Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 – and it won't end well this time either

That’s a choice I can’t make for you.

Why not just apply for a permanent residence of Canada? No need to kill yourself lol. Or you could try Germany, the UK, Czech Republic or some shit ya know?

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I’m not sure anyone here would disagree with you on that. I think @Brainspore’s point is that you can’t bandy about terms like “unelectable” for select candidates in the context of close elections like Clinton’s 2016 loss.

Maybe this is where the right is winning. We’re here debating the finer points of sexism in politics. Meanwhile…

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Wasn’t really that close, though. Not disputably close like Gore vs Bush, because she woulda if she coulda.

And I maintain that women, when measured against the hideous thousand year storm of Trump, will poll artificially high like Clinton did right up until the end, leading people to think the candidate is electable when in reality… not so much. Not against this opponent, in this cycle.

Some of us old people can even parse a sentence properly.

Agh, I’d forgotten about the DNA test. Warren is brilliant, but even brilliant people make mistakes.

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And I maintain that if a straight white male establishment candidate (say, Tim Kaine) had won the Democratic nomination in 2016 and performed exactly as well as Clinton then nobody would chalk his defeat up to “I guess straight white male establishment candidates are just inherently unelectable this cycle.”

When a male candidate narrowly loses an election he carries the responsibility himself. When a female candidate narrowly loses an election it’s because “America isn’t ready to elect a woman right now.”

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Remove the weighty Clinton dynasty baggage, the “but her emails” FBI shenanigans, and… all the latent sexism that the polls missed… a male candidate would have won against Trump.

Well yeah, this is obvious because there’s never been a woman president before. Until that happens, you get no choice but to carry the mantle of all {type} people.

The great miscalculation before the 2016 election wasn’t “we didn’t predict how few Americans are unwilling to vote for a woman in general and Clinton in particular.” In that regard she performed more or less as expected, and better than any white male candidate the Democrats have come up with since her husband left office.

The great miscalculation before the 2016 election was “we didn’t predict how many Americans would be willing to vote for a clearly unstable, comically unqualified criminal fascist cartoon villain.”

So if Obama had lost the electoral college in in 2008 (but won the popular vote by millions) would it have been a reasonable takeaway to conclude that the Democrats shouldn’t nominate any black people for the time being?

Does Bernie’s loss in the 2016 primaries mean that America isn’t ready for a Jewish guy?

I’m not [blank]ist, but America clearly isn’t ready for a [blank] President” feels like a cop-out to me.

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That’s an … interesting … disclaimer, considering she massively lost in key districts Obama won by a virtual landslide.

I think we all underestimated how many voters were raging under eight years of the “uppity” Obama, and were more than willing to unconditionally transfer that rage to the female candidate.

White dude vs white dude, now you’re looking at a bit more sophisticated moral calculus for these “undecided” voters.

Not what I said. Against this candidate, you’d be playing to his strengths which is a strategic mistake. Even Warren screwed this up with the DNA test to “prove” she had indian ancestry. She played right into Trump’s hands.

I mean, if you want four more years of Trump, then by all means?

You keep insisting that a white male candidate is the only way to defeat Trump.

I keep insisting that the premises underlying that assumption are weak at best, especially considering that Clinton substantially outperformed any white male candidates the Democrats have put forward for the last several election cycles, and won more votes than any white male candidate in history.

I think we may have reached an impasse.

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It literally doesn’t matter if she gets every single vote in California. You have to be able to win. And that means appealling to enough people in every US state, for better or worse.

I say the missing ingredients in the polls were latent sexism – and racism, which was gleefully transferred to Clinton. I didn’t want to believe it at the time, but … now, there’s no other way to see it. Trump is the embodiment of the sexist, racist candidate. Those are his strengths.

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I guess the US is just more misogynist than countries like New Zealand, Norway, the UK, Germany, and Iceland, all of whom have elected a woman as head of government within the last 5 years.

Oh wait, I accidentally left a few out: Malta, Poland, Peru, Chile, Liberia, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Namibia, Haiti, Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia, Romania, Georgia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Singapore,…

I suppose we just have to leave our political glass ceiling in place until we are as socially advanced as all these other countries.

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I believe it will happen one day, perhaps in my lifetime, certainly in my children’s lifetimes. Just not against this particular candidate, in this particular race.

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It’s a weird fixation problem in general. Though they have moved from Benghazi to the “Green New Deal.” I kind of like AOC running interference at the moment since she’s not in the running this go.

Really the centrist swing seems mostly rooted in eight years of down economy for Obama. With the swing before rooted in the subprime crash for Bush.

Trump needs a similar crisis to see a shift. Failure in a trade war with China is most likely the best target for that. A down economy and higher prices might be enough blood in the water for the right. But that’s way too hazy if that will crack before 2021.

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  • If this election is decided by who the sexist racists vote for then we might as well give up, because nobody the Democrats could nominate could out-sexist or out-racist Trump. Even if they did, that wouldn’t make us any better off than we are now.
  • If this election is decided by the so-called “moderate” Trump voters who flipped from Obama to Trump in 2016 then we don’t need to nominate a white male candidate, because those voters have already proven that they’re willing to consider supporting someone who isn’t a white male candidate.

Either way, the Democrats would be foolish to base their choice of candidate on who they think will have the most appeal for voters who currently support Trump. They should be basing their choice of candidate on who best represents the values of the non-Trump-supporting majority of the country.

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I thought of somebody, the Democrat(s) who did blackface in that southern state. Would that out-sexist and/or out-racist Trump?

Can we just agree not to try? Please?

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As an aside, there’s no Clinton dynasty and the people who kept talking about it were dumb. The Kennedys are a dynasty. So are the Bushes. Bill and Hillary are a husband-and-wife tag team, if they’re anything. You can’t have a dynasty of two people who are in the same generation and who are just married to one another.

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And then, after that maybe we can have our first African-American candidate! And then maybe a Catholic!

Just not against this particular candidate, in this particular race.

Pretty sure I’ve heard that one before.

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