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Democratic Presidential Primaries & Caucuses |March OT| Last Tuesday was 1000 years ago, old news no one cares about (Discussion Guidelines in OP)
- Thread starter Poodlestrike
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My god, I mean does his staff want to help Trump? I just don't get it.
Like everyone knows each day this drags out helps Trump. At this point if you want Trump out there is no way you want Bernie to keep dragging this corpse of a campaign on.
It is baffling.
Like everyone knows each day this drags out helps Trump. At this point if you want Trump out there is no way you want Bernie to keep dragging this corpse of a campaign on.
It is baffling.
Cut off the rest of the axios headline?
Axios: Bernie Sanders suspends his 2020 campaign *Facebook ads*
*edit* whoop failed the hyperlink but fixed
Axios: Bernie Sanders suspends his 2020 campaign *Facebook ads*
*edit* whoop failed the hyperlink but fixed
If a person needs medicare for all to be instituted otherwise they will probably die, then I feel extremely sorry for this person and they should do whatever they feel is best for them.
However, no one should vote for a presidential candidate based on a specific policy position, especially a policy position which isn't held by the vast majority of that politician's party. Proposed policy positions are compasses, they show you what direction a politician is going in, nothing more.
I don't see other candidates proposing multipayer models found in Europe. I see no sickness funds being proposed. I see a public option model that is going to be left to compete with the current wealthy insurance industry, something other countries public options didn't have to compete with.
All the evidence you need of this is the shitstorm of spin that came from them when Warren briefly had the lead. Jimmy Dore was all over her at that time.
On what level do you think this helps Trump? Truly, as a factor give it a % of why it helped Trump win if Trump were to win in this hypothetical.
If a country has no competition for its "public option", it's not an option, it's mandatory government insurance.
Sure, but the competitor is a monster in the US. A monster that you wouldn't find elsewhere because of decades of allowing the insurance industry amass its wealth, and influence over politicians. For example, Netherlands didn't have to put up a fight against a monster like this.
Other countries multipayer models have to compete against social sickness funds, which operate differently from the insurance industry we have, much less one as buff as ours is.
This is like pulling off a band-aid slowly. I guess they wanted to announce it themselves but axios beat them to the punch
The country has a bigger crisis going on NOW, not just the ones he was trying to address in his campaign, the best thing he can do for the country is in the senate.
This is why Bernie came at Biden with that fire. He was trying to trigger some kind of meltdown.
We can't nominate a guy who's non viable in most swing states...so yeah
The US system is a mess because it emerged as an accident post-WWII due to WWII wage caps, and by the time anyone tried to do universal stuff, most people were covered already, making it very difficult to make sweeping changes. The primary reason we don't have better stuff now is primary because of political screw-ups, not a illuminati plot.
Insurers also aren't the reason healthcare services are so expensive. They're just the middlemen with whom people interact, so they get the blame even though the actual issues lie elsewhere in the system.
He's the wrong messenger in that he is presenting a narrative at odds with itself, for example:
The average Dem primary voter supports M4A in a vacuum. Its not that they do not realize it. Sanders didn't present a narrative that made them believe it was actually possible.
The full economic fallout is going to be quick in the grand scheme of things, but it will take literally months for the full fallout from COVID-19, and as a result you aren't going to have a steeled resolve to take a risk on someone like Sanders. Which brings us to this post:
The support for Biden has nothing to do with specific instances or policies. Its a run to comfort and security. Biden isn't perfect and those imperfections were shown very clearly in how about 2/3rds or better of all moderate Dems basically shopped around between Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Bloomberg as alternatives for Biden until those people removed themselves from the scenario.
That doesn't mean there isn't passionate support from the moderate wing, they're showing up to primaries at a record rate. They're passionate about getting Trump out and returning to normalcy. And that isn't because the moderate voter doesn't think "normal" is just fine. A lot of them stayed home in November '16 and protest voted for Sanders in the '16 primaries because they weren't happy with normal. But right now they'll take a return to the broken system most of them have adapted to as opposed to the catastrophe and chaos approach to governance that the Trump admin. has shown. A revolution would appeal to Dem voters after a moderate Dem more than it does after an unhinged Republican. The middle of the country, from moderate dem through undecided independent all the way to fiscal conservatives have been driven progressively more and more risk adverse these past 3 years and change, COVID-19 is the straw that breaks the camel's back on the appetite for further risk in 2020.
He's already gotten policy concessions. The entire party made some pretty large concessions in 2016 already and the primary has seen everyone, including Biden, move further down that road. Biden is about as far to the left as he can be and still have moderate dem appeal in red and swing states that will help pick up house seats and possibly the Senate.
Also, Sanders isn't wasting anything if he drops out in the next few weeks without an explicit policy concession. If the Dems win the Senate Bernie Sanders will be one of the ~10-15 most powerful politicians in the country. He's the clear leader of the most progressive branch of the party, with a high enough floor of public support to make his endorsement of any policy a critical component.
He also has a good relationship with Biden and will have more soft power regarding the narrative and administration's practices than the vast majority of his colleagues.
For Sanders a Biden presidency likely works out better than anything other than a Sanders or Warren presidency.
The next tier of value he could possibly extract will be appointments for some core Sanders coalition people. I'd imagine he'll want to push for a progressive at the head of the DNC, or at least a two person leadership role where one of the two is a progressive. I would assume that he's also going to fish for some key staffers to find valuable administration homes as well. None of that can really be talked about during the campaign though.
To me the turn was when he emerged as the front runner from NH and Nevada and, with reasonable space between NV and SC, spent the time continuing his standard stump speech about revolution and down with the establishment.
That was the point to make a turn. He's running at rhetorical opposite ends. He can't say he's leading a revolution, but then tell people not to worry about M4A's implementation, while also not giving meaningful details on how he would implement M4A.
That was the moment to drop the revolution narrative and bring some level of detail/clarity to what a Sanders administration would look like in actual implementation and practice. He caught the attention of the party and, to a slightly lesser degree, the nation. He then failed to capitalize on it.
Sanders is right that M4A, student loan forgiveness, and free education aren't actually radical ideas. The first is similar enough to what other developed countries employ and uses a widely popular existing program to do it. The second is effectively an economic wash in the short term and a big economic benefit in the long term. The last is a basic requirement for the U.S. to meet its service needs in the medical, tech, and science fields.
But instead of laying out the common sense component and how they could be implemented in a practical fashion he continued the revolutionary and moral arguments.
I don't know if that would have been enough, but I think it would have made for a much more competitive primary to date at least.
Everyone who isn't a hardcore GOP loyalist sees how badly Trump has bungled COVID-19, he's not putting that back in a bottle by cutting some checks. Pelosi has already beaten him to the media narrative there, he might try to catch up, but cutting checks is going to be seen as a band-aid on a situation he made worse, using a solution given to him by other people.
There is a substantial floor to Trump's support so no one should expect this to doom him in November or sink his support entirely, but at the end of the day the administration joining in a chorus in favor of sending out cash while the stock market is in shambles isn't going to be enough. Beyond that, about the time that the GOP is going to want those checks to stop will be when people are going back to work and realizing just how much damage to the average person's livelihood has been done by this, exactly when the general election is heating up.
Also Biden isn't an active member of a political body. He can say whatever he wants and has, by having his own pressers on how he'd respond. Those have been well enough received to show a massive edge for him over Trump.
Beyond that, how does staking out ground to the left of Biden on a handful of things even benefit Trump? That isn't going to win him moderate Dems. There might be a few on the far left fringe who are dellusional enough to put any value in it, but those people weren't good faith actors on behalf of progressive values in the first place and if Trump could sway them with this he'd have thrown out some other bit of populist red meat that would have before November anyway.
Politicians who refuse to regulate prices are the one's to blame for this.
There's a huge difference between hating him and thinking he's not a good candidate.
People have got to stop making this personal. Happens over and over and over again in this thread. Not voting for Bernie is a "fuck you" to progressives, it makes you a "Biden stan" etc.
Lots of people vote tactically. Don't project your personal identification with a candidate on others.
Thankfully he has the luxury of living in NYC, so he can vote his conscious if he wants, even if the reason is stupid.
Bernie or Bust people mostly live in very blue states, so I wouldn't worry about them.
I see claims of toxicity from within Sanders' supporters as largely overblown, but yes, there is a contingent you can never win.
A non-trivial portion of moderate Dems see Sanders' self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist label and take issue with the second half. A portion of the very online people giving his campaign a bad look instead take issue with the first, but he's the closest they've gotten in their lifetimes so they'll take it.
What they somehow seem to miss is that almost to a person these socialism first, democracy second types are closer to a bourgeoisie lifestyle than they realize, and that their careers as commentators, youtube channelers, etc. would have zero fucking value to an actual socialist state.
So you can't reach them. Being flexible means getting off the soap box long enough to let someone else speak and the soap box is a key part of the grift they're enacting.
None of them are suggesting actual UBI. The GOP are suggesting giving away cash money in the short term to avoid any meaningful long term concessions that can't easily be rolled back (like paid sick leave for everyone).
A wave of populist Dems have joined in quickly because, yeah, free money is popular. The rest of the Dem party will generally follow because, again, getting free money is popular.
It doesn't make it good policy though, and it sure as hell isn't a real step towards UBI unless it becomes the norm for the foreseeable future.
1. claiming someone lacks empathy or doesn't care that people are going to die is insulting ad hominem. At no point did the person you responded to make that claim.
2. How would M4A differ for the medically in need from a combination public/private system that guaranteed funding for their care? What's so magical about it being "Medicare" that makes it better than other forms of universal healthcare?
3. The M4A = problem solved crowd should actually do some reading on how other countries legitimately implement healthcare.
Most of the top 10 healthcare quality nations in the world use some form of public/private system. It isn't entirely a state system.
Second, even in the U.S. private insurance companies are regulated to the point where profit margins are in the single digits. Yet Sanders cites them as the problem, not the for-profit hospitals (most of the top 10 healthcare nations have a combination of public and private non-profit hospitals).
Third, everyone, including both Sanders and Biden, argue for cost controls on pharmaceutical companies, and M4A isn't likely to meaningfully change implementation versus a universal care public/private split.
Fourth, the big lesson being missed in these discussions centered around COVID-19 is that in most of the top 10 healthcare nations there are strong local (i.e. county) level health agencies that managed care on the local level. Very few nations have tried universal care managed from the top down and the ones that have, like the UK with NHS, are less productive and cost effective than their locally managed counterparts.
These are the governing bodies who should have been on the front lines for COVID-19, but across the country lack the strength (in all contexts, fiscal, regulatory, staffing, etc.) to do something.
In the U.S. we have entire states that literally refused free money in order to continue denying Medicaid expansion. They literally rejected free money so they could tell poor kids to fuck off. Those happen to be GOP stronghold states, yet you're painting the problem as moderate Dems tolerating half measures. The problem is that the other side of the isle sees the pain as the purpose, not that the moderates only slightly to the left see viability issues with a specific path to universal care.
Until we solve the last issue any kind of nationalized care is guaranteed to fail. A public/private system with adequate low income support to remove or at least soften the financial burden is an actual viable short term workaround.
Definitely. I don't think Bernie is a great candidate, but as a politician, I don't have any real beef with him. If he was the nominee I'd happily be voting for him. If Warren was out by Super Tuesday, I probably would have in the primary. I voted for him in 2016 and five years before that when I was frustrated about Obama and he was talking about primarying him, a part of me wanted him to.
I think the distinction here is I consider Dem President + Dem House and Senate a pretty admirable goal with little regard to who the big cheese is. I thought Obama was The One in 2008, and while I know a lot of Bernie supporters thought that too (and were then disillusioned by his presidency not delivering on everything he campaigned on), at least the ones I know personally didn't keep up with the day-to-day political minutiae of Obama's presidency. Which party controls Congress is significantly more relevant to the likelihood of progressive policy gains. If Pelosi can get something through the House and Schumer can get something through the Senate, Joe Biden isn't going to stand in the way of that, and neither would Bernie Sanders. That isn't to say the powers wielded exclusively by the executive branch aren't important (and I do think Bernie would be an upgrade over Biden in this regard), but when you look back after 4-8 years at the long-standing achievements, it's always legislation. All the executive orders in the world can be undone by the next administration with the stroke of a pen, if they're not already actively undermined by the courts (which currently lean conservatively).
It was on PBS stream. But the audio was cut off until Manchin was speaking.
It's something than Pelosi half assing it.
And now this is something that's in consideration rather than Yang being ignored
True. Most of the Bernie-or-Busters I've met online also say that they see the moral argument of voting pragmatically in swing states like MI, since the rational ones know full well that four more years of Trump is awful, plus encouraging fellow blue/red state Busters to vote down ballot.
This has nothing to do with Yang. Stimulus checks were part of the anti-recession efforts in both '01 and '08.
I get that, but like, memes control the public discourse today. All these accounts are basically lying about Biden and pushing out shitty memes. There's no way this doesn't impact the general.
Dumbass people on twitter and insta are going to fuck us over.
Yes. Short term cash stimulus has been a GOP tactic to curry favor for a good bit now. It works because everyone likes that quick free money, while the GOP knows the average person isn't going to actually retain any of it.
Its trading government debt for a corporate handout via not fixing the fundamentally broken parts of the system. So GOP dream legislation.
....this is the entire point of fiscal stimulus.
This isn't a "GOP pushing for it because electioneering" thing, this is a "GOP actually listens to normal economists when they inevitably get caught with their pants down during an economic crisis" thing.
the goal of appearing to the left of democrats on some issues would not be to win over leftists or moderates but to depress turnout among leftists and young voters, like he successfully did in key states in 2016
yeah cutting checks to ordinary people in an economic crisis is objectively good stimulus policy beyond being a potential vote winner
yes. and frankly with how things are looking the checks are going to have to be really fucking big.
POLITICO on Twitter
“An announcement from Sanders' top staffer represents the most stark signal yet that the progressive icon is considering ending his presidential campaign https://t.co/7uqHuv8SqO”twitter.com
he had a good run. I really wanted things to be different :(
edit: apparently not true. that's a shame
or maybe it is true. either way, it's very sad to see that he didn't perform well this time.
If memes controlled the public discourse then Sanders would be dominating the primary right now. If Biden expects Sanders supporters to vote for him purely because his pitch is "I'm the best guy to beat Trump" and they don't turn out for him, maybe he should have done more to reach out to them and win them over.
I honestly think the majority of people who support Sanders will end up voting for Biden in the General. On the other hand if Biden loses because he didn't think it was worthwhile to do more outreach to Sanders supporters, I'm personally going to drag every person here that acted like assholes towards Sanders supporters when the should have been criticizing Biden for not doing more to win them over.
And it's rich that you're criticizing Sanders supporters for lying. Biden lies too, but that doesn't stop anyone from not giving a shit.
Both him and Menaker really showed their asses in this primary
if biden being so easy to criticize makes him lose the election, he should get the blame for not listening to the criticism and changing, not the people trying to make him do better
Except, what I am saying is all the memes are flat out false hoods.
Also, Biden IS changing to criticism. He's already to Hillary's left and is taking plans from Warren and Sanders.
If Steve Mnuchin is serious about predicting a 20% unemployment rate, then even the stimulus the republicans are considering aren't close to being enough. it has to be awful to be a legitimate economist working w/ republicans who just want to do the bare minimum.
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