As we approach the *checks notes* 3,000,000th year of the endless slog towards the November 2020 president elections, it strikes me that their are two kinds of voters right now.
1.) People who are so drained and tired of the process that they don’t have the energy to be worried about Bernie Sanders winning the nomination, regardless of their feelings, because even if he is flawed, he would still be an infinitely better President that Papaya Pol Pot ever could hope to be, as if Biff could hope do anything other than make money and fuck his own daughter, and
2.) People who are so terrified of not putting Joe Biden on the ticket that they are currently having colossal, epic meltdowns over the fact that Bernie has (functionally) won both Iowa and New Hampshire, and polling is suggesting that he’s closing the gaps in South Carolina and Nevada, and it seems like he’s in a good position to get out of Super Tuesday quite nicely, who are predicting the literal fucking apocalypse if he wins the nomination.
I am not the world’s biggest Bernie Sanders fan, nor would I ever pretend to be. I could spend several dense paragraphs explaining exactly what is I don’t like about his particular approach to politics, systemic racism, wealth inequality and a whole bunch of other topics.
But here is something I do know for sure; panicking about Bernie Sanders becoming the Democratic nominee out of fear that the public nominating a perfectly good politician who is Not Donald Trump is about the stupidest fucking thing you can do at this point, and for all the talk of unifying the party, there’s a stubborn amount of people still clinging to the dumb headed belief that throwing their support behind a guy who’s most socialist policies are essentially 1.) less people should die, 2.) less people should be drowned in student loan debt, and 3.) rich people should pay more taxes is some sort of electoral death knell is wrong-minded and stupid. A smarter, better, less openly corrupt and monied party might realize that moving to the left ever so slightly on issues that aren’t even issues in most of the first world nations on Earth could be a net positive.
Instead, house Democrats are freaking the fuck out that nominating Bernie Sanders would be The End of Everything As We Know It.
“I’m a liberal, so I like Bernie and I don’t have anything against him. I’m just a realist,” said Rep. Juan Vargas (D-Calif.), who has backed Bloomberg. “The reality is, he’s not going to play well. And Trump will easily be able to label him as a socialist… and we’re going to get absolutely wiped out.”
Politico
That is an actual member of actual Congress actually speculating that if a perfectly fine candidate wins the nomination, the Democrats will lose. That kind of a thing permeates center-left thinking. The focus, as it were, is never quite on winning, or on attempting to win; only on the myriad of ways they could fail, if they don’t adhere to the tried and true Way of Doing Things ‘Round Here.
According to Politico, more House Democrats are beginning to come around to the idea of backing former New York City mayor-who-all-New-Yorkers-Hated and billionaire crapbasket Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg has slammed the airwaves with a metric fuckton of advertising, and as Biden and Buttigieg faulter, the Centrist powers-that-be are desperate to find the average-ist white dude they can put on a national stage that won’t do something as radical and beyond the pale as *checks notes* suggesting health care is a basic and fundamental human right and maybe we should stop letting people die because they can’t afford health care.
Bloomberg is an empty suit at best and a billionaire opportunist in the same vain as Trump. His rise in the polls is almost completely attributed to the fact that people have now heard of him, and that’s only because it’s literally impossible to avoid him at this point. Throwing support behind this dipshit because supporting Sanders could “lose you an election” is like deciding to eat horse manure because you don’t like strawberry flavored ice cream. Yeah, strawberry flavored ice cream might not be your favorite, but the other option you have is to literally eat shit.
If Joe Biden, or Pete Buttigieg, or Elizabeth Warren (who I align with far more than Bernie Sanders) had come out of Iowa and New Hampshire with two wins, they would undoubtedly be treated like the frontrunners. Instead, we have mouth-breathers like Chris “Holy Fuckin’ Shit, How Is This Screaming Mediocre Ass White Dude Still Making Six Figures for Talking Bullshit” Matthews on air talking about how Bernie may be a literal, actual communist and Chuck “Such A Lack of Space and Airtime I Can’t Be Bothered to Come Up With a Better Nickname for Him” Todd calling Bernie’s online supporters “digitial brownshirts” and insisting that, in spite of winning Iowa and New Hampshire and closing his gaps in polling in other states, that Bernie can’t be the frontrunner.
It really isn’t hard to see why Bernie’s most ardent and vocal supporters might think there’s a conspiracy to keep him from winning the Presidency, when the Democratic party apparatus and the liberal-leaning cable news channel (PRO TIP: Don’t watch cable news, it’s fucking garbage) go out of their way to make it known how much they don’t want the guy to win. It’s confirmation bias, sure, but they don’t have to make it so fucking easy for them.
I mean, they’ve got me, a person who has proudly proclaimed to not be about that Bernie life numerous times, openly defending him. There is a concerted effort being made to tie the idea of Sanders winning to a surefire loss. It’s almost as if there’s a portion of the Democratic party who doesn’t want to do that whole “respecting the will of the voters” thing that they say they want if the guy who wins isn’t their guy!
The will of the voters is being exercised though. People like Bernie, or at least they like him more than the other candidates. At least one set of caucus voters and one set of primary voters seems to think he can win. Bernie polls a little better every day. The dude is, for all intents and purposes, the motherfucking frontrunner. And for all the talk of restoring decorum and balance and all that other shit, it seems like people still want to re-litigate 20-fucking-16 and get their petty little jabs in.
Maybe — and hear me out, because the primary is long and this might sound crazy — maybe we shouldn’t pre-emptively slam a potential nominee because his thoughts and opinions don’t align 100% with our own.
I know, I can tell that your pearls are clutched as hard as you can clutch them, Democrats. But the key to beating Trump might just be not acting like a bunch of children, putting your silly personal beefs the fuck aside, and standing the fuck together to rally voter support and get this tin-pot dictator out of the highest fucking office in the goddamn country. Maybe, just maybe, ya’ll could just shut the fuck up for once and do what’s best for the greater good.
It’s a lot to ask, I’m sure.
I don’t agree that people wouldn’t be losing their shit in a similar way if Warren had won. I think you’d see a lot of this same bullshit.
Nevertheless, this is absolute bullshit. The Democratic Party is so full of spineless, frightened wankers who are terrified of change that its disgusting. This isn’t anything new…they were the same way 12 years ago when Obama was running (albeit, to a lesser degree). It’s just that now they’re so clearly stabbing themselves in the foot (and then pulling the knife out and doing it again) that it’s making the rest of us crazy.
If the Democratic Party somehow manages to nominate Bloomberg, of all people….I’ll vote against Trump by checking his box but otherwise I’ll be … fuck there’s no words for how apoplectic I’ll be.
The thing is, I don’t really think Bloomberg has an actual, real shot. His upshot in the polls and even among black voters is based purely on the fact that 1.) he’s spent a shitton of cash to run ads basically every-fucking-where, and 2.) people now know who he is. Of course an older black voter who watches cable news, sees Joe Biden faultering and is still answering a landline telephone is gonna go Bloomberg.
I say Warren would get less shit because there’s less animosity between her and the Powers That Be than there is Bernie and the Democratic Party in general. Still, throwing your weight behind a loser like Bloomberg, who probably couldn’t even win his own fucking state, is a colossally dumb move that is doomed to fucking backfire.
Oh, I think Bloomberg has an icecube’s chance in hell but the Democratic Party (leadership in particular) is such a clusterfuck that I’m well aware I could be totally wrong.
Yeah, I think Bloomberg is the flavor of the month because there’s no single centrist who is anywhere close to Bernie in terms of popularity. I still think it’ll be Pete; empty suit, not old, “outsider” experience. But so long as he and Biden and Klobberin’ Time share one lane, none of them are gonna catch Bernie and that opens the door for him as well as Bloomberg’s media blitz. But that shine wears off eventually; he’ll have to actually be for something other than “I’m the rich guy on TV.”
yeah, bloom isn’t going anywhere. hitting fatty on tv sure is nice but it doesn’t get you any votes. he’ll have to get in. and that won’t go as smoothly
The entire DNC is stuck in the early 90s. They think that any talk of raising any taxes is a death knell. THey are just completely tone deaf to what actually matters to the current electorate.
It’s cool to see Bernie winning pretty handily (so far). Harder to cover it up and deny. What isn’t cool is how fucking incompetent the Democratic party is. Holy shit, they’re really trying to look fucking stupid so hard.
…that’s some sound reasoning…or certainly sounds like it to me
…as others have pointed out at least part of Bloomberg’s apparent appeal – beyond the depressing fact that outspending your opponents in the advertising stakes translates directly to an advantage in the polling numbers – seems to be that he’s emphasizing the fact that he’s campaigning against donnie dotard
…if ultimately that’s where all that cash goes & he steps back in favor of a candidate that isn’t trying to out-trump trump so a different set of interests can buy out the keys to the ship of state then fair enough
…& yes, if it came down to it I’d sooner see him sworn in than round two of the current shit show…& yes, if I’m entirely honest I do think there are better options than Sanders
…but of the B team I’d be hard pressed to feel entirely confident in a process that spat out Bloomberg, Biden or Buttigieg as the final result…& with things being what they are I surely would like to have a bit of confidence in something sometime soon?
I think what I really don’t get is how – with the vast yawning gulf that presently exists where once was a mere aisle – the relatively minimal differences between the D-candidates somehow contain red lines for some voters…are these people really going to pick “more of this, please” over “literally whatever else is on offer”?
Breitbart seems pretty certain that Bloomberg is going to tap Hillary for his VP and they’re freaking out. So that’s funny, even if remotely close to true.
They’re already freaking over the hypothetical California-style gun control they’re going to do, the poor idiot children.
Agree with you absolutely. Bernie’s not my first choice, but backing a weasel like Bloomberg because of “elect-ability”? No.
No.
I dunno, it seems to me like the Dems (and the pundit class who back them) know exactly which side their bread is buttered on.
I don’t know that they’re acting stupidly so much as self-servingly.
Their anxieties are showing us who a lot of them really are. Not servants of the people is a quality (or lack thereof) as clear as day.
It’s arguably the smart thing to do in their position. To pretend like Sanders doesn’t exist, except when he does exist, in which case treat him like the second coming of Hitler while also being totally useless and ineffectual at the same time.
The whole Chris Matthews thing is the perfect summary of this sort of thinking. As in, methinks the pundit doth protest too much.
Party brass would much rather have a second Trump term than a first Sanders term if that’s what it came down to.
…sure can seem that way…& yet I still can’t get my head around how you add it all up to get there?
It’s less “Democrats” and more “party hacks who see an end to the gravy train if a real leftist got the levers of power.”
I have few issues with Sanders save the biggest one — that any real move toward democratic socialism requires Congressional power way more than executive — but the people howling about that are ignorable. Have they already forgotten that *EVERY* democratic nominee gets called a socialist every 4 years? Bill Clinton? Socialist. Hillary Clinton? Socialist. Obama? Foreign socialist. Kerry? Socialist. On and on and on…
It’s almost as if Republicans (and Centrists Democrats) have spent so much time and energy destroying education and refocusing learning on STEM programs instead of English and history in a long-term attempt to make it so no one actually knows what a “socialist” is in order to justify calling anyone they disagree with a communist.
I can swear up and down that when I was in high school my Modern World History book contained the line “socialism is often considered to be the first step to communism”. I’d kill to be able to find that textbook again.
I believe it, I mean, unless you went to school in Texas where I believe the line was “Socialism is for fairies and pansies and Mexicans” until 1998.
I’ve been saying since the early aughts that the game was largely lost as soon as GWB got his fingers in the education system. That pretty much doomed us to a few generations of feckless sheep who would go wherever the mouthpieces (Fox News) told them to go.
I would agree in theory, that any meaningful movement left would take congressional power but Dotard has basically just ignored congress and done what he wants for 3 years. He has shown that there are no checks and balances that are enforceable as currently constituted.
On the one hand, yes, the unitary executive is a thing that exists these days and I’d rather have a not-shitbag holding that lever of power on, say, border policy. On the other, though, look at the wall — Trump’s big promise 3 years in has barely gone anywhere because it’s actually not that easy to get money through Congress unless it’s the *$%&!^ing military budget. M4A (or whatever health care option you prefer) can’t be done through executive order or policy shift; that’s gonna require Congress.
Kinda cried wolf a little too hard, didn’t they?
“It’s confirmation bias, sure, but they don’t have to make it so fucking easy for them.”
This. They’re making it really damned hard to keep the hardcore Bernie stans from going completely tinfoil. They just keep poking this bear. If he doesn’t win it, or heaven help us we end up in a brokered convention, we’ll be wishing for the 2016 national convention.
And if we loose again to Trump, it will be the third sates fault. No Russians required.
“And if we loose again to Trump, it will be the third sates fault. No Russians required.”
I don’t know. I’ve been seeing all those stupid quizzes on Facebook that were so common in 2016 popping up again, grabbing people’s info. I always report any blatantly false propaganda ads that are given to me but I’m betting that that vast majority are falling for them right and left right now and that IS the Russians.
At least the people I see posting results in my feed are typically non voters, and apathetic to politics.
Party unity only counts when we’re talking about nominating a right wing Democrat.
These people aren’t afraid of losing the election. What they are really afraid of is losing their money train should Sanders get elected.
“These people aren’t afraid of losing the election. What they are really afraid of is losing their money train should Sanders get elected.”
Yep, exactly. Biden, Mayor Pete (I’m never going to get his last name right), Klobuchar, Bloomberg, all of them are perfectly willing to keep the lobby system going and aren’t likely to do a thing about taxes. I think the majority of the Democrats would remain beholden to them for that alone.
“Remember guys, whoever’s the nominee we gotta stop talking shit and get behind them!”
*Bernie starts pulling ahead, hard*
“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK him.”