Totally. Forget Howard Dean. What a douchefaucet. He’s irrelevant now.
Bernie is looking better and better. We will see in a couple weeks, but it’s looking like he will pull out at least one of IA and NH, quite possibly both. When that happens, there is a waterfall that the rest of the primaries tend to fall over. Not across the board, but in a general wake up and smell the coffee way.
I am always impressed by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
I hope that as Sanders is running as someone offering more than just another centrist, he addresses this. As he did with BLM. I still think he’s far and away the best candidate and hope he can at least come up with some more specific race related policies to go with his class related ones.
A left radicalism that fails to debate its own standards, that counsels misdirection, that preaches avoidance, is really just a radicalism of convenience.
My feeling is that Sanders knows affirmative action has a bad name for too much of the electorate; overtly addressing racism before the election (or at least the primaries) could well preclude the opportunity to do anything about it, hence the soft-pedal on that note - it’s not as if there aren’t a whole bunch of other reasons he deserves the Presidency anyway. And given Sanders’ credentials, I think it’s right to expect a comprehensive effort to address entrenched racism once he’s been given the mandate to make America great again better than it’s ever been.
I’d say that a Sanders administration would almost certainly display great leadership in this arena, far eclipsing any previous efforts - because that would be consistent with his principles. Sanders has painted a fine picture of his aims, but there’s this area of blank canvas inviting you to join the dots… it seems like an inverse dog-whistle to me.
But hey, I could be mistaken… Sanders is pretty keen on ‘bringing people together’; I’m not exactly sure how he weighs that against showing moral leadership. But I for one am tipping he has just enough pragmatism to succeed in pushing the ‘art of the possible’ to new heights.
Aside from being a great tool from a source that seems as solid as we get online,
the news is pretty good also.
And the broadcast news around here has him up by three in Iowa today, but I’m not sure what that says about anything, as their inscrutable Iowan methods seem to involve cats in sacks, line dancing, and corn.
I don’t understand the caucus system. I’ve read about it, and I have no idea why you’d do it that way.
I’m from MA. We invented Gerrymandering.
Pretty sure it is about shenanigans.
Judging by the groups that I’m following on Facebook, and the chatter therein, college people are turning out in DROVES in Iowa tonight. The precincts are running out of forms (strategically, no doubt) but people are making their own copies. The caucuses are filling with young people!
As had been said many times in many ways, Bernie’s grassroots support, esp among the youth, is very hard to estimate. Traditional measurement methods don’t apply.
I have a very good feeling about this tonight. I could be wrong and it might be tight or a loss, but my gut feeling is that Bernie is about to pull off a landslide in Iowa!!!
It harkens back to Town Meeting, which is how town matters are decided in New England. It carried over into Iowa for the primaries. The precinct sets an agenda, and then goes down each item on the docket and there is a public vote after a public forum on each item. There is no hiding. It is out in the open. It is up to each speaker to sway people and it is up to each voting person to buck up and show their support for whom they are voting for. It’s not a secret ballot because the intent is that it is a more intimate gathering and people should not feel they need to hide their feelings on the candidates or whom they are voting for. By having it out in the open and not anonymous, the ethos is that it is more real. Having participated in, organizing and speaking at Town Meeting in Vermont, it is a very different way of looking at government matters. People whom you vote against are your neighbors and family, and will remain so. So, measure your words, remove the ad hom stuff and get right down to the heart of matters.
I hope that helps. I actually like the Iowa caucuses. They are weird-seeming, but they are one of the last pieces of real America. Now, if we could just get them into the inner cities and have a better representation of the actual people in the USA…
It’s common for pundits to recite ass-covering phrases like “it all comes down to turnout” or “anything could happen” on the eve of a big election. If you’ve been following FiveThirtyEight over the years, you know it’s not our style to do that. Instead, we issue probabilistic forecasts, which can sometimes seem quite confident: We had Barack Obama as a 90.9 percent favorite to beat Mitt Romney on the eve of the 2012 general election, for example.
So let’s get a couple of things straight before the results start trickling in from Iowa tonight:
- It all comes down to turnout.
- Anything could happen.
Sounds like Clinton and Cruz are winning. Boo!
Who want to blame the moderates who’re too cowardly for a revolution (that and fucking Garrymandering).
I blame the olds.
Fucking Boomers.
O’Malley just chucked in the towel.
Good use of that $500K loan he just took out.
I’m sure Debbie Wasserman Schultz will find a way for him to earn that back.
