Bernie's 2020 Campaign: August 2016 - At least through April, apparently
drummerboy said:
terp said:It was designed to protect the slave states, mostly.
The waters do get a bit muddy when you argue for simple majority rules when it suits you. It is important to remember that our system was designed specifically to avoid the dangers associated with such idiocy.
And if you think the electoral college is protection against idiocy, good for you.
And therein lies the problem. The liberal urban centers have specific ideas about how life should work. Rather than working on local solutions, they want everything centralized. Anyone who disagrees is an idiot.
And you think that picking our president based on majority rule isn't going to alienate a large percentage of the country? In this model campaigns will largely ignore all of rural America because the battles will go primarily to the cities.
The likely outcome is the federal government will take more and more control of people's lives. Many of these people already feel that they have no recourse. This will amplify this phenomenon to a great extent.
Or maybe I'm just an idiot for not agreeing with every government boondoggle you can come up with.
terp said:
drummerboy said:And therein lies the problem. The liberal urban centers have specific ideas about how life should work. Rather than working on local solutions, they want everything centralized. Anyone who disagrees is an idiot.
terp said:It was designed to protect the slave states, mostly.
The waters do get a bit muddy when you argue for simple majority rules when it suits you. It is important to remember that our system was designed specifically to avoid the dangers associated with such idiocy.
And if you think the electoral college is protection against idiocy, good for you.
And you think that picking our president based on majority rule isn't going to alienate a large percentage of the country? In this model campaigns will largely ignore all of rural America because the battles will go primarily to the cities.
The likely outcome is the federal government will take more and more control of people's lives. Many of these people already feel that they have no recourse. This will amplify this phenomenon to a great extent.
Or maybe I'm just an idiot for not agreeing with every government boondoggle you can come up with.
Yeah, ok.
And you don't think that elections which give the victory to the loser don't alienate 10's of millions of voters who just saw their vote go in the trash heap?
nan said:
Bernie is assembling a very diverse team for 2020, including someone local and the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz:
Well played.
Instant diversity. Like pouring it out of a soup can. What's not to love?
drummerboy said:
terp said:Yeah, ok.
drummerboy said:And therein lies the problem. The liberal urban centers have specific ideas about how life should work. Rather than working on local solutions, they want everything centralized. Anyone who disagrees is an idiot.
terp said:It was designed to protect the slave states, mostly.
The waters do get a bit muddy when you argue for simple majority rules when it suits you. It is important to remember that our system was designed specifically to avoid the dangers associated with such idiocy.
And if you think the electoral college is protection against idiocy, good for you.
And you think that picking our president based on majority rule isn't going to alienate a large percentage of the country? In this model campaigns will largely ignore all of rural America because the battles will go primarily to the cities.
The likely outcome is the federal government will take more and more control of people's lives. Many of these people already feel that they have no recourse. This will amplify this phenomenon to a great extent.
Or maybe I'm just an idiot for not agreeing with every government boondoggle you can come up with.
And you don't think that elections which give the victory to the loser don't alienate 10's of millions of voters who just saw their vote go in the trash heap?
whatever one's position on the usefulness of the Electoral College, one thing it certainly does NOT do currently is force candidates to pay attention to rural voters. Campaigns focus almost exclusively on large and large-ish states that have a divided electorate. Thus the focus on states like FL, OH, PA, NC and similar states. And when a candidate goes to the FL panhandle, they aren't pumping hands out in the rural areas, they're holding a rally in Tallahassee, because that's where the votes are. Less populated, more rural states that aren't contested like VT or MT get virtually no attention.
Not to mention that the Electoral College math means that votes in certain states are less valuable than others. A vote in NJ "counts" less than a vote in ND. It's just the math.
One thing could be said about abolishing the Electoral College and awarding the presidency to the candidate with the leading popular vote tally is that it would make every vote in the entire country equal. A vote in LA county would be just as valuable as a vote cast in the Alaskan wilderness.
Certainly candidates aren't likely to campaign in the boondocks where the voters are sparsely distributed. But they might visit Boise or Manchester or Birmingham, places that no candidate is likely to set foot in after those states' primaries.
But that said, I doubt the Electoral College is going away in my lifetime.
terp said:
You're aware that our form of government is a Republic and not a Democracy. Yes?
When I was very young I heard that said. So I looked up the definition of a Republic and found that it was a government without a hereditary ruler. Another words, not a Monarchy. Unlike The Peoples Republic of China we are a "Democratic" Republic, just like Bernie Sanders, as distinguished from the rulers of the latter nation is a "Democratic" Socialist.
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and James Madison, Father of the Constitution called the political party they founded the Democratic Republican Party.
terp said:
The waters do get a bit muddy when you argue for simple majority rules when it suits you. It is important to remember that our system was designed specifically to avoid the dangers associated with such idiocy.
How's that working out?
ml1 said:
whatever one's position on the usefulness of the Electoral College, one thing it certainly does NOT do currently is force candidates to pay attention to rural voters. Campaigns focus almost exclusively on large and large-ish states that have a divided electorate. Thus the focus on states like FL, OH, PA, NC and similar states. And when a candidate goes to the FL panhandle, they aren't pumping hands out in the rural areas, they're holding a rally in Tallahassee, because that's where the votes are. Less populated, more rural states that aren't contested like VT or MT get virtually no attention.
Not to mention that the Electoral College math means that votes in certain states are less valuable than others. A vote in NJ "counts" less than a vote in ND. It's just the math.
You make good pints.
Trump won the Electoral Vote by winning three States by small margins. Those States were Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. How many votes did he get in Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh?
Mr. Terp,
Why do you believe that rural voters are more resistant to Government control than urban voters. Who are more likely to want Government to limit women's right to do what they wish with their bodies, or limit whom we can marry or, even, what we can smoke? The current occupant of the WH is a complete authoritarian.
BG9 said:
STANV said:For the conservative red states, very well.
terp said:How's that working out?
The waters do get a bit muddy when you argue for simple majority rules when it suits you. It is important to remember that our system was designed specifically to avoid the dangers associated with such idiocy.
I was talking about avoiding "idiocy". If that, as terp says, is the purpose of the design of our system it's a colossal failure.
And BTW, folks in the "conservative red states" are not doing better than those in the "liberal blue states". Is Biloxi, MS a better place to live than Maplewood, NJ?
STANV said:
BG9 said:I was talking about avoiding "idiocy". If that, as terp says, is the purpose of the design of our system it's a colossal failure.
STANV said:For the conservative red states, very well.
terp said:How's that working out?
The waters do get a bit muddy when you argue for simple majority rules when it suits you. It is important to remember that our system was designed specifically to avoid the dangers associated with such idiocy.
And BTW, folks in the "conservative red states" are not doing better than those in the "liberal blue states". Is Biloxi, MS a better place to live than Maplewood, NJ?
Of course not.
But they feel it's working out well. They have the fantasy of "we're finally sticking it to those people, LGBT, foreigners, POC, liberals with an illusion of their ascendancy. A living a life of not realizing the screws being applied.
And actually, to some degree with the new tax law the conservative poor read states are being helped. A larger transfer of wealth from rich to poor states. But then, aren't we supposed to help the poor?
Sweet Jesus. In the name of all that’s holy. Let this guy be the nominee. Or Lieawatha.
Bernie is originally from the Bronx. This means he might be a Yankee fan. I forgive him for that.
Now where is that damn T shirt?
There is a Bernie CNN Townhall tonight at 8:00 PM
CNN to host Bernie Sanders at 2020 town hall
Edited to add: I just saw that you should be able to view this for free from his Twitter.
jamie said:
And? How did Bernie do? I was underwhelmed.
I thought Bernie did great overall, but it looks like CNN was up to their old 2016 tricks again. Compared to say, Kamala Harris's TH, this was a smaller venue with placed piranhas. They had negative talking heads right before and after also. Chris Cuomo said his $10 million supporter contributions were "chicken feed." The biggest problem was the people asking questions, who it seems were not, as in a real townhall--average people on the street, but interns and employees of lobby groups and other anti-Sanders venues. When introducing the questioners, CNN did not disclose some of their real positions or affiliations. But, in spite of all of that, Sanders answered the questions and did a great job. And it was a great opportunity for him nevertheless.
jamie said:
which questions weren’t fair?
It wasn't that they were not fair--it's was the framing--in a kind of "when did you stop beating your wife" kind of way. Kamala Harris did not have this kind of "gotcha" questioning at her townhall.
Here is some more discussion: it: https://twitter.com/WalkerBragman/status/1100426325012156417
Can you answer my question or do I have to go through tweets in order to figure out what you’re thinking?
Bernie was evasive and very unimpressive. Even worse than Tulsi on her best day. And that's not saying much.
Creative differences after helping him raise 10 million?
WASHINGTON — The architects of the 2016 insurgent campaign for Senator Bernie Sanders abruptly parted ways with his 2020 campaign on Tuesday, dealing him a surprise blow one week after he entered the presidential race with an emphatic show of fund-raising strength.
The consultants, Tad Devine, Julian Mulvey and Mark Longabaugh, said in a statement that they were “leaving because we believe that Senator Sanders deserves to have media consultants who share his creative vision for the campaign.”
Their decision was unexpected: The three produced the announcement video that Mr. Sanders released last week, which has helped him raise $10 million, and they had been intimately involved in the planning of a second White House bid for the Vermont senator.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/us/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-consultants.html
jamie said: Can you answer my question or do I have to go through tweets in order to figure out what you’re thinking?
I answered your question. Let me ask you a question. What exactly don't you like about Bernie's fundraising and platform? Which candidate has a better approach to fundraising and a better platform?
Time to Get on Board With Bernie
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/time-to-get-on-board-with-bernie/
Now, it strikes me, is not the time to be beating up on Bernie Sanders from his radical port-side. Yes, comrades, the Democratic Party is an inherently elitist, fatally flawed vehicle for progressive change. It is a corporate and imperial institution, owned and controlled by the nation’s interrelated and unelected dictatorships of money and empire.
Yes, generations of progressive and leftist activists have found out over and again that “you don’t take the Democratic Party over; it takes you over.” We need to build and expand real people’s movements beneath and beyond the “inauthentic opposition party” (the late political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s dead-on term for the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats) and U.S. major-party election cycle, which function together as shock absorbers for potentially radical popular anger and “the graveyard of social movements.”
Yes, Sanders is a fake “independent” who is maddeningly unwilling to confront the Pentagon system and the criminal Pax Americana. And yes, he isn’t really a socialist. He isn’t talking about workers’ control of production or of the workplace (where working-age Americans spend most of their waking hours) more broadly. He isn’t demanding the overdue nationalization of the nation’s top, archparasitic financial institutions. He isn’t calling for a general strike or a Gilets Jaunes-style rebellion of the proletariat. He hasn’t joined serious ecosocialists in calling for the Green New Deal he advocates to be funded with massive, required reductions in the U.S. military budget—or for the Green New Deal to be buttressed and protected by government control or takeover of the big banks so that capital can’t just leave the country in response to the demand of environmentally responsible investment.
Fine, but here are six things for understandably angry and alienated leftists to keep in mind going forward.
First, the U.S. electoral system is a two-party regime by design. It has been from the start. And the notion that we are going to get something seriously progressive done via third and fourth presidential candidates under that system is every bit as much of a pipe dream as the notion of lefties seizing power in the Democratic Party.
The high-water mark of third-party, democratic socialist presidential politics in the United States is Eugene Debs getting 6 percent—that’s right, 6 percent, and a great, Christ-like candidate to boot—of the popular vote in 1912. And we don’t even elect presidents by popular majority vote in the U.S., anyway.
Want viable third-party candidates for the top elective offices in the U.S.? Buy some yellow traffic vests and hit the streets to join France’s Gilets Jaunes in calling for a new constitution that privileges real, popular sovereignty, bourgeois representative democracy. Demand the establishment of a constituent assembly to draft a new charter with new rules of the electoral game, including (for starters) full public financing and proportional representation, an end to the insane Electoral College, an end to the ridiculous apportionment of two U.S. senators to each state regardless of population, the abolition of gerrymandering, an end to voter suppression and felony disenfranchisement, and the drastic shortening of the campaign season. Without fundamental change in the institutional structure of U.S. electoral politics, which nobody seems to want to talk about beyond small circles, the third-party thing is just another way to waste scarce energy.
Second, if you don’t think it’s a big deal that the word “socialism” is now received favorably by majorities of Democrats and millennials, then you are too damn cynical for your own and the common good. So what if it lacks precise and fully radical definition in the national political culture? Why expect that? Meanwhile, think about it—four interrelated developments have taken the totalitarian fear-sting out of the word for millions upon millions of people living in what is still the world’s most powerful nation: 1) the end of the Cold War; 2) the miserable performance of oligarchic neoliberal capitalism as experienced by most of the majority working-class U.S. population; 3) the transparent absurdity of the American right’s constant redbaiting of almost everything to its left as “socialist;” 4) the remarkable success Sanders experienced running as a self-declared socialist in 2016.
Sorry, hyperalienated cynics, but that is a big freaking deal. It is nothing to sneeze at in a time when capitalism seems determined to turn the entire planet into a giant greenhouse-gas chamber.
Hard-core Sandernistas give Sanders excessive acclaim for legitimizing the word “socialism” in the U.S. The lion’s share of credit belongs to capitalism and to the ironies of its victory over the Soviet Union. Capital’s Cold War triumph helped give free rein to rapacious global capital while depriving the capitalist powers of the tyrannical Stalinist foil that let them easily equate socialism with authoritarian dungeons and totalitarian thought-police.
Still, Sanders has played a significant role in raising the United States’ new democratic socialist potential. His success can help actual socialists to his left advance a more meaningful and genuinely anti-capitalist (not merely and oxymoronic “moral capitalist”) definition of the term.
Third, as I have previously explained here and elsewhere, Medicare-for-all (single-payer health care) is a powerful and sweeping reform, with revolutionary implications for ordinary and working-class people’s ability to fight class rule and its partners: sexism, racism, imperialism, nativism and ecocide.
Fourth, we have no choice but to get behind and then push to the left the Green New Deal, even with its current insufficiently radical formulation in the hands of welcome novices like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The climate-crisis clock is ticking with ever greater ice-sheet melting and rainforest-ruining urgency every day. If environmental catastrophe isn’t averted over the next 10 to 20 years through drastic green policy change within and beyond the United States (the homeland and headquarters of the fossil fuel industry’s almost unimaginably evil project of turning the entire planet into a greenhouse-gas chamber), then nothing else we on the actual left care about is going to matter very much. We’ll just be calling for the more equal sharing out of a poisoned pie, the turning upside-down of a disastrously overheated world. Refusing to get on board with the Green New Deal because it isn’t yet fully anti-capitalist and radically ecosocialist is foolish. It is, in fact, “making the perfect enemy of the good.”
Fifth, we on the actual left should look forward to the debate that a robust new Sanders campaign can force on the Democratic Party. Already the mainstream corporate Dem politicos and pundits are lining up with the standard charge—certain to be lobbed at Sanders again and again as the election cycle deepens—that there’s “just no realistic way to pay for” the supposedly “fantastic,” “unrealistic,” “extreme,” “radical” and “socialist” things (such as single-payer health care, a green jobs programs, free college, expanded Social Security, etc.) that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez want. This will be a good moment for an actual left to speak up. In accord with the limited vision of the 1967 AFL-CIO-backed Freedom Budget, Sanders will insist that we can afford the good progressive things that most Americans want simply by taxing the wealthy few and their corporations. He’ll hold back from courageously and honestly acknowledging that we’ll have to take huge slices out of that great, unmentionable institutional and budgetary elephant in the room—the Pentagon system—and that we’ll have to institute real popular control over the nation’s financial surplus and thus over its top financial institutions.
That will be ********. The truth is that we can’t bring social democracy and a desperately needed World War II-style environmental reconversion about without dismantling the war machine and bringing the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money to heel.
Let the debate proceed.
Sixth, it will be very instructive to millions to watch the dismal, demobilizing and dollar-drenched Democrats knife Sanders and rig the game against his majority-backed, progressive-populist agenda all over again in the 2020 primaries. The Democratic Party’s handlers can be expected to demonstrate again that they prefer to risk losing to the right, even a creeping-fascist, white-nationalist right, over losing to the left, even the very mildly social democratic left, in their own party. Even if they sneak past the GOP this time (as they occasionally do), their likely miserable capital- and empire-captive performance in office will remind millions of citizens who get it that the country needs socialism; that the time is long past when We the People can capture the Democratic Party and wield it for genuinely popular purposes that privilege people over profits; and that we need to embrace an actually left and socialist People’s Party that is intimately linked to great and locally rooted grassroots social movements that function beneath and beyond the election cycle.
ugh - an opinion piece by a Bernie bro I'm sure. My thoughts - one shouldn't need to write a piece like that to get people behind their candidate. They're in complete defense mode - why is this?
Let's just get the details on his plans first. Free college paid for by Wall Street speculation - really? That's a major gamble. Medicare for all paid for by the rich and undoing tax loopholes - umm no.
How about be honest and put out a universal health care plan that's similar to other countries like Germany - people will need to pay more taxes into it ultimately. Why not be a realist about this?
Bernie's gang - instead of laying out his plan - they're already formulating excuses of why people aren't supporting him.
and I've said this many times - please just share a link - don't paste the whole text of someone's work.
Also, if Jimmy Dore wasn't a Bernie supporter - he would of had a field day with that town hall video.
jamie said:
ugh - an opinion piece by a Bernie bro I'm sure. My thoughts - one shouldn't need to write a piece like that to get people behind their candidate. They're in complete defense mode - why is this?
Let's just get the details on his plans first. Free college paid for by Wall Street speculation - really? That's a major gamble. Medicare for all paid for by the rich and undoing tax loopholes - umm no.
How about be honest and put out a universal health care plan that's similar to other countries like Germany - people will need to pay more taxes into it ultimately. Why not be a realist about this?
Bernie's gang - instead of laying out his plan - they're already formulating excuses of why people aren't supporting him.
The author is not a Bernie Bro, has been a harsh critic, and, in fact wrote an anti-Bernie book during 2016. He's now being a realist and writing why supporting him makes the most sense.
jamie said:
and I've said this many times - please just share a link - don't paste the whole text of someone's work.
Also, if Jimmy Dore wasn't a Bernie supporter - he would of had a field day with that town hall video.
Not the whole text--actually just a piece. But, I will try to make them shorter. Bernie did great in the town hall, despite it being disingenuously set up for him to fail. Not a good look for CNN--not good journalism.
nan said:
jamie said:The author is not a Bernie Bro, has been a harsh critic, and, in fact wrote an anti-Bernie book during 2016. He's now being a realist and writing why supporting him makes the most sense.
ugh - an opinion piece by a Bernie bro I'm sure. My thoughts - one shouldn't need to write a piece like that to get people behind their candidate. They're in complete defense mode - why is this?
Let's just get the details on his plans first. Free college paid for by Wall Street speculation - really? That's a major gamble. Medicare for all paid for by the rich and undoing tax loopholes - umm no.
How about be honest and put out a universal health care plan that's similar to other countries like Germany - people will need to pay more taxes into it ultimately. Why not be a realist about this?
Bernie's gang - instead of laying out his plan - they're already formulating excuses of why people aren't supporting him.
What is this anti-Bernie book called?
Doesn't matter. We are not going to permit Bernie to have the nomination. Ain't happening. It's reserved for a Democrat.
jamie said:
nan said:What is this anti-Bernie book called?
jamie said:The author is not a Bernie Bro, has been a harsh critic, and, in fact wrote an anti-Bernie book during 2016. He's now being a realist and writing why supporting him makes the most sense.
ugh - an opinion piece by a Bernie bro I'm sure. My thoughts - one shouldn't need to write a piece like that to get people behind their candidate. They're in complete defense mode - why is this?
Let's just get the details on his plans first. Free college paid for by Wall Street speculation - really? That's a major gamble. Medicare for all paid for by the rich and undoing tax loopholes - umm no.
How about be honest and put out a universal health care plan that's similar to other countries like Germany - people will need to pay more taxes into it ultimately. Why not be a realist about this?
Bernie's gang - instead of laying out his plan - they're already formulating excuses of why people aren't supporting him.
OK, I was wrong on that--the book I was thinking of was written by Jeffery St.Clair, but he has written lots of negative articles on Bernie which you can find by googling his name with Sanders.
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The first thing that comes to mind is that Bernie has dealt with Vermont winters since 1968. My sister lives about 14 miles west of Burlington. I have experienced Vermont winters.
It takes a lot of "hard bark" to do so. Ok, that is a Maine saying.
Bernie has been Mayor of Burlington 4 times............a Vermont Congressman for several terms
and the Junior Senator from the Green Mountain State since 2006. He is not new to politics nor did he move to Vermont because a Senate seat was about to become vacant.
Look at the films of the crowds he attracted last time...........while the others had to photo shop scenes of empty bleachers to make them appear full.
But most of all listen to his message................one that last time so many dismissed as "pie in the sky". Now count the others who have declared their candidacy. Do their messages sound familiar.
Bernie dreams of a day when a cancer patient will not have to set up a "go fund me: account in order
to pay for his/her medical bills. Can we do less?