Comment Rescue – I love Sanders & Harris (continued)
“…my vote is locked in for Sanders because he’s the only one who has demonstrated a consistent and appropriate vision for our future.”
That’s great. Be passionate. Work hard. But if someone else wins the nomination, lock in for that person in the general even if it is your fifth choice for the nomination. Even it is your 5oth choice for the nomination.
Building up your candidate. Make your case. And fuck every one of you who think your job is to tear down fellow Democrats. Fuck you, very much.
And BTW – Lord knows, it is tough. You see these candidates with real problems… (why doesn’t everyone see it?) It is incredibly tough to keep the hatchet in the hatchet drawer. It is going to take all of your maturity and dignity. But you can do it.
Harris helping move the Overton window:
…Monday night, Kamala Harris endorsed a “Green New Deal” — an ambitious and increasingly popular plan for combating climate change while making massive public investments into the clean energy economy.
If you don’t think AOC, Sanders, and Warren have already had a HUGE impact, you are not paying attention.
“If you don’t think AOC, Sanders, and Warren have already had a HUGE impact, you are not paying attention.”
Which is why I’m not playing the “if it’s not [blank], then [blank]” game this time around. I’m ruling out mainly people who are saying dumb-ass shit about the country needing to come together.
Anybody who says the country wants to come together is living in a bubble. Everybody I meet wants to kill somebody, not pretend we’re all one big happy family, and I prefer a Democrat who wants to win, not compromise.
I don’t think it’s a good strategy pre-primary to say, well I prefer candidate X but it really doesn’t matter, whatever happens. Wake me when it’s over.
Doesn’t seem like a winning approach to me.
This is how we get a junk nominee and then… well, you know.
Having a strong favourite for the nominee today says nothing about what I’ll do in the voting booth in November 2020. Why these are conflated I don’t know.
A good strategy for what? I’m following what I think is the best strategy for my sanity.
Proselytizing about a candidate is a fool’s game. How many people do you think you’ll influence? A dozen, tops? And most of them in Delaware, where our votes count for nothing anyway. So explain to me in more detail why I’m supposed to give a fuck who gets the nomination, since it gains me nothing but agita.
What’s this approach you’re talking about supposed to “win” me? My preferred candidate as the nominee? Sorry, but that presumes that my favorite candidate would actually make the best nominee, which is something I can’t state or predict with any accuracy.
At this point I like Warren, as I have for several years, but I realize that she polls poorly and isn’t anti-capitalist. Still, she’s for reining in the finance sector, which seems to me like a good first step out of capitalism. I happen to think that curbing capitalism’s excesses will weaken it, which I think is necessary before people will accept anything else. But she might make a poor nominee if lots of people think she’s a scold. The way to find out is by voting.
So what’s the point of arguing whether she’s progressive enough when we can’t influence the outcome and we’ll vote for her regardless? When the Delaware primary comes around you’ll vote for Bernie, I’ll vote for Warren, and about 100,000 other Democrats will vote, too. Whoever actually wins won’t gather enough delegates to matter, but it might give us a better idea of who appeals most to the masses — which is, after all, how elections are won.
WORD.
One other thought on this incrementalism I’m endorsing: Mikhail Gorbachev was not a radical reformer. But once he started with a little reform, the public liked it and kept on going without him.
The lesson, at least for me: You don’t need to preach total revolution to start one. People are more comfortable endorsing reform. Once they get some, they realize they were aiming too low.
If you prefer a domestic example, there’s Lincoln. He never proposed freeing the slaves before he was elected. But once the process started, he didn’t really have much choice.
The entire construction of “preferred candidate versus best nominee” is masturbatory. Doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s like the electability argument. It’s irrelevant.
Some candidates have demonstrated strong historical support of most of the things I care about and some don’t. I guess complicating it gives some sort of onanistic pleasure. I don’t know. Nancy seems to dig it.
Poor analogy. I’m for leaving it alone. You’re the one who wants to do battle over it.
Yeah, I think the difference between a Sanders/Warren type and the field is worth fighting about now.
You still haven’t explained why. I agree with you about the dividing line among candidates, I just don’t see the point of fighting.
If you’ll recall, the fighting last time proved fatal. If I’m making a mistake this time, at least it’s a different mistake.
It is incredibly tough to keep the hatchet in the hatchet drawer. But Trump only wins if he gets to face someone suffering from 1,000 hatchet wounds.
I think it was the opposite. We didn’t fight hard enough in 2016. The wrong nominee was selected. Here we are.
Not sold on the idea that the Dem primary fight was causal in any way.
That’s a fair point.
I disagree. Enough people carried enough bitterness that the Democrat lost.
Didn’t fight hard enough? Where’s the evidence for that? The idea is to win people over. “Fighting” them isn’t going to get that job done, sorry. All it did last time was make all the fighters, on both sides, hate each other. Yeah, the problem must have been we didn’t fight hard enough. When someone’s logic is impossible to follow, it’s usually not logic.
Your solution to everything is to fight. I don’t think you have the slightest idea of how to persuade anyone of anything.
If you lose a fight you didn’t fight hard enough.
Maybe you don’t think you’re in one, but it’s happening whether you like it or not.
This idea that I’m suppose to be a “persuader” on a legacy internet blog is a funny idea to me.
And the idea that you’re supposed to be a “fighter” isn’t? So you’re basically just virtue signaling?
Signaling! Hahaha. OK.
If you’re not trying to persuade, what are you trying to do? Ha ha.
“If you lose a fight you didn’t fight hard enough” might be one of the stupidest slogans I’ve ever heard from a non-Tea Partier.
Maybe if you left the fucking house you’d know what I’m doing.
Feel the same about the “bring the country together” comments, it’s not going to happen, probably not in our life time. Same for a Dem candidate that’s out to win and will not compromise, the time to fight is long past, if they don’t know it by now they never will.
“If being a Democrat is more important to you than universal health care either you’re a party sycophant or you don’t care about universal health care all that much.”
-Briahna Joy Gray
Via Dave Weigel – Mike Bloomberg in NH just now: “It’s great to see so many fellow Democrats embrace the idea of a Green New Deal.”
I can’t wait for Joe Biden to tell everyone how he’s been the real champion of universal health care all these years.
Attention: if anyone is confused and thinks this blog is the place for activism, logical argument and persuasion…. I have very bad news.