U.S. Politics: 22 Trillion Problems But An Unsecured Border Ain’t One

[Ice Queen]

1 hour ago, Paladin of Ice said:

A rising star only with the uniquely stupid and uninformed who thought that anything Bernie Sanders touched was golden and sanctified.

Gabbard is a Republican with questionable ties. That guru she hangs out with is a nutcase. 

[lokisnow]

I don't like Harris because I'm deeply suspicious of the grooming, she was a tough-on-crime prosecutor because that was viewed as the electable path by the power brokers grooming her for elevation to higher office.  Her AG campaign was extremely hard fought, and she fantastically underperformed what a typical democrat in California would manage to perform, As an incumbent/state wide figure, her coronation by her groomers as senator was a breeze, but she was aided by not having to face a republican in that election.

I'm just worried that the grooming and coronation successes will scale up for the presidency race. But, on the other hand, she's the only candidate that has had a good rollout, Elizabeth Warren's rollout has been a multiple picksix disaster, and Booker et al all punted, she at least can move the ball down the field, which indicates she probably is doing better than I feared she would. 

[lokisnow]

1 hour ago, Maithanet said:

That's what I'm getting at.  Trump's base is going to be at intensity 100 in the 2020 elections.  If he "only" uses executive actions to get $3 billion for the wall, what is that intensity going to look like?  99.9?  Hard to believe that's what makes the difference.  In contrast, 70% of independents are opposed to declaring an emergency to build the wall.  Remembering that many independents are actually Republicans who just don't like labels, that is about as unpopular as things get these days.  

Trump won independents by 4 points in 2016, and he's governing like he doesn't need them anymore.  What I don't understand is why he thinks that.  If Trump loses independent voters by 4 or more points, he has essentially no chance at reelection. 

I just don't think he's actually going to lose very many republican "independents" over a "national emergency" declaration that moves around some minor amounts of mostly military funding. Everyone is acting like this is a huge, deal, but most people are going to shrug at the small amounts of money involved, If this were a multi- trillion dollar maneuver, like demanding a trillion dollars so we can build five more F35s, people might actually get upset, but even then, it's military, they'd probably just not give a damn and figure anything military is probably needed.

What would really upset all those republican "independent" trump voters would be declaring a national emergency to appropriate a trillion dollars to spend on the poor, but they're never going to change their vote to not-trump over anything security or military related.

[Maithanet]

3 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

As an incumbent/state wide figure, her coronation by her groomers as senator was a breeze, but she was aided by not having to face a republican in that election.

Was she?  I think defeating another Democrat in the general election sounds a lot more challenging than winning against a Republican.  Even the most incompetent campaigner would have won the Senate race in California in 2016.  Clinton beat Trump by 4 million votes in California. 

Everything I've seen from Harris is that she is a skilled campaigner and politician when it comes to winning votes from Democrats.  That is a valuable skill for sure, but it remains to be seen how well she can hold up when the Republicans break out their knives and start cutting.  She hasn't faced too much of that yet. 

[Paladin of Ice]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Not really. I was a Clinton supporter and initially thought she was going to be a huge star. It’s not until you pealed back the layers that you could see she was a deeply flawed individual.  

Thing is, it’s not like Gabbard’s awfulness was hiding or anything. A minute’s worth of googling and research would take you on a dive right into it. Plus she has a right wing Democrat/actually moderate Republican voting record on all but a few issues, (as opposed to most of the faux moderates we hear about that keep sticking to the Trump line) so most of the attention she got, especially from progressives, was due to being a superdelegate who backed Bernie. And while I was glad that Bernie pushed the economic discussion in the party leftward, the idea that anyone or anything he touched or backed should be adopted was always obviously bullshit, at least as far as I’m concerned.

[Kalbear]

Two things were going for Gabbard. She supported Bernie quite heavily, going beyond what a lot of others did and quitting the DNC over it. And she's pretty. 

And sadly that really is about it for her. A lot of my faux dem friends who love the military love her for...reasons, but her record is totally shit. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

6 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

I think the concerns are quite legitimate. That said, I'm also concerned that she will be held to a different standard, than others that have preceded her, that became generally regarded as civil rights icons, even though they had troubling stuff in their past as well. What I want to know was is she guilty of being a politician doing politics, which I can forgive to some extent, or does she actually believe in some of the stuff she did that is questionable.

Neither of these options particularly sound better to me. I prefer the option of her actually believing in the goodness of the stuff she did but has changed her mind. A lot of people were hurt from her policies. It’d better if she legitimately thought some good would come out of it rather than simply wanting to gain/maintain political  power. Like Hillary’s vote for Iraq. Wrong, but her rethoric around the discussion of it indicates she had at least some degree of good intent and the out of being provided false information by the bush Administration.But admittance to failure is not really enough either.   I’d more inclined to show leniency to a politician who does acknowledge their mistake but also try to repent. Harris’record is not one of a progressive prosecutor, she did some good, and not all criticisms in regards to her are imo valid, but she did take San Francisco criminal justice system in the wrong direction. “The tough on crime direction” that ends with more people sent to prison who shouldn’t be sent to prison.   SF was making far more progress with her predecessor and she hasn’t really owned up to her mistakes.

[DMC]

4 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Because with the courts itll be in the news for a long while after this. Whereas if he just drops it now? People will move on in a month or two.

I think I disagree with this premise, or at least approach it in a different way.  So the entire point of all this is "appeasing his base," right?  I think he's wrong to be worried about that, which I'll mention later, but don't think anyone's arguing that's what he's worried about.  Which pretty much means getting the right media to shut their faceholes.  If your own party allows you to not only be admonished but blocked policywise in the Senate and you don't respond with a veto, that's definitely gonna be called out by those faceholes as weak.  If you allow the courts to stop you, then you have a natural enemy that isn't gonna piss off your Senate caucus and gives Coulter and Limbaugh John Roberts to whine about, if anybody. 

And as for the media coverage, the story is only gonna come up again if there's a ruling (I guess also with oral arguments a bit, but probably not much for awhile after a lower court blocks it).  And that either means Trump wins, or Trump was screwed.  Both are things Trump is comfortable selling.  I will not allow myself to call it a "win-win" situation for him, but it's pretty close.

4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Gabbard in 2017 was a rising star. Gabbard in 2019 is an embarrassment. Hence why I’ve advocated that young/new politicians should be careful.

I never thought Gabbard was a "rising star."

4 hours ago, Maithanet said:

I guess I'm just curious what people think here.  Do you think if Trump went from doing what the base wants 99% of the time (like he has thus far) to only say, 90% of the time, would he really suffer from a drop in enthusiasm from his base?  Trump clearly thinks that he would, but I'm not sure why he thinks that. 

No, I think we've talked about his before.  The empirical evidence suggests to anybody that can adequately interpret data that he doesn't need to worry about his base and only gets hurt in approval when he does unpopular things because unpopular things tend to be unpopular with independents.  Silver had a write-up about this this morning.  His GOP approval during the shutdown dropped one point.  From 89 to 88.  That's actually incredibly remarkable.

3 hours ago, mormont said:

Because he's scared shitless of losing his base. Appealing to the base is the only thing he knows how to do and the only thing he's ever done that worked. If they desert him, he has nothing left in the tank. The reason Trump never pivoted to the centre, as people kept predicting, is that he has no idea how to do that. He's a one-trick pony, politically speaking. 

Yes, and building upon that Silver write-up, this is why he will lose re-election if he keeps it up.  His base is not a winning coalition in terms of the electoral college.  It actually takes quite a bit of effort for a president to be this unpopular when economic satisfaction metrics are so high.

27 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

I don't like Harris because I'm deeply suspicious of the grooming, she was a tough-on-crime prosecutor because that was viewed as the electable path by the power brokers grooming her for elevation to higher office.

Yeah, so?  Is there something fundamentally wrong with the "power brokers" of the Californian Democratic party?  Seriously, how much more liberal can you get?

52 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

Her AG campaign was extremely hard fought, and she fantastically underperformed what a typical democrat in California would manage to perform, As an incumbent/state wide figure, her coronation by her groomers as senator was a breeze, but she was aided by not having to face a republican in that election.

Ok, so she had a tough first election for AG.  You're leaving out the fact she was reelected 57-42, which was just about as good as anybody.  And, as Maith said, beating a Democrat in a general in California Senate race is actually harder than beating a Republican these days.  It's silly to say otherwise.

18 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

That is a valuable skill for sure, but it remains to be seen how well she can hold up when the Republicans break out their knives and start cutting.  She hasn't faced too much of that yet. 

It's weird that Trump has held his fire on her thus far.  Even complimented her.  No idea what that means.  Probably nothing.

[OldGimletEye]

1 hour ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Neither of these options particularly sound better to me. I prefer the option of her actually believing in the goodness of the stuff she did but has changed her mind. A lot of people were hurt from her policies. It’d better if she legitimately thought some good would come out of it rather than simply wanting to gain/maintain political  power. Like Hillary’s vote for Iraq. Wrong, but her rethoric around the discussion of it indicates she had at least some degree of good intent and the out of being provided false information by the bush Administration.But admittance to failure is not really enough either.   I’d more inclined to show leniency to a politician who does acknowledge their mistake but also try to repent. Harris’record is not one of a progressive prosecutor, she did some good, and not all criticisms in regards to her are imo valid, but she did take San Francisco criminal justice system in the wrong direction. “The tough on crime direction” that ends with more people sent to prison who shouldn’t be sent to prison.   SF was making far more progress with her predecessor and she hasn’t really owned up to her mistakes.

Well her campaign has just started. I'm willing to give her some opportunity to explain and reflect on her record and explain how she might do things differently as president. As far as her predecessor making more progress in SF, honestly, I don't know anything about that. Could you further elaborate on that?

I think its interesting you brought up Hillary. Ultimately, I ended up supporting Hillary over Sanders. Not because I thought Hillary was perfect. And not because I was a fan of everything she did. But, because given my set of choices, I thought she was the better candidate.

I'd also note despite what Hillary had to say about Iraq, she seemingly couldn't let go of her interventionist ways. Something that has always bugged me about her. 

Ultimately, I'm looking for candidate to do two things:

1. Be able to thrash Trump.

2. And be able to get the "radical left wing agenda"* done.

Certainly, if Harris was to continue to promote "tough on crime" policies, I wouldn't be inclined to support her. Whether she actually believes in that stuff, well I'm not too sure. She wouldn't be the first politician to play politics to get elected. LBJ is a good example. In the 1950s, he was making negative comments about civil rights. By the 1960s, when advised not pursue civil rights, he was saying, "then what in the hell is the presidency for?" What was the difference? Probably because in the 1950s he was a Senator from Texas. I understand the political climate back in the 1990s and the 2000s. When it comes down too it, I'm more concerned with what she might do in the future, than what she did in past.

*with the understanding of course, that what goes for the "radical left wing agenda" these days is evidently anything that is somewhat to the left of Attila The Hun.

[Maithanet]

11 minutes ago, DMC said:

It's weird that Trump has held his fire on her thus far.  Even complimented her.  No idea what that means.  Probably nothing.

Yeah, I'm going with nothing.  Or if you're being generous, he has to work a little harder to attack her than Warren, and since he's lazy he hasn't gotten around to it. 

Quote

No, I think we've talked about his before.  The empirical evidence suggests to anybody that can adequately interpret data that he doesn't need to worry about his base and only gets hurt in approval when he does unpopular things because unpopular things tend to be unpopular with independents.  Silver had a write-up about this this morning.  His GOP approval during the shutdown dropped one point.  From 89 to 88.  That's actually incredibly remarkable.

His base support is astonishingly robust in the face of many, many fuckups.  I mean, the entire past two months have been just Trump whining, hurting Americans and negotiating worse and worse deals for himself.  How much would Obama's popularity have gone down if he'd done that?  Ten points?  It would be a lot.  

Nonetheless, I remain modestly optimistic about 2020.  It seems like the lessons Trump learned from the 2016 election were:  The base is why you won, the polls always underreport your popularity and the normal rules of politics don't apply to you.  I'd argue that all of those were only half true in 2016, and 100% false in 2018.  In 2018, Trump's base showed up to the polls, and they still got crushed*.  If Trump runs the 2020 campaign like he did 2018 (and he has been anathema to change or moderation thus far), I think he loses.  He's going to try and run for Reelection as an outsider, and that is going to be a very, very tough sell. 

* Florida notwithstanding.

 

[DMC]

46 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

I prefer the option of her actually believing in the goodness of the stuff she did but has changed her mind. A lot of people were hurt from her policies.

I don't think it's fair to say everything her, and especially just her office, had to defend in court should be described as "her" policies.  I think it's fair to criticize how she dealt with problematic laws - and I'm happy to have that debate - but I don't think we should be describing everything that happened in San Francisco and California during her tenures as DA and AG as something she necessarily advocates, let alone ascribing them as "hers." 

That's child's play.  There are certain examples where she did advocate problematic policies in my view, so those are definitely fair game.  But there's also many things where she very clearly made her personal opposition apparent, and I think that should be taken into account as well.  And, in most cases she didn't state an opinion one way or another, as is the nature of being in such positions.  Plus, while it may be politically convenient, I do think in terms of position taking it's more useful to look at her Senate record - where she inherently is not limited in terms of policy advocacy, just as she would be as president.

5 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

In 2018, Trump's base showed up to the polls, and they still got crushed*.  If Trump runs the 2020 campaign like he did 2018 (and he has been anathema to change or moderation thus far), I think he loses.  He's going to try and run for Reelection as an outsider, and that is going to be a very, very tough sell. 

It's very important to emphasize that midterms are not predictive of a successive reelection, at all.  But 2018 should have dispensed with this almost unspoken myth that Trump can do whatever and still prevail with the general electorate.  I honestly don't get many holding on to this belief in the face of the tonnage of empirical evidence to the contrary.  Although maybe I get it.  It's like when the Yanks were up by 2 with Mo on the mound and I'd still be like...we'll see.

[KingintheNorth4]

Remember when the Republicans would scream about "abuse of power" and "executive overreach"?

Good times.

[Bonnot OG]

6 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

That kiddo is the kind of liberal that wants liberals to lose so they can complain about liberals not being liberal enough. This is why there’s the adult’s table and a kid’s table. Go fetch him a sippy cup and move on.  

lol I'm not a liberal. I don't cow down racists, I don't think we need to get a president in the center (when the center is far right now with how far the actual right has shifted), I don't worship cops, I don't make excuses for bad policies like those of Harris, I don't think baby steps are the way to go or that reform is going to work at this point.

 

lots of black people despise Harris for the harm she did. But I don't expect the white liberals in here to associate with poc  outside of work to know that.

 

It's pretty clear I actually have a better understanding of how garbage she is and how she actually helped uphold white supremacy while working as a prosecutor, than some here do.

 

Just because she's black doesn't mean she didn't uphold racist policies or enable a bigoted system and perpetuate white supremacy.

[DMC]

There's another wholly inaccurate myth going around here that I feel like dispensing with.  This idea that the Senate is irredeemable for the Dems.  It does look bad for them in 2020, but that hardly is a permanent status - and even that can change quickly.  Let's try to look at this comparatively.  My problem with this premise is that neither party has a majority coalition right now.  The Republicans did after the Civil War and FDR built the most successful party coalition in American history in 1932.  Pre Civil War, for four score and seven years, the party systems were fairly fluid, so let's leave that out. 

So, for a rudimentary look, let's see the majority party switches for these three eras - Post Civil War (1866-1932), New Deal (1932-1980), Reagan Revolution (1980-current)*:

• Post Civil War Senate (66 years or 33 sessions):  5 - 1878; 1880; 1892; 1912; 1918.  Rate (5/33) - 15.2%.
• Post Civil War House (33 sessions):  9 - 1874; 1880; 1882; 1888; 1890; 1894; 1910; 1918; 1930.  Rate - 27.3%.
• New Deal Senate (46 years or 23 session):  5 - 1932; 1946; 1948; 1952; 1954.  Rate - 21.7%.
• New Deal House (23 sessions):  4 - 1946; 1948; 1952; 1954.  Rate - 17.4%.
• Current Senate (38 years or 19 sessions):  5.5 - 1980; 1986; 1994; 2001^; 2006; 2014.  Rate - 28.9%.
  • ^2001 pertains to the famous Jim Jeffords flip, which gave the Dems the Senate majority for about 18 months.  I think that should be worth half a point. 
• Current House (19 sessions):  4 - 1994; 2006; 2010; 2018.  Rate - 21%.

I don't see how you can look at that and be like, damn, the Senate is screwed for the Dems.  Yes, the GOP has an inherent advantage because they appeal to rural voters and rural voters are advantageous in disproportionately small states.  But that's hardly an intractable obstacle, especially, to sound like a broken record, due to polarization.

While that's a really primitive analysis, this is backed up by actual research.  Frances Lee is one of my favorite people in the field, and probably the top Senate scholar that isn't ancient (to be fair to others, most congressional scholars focus on the House, for a variety of reasons).  She wrote a book emphasizing the emerging uncertainty in congressional majorities that happens with polarization:

Quote

For nearly half a century, Democrats were the majority party, usually maintaining control of the presidency, the House, and the Senate. Republicans did not stand much chance of winning majority status, and Democrats could not conceive of losing it. Under such uncompetitive conditions, scant collective action was exerted by either party toward building or preserving a majority. Beginning in the 1980s, that changed, and most elections since have offered the prospect of a change of party control. Lee shows, through an impressive range of interviews and analysis, how competition for control of the government drives members of both parties to participate in actions that promote their own party’s image and undercut that of the opposition, including the perpetual hunt for issues that can score political points by putting the opposing party on the wrong side of public opinion. More often than not, this strategy stands in the way of productive bipartisan cooperation—and it is also unlikely to change as long as control of the government remains within reach for both parties.

*I'm not huge fan of using 1980, rather than 1994, as the cutoff.  That's an unending academic debate that ultimately doesn't matter.  However, considering we are talking about Congress, where the trends of polarization began in the late 70s according to DW-NOMINATE, I think it's preferable.

[mormont]

1 hour ago, Bonnot OG said:

But I don't expect the white liberals in here to associate with poc  outside of work to know that.

Did... did you just pull out 'I have black friends' in an attempt to boost your credibility?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 hours ago, Paladin of Ice said:

Thing is, it’s not like Gabbard’s awfulness was hiding or anything. A minute’s worth of googling and research would take you on a dive right into it. Plus she has a right wing Democrat/actually moderate Republican voting record on all but a few issues, (as opposed to most of the faux moderates we hear about that keep sticking to the Trump line) so most of the attention she got, especially from progressives, was due to being a superdelegate who backed Bernie. And while I was glad that Bernie pushed the economic discussion in the party leftward, the idea that anyone or anything he touched or backed should be adopted was always obviously bullshit, at least as far as I’m concerned.

Truth be told, I never thought to bother looking into her past or her stances because she didn't mean anything to me. I just appreciated that she took a principled stance on something that on paper could be a career killer.

2 hours ago, DMC said:

I never thought Gabbard was a "rising star."

I did before a lot of her baggage became more wildly known. We can agree to disagree.

Also, I agree with your take on the Senate. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

11 minutes ago, mormont said:

Did... did you just pull out 'I have black friends' in an attempt to boost your credibility?

He's black, to be fair. But he also makes sweeping assumptions about people and seems to be totally unaware that he is what he hates at times. The kid's an extremist whose methods will lead to what he fears most becoming even more wide spread. If we put him in charge, Trump would get 80% of the vote.  

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

We can agree to disagree.

Of course we can, your post was just the most efficient to respond to these threads' disproportionate attention towards Gabbard.  I don't get why y'all seem to care so much about Tulsi Gabbard.  If Chuck Liddell was asked about Tulsi Gabbard he'd be like "what's a Tulsi Gabbard?"

[Kalbear]

49 minutes ago, DMC said:

There's another wholly inaccurate myth going around here that I feel like dispensing with.  This idea that the Senate is irredeemable for the Dems.  It does look bad for them in 2020, but that hardly is a permanent status - and even that can change quickly.  Let's try to look at this comparatively.  My problem with this premise is that neither party has a majority coalition right now.  The Republicans did after the Civil War and FDR built the most successful party coalition in American history in 1932.  Pre Civil War, for four score and seven years, the party systems were fairly fluid, so let's leave that out. 

 

As I've said before, looking at history when we are in an entirely different political climate is about as useful as saying that Republicans are the party of Lincoln. 

Having a majority coalition doesn't matter nearly as much as having the majority in a state. The majority thing matters a whole lot when you care about a lot of disparate areas of the country, but states are largely separated into urban-rural divides, and right now you can easily figure out who is and isn't going to be the senate party in a state simply by urban/rural population differences. 

And based on that, Republicans have an edge of something like +4 senators right away. 

Now, if you want to change that, cool beans, but there's no sign that things like that are actually changing towards other values, and if anything they're becoming more entrenched. Can it change in 20 years? Sure. By then we'll have a system where democrats won't be able to appoint a single judicial or executive nominee to their cabinet, won't be able to pass any laws, and will be entirely stuck. 20 years of that will pretty much end what we have as a government, and there's no sign that this kind of hardball is punished (and if anything, it is actively rewarded and lauded as being a good move). 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

5 minutes ago, DMC said:

Of course we can, your post was just the most efficient to respond to these threads' disproportionate attention towards Gabbard.  I don't get why y'all seem to care so much about Tulsi Gabbard.  If Chuck Liddell was asked about Tulsi Gabbard he'd be like "what's a Tulsi Gabbard?"

Can't speak for anyone else, but I don't think I do. But Kal basically hit the nail on the head: she's attractive, and not just in a "D.C. attractive" kind of way. It's impart why AOC gets a lot of attention too, accept she also has a lot of great policy positions and just seems incredibly likable. Her reaction to winning was priceless. 

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/06/27/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-new-york-reaction-vpx.ny1