think that assumes that he interacted with the rest of NYC in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s… Trump has always lived in a very stratified type of society, interacting with a certain class rather than the rest of us. Living in a high rise in manhattan is not the same thing as being part of the life of a city like NYC, even remotely.
That he never listened to a woman? Being raised in a more misogynistic time and place isn’t an excuse…
We’re not even close to the primaries. Maybe let’s not just accept the “wisdom” of the press before the first vote is even cast…
[ETA] Dr. Tures’ metrics come from the ACU… the same guys who put on CPAC… Not exactly a great metric for measuring “progressive” and “moderate” since their view of moderates is likely to the right of Reagan…
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Perhaps that’s why he’s publishing in the Observer rather than a journal? In any event, “moderate” isn’t the ACU’s term for him, no doubt their term for all these candidates would be “socialist”. Tures is only using their “score”, which I assume is based on candidate votes on some subset of bills of interest to the ACU. For me the most interesting line in the article was
His record during his last two years of voting (2007 and 2008) were perfect zero scores, and it’s kind of tough to be more progressive than that.
Which means of course that with a lifetime score of over 12 he was even more conservative in the early days than I’d remembered.
Incidentally, when Biden was running for president in the late 80s, the UK soft-left media (including the Grauniad and the Observer) were totally in the tank for Biden, and he seemed to be almost living in London. I could hardly turn on the telly without seeing his vulpine grin and gleaming pate on some political chat show or another. Of course, where most of us would return to the US with a teapot or a scale model of Big Ben for a souvenir, he returned with a story about growing up the son of a Welsh coal miner.
Just this week…
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Biden knows that 99.99% of the D base will vote for him over the orange man. With that in mind, his incentive to “STFU and go away” is essentially zero.
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@xeni Exactly what is this supposed to mean? Are you suggesting that men should play some role in a woman’s decision to have an abortion or not? If a man “takes responsibility” can he stop a woman from having an abortion?
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It means that when a woman takes the unfortunate measure of availing herself of an abortion, American society often pins the unplanned pregnancy on her “irresponsibility” or “promiscuity” while absolving the man who impregnated her of those same supposed sins.
That doesn’t imply that men should have a veto on a woman getting an abortion, but rather notes that this is yet another situation where politicians (especially older male ones like Biden) give men a free pass when it comes to assigning culpability.
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Yup.
Cover of a John Prine song.
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There’s an important distinction to be made here.
When Obama talked about same sex marriage, at the time, he made it really clear that while he himself wasn’t comfortable with same sex marriage and that it conflicted with his religious beliefs as a Christian, he would support laws that pushed it forward nonetheless, because it would help other people. It wasn’t long before he embraced it personally as well.
Joe Biden not only has not historically personally supported abortion, but has opposed letting other people have that right as well. That’s extremely different.
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The DEM position has always been “legal, safe, and rare.”
And politicians are always trying to please as many as possible.
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Women bear the burden of contraception as well as the vast majority of the financial burden of unplanned pregnancies not to mention being the parent responsible for raising said offspring. Men can frequently just walk away and think no more of it. I see it all the time, and yes, like it or not, a great many male humans just flat out suck as responsible parents. So I would answer 2 ways. 1) condoms are cheap and plentiful, not as effective as BCPs or IUDs, but with no adverse side effects, and 2) men being held financially really and truly responsible would most likely have an impact on the choice to abort if the deciding factor is financial. But, no, the only one who can decide what to do with a woman’s body is that woman. Period. QED.
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I do not view Joe Biden as a choice. I think his presidency would always be a tragedy.
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Biden. Thinking this’ll help him snag some conservative votes while simultaneously giving the nod and wink to liberals willing to play the game of ‘Say Whatever It Takes To Get Elected’.
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…Damn. I didn’t realize that was so recent.
Damn, damn, damn. “Republican Lite,” indeed.
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Except it loses many independent voters, exactly what hurt Hillary last time. Add that to weak enthusiasm from the progressive portion of the party, and you have a perfect recipe for another orange-hued disaster of cyclopean proportions…
…And little, tiny hands. Behold: CHEE-TO REX!
When, exactly, are we going to be done with this “3rd Way” neoliberal/GOP Lite bullpuckey?
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that would probably require getting rid of the electoral college and, tragically, the only way we’ll ever eliminate the electoral college system would be if hurt the republicans instead of the democrats. i’m not sure if that’s even possible given the demographic distribution of the country and the structure of the electoral college.
one thing i think is certain, biden is unlikely to beat 45 by 3 million in the popular vote the way clinton did.
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I’ll be happy simply to see der Orangenführer gone, even by a single vote. But… Ill-omened, foredoomed, day-before-Volcano-Day-brimstone-in-the-air bad signs are afoot. I’m hearing and seeing a lot of the same things I heard and saw in 2016, especially from Biden and the DNC, and I’m deeply worried.
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Hide and watch. The circular firing squad is loading up.
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You mean “by only 3 million”?
Here’s what I think is the first large poll done after Biden’s Hyde reversal. The whole thing is fascinating, but the important polls for this thread are polls 4_1, 14, and 15. As I read them, his change will slightly increase support from Democrats, with most of the change coming from “liberal” Democrats (the ones who otherwise might be least likely to vote for him). The change will also slightly decrease support from Republicans, but mainly from “conservative” Republicans (the ones who were not going to vote for him regardless). I think his flip-flopping might end up being an unintentionally brilliant move, since while a majority of Americans actually support the Hyde amendment, I suspect that many of those supporters are people who are genuinely conflicted on it, and will identify with Biden looking like he too is conflicted on it.
Of course, it is very early days, we haven’t even had the first debate, primaries are way off in the future.
I hope “loses” turns out to be “gains”. More Independents voted for Trump than Clinton in 2016, and if it’s all still about the economy with them and they like the economy in 2020… ?
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