And it ain’t just Clinton:
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God help us, it might come down to him or The Orangista. I worry that Warren would be steamrolled by that fat fucker on the debate stage. And the target Mayor Pete has painted on his back would be just too tempting for the Klu Klux GOP. Harris made that comment about early release for non-violent offenders from prison making it hard for companies to get cheap captive labor. Bernie’s flaming out. Hickenlooper flamed out a couple of days ago over some damned thing. Jay Inslee is appealing, but he has no name recognition whatsoever. And there’s this:
Beto O’Rourke just hired a “senior advisor” who used to lobby for Keystone XL, Seaworld and private prisons
The ranks of acceptable Dems are thinning, and the power of Trump’s psychopathy is going to be hard to defeat. It might take another psycho to beat him. Remember when he loomed over Hillary in that debate? He’s not above anything, including ANYTHING.
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We will not pull a single voter away from Putin’s Cloaca Cleaner. The only hope is to get people out to the polls and vote for Democrats. Unfortunately, moving steadily to the Right and serving up “jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today” has alienated a lot of otherwise Democratic voters.
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The problem I have here, is what the “unacceptable” behavior IS. No, I am not OK with this bullshit around the right of women to administrate their own damn flesh. PERIOD. And even moreso, from someone who is supposed to be the champion of liberal values, FFS!
Hiring a lobbyist with icky credentials is not equivalent to throwing women under the bus, that simple.
@tsath Hear, hear. The DNC, unsurprisingly, is making the exact same mistakes as they did in 2016, from what I can see. It’s profoundly disturbing.
What exactly has the DNC done that makes you say this? I assume you mean an explicit mandate from the organization, not just some vague tin-foily stuff?
You haven’t been paying much attention, then, have you? Biden is the toast of the DNC elite, of course. And he’s triangulating himself into a corner again, dammit.
More specifically, the DNC and Democratic Party national apparatus is overwhelmingly beholden to neoliberal ideas and methods. And if Hillary couldn’t sell that jar of sauce, no way in hell is Joe going to do it, sorry. I don’t particularly like HRC but in my opinion she’s still a good bit sharper, both politically and regarding important, core issues, than Biden ever will be. Well, at least if you ignore that whole Kissinger love-fest… Ick >.<’ .
Attempting to (yet again!) lurch to the right to court mythical, sparkly-unicorn “swing voters” has largely failed for over 30 years, now, with occasional success with Presidents but horrid national and local government results. We’re talking terrible, stinky-bad, no good, NOT WORKING, people; we’ve lost most of the freaking country! And those local laws are the ones that chew on your ass, folks, such as bizarre attacks on reproductive rights.
Does no one remember the last election? Dolt 45 was and is a huge disaster, you betcha, but the incredible losses Democrats suffered in 2016 were just the capper on decades of poor performance. We need a different way, other than simply (badly) aping the freaking GOP as corporatist bootlicker slaves. Neoliberalism must die.
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You didn’t answer the question. You accused the DNC of doing something that they did in 2016. Now, in 2016 the leadership violated operating principles and unfairly worked with one of the candidates. There is now an entirely new leadership, and so far as far as I can tell they are operating within guidelines. So, I’ll ask again: what specifically has the DNC done?
“Oh, the party is beholden to neolib stuff” is exactly what I meant by “vague tin-foily” stuff.
the incredible losses Democrats suffered in 2016 were just the capper on decades of poor performance.
Democrats held the White House for 16 of the 24 years up to 2016.
They seem to be doing their best to come across as out of touch again, that’s for sure.
And in that same period, they lost hundreds upon hundreds of seats in state and local elections by focusing almost entirely on the presidency, a point you incidentally proved with your response.
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It still doesn’t explain what “the DNC” is supposed to be doing that is “exactly the same mistake” that they made in 2016, unless he meant putting a weak intern in charge of the twitter account. “The DNC” has become kind of a bogeyman for people whose idea of how the party operates is drawn largely from Assange-curated email from one cycle. Suggestions that Biden is somehow DNC-annointed have no foundation, unless you believe that the DNC is secretly pulling the strings behind FOX and other popular media.
It is possible that the DNC abandoning Howard Dean’s “50 state strategy” was partly responsible for some of the losses in congressional seats and governorships, though the decentralized nature of the Party means that the DNC has a limited role in local campaigns. The current DNC leadership has announced that they will be returning to this strategy, ie not making this same mistake.
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And Democrats lost the entire rest of the country, in trade. Two Democratic Presidents in 30 years IS NOT sufficient, sorry, not even close.
I also didn’t accuse the DNC of actual wrongdoing in the current election cycle; that, in fact, is all you. What they are doing, along with Uncle Joe right here, is making the exact same neoliberal “triangulation” mistake that has been biting us all on the collective heinie for decades.
There’s NOTHING vague about the neoliberal roots of the current Democratic party. Not even close; it is, in fact, rather blatant and obvious.
Have you read the article you are replying under? Do you actually support Biden in this? If so, you probably should marinate for a moment on what, exactly, a “Democrat” is to you, and see what you cook up. Why aren’t you voting for the GOP…?
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What are they doing? What specific action(s) of the current DNC are you referring to?
Do you actually support Biden in this?
No, I’m trying to pin you down on an assertion you made about the DNC.
If so, you probably should marinate for a moment on what, exactly a “Democrat” is to you, and see what you cook up. Why aren’t you voting for the GOP…?
I’ve been a Democrat for several decades, thank you very much. As for the difference between my Party and the GOP, I refer you to this:
I already supported my assertion about the Biden and DNC well enough, in my opinion. But here ya go, Biden first:
https://www.laprogressive.com/joe-biden-reality/
Boom. This post is getting a bit long,if you actually read the articles, so tell me if you’d like the same for the Democratic Party and/or more for Biden.
Of note, if you think an anti-choice candidate won’t split the party asunder, you’re smoking WAY too much weed.
So you don’t actually have anything about the DNC? I never questioned the part of your post(s) where you criticized Biden, or the main thrust of the thread, only the part where you think that a particular organization is somehow to blame. Trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, I went to all 3 links and did a search on “DNC”. The response was “no matches” all three times.
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THIS, for one:
https://news.yahoo.com/dnc-chair-tom-perez-t-210542056.html
DNC Chair Tom Perez: We Can’t Have a Climate-Only Debate Because Then We Must Accommodate Everyone Else
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Thank you. While I don’t necessarily disagree with the DNC that it would be silly to artificially restrict questions in one debate (or two if there are still 20 candidates) to one topic, however important, at least your answer is about a DNC action.
Perez is handling this badly. All he needs to do is point out that this is a violation of rules that were passed after the last election to make the debates better. (This is apparently true.) He probably does need to defend that decision, but “what about all the other single-issue topics” is not a good defense.
Now that Biden has joined the progressive candidates in endorsing the green new deal, I suspect there isn’t enough difference between the major candidates on the issue to fill the time allotted. I’m pretty interested in the topic – I used to work in the field for the EPA – and I’m not sure I could stand 2 hours of that.
Not presidential politics, but the DNC is absolutely more interested in protecting its incumbents from primary challenges than it is in encouraging open democratic primary elections.
Re: Biden, even if they’ve smartened up and aren’t actively putting their thumb on the scales this time around, it’s pretty damn obvious that the party establishment is far more interested in having someone “safe” and “electable” like Biden as the nominee than a barn-burner like Warren or Sanders who might actually do something to upset the status quo.
Meanwhile, Biden has “transformed” on so many topics now that I have a hard time having any faith in his actual commitment to whatever he’s saying this week. He has the same problem Clinton had: launching as a moderate centrist Democrat and planning to run on the “things are always fine under a Democratic presidency” stability platform, only to get assailed by the hordes of people who are fully aware of just how not-fine things actually are in this country.
Maybe I’m overly cynical at this point, but if candidates haven’t been convinced of things like bodily autonomy for women or the impending civilization-ending crisis of climate change by now, their “evolution” on those topics after announcing their candidacy (and after making repeated statements about their centrist attitudes on those same topics) is utterly insincere. They have no intention of following through on those evolved positions once the immediate danger of “keep the left happy to win the election” has passed. (And to be clear: it’s good if politicians are willing to change their position. It’s less good if they only do it in the face of public pressure that makes it clear they’re unlikely to get elected without renouncing the deeply-held beliefs they’ve reiterated less than a week earlier, and their website’s policy page looks like a hastily-executed copy-and-paste job of various pressure groups’ press releases.)
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