US Election Thread - Is this heaven? No, it's Iowa

[Brad Thomas Jensen]

The delegates are not chosen by the people at all and haven't been for at least the last 20 years. It appears that the CFR, Fed Reserve board, Wall Street executives.

We the people don't even get to choose what questions are asked during the debates! All this shit about the elections being so important is laughable! The whole thing is a giant farce not more than a reality show for the dumbed down public. Democrat or Republican it makes no matter they are the same. Take a good long look at the voting records of our congressmen if you need convincing. I should think that anybody could tell there is something very very wrong in Washington and none of the candidates put forth would change it if they could.

[Bonesy]

I'm sorry, I think you're in the wrong reality. Yours is through the other wormhole.

[lokisnow]

Democrats and Republicans have extremely different approaches on whether or not all people have certain inalienable rights and can expect equal protection under the law. If you don't realize this, you've probably not had your rights made into a political sport with uncertain outcome as to whether or not they'd be recognized and you've probably never experienced a lifetime of anxiety that the law didn't apply equally to you, again, because that access to a just system has also been a political game of keepaway.

[winterfellsedai]

Jeb is awkward...it's just true.

[winterfellsedai]

Hmmm. It might be that they were trying to liven him up. But his lack of charisma can't be hidden from society.

[Bonesy]

What?

You two seem to be communicating, but I'm at a loss.

[TrackerNeil]

7 hours ago, Triskan said:

Isn't it possible that the superdelegates situation in 2008 was a special circumstance in which they would especially not overturn given Obama's historic candidacy?  That was certainly a narrative at the time.

Maybe, but what I know of politicians tells me that they are not going to band together to override what they perceive as the choice of the people, not without great cause. Perhaps if it seemed the nomination was going to someone clearly unelectable they'd act, but who in this race is that? Clinton nearly got the nomination last time, and polls well enough this time around. So does Sanders, and both of them have pretty conventional qualifications. I don't think anyone should count on the supers to save his/her candidacy.

(Yes, I think in 2008 there was the notion that if the superdelegates intervened to prevent the nomination of a black candidate there'd be hell to pay, and that is probably true.)

[mormont]

I'm trying to picture a scenario where the superdelegates would intervene, and I just can't. It would be political suicide. Imagine the attack ads. 'Why elect the candidate even their own party didn't want!' Just... no way.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

8 hours ago, Triskan said:

We're the people that conceived "Jeb!" as clueless and wooden as Jeb is, or was it some attempt at being deeply calculating like "Shit, Jeb is so boring that we have to signal 'We get it' ? "

Jeb! Bush is the Jai Courtney of politics.

[Paladin of Ice]

Rand Paul has decided to drop out. (And in grand Rand Paul tradition, it comes shortly after having pledged to continue campaigning. I feel the echoes of him filibustering against drone use and then turning around and saying he wasn't opposed to using a drone to shoot up American streets to stop a guy who had stolen $50 from a liquor store.) I have to say I'm slightly surprised, I thought sheer obstinance might get Paul to stay through another few races. Put it down as another way that he's not his father, I guess. (Also, thanks for completely upending my Republican Candidate dead pool, Rand.)

[OnionAhaiReborn]

Robert Reich: Bernie Sanders is the only candidate of change

In 2008, when then-Senator Barack Obama promised progressive change if elected President, his primary opponent, then-Senator Hillary Clinton, derided him. 

“The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect,” she said, sarcastically, adding “I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be. 

Fast forward eight years. “I wish that we could elect a Democratic president who could wave a magic wand and say, ‘We shall do this, and we shall do that,’” Clinton said recently in response to Bernie Sanders’s proposals.  “That ain’t the real world we’re living in.“

...

After the 2008 election he even turned his election campaign into a new organization called “Organizing for America” (now dubbed “Organizing for Action”), explicitly designed to harness his grassroots support.

So why did Obama end up relying more on deal-making than public mobilization? Because he thought he needed big money for his 2012 campaign.

Despite OFA’s public claims (in mailings, it promised to secure the “future of the progressive movement”), it morphed into a top-down campaign organization to raise big money.

In the interim, Citizens United had freed “independent” groups like OFA to raise almost unlimited funds, but retained limits on the size of contributions to formal political parties.

That’s the heart of problem. No candidate or president can mobilize the public against the dominance of the moneyed interests while being dependent on their money. And no candidate or president can hope to break the connection between wealth and power without mobilizing the public.

(A personal note: A few years ago OFA wanted to screen around America the movie Jake Kornbluth and I did about widening inequality, called “Inequality for All” – but only on condition we delete two minutes identifying big Democratic donors.  We refused. They wouldn’t show it.)

In short, “the real world we’re living in” right now won’t allow fundamental change of the sort we need. It takes a movement.

Such a movement is at the heart of the Sanders campaign. The passion that’s fueling it isn’t really about Bernie Sanders. Had Elizabeth Warren run, the same passion would be there for her.

It’s about standing up to the moneyed interests and restoring our democracy.

[TerraPrime]

And what could a Sanders presidency do about the issue of big, dark money in politics, that a Clinton's presidency can't?

RAFO, I guess.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

I'm happy Obama beat Hillary in 2008, but HIllary was right and Obama was wrong about what it would take to govern in the political climate that we have. Obama didn't give up on "public mobilization" in lieu of "deal making" because he needed "big money" for his campaign - he needed it because Washington DC operates via transactional politics and it was literally the only way for him to get anything done. 

[OnionAhaiReborn]

18 minutes ago, TerraPrime said:

And what could a Sanders presidency do about the issue of big, dark money in politics, that a Clinton's presidency can't?

RAFO, I guess.

Reich's argument is that it's about building a movement that would carry Sanders (or someone else, like Elizabeth Warren) into the White House, and then having a President who uses their position to continue to mobilize that mass movement.

It doesn't seem likely to happen this time around, but I would never even bother voting if I didn't believe it was possible (but I firmly believe, like Reich, that history shows that it is).

[TerraPrime]

8 minutes ago, OnionAhaiReborn said:

Reich's argument is that it's about building a movement that would carry Sanders (or someone else, like Elizabeth Warren) into the White House, and then having a President who uses their position to continue to mobilize that mass movement.

And that goes back to Nestor's point, and the point I made in the last thread, which is that the political reality is too entrenched to change.

When Obama ran on "Hope and Change," I didn't believe him. Not that I doubt his sincerity (well, I do, but I also accept that it's a legitimate slogan), but I don't think he, alone, can do much about the shitty political environment of DC. I supported Hilary in the primary season and was sad to see her lose. Turns out that Obama still managed to do a lot of good things in office, probably about the same amount of good as a Clinton presidency would have, on balance. But he did try to shift the climate, like in the lead-up to the PPACA, and he was chewed up, spat out, and shat on. By both the GOP and the Democrats. So rather close to what I thought would happen.

Being the ethical guy in a rigged game earns you only spiritual brownie points. Nothing else.

So that's why I will continue to support the pragmatist candidate, Clinton, even if I disagree more with her platform items. She is a dyed-in-the-wool career politician who will wring the marrow out of you and deny doing it. That's the type of person I want in the WH.

[TrackerNeil]

11 minutes ago, TerraPrime said:

When Obama ran on "Hope and Change," I didn't believe him. Not that I doubt his sincerity (well, I do, but I also accept that it's a legitimate slogan), but I don't think he, alone, can do much about the shitty political environment of DC. I supported Hilary in the primary season and was sad to see her lose. Turns out that Obama still managed to do a lot of good things in office, probably about the same amount of good as a Clinton presidency would have, on balance. But he did try to shift the climate, like in the lead-up to the PPACA, and he was chewed up, spat out, and shat on. By both the GOP and the Democrats. So rather close to what I thought would happen.

I admit that it frustrates me when liberals get all pouty that Obama didn't wave his arms and institute a single-payer health care system, eliminate the influence of money in elections, and banish all Republicans to the netherworld. We elected Obama president, not God-Emperor of America. I think he's been a good president, but no president can achieve everything we might want. That's just the way it is.

Look, I have no beef with Sanders, but this idea of a mass movement that is going to force Congress to wipe out the private health care industry is just...well, I'm going to be kind and call it extremely unlikely. Can anyone cite an example of such a movement that forced Congress to do something both parties opposed? I'd like to see if there's historical precedent.

EDITED TO ADD: And before anyone gets excited, no, I am not urging anyone to vote for Clinton. I am counseling realistic expectations from whomever you vote for.

[Shryke]

Yeah. Obama, imo, obviously really believed in the idea of changing the political climate in DC. Before he was even inaugurated, the GOP had decided to give him nothing. No cooperation would be allowed. His own party members fucked him on closing GITMO and specific provisions of his key legislation (Obamacare). Shit, even the stimulus was watered down before it was even proposed because they thought (correctly) they wouldn't be able pass anything much more ambitious then that.

Clinton knew what she was talking about and it's still correct today. Obama spent years trying to get shit done, to mobilize public support and it just ain't gonna happen.

The problem is the same one every time with guys like Sanders or Reich: trying to frame this as the people vs big money. As an issue of class. They never seem to consider that maybe alot of the people just don't agree with them. That these people have different priorities, different views of what america should be. That they don't think "I may disagree with Bernie Sanders on the abortion issue or the gay rights issue, but I know he’s fighting for me and my kids" but instead "Abortion is murder and Sanders is a murderer".

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

19 minutes ago, OnionAhaiReborn said:

Reich's argument is that it's about building a movement that would carry Sanders (or someone else, like Elizabeth Warren) into the White House, and then having a President who uses their position to continue to mobilize that mass movement.

It doesn't seem likely to happen this time around, but I would never even bother voting if I didn't believe it was possible (but I firmly believe, like Reich, that history shows that it is).

I honestly think that it's a fundamental mistake to think that there is a nascent mass political movement out there that lines up with Sander's social democratic ideology. 

This is a kind of partisan wishful thinking that both sides engage in during the primaries, when there are candidates running on the fringes of these parties and actively trying to pull them left or right. Certain types of partisans in both parties are convinced that if they run a "left wing enough" or "true right wind conservative" that they're somehow going to blow up the electoral map and it's going to turn out that a significant number of Republicans were really truly secret socialists or that a significant number of blue collar democrats were really truly closet Republicans, and there is really no actual meaningful data suggesting to us that this is true. All of the data we have is that people are partisan and getting more partisan by the year, and we are unfortunately, as a country, pretty much split down the middle on the kind of society we want to live in. 

 

[OnionAhaiReborn]

2 minutes ago, TerraPrime said:

And that goes back to Nestor's point, and the point I made in the last thread, which is that the political reality is too entrenched to change.

When Obama ran on "Hope and Change," I didn't believe him. Not that I doubt his sincerity (well, I do, but I also accept that it's a legitimate slogan), but I don't think he, alone, can do much about the shitty political environment of DC. I supported Hilary in the primary season and was sad to see her lose. Turns out that Obama still managed to do a lot of good things in office, probably about the same amount of good as a Clinton presidency would have, on balance. But he did try to shift the climate, like in the lead-up to the PPACA, and he was chewed up, spat out, and shat on. By both the GOP and the Democrats. So rather close to what I thought would happen.

Being the ethical guy in a rigged game earns you only spiritual brownie points. Nothing else.

So that's why I will continue to support the pragmatist candidate, Clinton, even if I disagree more with her platform items. She is a dyed-in-the-wool career politician who will wring the marrow out of you and deny doing it. That's the type of person I want in the WH.

Obama ran on a conflicting "hope and change" message- on the one hand he was the candidate of post-partisanship, on the other hand he ran on a robust progressive platform, and, after his election, promised to use his organization to continue mobilizing grassroots support for that progressive agenda.

He continually tried and still tries the "let's all get along" post-partisanship message. What he did not do was attempt to leverage grassroots support to get his agenda through Congress. At the outset of his Presidency he allowed Republicans to change the rules of the game such that nearly everything required a supermajority vote in the Senate. He could have publicly challenged Republicans to allow simple majority votes on the agenda he had been elected on months before, instead he scrambled for a handful of Republicans, and cut deals with Democrats to reach 60 votes. This strategy deprived us of cap-and-trade, EFCA, the public option, the DREAM Act, all of which could almost certainly have cleared majority votes. He didn't ever try what Reich is suggesting.

[TrackerNeil]

3 minutes ago, OnionAhaiReborn said:

He continually tried and still tries the "let's all get along" post-partisanship message. What he did not do was attempt to leverage grassroots support to get his agenda through Congress. At the outset of his Presidency he allowed Republicans to change the rules of the game such that nearly everything required a supermajority vote in the Senate. He could have publicly challenged Republicans to allow simple majority votes on the agenda he had been elected on months before, instead he scrambled for a handful of Republicans, and cut deals with Democrats to reach 60 votes. This strategy deprived us of cap-and-trade, EFCA, the public option, the DREAM Act, all of which could almost certainly have cleared majority votes. He didn't ever try what Reich is suggesting.

After the Newtown shooting, Obama went on the road to use "the power of the pulpit" to shame Congress into enacting gun control legislation. The bill never even got past a Senate filibuster, much less a House vote. What does that say for the power of grassroots support?