“Of course, it CAN’T have anything to do with Biden himself, oh no, we can’t have that.”
That didn’t work for Hillary and it won’t work for Biden. Please stop.
And guess what? While I like Bernie a lot, I didn’t vote for him, this time around; that heart attack is definitely no bueno. “Bernie bro” that, bro. You and yours are making exactly the same dumb choices you did in 2016; how’d that work out, again?
The idea that ANY candidate is some sort of untouchable, sacred cow is absolutely repugnant to me and anathema to the very foundation of “democracy”. You should be ashamed of yourself, quite frankly, as an undemocratic lout.
Furthermore, such attempts to silence dissent inevitably feed into the Streisand Effect, negating your efforts in the end. It’s futile. Rather, it would probably be best to learn to explain why people should forgive Joe his obvious defects, instead of pretending they don’t exist. Many people in this thread do a pretty good job of it; perhaps you should emulate them?
Well, he can’t really say that those changes were suggested pre-pandemic by the popularity of his primary opponents. But either way, chances are that he’s not going to follow through on them.
All that understood, I’d still rather have him in the Oval Office than Biff. I don’t know if insulting voters’ intelligence will get him there, though.
I hope so. Anyone who worked in a senior campaign position for Clinton in 2016 should be banned from participating in Dem campaigns forever. Instead they should be encouraged to work for big tobacco or the fossil fuel companies or other evil industries so that their incompetence can be put to good use.
Political journalists have been wishing for a brokered convention since forever. It gives them something exciting to write about, even though the whole concept is at odds with the modern system of primaries.
But how can you have a brokered convention when epidemiologically, a convention of any sort, brokered or preordained. borders on insanity.
I get all this. Using an expression like “the blacks” is (obvious to me) “othering” and I could easily explain what that means and why it’s bad. And you’re right, some people have the mental agility to absorb all kinds of new ideas, at every stage of life. But some people don’t, and Joe is one of those who seems to not have absorbed any of this. His use of black-ish vernacular (“you ain’t…”) strikes me as wrong, because first, it’s like “verbal blackface”, and second, of course, he’s outside the group and he’s telling them who they are, and that’s obviously bad.
Hello, can’t everyone see he has serious cognitive decline and he isn’t absorbing much of anything lately? We’ve all heard his other gaffes, like saying that he can beat Joe Biden, or asking people to vote for him for Senate, and many others.
Someone else here said that there’s no rule that allows the pledged delegates to break their pledges. Maybe that’s the case, but I’m sure there are Democratic party attorneys, far smarter and better informed than me, looking into possible paths to doing that. I’m sure there are discussion within the party leadership about pressuring him to withdraw, and who would be the logical replacement. I don’t know who that woudl be. I don’t think it’s Bernie. It would be someone who gets all the nuances that are needed these days to handle the coalition that is the Democratic Party.
I’m sorry to say this but Joe seems so out of it, someone could probably put a resignation speech in his teleprompoter and he would deliver it. Someone could probably hand him a resignation letter and tell him to sign it and he might do it. Ok I’m exaggerating a little bit but come on… this guy is out of it and I still don’t believe he’s going to be the nominee unless they have decided Trump is going to win and they need a throwaway candidate, kinda like Bob Dole was. I don’t think that is the view at this point though, not at all, so I’m pretty sure they will find a way to get him out.
I’m speaking bluntly about stuff that seems pretty obvious but people aren’t talking about much.
This is honestly the strangest theory I’ve heard about the DNC to on this BBS, and that’s saying something. It isn’t going to happen, the party membership will not stand for a major rules change at this point.
The idea that Biden is in cognitive decline is a right wing talking point. It isn’t true.
If the only time you see Biden is if you’re watching news stories about his gaffes, then he looks bad. The rest of the time, he’s more or less the same old Joe Biden. He’s always been much better in relaxed situations like round tables than in situations that stress him; in the latter, adrenaline prompts him to talk faster than he can think, and sometimes stuff comes out wrong. However, that’s not new, he was just the same in the 80s too. It is true that he has more trouble finding correct words now than he used to as he speaks, a classic thing as people age, but it doesn’t necessary mean a meaningful diminution of cognitive acuity, only of verbal acuity.
Biden is fine. (To be clear, I don’t mean that his positions are fine, or that I’m happy that our candidate is a guy his age.)
Thanks to everyone who replied to me. You did give me cause to rethink what I wrote.
First of all to the “defeatist” remark. Not so much defeatist as defeated. I have given up. For context, I used to think like you guys. For over thirty years, since before I could vote, I thought like you. The first presidential candidate I voted for was Barry Commoner. You couldn’t get much more hopeful than that in 1980.
As for privilege blind, I am guilty. I did ignore genuine progress that has been made on the fronts mentioned by gracchus. That progress has also been slipping for the last several years. Anti-gay and racist violence is increasing.
Thinking about that made me reconsider exactly when and why I gave up, and I realize that it’s not that long ago. It was around the time that John McCain gave white racism and evangelical reactionaries a national political voice. Since then I have seen the political climate in the US only deteriorate. Sara Palin -> Tea Party -> Trump. Add in the mix of Twitter (45 percent of Corona virus tweets are most likely by bots, according to Carnegie Mellon University), Facebook, Whatsapp and the Bernie supporters who vote for Trump (idiots, every one) and he wins again in 2020. I would have loved to see Warren as the Dem candidate. Since she is not, I would love to see Biden win, as much as I despise him. I would love to be hopeful again, but I can’t.
Now, with my remarks revised, give me a reason to hope now.
Or even better, why are you hopeful?
If it takes a delusion that there is enough value in living to get up and live tomorrow then I’ll take it. Because I understand the alternative and why it is more destructive for everyone around me to think that way.
The point, as I have stated twice in this thread, is to ask “What reason is there for real hope?” Especially given the trend of the last ten years. And it’s not really doing me any good at all. I never said that it was.
From New Hampshire: Buttigieg+Klobuchar+Biden = 53%, Sanders+Warren = 35%. The time may come when the many posters here who are for “Sanders or Warren” will have to put on their thinking caps.
The people who gave us Biden are not Russian bots or incel trollies. They are the majority of registered Democratic Party voters. The first step forward is to acknowledge that fact.
You’re perfectly entitled to feel depressed about things as they are in the spring of 2020, but if your marker for where things started to go down is John McCain, you are operating on a fairly short time scale. There are still people around who were alive when there were a dozen lynchings a year, and many more still alive who had to use the “colored” water fountain. I’d suggest you ask them if racism had gotten worse in their lifetimes.
No one else can give you hope. Like… Really we are not responsible for your depression or how you percieve reality. But that doesn’t make it clever or useful to sit on a boat with a hole in it and tell everyone how much drowning is gonna suck. Personally I benefitted a lot from the advances made in the past. When the inevitable shit hit the fan for me personally in my individual life I had options the women just a generation older than me didn’t and I sure as hell am glad. I may cry with sorrow for the world from time to time but I’ll give up on hope when I’m ready to die… not a minute before.
