I can’t lie: I still have some residual warm feelings toward Joe Biden. Maybe it was when he gently let Sarah Palin word salad her way through their 2008 VP debate. Perhaps it was from 2012, when Obama had looked a step slow in his first debate against Mitt Romney, so Biden went ahead and bodied Eddie Munster Ryan to steady the ship against the media narrative of the moment. It could be any of the times we saw Joe and Barack laughing together.
For me personally, it probably has more to do with Biden articles in The Onion. I’ll never get over him shirtlessly washing his Trans Am in the White House driveway.
Whatever the case may be, I suspect a lot of people have some of those feelings toward Biden, even if the wider party hasn’t always agreed with his I’m-just-building-consensus palate of business/conservative centrism out of a state that puts the “friend” in “corporate friendly.”
I’d also guess those feelings played a role in the Democratic establishment deciding early on that Biden was going to be their guy. And sure, he was Barack’s wacky Uncle Joe, and remember those good times? But it didn’t take a leftist troll or a “Democrats in disarray!” opinion piece to point out that Biden has some priors when it comes to national campaigning:
- Biden had a lane to win the nomination in 1988 and didn’t get close. Despite strong early fundraising and frontrunner Gary Hart being knocked out of the race, he was forced to drop out before Iowa because a) he plagiarized a rather famous speech from a leader of the British Labour Party b) his campaign was poor and disorganized and c) he came under fire for talking about civil rights actions he’d taken that he hadn’t. He ultimately fell behind such luminaries as Michael Dukakis and Dick Gephardt and quit the race before Iowa.
- Biden in the 2008 campaign made some highly questionable comments about race and other issues and went on to finish a distant fifth in Iowa before ending his campaign, unable to get any traction against either Obama or Hillary Clinton. (But hey, he at least made it to the caucuses that time!)
- Biden’s knack for talking about things that were either made up or wildly exaggerated never abated during his time as vice president. He’s now 77 years old and his gaffes have become increasingly less “Ha, well, that’s tongue in cheek” and more “Oh no, grandpa is telling that story again”
- Whether or not Hunter Biden did anything illegal — sincerely doubtful — Joe Biden getting his family big-time jobs because of the name “Biden” does show how little he’d want to change things in a post-Trump world when lots of people want more than that
The party piled their eggs in the Biden basket, and now they’re desperately trying to clean up the mess while blaming everyone else for the broken eggshells. Meanwhile, a dastardly socialist who (I’m legally obligated to scare-highlight this) isn’t even a member of the party!!! looks ready to run away with their nomination. Worse, the media has decided the second-most viable candidate is an ex-Republican billionaire openly buying his way in. Unfortunately, Bloomberg also appears to have no political skills, no political base outside of other people in Jeff Epstein’s black book and was repeatedly disemboweled during his first debate in ways that made proctologists squirm.
To me, and maybe to you too, this is fine, as there were only two candidates I truly liked this year, the socialist and the wolverine who rearranged Bloomberg’s internal organs live on stage last week. So, yeah, good. OK.
At the same time, I’m aware that I’m further left than the typical member of the Democratic Party. While there are a growing number of panicked party apparatchiks lobbing desperation bad-faith attacks, there are also voters legitimately confused and annoyed over the fighting. Many of them genuinely aren’t sure about democratic socialism and aren’t entirely convinced about the senator from Vermont.
Some of them are mad at the left, they’re mad about the “Bernie Bro” scourge that’s maybe 14% real, they’re mad at other voters, they’re mad at Bernie, they’re mad at the media, they’re mad at people who don’t agree with them, and they’re really mad at the people who are mad at them — but they ought to be mad at their own party, because the Democrats are the ones that brought them here.
Party leadership waited on Biden, seeing him as the white knight who could topple Trump. In a different time — hell, even in 2016 — that may have been a decent bet. In 2020, it just isn’t. Fairly or unfairly, the left feels screwed by 2016, and to back Biden was to both reboot the failed Hillary template of four years ago and ignore his nigh-disastrous campaign history. Yet the party pushed ahead, lining up donors and laying down fire at anyone who dared point out that this seemed like a bad idea.
And sure enough, the Biden push sucked the oxygen right out of every other moderate campaign. I don’t know if Kamala Harris or Corey Booker or Julian Castro could have built a groundswell and been able to weather the fire better than Mayor Clever Clogs or Sen. Minnesota Nice. But I do know, as someone who didn’t support any of them, that I appreciated those three options far more than the centrists we have left in the race. Harris is a flawed but sharp voice; Booker is actually somewhat hopeful and inspirational unlike Pete’s dopey turd act; and Castro appealed to a demographic the party needs and seemed interested in better policy.
As for Biden, he’s reached South Carolina, his firewall state. The plan was always that he could win big here, buoyed by the support of older and more moderate black voters in the state. He may still eke out a victory, but if it’s close, that won’t be enough to shift the narrative that he’s fading and flailing while Sanders leads almost across the board in Super Tuesday states and even Bloomberg is cutting into what should be Biden’s base.
For what it’s worth, today’s Palmetto poll puts him up +18, and that may not be an outlier — Obama in ’08 and Hillary in ’16 won by far bigger margins than expected with the lion’s share of who Biden is hoping will turn out for him. If he can put up a big win, and the media bubble continues to pop for Bloomberg, it could reignite the electability argument for ole Joe and let him run free in the centrist lane. The Democratic establishment can only hope that’s the outcome.
Yet even in their best-case scenario, they’re still stuck with Joe Biden, a twice-failed candidate who can’t keep his story straight. He’s got Trump-level family issues. He can’t campaign with the same vigor as any of the other contenders (yes, even a stroke waiting to happen like Mango Unchained) and has policies that disqualify him with a sizable and very loud portion of the party.
At 77 years old, none of that is going to change one iota between now and November, should he make it that far, and — again, best-case scenario here — that would ensure the battles of 2016 will continue to be fought and the lessons of the last election will remain unlearned.
It is weird and funny and sad to see a party stalwart like Chris Matthews become unhinged over Bernie Sanders breaking through some imaginary electoral Maginot Line. But while Matthews walked back his criticism of Bernie, he’s overlooking a far easier thing that centrists like him should be a lot angrier about: Why did his party choose to build such a flimsy defense in the first place?
Watching Biden in the debates makes me feel like I am visiting my mother in the old folks home. Everyone there seems fine one minute and then you look in their eyes and they have completely checked out. They can keep doubting Bernie & trying to take him down but it looks like his message has finally got enough traction that the corporate media is struggling to stop it. Maybe Trump’s “fake news” stuff has convinced both sides that the news is bs? Maybe people are realizing that this same media told us Trump could NEVER win? Now a Republican friend of mine is telling me that Bloomberg is going to team up with Hillary? That is the latest conspiracy theory on the right? I think I need to go live on a deserted island until after this election plays out or much longer depending on the outcome.
Our Cartoon President’s last episode was literally about Bloomberg getting Hillary to come back, and it was fuck awful.
I’ve said it before, and I’m SURE I’ll say it a bajillion times after this, but:
Biden’s shot to win was in the 2016 election.
And because he was grieving Beau, he chose *not* to tun that year.
It WAS a 100% valid choice, don’t get me wrong. But THAT cycle was his shot to win.
Joe has ALWAYS been a gaffe-prone and/or shitty campaigner.
ALWAYS. (👏ALLLLLLL👏WAYYYY👏ZZZZUH👏)
Terrible.
*SO*.MANY.GAFFES.
So the fact that *this* time around, the man is having difficulties on the campaign trail should be surprising exactly….
ZERO people in the media–OR elsewhere.
Ffs, it was Uncle Joe (whose bromance with his buddy Barack *I* ADORED as much as the next gal!🤗💖😁) who said THIS, back during the ’08 primary races:
https://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama/
I liked Joe even back during that race, but definitely thought he was NOT the one who ought to be president–but I also DID like the idea of him at VP, and was thrilled that Obama chose Biden for that.
Also in news that SHOULD be used on the campaign trail this fall, this vote, which should be aired early AND often, against Gomert, Amash, Massie, & Yoho(Yolo? Fomo? Yoo-hoo?):
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/emmett-till-bill-making-lynching-federal-crime-passes/story?id=69229940&__twitter_impression=true
JFC, how does one vite *against* making Lynching a goddamn felony?!???😑🙄🙄
Spread the shame of those 4 far and wide.
The problem with the DNC (and the RNC, in their own way) is that they have overwhelmingly become places for people to stop things from happening.
So the DNC is designed to stop money from being spent on candidates outside of sure-bet districts, stop primary challenges, stop new initiatives that upset lobbyists, stop anything that might net a bunch of new seats but lose a few along the way.
What that means as a result is that the DNC was unable to find compelling voices that were acceptable to big donors, and they ended up with Biden. They also couldn’t come up with an alternative to the stupid failed debate format, because they couldn’t upset the established debate hosts and networks, and that meant more longshot alternatives like Castro and Booker couldn’t get any traction.
When someone like AOC or Warren or Sanders emerges with a boatload of policy ideas and a serious critique of how the status quo reinforces Democratic weaknesses, the DNC reflexively takes the side of the status quo. (The GOP does something similar by clamping down hard on anyone who deviates slightly in terms of their policy mandates.)
The DNC desperately needs new blood that can debate hard and still come up with a consensus, but they are instead all about blocking out dissent with denial for as long as possible until things collapse for them.
“The DNC desperately needs new blood that can debate hard and still come up with a consensus, but they are instead all about blocking out dissent with denial for as long as possible until things collapse for them.”
SO much ^^^THIS!!!
I know I say “We need a Wellstone” type candidate with some regularity.
But we REALLY *DO* need someone like him again,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wellstone
Or a Humphrey (mind you, HE was Johnson’s VP, who also HELPED LOT, with building the consensus to push through the 1960’s Civil Rights & Title laws,
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/huberthumphey1948dnc.html
Or a Gene (NOT Joe!!! He was from Wisconsin!) McCarthy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_McCarthy
We need progressive politicians to be back at the *center* of the part’s dynamics again.
And we NEED to get ourselves away from that damn rightward swing, that has what would have been Republican views 30-40 years ago being *our* “Centrist” viewpoint nowadays.🤨🤨
Elizabeth Warren is a Wellstone/Humphrey/McCarthy type. She’d be winning if it wasn’t for the tragic fact that she does not have a penis.
That’s why I’ve been on board for her since before the *last* election, when she didn’t end up running.
I happil voted Hillary in the final race (I voted Bernie in my state Primary),but I WANTED to be voting for Warren (and I WILL be voting Warren in *this* primary😉😁🤗)
The inevitable likeability/shrill/angry anchor was thrown at her right away, and that hurt.
I wouldn’t discount the pundits also freaking out about the financial implications of any serious Democratic plans as well. Massive increases in military spending, border control and other GOP favorites never face the same scrutiny, nor do the unsustainable cuts in taxes for the rich.
Cost savings never get considered by pundits, or the benefits of spending.
Pundits have decided to give the GOP a free ride on irresponsible policies, and as a result think it is solely up to the Democrats to keep the old order in place. When someone on the left suggests a change, the pundits descend like locusts in large part to compensate for what they will never do to the right.
I wrote too much already and didn’t want to get into this in the post, but any reasonable look at what happened in 2016 and where the country is now would have made Elizabeth Warren the obvious ideological choice as a unity candidate. She’s not beloved by the party elite but has some moderate support, wants to reform capitalism vs. pushing for democratic socialism and would have been a million times more palatable to the Bernie brigade (now she’s an evil snake some of them will never vote for because she dared to admit M4A would be difficult to pass, but part of that is they feared/fear her as taking some of Bernie’s support).
The fact that she has generally been as off the table for the party as Bernie says a lot about what they wanted.
Yeah – I said this elsewhere last week maybe, but it’s clear who the party does and doesn’t want to be president. Warren would probably be a shoe-in if the party had helped her.
Yup. I’m convinced people (few people anyway) are pushing Klobuchar just because she’s there to say no to everything. Why would anybody want, or want to be, that?! Imagine getting into politics and not wanting to do anything.
I would have likely supported Joe in 2016. I’m sure that would have been a mistake in the long run. He might have won (probably would have done better than Hillary) but he would have been such a blase President that the Republicans would have probably been bolstered for a win in 2020. That would all have been a bummer but it’d be light years better than what we ended up getting.
Now that Trump has set the constitution on fire and the country is burning down around us, however, we need a lot better than an Aw Shucks president. And we desperately, desperately need real health care. Biden would have been okay before the tax cuts but now that they’re in place he would be a disaster.
Yeah, the only starting point is “Republicans are against America and democracy” for any Democrat and if you’re not there, you’re a bad option.
I could not agree more. I can’t figure out if the party is so out of touch that it doesn’t realize that anointing someone actually turns most people off, or that they don’t care, or what. The reality of it, too, is that there have been far less risky centrist/establishment candidates they could have thrown their weight behind but they chose this election-fumbling gaffe machine because they still think people have good feelings coming out of the end of Obama’s term. Like, I think had they anointed Booker, he’d be a frontrunner by now.
Voting is emotional – that’s why we have Trump. I yearn for the days of Obama but I can literally barely look at a picture of him or Michelle without wanting to burst into tears. Not because I loved them so so much but because of how far we have fallen and how they were replaced by a goddamn neo Nazi sympathizer. So looking back in pain like that makes me absolutely not want to turn back the clock – and Biden feels just like that. Like, would we get Biden, see little or no progress, and swing back to another Trump? Probably. That might happen anyway but rewinding and retracing our steps feels like a sure fire way to get that. The fact that Biden could experience the Republicans during Obama’s terms and then still live under the delusion that his white man smile will yield him results pisses me off. Even the moderates I regularly talk to want to see Republicans in jail and don’t want to hear much about cooperating with them. If they like Biden it’s because they think he can beat Trump, not because they like anything he says. The rage, while in many different forms, is universal among us masses and Biden is not channeling that rage.
And Bernie has learned lessons from his 2016 loss – because he ran and stayed in the limelight afterward, his structure and fundraising audience stayed in tact. They didn’t take him seriously then, and this year, he is arguably a lot more serious and they don’t take him seriously now. And here we are.
Bernie is not the one I want to see on the top of the ticket (for me, it’s because I think Warren will be more effective in getting a progressive agenda implemented), but they could have stopped Bernie by now and they didn’t fucking try.
Yeah, this is just it: Winning is good, but using that power effectively is way more important.
Obama could have but didn’t. Biden would never. He’d compromise before he even asked the GOP about what compromises he could make. (They’d probably respond by throwing Hunter Biden in jail while Joe said “Y’know, you have to work with these people…”) And like you, my concern with Bernie is that he has few natural allies to get anything done, and if he doesn’t win with a huge groundswell — which I think is extremely unlikely — nobody is going to fear his mandate on either side. I suspect many Democrats would work with him, but they wouldn’t go out on a limb for him and that basically kills his agenda dead because we all know the GOP won’t give a millimeter to sOcIaLiSm.
You know, I was essentially a centrist when Barack Obama was elected President. It was his steadfast refusal to tell the Republicans to go fuck themselves and instead give away the store in the hopes that maybe, one of these days, he might actually get a single vote from them on a policy matter that shoved me all the way to the left. Hell, Hillary was absolutely no better than Biden in that respect. She was constantly starting with the compromise and then moving even farther to the right.
Warren is my first choice (I voted for her yesterday), but I’m fine with Bernie as the nominee. One thing that really brought people along in 2008 was Obama’s rhetoric, but it turns out that he suckered us all by lurching to the center-right the minute he got sworn in. While Sanders will definitely have to swallow some poison pills (fed to him by Congressional Democrats) to get his agenda enacted, at least those compromises will actually be compromises and not giveaways to the right.
I absolutely wanted Obama to be more of a hardass against Republicans but we definitely can’t erase the unprecedented obstruction he faced from them – his ineffectiveness was only partially his fault – and in an attempt to get around that stuff, he very greatly expanded executive power and now it all lies in the hands of Trump.
Agreed, and I’ll add: Trump proved what a lot of us were yelling about during the Obama years: It wasn’t just a policy disagreement or GOP stall tactics or built-in Democratic ineffectiveness — it had so much to do with the racist backlash to Obama, and there’s just no answer to that.
He had a few policies that in retrospect are clear missteps: costly and confusing health care vs. a public option; not going way harder at the bankers, which would have been popular in a bipartisan way; putting more juice in an already overpowered executive branch. Yep. Those were not wins for him. But he legitimately faced an opposition unlike anything any other president has in modern times.
I’m still pissed about Obama’s passivity about the bankers. I’ll never forgive him for choosing Timothy fucking Geithner for Secretary of the Treasury.
Whenever Trump is spouting out about how no one in the history of the universe has been treated as poorly as him, my eyes roll out of my head thinking of what Obama endured. And the DNC seemed to roll over and show their bellies on a regular basis whenever the GOP raised its ugly head.
Yeah, he absolutely could have “saved” the financial system and at the same time rewritten the rule book and put some of the worst offenders out of the game forever and he just … didn’t. It wasn’t even a political calculation like health care was, it just was never on the table. IMO that would have bought him a little longer on the racial backlash, but I suppose we’ll never know.
The Trump thing is doubly incredible because he got his political start by claiming the president wasn’t born in America. Nobody has ever been as self-unaware as he is.
I would qualify the obstruction piece with the fact that for the first two years he had a Dem majority in Congress–and for 1.5 of those years it was a supermajority. He just…wanted Republicans to like him so much that he fucked all of the rest of us. His nomination of Geithner was the moment at which I thought to myself: “he might have played us for suckers.”
I’d argue that Obama 1.) never really sold himself as a progressive, just as more to the left than his peers, and 2.) never understood how bitterly racist congressional Republicans would be towards him.
It’s easy to say he had a supermajority and therefore should’ve done X, Y and Z, but, like, it’s removing important historical context. Mainly that assholes like Joe Liberman and blue dog Democrats were weary to fall in line with him, and the aforementioned horrible amount of racism that openly led to dipshits like McConnell swearing to make him a one term President. There was a level of vile and venom spewed at Obama that I think took him by surprise. I think his overtures were made in good faith, and the people who opposed him almost entirely operated in bad faith No one gave a shit about compromising with him, they just wanted the first black President all the fuck the way out of office, and if it meant fundamentally destroying the way a functioning government is supposed to work, so be it.
I also kinda balk at the idea that Obama played anyone for a sucker. Again, he never really came out and beat his chest and yelled “I AM A PROGRESSIVE” in the same way Bernie has. We’re talking about 2008 here. Obama wasn’t even in favor of gay marriage. His foreign policy agenda was pretty much in line with Hillary and Edwards on all but a couple issues. He certainly wasn’t talking about breaking up the big banks or letting Detroit fail or any of that. His most leftist policy was the public option, which is a far cry from Medicare for All, but was still sold as radical socialism. (Which is why I think Bernie being a Democratic socialist doesn’t matter because every fucking Democratic candidate for president gets called a socialist or a commie and have since JFK was elected.)
People kind of got caught up in the soaring rhetoric and the speeches and the “YES WE CANS!” and the “HOPE!”, but if you actually listened to his policies, there was no doubt that he was a centrist. A centrist with leftist tendencies, but a centrist nonetheless. If Obama failed, it wasn’t because he played us, it’s because he didn’t weaponize the mandate he had from the people and tried to eagerly to get Republicans to play along, and he realized that they had zero intention of doing so far too fucking late.
It’s almost like they thought the Bernie thing would die. As though they could just put Biden on the ticket and he’d coast and that Bernie would just be another side distraction.
They underestimated Bernie for the second fuckin’ time, only this time, he’s got name recognition, and people are buying what he’s selling. The DNC could’ve backed any number of horses, but instead they backed the guy who lost two campaigns, is a known gaffe magnet, and who has proven he can’t keep up.
The DNC could’ve backed any moderate candidate in the field and it would’ve been better outcome. Warren, Harris, Booker, Castro, hell, even Pete or Amy. The gap between “what Democratic voters want” and “what the Democratic party apparatus wants” keep becoming more and more obvious, but they don’t want to deal with it.
It’s classic paternalism. The DNC knows what’s best for us, so we should just trust them and follow along, rather than actually convincing us that what they’re doing is right because our votes shouldn’t be taken for granted.
I know – last fall, people were really excited by the diversity of the field and the number of people running, even if they complained. While it’s probably normal that we’ve grown fatigued, Biden was late to announce – like, they looked at ALL those people – many very establishment people – and decided NONE of them was worth backing?
My hope is that as time passes the DNC’s controlling of this shit becomes more and more of a liability and the voters soundly reject it. It made sense in 2016 – it was fairly obvious that Hillary was a tough contender against Trump (and despite how the stupid math worked out, she absolutely was – just not tough enough). Bernie was new, his supporters put a bad taste in lots of people’s mouths (and still do). It made some sense back then because who the fuck else were they going to back. But this year? No sense to choose Biden.
I’ve always been bothered by how quickly everyone jumped on Obama’s bandwagon after he gave that speech to the Democratic Convention in 2004. It was a great speech and it fired everyone up but the result was that he became such a superstar that people were voting for him just because of that one thing.
And yeah, after 8 years of GWB Obama was unbelievably refreshing, like getting a drink of ice water after walking in the desert for years. But his success was so plainly a case of the cult of personality taking over the minds of the people that Trump’s success is pretty much a foregone conclusion. Popularity rules more than anything else, and that’s what the DNC was hoping for when they hitched their wagon to Biden. People were disappointed that Biden didn’t run in 2016 and after Hillary’s disaster, a lot of people were talking about how different things might have been if Biden had run instead. It’s not his policies or his past or his work for Obama that’s put him where he is today. It’s the good cheer and charisma, the popularity of this clean cut white guy who can make people laugh.
This is also a large part of why Elizabeth Warren has been having such a hard time. She’s the teacher, the one who frowns on America with disappointment because she knows we can do better. That’s not exciting or charismatic or fun which, unfortunately, is what America wants no matter which side of the line they’re on.
I’m just like Warren, really, frowning down on my country with such disappointment. We could do so much better.
— Edited for stupid autocorrect. God, the older I get the worse I type. —
I mean, I don’t know if anyone really jumped on Obama’s bandwagon in 2004; Hillary Clinton and even John Edwards were clearly supposed to be the frontrunners. Obama winning in 2008 bucked conventional wisdom; even then, the DNC didn’t get behind Obama until he had to, spawning a grudge that would see Obama building his own grassroots organizing thing that competed with the DNC.
But it shouldn’t be a surprise that people vote for popularity first and policy second. I mean, I love policy, but I’m a fuckin’ weirdo, and if I try and get into a policy conversation with my wife her eyes glaze over, and I don’t blame her. Policy is fucking dry and dull, which is why I’ve always felt lines like “HE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW HOW WE’RE GONNA PAY FOR MEDICARE FOR ALL!” don’t land quite as hard as people like; no one really knows how anything in the governments get paid for, and the actual explanation is too fucking wonkish for Americans to be enamored by.
Admittedly, my perception of the election is biased. I was in NYC after the convention and up to a few months before the election. I had never heard of Obama until that speech and after it everyone I knew was talking about him nonstop. Actually, it was just like the fervor for AOC.
In addition to what KC says, I just want to add it’s yet another reminder that the “centrism vs. leftism” divide doesn’t really exist on policy grounds; it’s all perception.
Yeah, and whatever divide there may be doesn’t matter to most voters. There are tons of “Biden first choice, Bernie second choice” types out there that ideologically make zero sense, but they’re not really voting on policy anyway.
Yeah exactly. And it’s also been pretty clear that people are very much voting based on who they think can beat Trump which is like…no one fucking knows that so it’s all over the place haha. You can see this manifesting in the fact that nearly all of the candidates (maybe except Bernie?) have been trying to make the argument they are the most “electable.”
I’m not really that cool with the idea of the establishment stopping him though, if I’m honest. I don’t think anybody wants that, and it would be openly Un-Democratic (instead of deniably Un-Democratic like they are now I suppose). Also, imagine how pissed the Bros would be if they openly went against Bernie. I prefer Warren too, but I believe she’s mature enough and her fans are mature enough to work with Bernie. Bernie’s fans aren’t, even though I like their higher ideals like M4A.
Party votes don’t have to be democratic, though, and while that’s a bad system, it IS the system until another party can break it.
While I prefer the will of the voters, the party can set whatever rules it wants, which is something that seems weirdly lost on Bernie people who are trying to hijack a pre-existing political party rather than do the far harder work of creating their own party. FWIW, I’m fine with that because Bernie’s policies are light years better than the Dems. But if a million centrists joined the DSA and started screaming about changing the platform, I suspect party leadership wouldn’t be like “Hey, you’re right, you’ve got the votes, we definitely don’t need health care for all.”
I’d also have a lot more sympathy for the “It’s not democratic!” crowd if they’d also gone hard at caucuses, which are deeply undemocratic. But they didn’t, because Bernie always did better in those, and thus that was never on the table. That’s politics, btw, and exactly what they should have done to gain an advantage — but they get so mad when other candidates do the same sort of politics against them.
…I thought it was certainly effective when Warren responded to a Bernie supporter trying to make the claim that Bernie should get the nod if he had a plurality of delegates but not a minority by pointing out that Bernie & his supporters had been part of making the rules & now they needed to abide by them rather than 180 on his previous position simply because it now suited them to do so
…there are plenty of flaws in the way the game is played but if we keep ignoring the rules we set ourselves we’d be hard to distinguish from the right sooner rather than later
Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar or (God Help Us!) Bloomberg all equate to more of the same (or even 4 more years of the Cheeto). The DNC wants to chase after the Obama-Trump voters, when in fact winning depends on the ability to appeal to young voters, new voters, and folks who stayed home in 2016. This means Bernie or Warren. The Democratic Party’s ability to screw up its own opportunities is unparalled.