It is not enough to be right.
I feel like I’ve been screaming this for most of my adult life, but rarely has it been a more important idea than over the past four years.
Anti-vaxers are wrong. Trump supporters are wrong. Billionaires are wrong. People dying for lack of insurance is wrong.
But again, it is not enough to be right.
(What’s that Elizabeth Bruenig? Your column is actually headlined “Bernie Sanders Was Right“? Huh.)
There is going to be a lot of ink spilled — pixels darkened? — over Bernie Sanders’ second straight presidential primary loss, and there are going to be about four good takes and a billion bad ones all falling along the lines you’d anticipate: Who’d vote for some crazy lefty?!?! vs. der Dolchstoßlegende by the Illuminati-tier DNC.
I’m not here to offer a take. But it is beyond time to look at Bernie Sanders and the left with the sort of clear-eyed rationality that has escaped many of his supporters over the past few years.
Let’s start with a spicy meatball: At some point we need to ask just how good a candidate Bernie Sanders is.
I know I’m a broken record on this, but this is not about his correctness on the issues. However, unwavering devotion and a crotchety attitude are things that are beloved by people who already agree with you and aren’t necessarily warm welcomes for everyone else. We (rightly) mock Joe Biden’s gauzy “Let’s all come together” bullshit as nonsense, but look around. That shit works! And frankly, I want a candidate who can work on that level and doesn’t seem like it’s beneath them to grovel for votes.
I hate that perception matters that much, but that’s the world in which we live. I know that Sanders believes in a genuinely better world for the non-rich and that is more than enough for me, but it is not enough for everyone. The left at large needs to ask itself how Hillary Clinton can be such a terrible candidate by losing to Trump and that Biden is a sunsetting joke — and Bernie wasn’t remotely close to beating either one of them in a primary.
If your only answer to that is “the media” or “the DNC” or “voters are dumb” then I am extremely ready to hear from you about how those things are going to change in any meaningful way between now and 2024.
The sort of revolution Sanders believes we need would take a lot more than just the Oval Office. Even if Bernie won in November, he would have faced a metric fuckton of opposition, the sort of static that would have made the tea party’s racism against Obama seem like a goddamn love note. We know that Democrats are barely capable of hanging together when they agree; even a narrow House and Senate majority would have been unlikely to hold the line for the proposals Sanders would have thrown their way.
The reality is that the climb is a hell of a lot higher than Sanders winning the nomination. If anything, to accept that as the goal is to swallow the shitty modern political wisdom that Congress is useless and the only power is in the unitary executive or the corporate firewall judiciary. And for what it’s worth, Bernie clearly bought into that — he ran for president twice, yet he’s never really been able to build a coalition in his many years in the House and Senate. Tough to win political power if you can’t convince people to join you.
Which brings us to the most clarifying moment of the Sanders 2020 campaign: The Elizabeth Warren debacle.
I believe that he really tried not to attack her. I am sure his campaign staff did their best to pass the message along. And it should have been a slam dunk to bring over her voters to the other progressive candidate in the race.
But when you have some of your loudest public voices screaming that competing in a primary against Bernie is a crime against nature … I just don’t know what to tell you. Even if you don’t believe in the existence of Bernie Bros, the snake emoji army sure made themselves noticeable in a hurry, and they’re still real bitter at Warren, who also would have been the most progressive nominee of my lifetime.
Yes, she’s a capitalist and he’s not; there is a clear ideological difference there. Yet the bigger obstacle seems to be of strategy, where he has spent years being the outsider screaming at the system, and she has tried to work in the system to make reforms. Considering how much the Democratic Party has pulled toward Bernie in the past decade, it’s fair to say both ways have their place. But in terms of accomplishments, she has the CFPB — which she got after butting heads with centrist Democrats and being such a nuisance they had her run it — and he has a lot of really great dead amendments. (That Trump gutted the CFPB shows not that it was useless, but stands as a reminder that legislative power matters and lasts longer than executive acts.)
If this comes across as harsh on Bernie, please know that I am also deeply disappointed. Unlike the dead-eyed centrist ghouls who would have us believe good things aren’t possible, I want what he’s selling. I want it desperately, and I want it tomorrow.
But if we put on blinders and start throwing hands at would-be allies because we fall in love with a candidate, we’ll never get anywhere.
We’ll be consigned to Biden after Biden if we can’t find a better way to make our case other than saying we’re right.
It’s kind of like every single promotion available at every single job, well, ever. Do they go to the best person for the job? Rarely. Mostly they go to the person who manages to look like the best person for the job to the people making the decision. Then, if that person is smart, they hire the best person to handle it for them. Let’s hope that happens here.
I also think one of the points you made gets glossed over a lot. Orange Imbecile aside, presidents are not dictators. To get Medicare for All or Free College for All, a president typically has to persuade both houses of Congress and the majority of voters (the ones voting for those Congresspeople) that it’s a good idea. Bernie doesn’t look to me like he has that skill set. Biden sort of does, but it’s aimed in the wrong directions. Warren could’ve done it, but … well.
Finally, the battle isn’t over. It’s not going to stop with Biden. We will see MFA and CFA *unless* we give control of the country back to Republicans. MFA and CFA are the endgame — to get there we’ve got to eliminate voter suppression and disenfranchisement. That’s the fight now. It’s just that simple. If the people can make their will known, we’ll get to the right place. If we allow Republicans to continue silencing voters, we’ll never, ever, ever get there, no matter how many Bernies there are.
I don’t think I care about “why” anymore. That seems to be a never ending death spiral of a question.
What I do care about, and what I’m not sure about is, what next?
I hate the “Bad man bad!” arguments I’ve seen against Trump and republicans in general. I try to avoid letting feeling alone by the guiding factor in my political thinking. There are plenty of justifiable, logical reasons to condemn the lot of them.
But then, a lot of those reasons apply to democratic representatives too.
Some people on The Left (whatever that is) have gone so far as to say that there is no difference between Biden and Trump. While I strongly disagree with that I still see a dilemma. Trump represents that immediate threat. He’s the venomous snake you encounter in the road. Obviously there, obviously dangerous, there’s an impulse to respond there which is visceral and instinctual. But what of Biden?
We are not good at assessing long term risk even when the outcomes of such risks can be much more deleterious to us. This difficulty in factoring slower threats into our political calculus is apparent when you see the argument about “How many people did communism kill?” Beyond being a massive oversimplification of several concepts, it also belies an inability or unwillingness to ask the same question of our dominant systems. How many people has capitalism killed? How many will it kill in the future? Is it even capitalism at fault when someone dies due to food, housing, or medical insecurity? Regardless of your answer, it should be obvious how complex this sort of question actually is.
How does this relate to Biden? A lot of the responses I’ve seen from people supporting Biden revolve around an analogy of “Needing to right the ship.” But what does that actually mean? Biden represents, presumably, a return to the “Before Trump” times. As I recall, those times were not so great for a lot of people and were on their way to getting worse. As in, the conditions BT are the conditions which made Trump possible. This, then, is the slow threat. A retreat back down the path away from the snake in the road, with only the hope that the snake won’t be there when we get back to that same point in the path.
It’s the complacency of thought here that has me worried. Great, the snake is no longer an immediate threat. You know what wasn’t happening before the snake? Any kind of vigilance to make sure we could fend off snakes or better, ensure there would be no snake in the first place. To mix metaphors a bit, the ship was not right in the first place and we were always going to encounter the snake. “Righting the ship” just means a return to bad times and almost ensures another snake. Possibly a worse one.
I don’t have any clear answer for what to do next beyond, continue to advocate for socialist ideas. In the political sphere I’m at a bit of a cross roads. Trump and Biden are not the same (though the overlap is striking). But the threats they both represent are very real. I’m worried that in ousting the bad man, we’re opening ourselves up to the same complacency which resulted in the bad man in the first place. I have no framework for this. I have no idea how to maximize the good here. Or if that’s even possible.
As Hello America’s tag line goes; fuck.
I have four words: Ruth Bader Fucking Ginsburg.
Here’s your framework, and I’m going to steal a couple of catchphrases from Jim Wright: Good (or in this case, better than the status quo) is not the enemy of perfect. If you (the collective you) are/were a Bernie supporter, I’m sorry that you will not be getting your unicorn. But that doesn’t mean you turn your nose up at the pony. Accept the fucking pony and fight for the unicorn again in four years. Because Ruth Bader Fucking Ginsburg is 87 fucking years old. Steven Breyer is 82. Clarence Thomas is 72. Alito is 70. The next President could guarantee a conservative lock on the Supreme Court for several decades.
I’m not yelling at you. I’m yelling at the both-parties-are-the-same, if-I-can’t-have-Bernie-I’m-voting-for-Trump-to-burn-it-all-down douchebags, because the two possible outcomes are not remotely the same. At all. I mean fuck, the foreign policy implications alone are just staggering.
I’m going to drink some more beer now.
This is a huge, huge, huge difference between the left and the right, and something I might write about later.
This argument right here? This totally shuts down dissent on the right because they understand what they’re trying to accomplish with the judiciary. (Edit to add: Trump went from “uh oh” to “palatable” to the powers of the GOP the second they figured out he wouldn’t give a shit about judicial nominations and would just submit Federalist Society lists straight to the Senate.)
A lot of Bernie supporters are skeptical that Biden will put someone they find palatable on the bench, and fair play to them, because he’s not going to put an anti-corporatist criminal-rights advocate on the Supreme Court. But to make the argument that Merrick Garland is the same as Brett Kavanaugh just because Garland isn’t as pro-worker as they are, is like, c’mon. Take the double and try to hit a homer next time up.
“Righting the ship” just means a return to bad times and almost ensures another snake. Possibly a worse one.”
Dear god, ^^^THIIIIISSSSSS!!!!!^^^^
If we can get Biden in, but there isn’t a MASSIVE push on his administration, and also on the House & Senate to pass laws preventing the sort of oligarchic presidency we’ve been seeing over the last 3(+) presidents now, we are 100% FUCKED as a Republic.
Because Dolt45, for all the damage he has done (and LORD has it been considerable!), has been a bumbling ignoramus a good 85% of the time.
But he’s *also* shown every wannabe dictator, exactly how easy a national… let’s be real here, a goddamn national coup would be.
Traditionally, we think of a coup as something that comes with a lot of physical violence. And they OFTEN do. But there is another way to describe it (from Merriam Webster** online):
“a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics”
Note, the “sudden and decisive” part.
This was the reason why–to *me* anyway–Bloomberg was fucking TERRIFYING.
Because he was every inch as terrible in potential as Trump has been, BUT BLOOMBERG WAS ACTUALLY COMPETENT AS A BUSINESSMAN.
Even for as terrible, destructive, and goddamn DEADLY as Trump and his incompetent crew have been?
They’ve BEEN a bunch of bublmbling incompetents!!!
They’ve been caught out, and had to backtrack. Or they’ve been found out and had to step down/resign/decline nomination (YES, I know *plenty* have gotten into positions, but remember the other terrible ones who WERE stymied–those are legion now!)
If we manage to get Joe in, but we DON’T have the power to set *real* teeth into legislation preventing another Trump…
All we have done,is to show the competent autocrat/the next dictator *How to take over EVERYTHING*
And we, and the world, are fucked for good.
Because had Trump been half has competent as his ego claims he is, *he*–with the help of Bannon, Prince, Thiel, And the TrumpCo kids, et al. would have done exactly that.
Literally the only thing which has saved us this far, is the fact that Trump is a malignant narcissist, and his need for admiration & adulation means he telegraphs every move.
** https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coup%20d%27%C3%A9tat
Bernie’s campaign was doomed from the start but not because of his progressive ideas but all because of money in politics. The funny thing is now the same corporate media idiots that did everything they could to disparage him are praising him (now that he is safely out of the race). My only hope for our future is the movement he started has some loud, smart voices out there like the squad, Jayapal, Khanna, Pocan, etc. If Biden picks someone more progressive as a VP, maybe we have a shot at real change down the line. My biggest fear is that I don’t see any way we even have a fair election next year or any year with what the Republicans have done to the courts and Moscow Mitch knowing that we no longer have rules or investigations. We need the virus to take out some of these fuckers NOW!
I have some thoughts –
Although, I’m as progressive as the sky is blue – right now we all need to focus on is getting Trump out and reclaiming the Senate. Then, the courts – all of them.
Society supposedly has a liberal bias – I know everyone isn’t as progressive as I am or most of us here.
If we can get Uncle Joe into the high office – every person who is not a rethuglican needs to do everything in their power to make it successful and keep the idiots from ever getting into power again.
That is a huge job.
There is so much to fix – it is overwhelming.
We need more Elizabeth Warrens and AOCs.
We need more Bernies.
We have to keep pushing that needle to the left whenever possible.
Uncle Joe isn’t the hero we need or deserve, but he’s the one we have.
We all need to get on board and organize the messaging.
Republicans have power because we let them.
Vigilance is key – hopefully we have learned our lesson.
Truthfully, I wasn’t paying attention before Trump, I am now.
“Uncle Joe isn’t the hero we need or deserve, but he’s the one we have.”
There you go. Bernie and Warren aren’t in the race any more, but their ideas ARE. Biden’s already talking about expanding Medicare and forgiving student loan debt. Why? Because those are major progressive issues and Biden needs progressives on board. And he’s going to be hostage to a second term, so if he gets elected, he’s got to push for progressive ideas if he wants reelection.
There is a strain of thought — and it’s not wrong — that Biden, though naturally conservative, generally finds his way to the middle of where the party is on issues, and right now the party is moving in the correct direction.
He talks a lot of bullshit about being ahead of the curve on gay marriage, but to his credit, his loud mouth did help push Obama to go public on it. Admittedly, his economic policies are less good, but the party isn’t what it was in 2000 or 2008 or even 2016. There’s going to be a lot more pressure (and huge thanks here to Bernie for this) for him to followthrough on some decent stuff.
Yeah I am with you. “Trump bad!” is not enough to save our country but the Republicans are in the middle of a coup where you will not have the opportunity to vote in a real election ever again if they complete it. It is a super emergency to get them out of power. Once we have stopped the bleeding, we can work toward best practices for healing.
Let’s keep in mind that, until Pete and Amy dropped out literally 1-2 days before Super Tuesday (with Minnesota still available for Klobuchar), Sanders had won two contests outright and had a statistical tie with Pete for another; and he was widely seen as the person with the strongest chance at the nomination. The only thing that changed that was the curious timing of the dropouts just prior to Super Tuesday. I wish to remind everyone at this moment that I am a Warren supporter and I voted for her. I also know that the DNC did actually fuck with the Sanders campaign in much more overt ways in 2016–and we have DNC people who corroborated it.
Now, that being said, I also wish to point out that even if Warren won the White House, she would very likely have taken the same course that Sanders would have: starting with a pretty far left position, and winding up with an actual compromise to get it through Congress. What we will absolutely have with Uncle Joe is him giving up by starting with the compromise position and winding up on the right just as if we still had a Republican in the White House. That is why someone like Biden or Clinton is so dangerous–because they actively don’t care enough to fight like hell from the left, so they’re perfectly fine ending on the right as long as they can tell people they “got things done.”
Also, again Warren supporter here, she didn’t help matters by refusing to endorse him after she dropped out. She’s very smart and knows damned well that he was the last chance the country would have at moving things closer to her end of the spectrum. Yet, she was pissed off and refused to endorse. That hurt him a lot because it was a tacit suggestion to her supporters to go vote for Biden instead.
Also it is important to remember that Sanders is actually a key figure in the Senate. When shit got real with some tough votes, Democratic leadership went to Sanders to work things out on more than one occasion. He spits fire on stage, but in the chamber he’s as pragmatic as anyone.
What will change between now and 2024? Nothing. Get used to it. This country has had a few gigantic political revolutions in its history, but we’re not even close to another one at this point. I wouldn’t expect another one in my lifetime, and in terms of a revolution leftward, maybe never. So instead I vote in all those off cycle elections and I vote my conscience in the primaries–because that’s what primaries are for.
Why are primaries for voting your conscious instead of for trying to wield electoral power?
…not trying to put words in butcher’s mouth but for myself I’d argue that primaries (by design) are to some extent a proving ground that fails to function appropriately or intelligibly unless people use them to vote for their actually-preferred-platform since it’s the only place in the process that encourages availability of a choice of distinct platforms to vote for that aren’t merely one of two party lines, more or less…at least to the extent that there’s essentially an industry’s worth of people claiming to be able to provide analysis extrapolated from the last primary season to provide triangulation & differentiation tips to candidates in the next one
…if we treat the entire process as an exercise in funneling the odds towards second-guessing the eventual two-horse race based on pragmatism alone we can jump through all the same hoops but at that point possibly the last remaining bit of the electoral process that isn’t entirely divorced from the role it would have by design goes by the board & I’m not certain we’d be any worse off if the whole thing were decided algorithmically without any actual voting by actual voters
…pragmatism is a valuable thing in a world of realpolitik but at some level any electoral system is based in idealism & if you don’t leave some of that stuff room to breathe somewhere in the thing your system is effectively busted beyond repair & the results likely to be uniformly trending towards the sort of bad places that litter the history books
…or at any rate it looks very much that way from where I sit?
“not trying to put words in butcher’s mouth but for myself I’d argue that primaries (by design) are to some extent a proving ground that fails to function appropriately or intelligibly unless people use them to vote for their actually-preferred-platform”
Adding on to Jake’s line of thought here, too.
By voting *my* conscience during the primary, in a state like Minnesota, where we have *both* the primary AND the Caucus system, I feel like those of us who DON’T typically have the time/ability to caucus send party leaders a message.
When we, as primary voters pick a Warren or Sanders, or a Wellasone, we’re reminding our party leaders that we WANT ______ to be taken into account, as they build the party platform, and that *without* ________, they won’t have the support they need to build winning coalitions–even within our OWN party.
If the D-side doesn’t have that hard push to the left, from folks at the polls, the Bidens (and Perez’s!) of the party will think that business-folks’ “Republican-Lite” democratic party is what the “true” leanings of the D party are.
But when we throw them a Bernie, Warren, Wellstone, AOC, Pressley, Porter, Tlaib, etc.–who then gets out and acting like a cockleburr & rubbing on sore spots for the folks who’d like “safe & boring,” the folks who are sending the delegates to the convention KNOW they have to throw in things that the left-leaning voters want, too
The Primary “vote your heart” thing,is ALL about convention delegates, party-platform building, and also often about down-ballot issues & support.
And it’s a good way to build up the grassroots folks who turn state houses & senates from one party to the other.
Because if primaries were for what you suggest they are for, then Hillary Clinton would have been the nominee in 2008. No way a black man with an A-Rab sounding name who talks about change gets the nomination.
But voting for Obama in that primary was a valid wielding of power. He was the strongest non-Clinton candidate. There was a plausible argument that he could win. But when there’s 37 candidates and only 2 or 3 have traction on election day, voting for one who doesn’t is just throwing out your vote.
It was only “valid” because he won Iowa, which nobody expected. If people took this argument that only the “electable” candidates should be supported going into Iowa in 2008, Clinton would have walked away with it because she took every single poll in 2007 and January of 2008. Again, I do think that primaries are for the wielding of political power–which is why people need to vote their conscience and see what happens (and hope that those primaries are actually free and fair in the process).
I’m not saying to think of electability and only that. I’m saying who can plausibly win a given race. For example, if it’s election day and candidate A is polling at 35%, B at 25%, and C at 20%, I’d say all three have legitimate cases. But if it’s A 45%, B 40%, C 3%, only A and B can win.
Before that Iowa caucus that Obama won, he was winning the poll there 32% to 25% to 24%.
Before South Carolina, voting for Joe Biden could just as easily be seen as throwing away a vote. Until that point, Biden came in 4th in Iowa with 6% of the vote, dead last in NH with 8.4%, and 2nd in Nevada with 17.6%–which was half of Sanders’ haul. At no point in those first races could he have been called the strongest–or even viable–candidate. Yet, he wins one state that literally everyone expected him to win, and suddenly Joe Biden is the Strongest Candidate and everyone else is expected to clear the field for him. That’s BS. If anything, all it really did was make him viable as a candidate once again, but certainly not the Clear Front Runner with the race in as much flux as it was at the time.
But he always had national polling that was strong and a viable path. At no point was he polling like he couldn’t do anything.
I think this came down to the mainstream forces in the party and politics doing everything in their power to stop the scary outsider. From the constant petty bullshit the TV channels pulled, to the coordinated drop out and endorsements, to the constant discussion about how the most diverse support base was just white folks (looking at you, The Root), to the complete erasure of his Judaism so they could call him just another old white guy. But that’s politics. I’ve said from the start that political power is never handed over without a fight (except when the Dems are giving it to the Republicans). It’s not going to be different in 4 years, or 8 years, or 28 years. That doesn’t mean give up or take your ball and go home.
I think when it comes to Warren it’s important to keep one thing in mind: she’s had two presidential primaries since she’s been a senator and hasn’t endorsed once. From my perspective, that’s cowardly. In both cycles she could have made a huge impact for either side, and chose not to. If she wasn’t going to support the candidate closest to her ideologically, she could have at least traded her endorsement for something substantive. I just can’t see a legitimate reason for her not to endorse.
She also burned a lot of good will with people who should be her natural allies. For nothing. She spent more time attacking Bernie at the debates than the person who she supposedly got into politics to oppose. I refuse to believe the rumors that she’s such a petty person that she did it for personal reasons. I just don’t get it.
But at the end of the day, the Democratic party is at least pretending to embrace much more progressive positions as a result of having had to deal with Bernie. And I’d much rather be fighting to pull Biden left than be fighting to stop Trump from destroying the world.
…I get the feeling that you & I maybe wouldn’t entirely agree about the endorsement thing – sure it might have helped Bernie but I don’t think it (or anything else) gets him over the line given the bigger picture
…& I think that calculation looks very different in the profit/loss stakes if you’re Warren rather than Bernie so for my money you’re miscasting that particular charge…but I don’t feel any great yearning to litigate it since it seems broadly pointless at this juncture
…I will say that I wasn’t surprised by the way his primary bid seemed to get hobbled by his own side…it happened before & it’s basically part of his brand…but I was surprised that the DNC didn’t get behind Warren…& I don’t think it can be argued that the brakes they put on Bernie’s chances didn’t get applied to her every chance they got so I guess what I’m curious about is what you think that all would have looked like if Bernie had been the bigger man & not run in the first place in favor of driving his supporters towards her?
…maybe it all goes the same way but I can’t shake the possibility in my mind that maybe in that timeline we’d be looking at Warren in Biden’s spot now & I have to admit that the pragmatist in me is more than a little pissed at Bernie for not staying out of it…which may or may not be fair but certainly makes all the stuff I’ve read about how she done him dirty seem like they deliberately miss the point they claim to be making
[on reflection that reads considerably more pointed than I intended it to so I’m just going to add that I explicitly do not intend it as thumbing my nose at your opinion or your position vis a vis Bernie & Liz &/or pragmatism in the electoral process…fwiw]
I don’t agree with Manny on much, but I think he’s right on point regarding Warren’s endorsement–or lack thereof. Would it have pushed Bernie over the line? Maybe, maybe not. But what it certainly would have done is push a bunch of Warren’s supporters to vote for him in the ensuing contests, which would give their side of the political spectrum more leverage against the corporate wing. At the absolute minimum, she could have traded her endorsement of Biden with some serious policy concessions on his part. I can’t state what her reasoning is, but from here it smacks of her taking the whole thing personally, rather than considering what she could do for the country–which, last I checked, was one of the reasons why she was running for President. Were the attacks on her personal? You bet they were. Should she have set her anger aside and done something constructive? Damned straight.
Also, I was actually happy that they were both running because it started to give the impression that these political ideas were becoming more palatable in the mainstream. Otherwise, I fear that if Bernie hadn’t run this time, that Warren would have looked like the Dennis Kucinich of the 2020 primary.
I get this line of thinking but I think it’s sort of foolish to think that Warren, polling at 10%, would somehow be the toppling domino to stop Biden who suddenly had a 20-point lead on Bernie nationally.
As I wrote: She works from within the system. Endorsing Bernie when the headwinds were blowing against him is the sort of beautiful “West Wing” moment that people imagine how they want politics to be; the reality is she made the right call by not casting her lot on a doomed voyage. (FWIW: I wanted her to endorse him. But I see the very valid reasons not to do so. Moreover, it’s fuckin’ bizarre to me that presume an endorsement means everyone then does it. I know Bernie people who didn’t vote for Hillary — I have to assume we all do!)
…that makes sense to me but it makes me think I ought to have been clearer about how wildly untethered from reality my “what if” was intended to be
…rather than fondly imagining that Warren could convert her low-scoring support at the stage the debate stages were looking less crowded into a late-surge to overtake Biden I was instead wondering how the whole proposition might have looked to the bits of the DNC who felt Bernie was too scary & Joe was the right sort of reassuring were Bernie never in it & moreover had announced his intention to support & endorse Warren from the outset rather than campaign himself
…it’s very much a nonsense proposition but I genuinely wonder if under those circumstances the belief that she could draw on some support from the ill-served constituency that naturally gravitate Bernie-wards while also literally outsmarting Joe every day of the week & twice on Sundays might not have had the DNC prepared to hold its nose & push her agenda rather than hope it suffocated fast enough to look like natural causes?
…apparently this is the sort of crap my mind foists on me in lieu of useful things like sleep so I guess misery loves company or something?
It makes sense. It’s a *real* interesting what-if on Warren’s trajectory without Bernie, but I kinda feel like he would have done about the same with or without her. He kept all his support from 2016, but he didn’t broaden it much.
The difference this time is that Trump was an existential nightmare then and now he’s a clear and present danger. Party voters wanted to back someone they think is more palatable to their imagined undecided voter. Which, imo, is wrong! And a bad way to vote! But it was always going to be tough for a woman (buh hillary!) and a leftist (buh the undecided never trumper!) and a change agent (buh we gotta beat trump!)
Speaking of interesting what-ifs: A lot of people drop the “Bernie could have beat Trump in 2016” which I buy. But it’s weird that nobody says “Biden could have beat Trump in 2016” when that, to me, actually feels like a way easier layup.
Biden would have absolutely smashed Trump in 2016. But then I think Clinton is the only dem who could possibly have lost to him.
…I think it’s true that Biden in ’16 could likely have taken the vote over DJT…& at the time I’m pretty sure I’d have expected it to be a no-brainer just like I thought she was when that was the other option…because like a lot of folks with half a brain & a naive belief that most people are decent enough & smart enough not to be taken in by the likes of Trump when the chips are down…I didn’t think there were enough assholes to outnumber the rest of us even in electoral college terms
…but they were…& now I’m an agnostic who wishes they were devout enough to think praying might do some good…because I don’t know if Joe is the horse I’d feel was safe money in this race…we know the field wasn’t level last time & this time around with all the extra turbulence the pandemic brings to the table I’m honestly more than a little scared about the fences still to be cleared in this race
“But it’s weird that nobody says “Biden could have beat Trump in 2016” when that, to me, actually feels like a way easier layup.”
A few of us have been saying that, since 2015…
But you’re RIGHT, there were VERY few of us😕
ETA, and I worry that my statements back then (and since!) of “Biden’s best chance was 2016” will come back to haunt me in perpetuity.
Because I *do* honestly believe that Joe had the goodwill of enough folks on the D-side, was “central” enough that he would’ve pulled many of the Rick Wilson/R. W. Painter/Bush-type Republicans, *and* there was the ability to chalk up gaffes & foibles to grief over losing Beau… LOTS of folks would have given him passes on lots of mistakes.
AND Joe’s missteps would have made him look like a goddamned Fred Astaire compared to Trump’s lurching & lumbering clodhopping.
This whole “Bernie people didn’t vote for Hillary” narrative makes me absolutely crazy. The reality is this: only 12% of Sanders voters supported Trump in the general. Do you know how many Clinton voters defected to John McCain in 2008? 16%. Of course, nobody likes to talk about that ugly fact because Barack Obama brought out enough minority voter support to overcome the Clinton voters who were either too closeted-Republican or too racist to vote for him. You’re always going to have bleed across the aisle between the primary and the general, but a 16 percent swing is huge.
Further, we also know that The Other Swing Voter was a much more significant share of the electorate in those three key states, and nothing has changed in the past four years to change that. If those voters didn’t have to deal with all of the voter suppression, AND if they had a candidate that they thought actually gave a shit about them enough to try and overcome those suppression tactics, then we would likely have seen a different outcome in 2016.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/other-swing-voter/604474/
In short, there are a shitload of variables to consider regarding the 2016 election, so blaming it on Sanders or Stein or the Russians is simply oversimplifying to the point of irrelevance.
…as time has gone on I think I’ve come around to thinking that all of those are still relevant in the sense of having been of material benefit to him in ways that it would serve all of us better if they hadn’t…& by extension that it’s worth considering the extra mileage required if we’re not to wind up endlessly weighing the extent to which third parties introduced enough variables for lighting to strike twice
…but at the same time I still think I agree with you
When there’s a million but fors, it’s easy for people to latch on to one.
My thing with the endorsement is that she could at least have traded it to Biden for something valuable. That would have completely ended things for Bernie. I wouldn’t have liked her choice to do it, but I would have at least understood and respected it.
…I get that…& I’m not presuming I understand what really prompted her to duck the endorsement challenge but I guess my prevailing assumption pegs it as having more to do with a calculus involving where she stands within the party hierarchy more than how it plays with the wider electorate?
…maybe it’s an odd combination of naive & cynical but I can see the cost in terms of in-house capital looks too steep to swing her to a Bernie endorsement & the Biden camp didn’t have the necessary incentive to provide whatever ask would have made that worth her her while…but it could just as easily be that refusing to nominate either reads as a tacit admission that an endorsement of Bernie burns some of that capital for no real gain but a refusal to do Biden the courtesy is as much of a middle finger as she’s prepared to give the DNC?
…if she’d looked to be holding a few more cards I think I’d see it differently but she gained so much less traction than it seemed to me her pitch warranted that overall it feels like an overly harsh criticism to characterize not endorsing either candidate as being a petty decision grounded in pique…which is not to say that’s what you personally are doing so much as it’s something I find myself thinking when that charge is levied against her
Thing is, she’s refused to endorse twice now in primaries where her endorsement was highly sought. That’s just wasting power. And we elect people to wield power on our behalf.
An endorsement ages like wine. It’s got a point where it’s most valuable, but after that it becomes bad vinegar. And yet the image I keep thinking of is Zoidbergs sandwich.
…yeah…I don’t know exactly where but somewhere along here is where I predicted that your thinking & mine diverge on the endorsement thing…not in an I’m-right-so-you-can’t-be way or anything…just in that I read that decision on her part differently when viewed as an exercise in wielding influence & overall I’m content to respect it in the basis that she talks some pretty convincing talk about thinking things through & if I can’t see all her working it doesn’t mean I don’t believe it’s there all the same
That’s why I refuse to believe the nonsense about it being personal or that she just needed time for self care.
“I think this came down to the mainstream forces in the party and politics doing everything in their power to stop the scary outsider.”
I agree a lot with this.
And I *also* feel like that’s even MORE reason for folks to vote their heart/conscience at the primary…
Because when the folks in charge can SEE that they won, but X% of their voters’ *first* choice was ______, they know they have to keep those voters happy, or they’ll sit things out (see also: 2016).
It’s like the old (but TRUE!) business adage, “It’s FAR easier & far less work, to keep the customers you *have* and earn their loyalty, than it is to develop/find an entirely new customer.”