US Politics: Mail and Managers for Mitch

[Larry of the Lawn]

3 hours ago, DMC said:

So Bernie's camp goes public attacking Warren as the "candidate of the elite," Warren responds, and she backstabbed him?  Gotta love the Bernie cultists. 

That's not really a good description of what happened.  That Politico article references a script that was allegedly from the Sanders campaign, yet every single other Sanders volunteer or campaign worker has said they never saw it and that their scripts explicitly instruct them not to discuss other candidates.  

Politico says that the Sanders campaign hasn't challenged it's authenticity.  They certainly haven't gotten in front of this but that one script that Politico got a hold of seems to be the only one like it.  

I've been following this on Twitter since it broke and it seems to be a nothing burger.  The Sanders campaign definitely hasn't gone "public attacking Warren as the "candidate of the elite"" though.  It was one leaked script, and no one seems to be able to produce another.  Warren's characterization of the script itself is pretty exaggerated.

[DMC]

15 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Politico says that the Sanders campaign hasn't challenged it's authenticity.

Yep.  If it wasn't authentic, they would have challenged its authenticity.  If it was accidentally leaked and Sanders' camp genuinely didn't want it out there, they'd put out a stronger statement to quash it.  Their response is the equivalent of going public.

[Darryk]

4 hours ago, DMC said:

So Bernie's camp goes public attacking Warren as the "candidate of the elite," Warren responds, and she backstabbed him?  Gotta love the Bernie cultists. 

It was Bernie campaign volunteers trying to sway voters by telling them that Warren was elitist, that Buttigieg couldn't get the African American vote etc. the usual campaign shenanigans.

Whereas this was a private conversation that could only have been leaked by Warren or someone close to her, in which Bernie's position is obviously  misrepresented in a most underhanded manner.

It's also been hilarious watching mainstream media outlets seize on it (which they don't do the same extent with other candidates). CNN had a guest on saying "well Bernie's always had issues with gender". Lol, yeah right. He's the only candidate who's been fighting for women's and minority rights since like the 60s.

[Fez]

3 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Only surprising one was Yang.

Yang has a few unique responses that can boost him up the rankings pretty quickly if you agree with him. For instance, he is the only candidate on record in favor of expanding nuclear power; which I support.

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Darryk said:

It was Bernie campaign volunteers trying to sway voters by telling them that Warren was elitist,

Yes, it was a script put out by the campaign to volunteers, per politico.  Allowing that to leak and saying nothing to contradict it has the exact same effect as Warren's leak.  Acting like there's some important distinction between the two is absurd.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

23 minutes ago, Fez said:

Yang has a few unique responses that can boost him up the rankings pretty quickly if you agree with him. For instance, he is the only candidate on record in favor of expanding nuclear power; which I support.

That’s funny, because I went the mild road on nuclear power. I think the case is I’m so dismissive of his main policy proposal that I haven’t looked at much else he’s said. Basically my test says I support the moderates and didn’t think he’d be closer to them than to Sanders and Warren. And Gabbard’s just weird at this point so she’s a wash in my book.

[SkynJay]

Yang was my highest at 12.  Biden next at 9.  Bloom, Warren, Sanders at 8.  

Warren remains my favorite, though I guess I need to pay more attention to Yang.

[Paladin of Ice]

46 minutes ago, SkynJay said:

Yang was my highest at 12.  Biden next at 9.  Bloom, Warren, Sanders at 8.  

Warren remains my favorite, though I guess I need to pay more attention to Yang.

My thing with Yang is that while he has some good positions, he also has some other things that are problematic to me at best. Like I’m sure I’ve heard him use that idiotic “run the government like a business” tag line, and say that he wanted to drastically cut down on how many people the government employs, which, to me, is only a good thing if it was some kind of garbled attempt to say that he wanted to cut down on contractors doing government jobs and developed in-house ability and expertise instead, but I strongly doubt that was the case.

 I did the Post’s test yesterday, Warren was on top for me with 14, albeit with a caveat that I only kinda agree with her on a couple of things, but then on one or two things where it had me disagreeing with her I only kinda disagreed. I don’t remember where I stood with the other candidates.

[HexMachina]

Another non-US but i still have my preferences so I took it. Highest was Warren at 13. Then Yang at 12. Sanders third with 9. Bottom two were Bloomberg and Biden at 3. (And thank goodness for the latter). 

This is actually how i would have expected my results to turn out. Warren is my personal preference, and even though i don’t much like Bernie I know he is in at least certain respects the closest to my position policy wise. Surprised and disappointed by his stance on gun registration. Actually a few of his position surprised me as i expected him to be further left. Maybe that is just my cultural difference showing though.

I didn’t think to check what i was aligned with Biden on

[Isalie]

Having taken the test, my conclusion is that a fair share of yall would be right wingers in Sweden. 

[Maithanet]

6 minutes ago, Mikael said:

Having taken the test, my conclusion is that a fair share of yall would be right wingers in Sweden. 

It is quite possible that I would be a center-right voter in Sweden.  But you should also keep in mind that part of the reason I don't embrace more leftist positions is because I am a pragmatist and I think that a candidate as far left as Sanders would make Trump's reelection much more likely.  And even if Sanders won, he wouldn't be able to get Republicans and many more conservative Democrats on board with his plans anyways, which means his support for lefty positions is almost entirely downside.

[DMC]

23 minutes ago, Paladin of Ice said:

is only a good thing if it was some kind of garbled attempt to say that he wanted to cut down on contractors doing government jobs and developed in-house ability and expertise instead, but I strongly doubt that was the case.

A man after my own "just finished a dissertation on the impact of bureaucratic expertise on policymaking" heart.

[Zorral]

How can expanding nuclear anything be smart in an era of global warming and the rapid warming of the atmosphere as well as the oceans and other large bodies of water? 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the meantime, as we were saying:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/01/democrats-should-be-worried-about-latino-vote/604882/

Quote

 

That night, the president captured headlines for declaring that “God is on our side” and accusing Democrats of disloyalty for not supporting his air strike. But for Domingo Garcia, the national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, what the headlines—and Democrats—missed was the significance of the rally’s location: the home of the country’s largest Hispanic evangelical congregation.

“That should be a serious red flag to Democrats,” Garcia told me. Trump’s outreach to conservative Latinos in the South serves as a warning sign for deeper concerns that several Latino leaders and political activists shared with me: that they are dissatisfied with the level of engagement they are seeing from the Democratic primary contenders and are noticing the same kind of poor strategizing by candidates that yielded disappointing turnout among Hispanic voters in 2016.

By all demographic counts, 2020 should be the year Latinos make a decisive mark on national politics: Their support could swing primary races in early-voting and Super Tuesday states, possibly securing the nomination for one of the Democratic contenders, and it could tip the scales in the general election if they turn out to vote in the same record-breaking numbers as they did during 2018’s midterm elections.

But some of the Latino political organizers I spoke with described the primary season so far as a master class in “political malpractice”—as one person phrased it—with candidates struggling to engage Latino voters, address issues beyond immigration reform, and treat Latinos as the influential voting bloc they are. Others reported a lack of candidate interest in working with their organizations, including missed meetings and radio silence on questionnaires. (On top of all that, the only Latino candidate in the race, Julián Castro, dropped out earlier this month, leaving an all-white stage for tonight’s debate.) There’s a real risk that if Democrats don’t sort out these issues soon, they could struggle to attract and mobilize what could be the largest minority voting bloc in 2020.

 

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

4 hours ago, DMC said:

Yep.  If it wasn't authentic, they would have challenged its authenticity.  If it was accidentally leaked and Sanders' camp genuinely didn't want it out there, they'd put out a stronger statement to quash it.  Their response is the equivalent of going public.

 

3 hours ago, Darryk said:

It was Bernie campaign volunteers trying to sway voters by telling them that Warren was elitist, that Buttigieg couldn't get the African American vote etc. the usual campaign shenanigans.

Whereas this was a private conversation that could only have been leaked by Warren or someone close to her, in which Bernie's position is obviously  misrepresented in a most underhanded manner.

It's also been hilarious watching mainstream media outlets seize on it (which they don't do the same extent with other candidates). CNN had a guest on saying "well Bernie's always had issues with gender". Lol, yeah right. He's the only candidate who's been fighting for women's and minority rights since like the 60s.

My point was that while Politico made it sound like this script came from the campaign in some kind of standard way, that's not the case.  Sanders said that his campaign consists of hundreds of people and so does Warren's.  When they asked Sanders if he'd approved the memo he said no, and that he'd just heard about it.  A bunch of Sanders workers and volunteers posted the scripts and guidelines and even a form you had to sign that all explicitly stated not to discuss other candidates.  The politico article is pretty misleading- it makes it sound like because he didn't say "the memo wasn't authentic" that it was approved and vetted by his campaign.  

On top of that, even this memo isn't "trashing" Warren, it mentions that her supporters tend to be more affluent, likely to vote, and older.  As far as I know this is all true?  

Point is this IS a media blow up and both candidates have since downplayed the entire thing.  Now, if you want to speculate as to whether or not either campaign intended this memo to come to light, by all means, go for it, but it's nothing like the politico piece insinuates or any article that references it makes it out to be.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Maithanet said:

It is quite possible that I would be a center-right voter in Sweden.  But you should also keep in mind that part of the reason I don't embrace more leftist positions is because I am a pragmatist and I think that a candidate as far left as Sanders would make Trump's reelection much more likely.  And even if Sanders won, he wouldn't be able to get Republicans and many more conservative Democrats on board with his plans anyways, which means his support for lefty positions is almost entirely downside.

Yeah this is 100% my approach as well. I'm conceptually down with M4A, but don't lie to me and say you'll get it passed.

Also, interesting to see the Europeans consistently go with Sanders and Warren while widely rejecting the more moderate candidates. 

[DMC]

5 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

The politico article is pretty misleading- it makes it sound like because he didn't say "the memo wasn't authentic" that it was approved and vetted by his campaign.  

Politico, and the rest of the media, are going to take their cues from the campaign.  Again, you're right, it could have just been something that got out and Sanders nor his camp did not intend.  In that case you at least give some statement trying to roll it back, instead, politico got this:

Quote

The Sanders campaign did not challenge the authenticity of the script, but it declined to comment. The Warren campaign also declined to comment.

And this:

Quote

“We were told never to go negative or contrast with other candidates,” a person close to Sanders’ campaign told POLITICO. “Bernie would let us know when it was O.K.. So if that’s happening, he’s aware.”

Once you give them a chance to clarify, and they pass, politico is entirely justified rolling with the story that the Sanders campaign is going after Warren (and Biden and Buttigieg) at an escalated rate based on the reported content of that script.

Also, there's this, that was just published:  Sanders camp admits anti-Warren script was deployed in multiple early states:

Quote

The controversial talking points attacking Elizabeth Warren that Bernie Sanders' campaign deployed were given to teams in at least two early voting states on Friday, three Sanders campaign officials confirmed.

Volunteers and staffers used the script on Saturday while canvassing for votes. But later in the day, after POLITICO reported on language in the script describing Warren's appeal as limited to the highly educated and financially well off, the campaign pulled it back. [...]

“The language was pulled because it was sloppily worded,” a Sanders official said, confirming that the script was an official campaign document. Sanders initially blamed the controversy on rogue employees.

13 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

even this memo isn't "trashing" Warren, it mentions that her supporters tend to be more affluent, likely to vote, and older.  As far as I know this is all true?  

The memo apparently said:  "people who support her are highly-educated, more affluent people who are going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what."  I think it's fair to summarize/interpret that as saying the Bernie campaign is asserting Warren only appeals to the elite.  The suggestion is clear.

16 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Point is this IS a media blow up and both candidates have since downplayed the entire thing.

I think it's very naive to assume it's just the media blowing this up when both the candidates have been given ample time to come out with a forceful statement, and neither has done so to my knowledge.  That strongly indicates this is approved by both candidates and they're now playing a (avoid the) blame game.  If not, then they are each running their campaign incompetently.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

ok, took the quiz.

I am most allinged with Warren (16), next come Sanders and Steyer (11) - interesting, no idea how Steyer got there. Then come Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Yang on (10), Gabbard (9) and Klobuchar (8).

[Ormond]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

How can expanding nuclear anything be smart in an era of global warming and the rapid warming of the atmosphere as well as the oceans and other large bodies of water? 

~

 

Switching to nuclear power from carbon based fuels would greatly REDUCE man-made global warming. It would be very smart to expand nuclear power if reducing rapid warming is one's main goal. 

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-power-global-warming

https://www.climatecentral.org/news/nuclear-power-needs-to-double-to-meet-warming-goal-18610

 

Nuclear energy is not going to solve the climate problem by itself. But it can be some part of the solution. 

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Yes, the downside is: there's no real solution for what to do with the nuclear waste, and accidents happen or so people say.

But that's another problem for another day.

[Ormond]

2 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Yes, the downside is: there's no real solution for what to do with the nuclear waste, and accidents happen or so people say.

But that's another problem for another day.

Nuclear power can't be the major part of the solution because we are at a point where we simply cannot build enough new plants safely quickly enough and have to rely on other measures.  And certainly rational people can take the position that the waste problem makes expanding nuclear power not worth it.

I was only pointing out that it is wrong to think that expanding nuclear power would increase global warming.