2020: The Two Year Long Election

[GreyhoundFan]

Another good op-ed from Jennifer Rubin: "Why Buttigieg and Warren are surging"

Spoiler

The punditocracy decided Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wasn’t electable. The conventional wisdom said it was impossible for a mayor of a mid-sized Midwest city to compete for the presidential nomination, even if he was also a Rhodes Scholar and an Afghanistan war veteran. Hillary Clinton had too many policies, so Warren wasn’t going to win over voters with substance. South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg was utterly unknown to the vast majority of primary voters, so he couldn’t compete with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose name ID was practically 100 percent.

All of this was gibberish (as a few of us suggested), but now that we see an Iowa poll (albeit, ridiculously early so it is not predictive but rather descriptive of this moment in the race) in which former vice president Joe Biden is at a respectable 24 percent, and Sanders is in the midteens in a state he should be dominating (he got 49.6 percent in the 2016 Iowa caucuses), and worse, in a statistical tie with Warren (15 percent) and Buttigieg (14 percent).

Let me suggest four reasons Warren and Buttigieg are surging while Sanders is drifting down in the back and almost everyone else (but California Sen. Kamala D. Harris who clocks in with 7 percent) is virtually invisible.

First, after 2½ years of listening to an ignorant ― a proudly ignorant ― president who plays to the lowest common denominator and has zero grasp of policy, Democrats (who take governing seriously) were just waiting for a supersmart, articulate, knowledgeable and informed candidate (or two). Warren has not only policies for virtually every issue but also a command of the facts that her policies aim to address. Buttigieg, his opponents claim, doesn’t have too many in-depth policies, but he has positions on just about everything, can speak fluently (in Norwegian, no less) about issues of the day and sounds very much like a brainy Rhodes Scholar.

Second, both Warren and Buttigieg have found a way to talk about faith, something the left hasn’t done for years. They defend Christian faith insofar as it inspires one to greet the stranger, care for the sick, tend to the elderly, etc. Warren loves to recite Matthew 25:31-40; Buttigieg expresses the same sentiment. (“When I think about where most of Scripture points me, it is toward defending the poor, and the immigrant, and the stranger, and the prisoner, and the outcast, and those who are left behind by the way society works,” he says. “And what we have now is this exaltation of wealth and power, almost for its own sake, that in my reading of Scripture couldn’t be more contrary to the message of Christianity.”) After watching a cruel, racist bully in the White House become the focus of the evangelical right’s adulation (verging on idolatry), Democrats are delighted to recapture the moral high ground.

Third, Warren and Buttigieg are not gloom and doom candidates. Buttigieg’s preternatural calm is soothing and reassuring; Warren’s peppiness and conviction that fundamental changes can be made (We can do this!) provide a relief from the cloud of Trump that has hung over our politics. Buttigieg promises to “change the channel” (please, take the remote!), and Warren bubbles with excitement as she describes her latest policy designed to level the playing field for average Americans. These are audaciously optimistic candidates.

Finally, better than most other candidates, they’ve used free media to their advantage. For a while, Buttigieg seemed to be on every cable TV show and at every town hall. Warren won’t go on Fox News, but she will go almost anywhere else and sign autographs and take pictures until the last person leaves. Not only do they maximize their audience by opening themselves up to questions, but they also convey confidence and energy in doing so.

In some respects, the success of Warren and Buttigieg shouldn’t surprise us. Optimism, confidence, a can-do attitude and bold value statements traditionally have worked well for candidates (e.g., Presidents Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama). And good candidates who are their own best messengers tend to beat weaker candidates who either shrink from the press or provide mushy, equivocating answers. Somewhere, the late senator John McCain ― the originator of the Straight Talk Express ― is smiling.

I know it's very early, this won't happen, and I will support whomever is the eventual Democratic nominee, but at this point, my dream is Liz as POTUS and Pete as VP.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Daily 202: ‘A product of the 9/11 generation’: Pete Buttigieg leans into his youth as he outlines a foreign policy"

Spoiler

THE BIG IDEA: When Pete Buttigieg was born in 1982, Ronald Reagan was president. Joe Biden had been in the Senate for a decade, Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vt., and Donald Trump was a Democrat.

The 37-year-old, who is polling in the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates, was a sophomore at Harvard when the twin towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. He debated with classmates whether the United States should invade Iraq as Mark Zuckerberg wrote the code for what would become Facebook in a dorm across the street. Buttigieg missed his 10-year college reunion because he was deployed to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, serving as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve.

Buttigieg invoked 9/11 seven times during a 57-minute speech on Tuesday that sketched out his vision for foreign policy and national security. “As a mayor from the industrial Midwest, as a product of the 9/11 generation and as a veteran of the Afghanistan conflict, my own worldview is shaped, predictably, by my life experience,” he explained to a full auditorium at the University of Indiana in Bloomington.

The man who could become America’s first openly gay president is also the first member of “the 9/11 generation” to credibly contend for a major party’s nomination. Marco Rubio, as a point of comparison, was the youthful candidate in 2016. But he was already in his 30s and serving in the Florida House on Sept. 11. In contrast, Buttigieg recalled reading “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama when he arrived in college in the autumn of 2000. By the time he finished his studies at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 2007, that argument seemed tragically quaint and America was mired in two quagmires.

“I fear that someday soon we may receive news of the first U.S. casualty of the 9/11 wars who was born after 9/11,” he said on Tuesday. “None of us will live to see the end of history.”

-- Buttigieg delivered this speech – his first significant policy address – to blunt the nagging criticism from major donors, media elites and naysayers in the Democratic firmament that he’s too young and inexperienced to become commander in chief. And he’s still got his work cut out on that front. This is a second-term mayor of Indiana’s fourth-biggest city, population 101,081. I’d be hugely impressed if you’re not a Hoosier and could name the mayors of Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and Evansville.

Buttigieg finished third in the DNC chairman’s race just last year and was almost entirely unknown a few months ago beyond a small cadre of political reporters cultivated by his team. One of the reasons he’s running for president is because he’s probably too liberal to win statewide in a place as red as Indiana has become. In 2010, Buttigieg ran for state treasurer and lost by 25 points to Richard Mourdock. That’s the Republican who would lose a U.S. Senate race two years later after declaring that a woman who gets pregnant by her rapist is carrying a “gift from God” and thus must have the child.

In the early months of his campaign, Buttigieg has faced questions about whether he’s leaned too much on his personality and not talked enough about substance. You probably know he speaks several languages and learned Norwegian so he could read more books by an author he liked, but you might struggle to explain where he comes down on the major litmus tests that have characterized the early stages of the nominating contest.

-- Buttigieg seems determined to avoid the fate of Gary Hart – the 1984 version who took on former vice president Walter Mondale, not the 1988 iteration brought down by whatever hanky-panky happened aboard the Monkey Business. He spent weeks working with a growing kitchen cabinet of volunteer advisers, including several alumni of Barack Obama’s administration, to craft a meaty speech that could show there’s beef in that patty.

So, rather than apologize for his youth, the boy mayor leaned into it. A recurring trope of the speech was that Americans should be thinking about what they want the country to look like in 2054. It’s no coincidence that this is when Buttigieg will turn 72, the age of the current president. (Trump turns 73 on Friday.)

“Thinking about the world three to four decades from now is exactly how we need to compete with countries like China, because that is how they are thinking, planning and investing,” he said.

Buttigieg used the word “future” a dozen times. “We face not just another presidential election, but a transition between one era and another,” he said. “I believe that the next three or four years will determine the next 30 or 40 for our country and our world.”

Among other things, he said, this requires a modernized approach to defense spending and rethinking the priorities of the past. “The U.S. has long sought to maintain total dominance in conventional war. But in the coming decades, we are more likely than ever to face insurgencies, asymmetric attacks and high-tech strikes with cyberweapons or drones,” Buttigieg said. “Yet our latest defense budget calls for spending more on three Virginia-class submarines — $10.2 billion — than on cyberdefenses. It proposes spending more on a single frigate than on artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

-- Without naming names, Buttigieg chastised the old guard of the Democratic Party. “I should acknowledge that, for the better part of my lifetime, it has been difficult to identify a consistent foreign policy in the Democratic Party,” he said. “We see leaders promise, again and again, to end the forever wars — only to fall short.”

He endorsed efforts to rescind the authorization for the use of military force that passed after 9/11. “As someone … who believed, back in 2014, that our involvement in Afghanistan was coming to an end and that I was one of the last to turn out the lights,” the mayor said, “the time has come for Congress to repeal and replace that blank check on the use of force and ensure a robust debate on future operations.”

-- Trump never delivered a speech this substantive before locking up the GOP nomination in 2016. The transcript of Buttigieg’s remarks runs over 7,500 words. He spoke with moral clarity about human rights abuses that the Trump administration has sought to sweep under the rug, specifically involving Saudi Arabia and the president’s refusal to hold the regime accountable for the murder of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. He said military intervention in Venezuela and Iran would not be in the national interest. He promised to recommit to the nuclear agreement with Tehran and the climate accord signed in Paris.

He covered all the major flash points like Israel (he was critical of Bibi Netanyahu but supportive of Israel) but also discussed areas that get less attention, such as Africa. “In Algeria, a new generation has risen up against a sclerotic government,” he said. “In Sudan, women have led a revolt against a criminal one. And, in Ethiopia, we have seen what it looks like when hope triumphs over hostility. By 2025, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population will live in the nations of a rising Africa: 60 percent of whose people are now under the age of 25. … As African peoples demand greater accountability and transparency from their leaders, the United States must stand ready to put our values into action, to promote empowerment alongside economic engagement.”

He never named Trump, but he sure trolled him. On North Korea, for example, he said, “You will not see me exchanging love letters on White House letterhead with a brutal dictator who starves and murders his own people.”

On the other hand, Buttigieg favorably quoted traditional Republicans such as Dwight Eisenhower. He was also unequivocal in expressing support for the concept of “American exceptionalism,” something that has tripped up so many on the left in recent decades. And he paid tribute to Dick Lugar by comparing himself to the late GOP senator, who earned bipartisan plaudits for his work on arms control and nuclear nonproliferation. “What’s not to like,” Buttigieg joked, “about a onetime mayor from Indiana who cut his teeth as a Rhodes Scholar and a Navy intelligence officer?”

He didn’t name Reagan, but he spoke of the need for America to again be that shining city upon the hill. “At home and abroad, it is not too late for America to restore her leadership position as a beacon of values that are both universal and at the core of the American project,” Buttigieg said. “It is hard to stand for human rights abroad when we’re turning away asylum seekers at our own borders. … The idea that the ‘American way’ is superior will be difficult to authenticate as long as our federal government is liable to shut down over policy disagreements. … Strength is more than military power. It’s our power of inspiration.”

...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Talk about a show that needs to be cancelled... "Democrats fret over the never-ending Trump Show"

Spoiler

After 23 campaign launches, 33 televised town hall meetings, hundreds of campaign events and tens of thousands of candidate selfies, the Democratic primary has started with a bang this year — busier and bigger than at any other in recent memory.

But the Democratic circus still can’t compete for attention with the spectacle of President Trump. The country remains far more focused on a ubiquitous commander in chief than on all the Democratic presidential candidates combined, a major concern for party strategists preparing for the general election in 2020.

“Donald Trump has managed to control the media cycle on a daily basis in ways that have made it difficult to communicate our message,” said Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez, who will begin his party’s official answer to the Trump Show on June 26 and 27, with the first of 12 televised prime-time Democratic debates.

New data complied by The Washington Post shows just how steep a climb the party faces. Through the first five months of the year, Trump has received about three times as much Google search interest in the United States, on average, as all his Democratic rivals put together.

He has been having about 75 percent more social media interactions on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram than his rivals combined since February.

And when it comes to CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel, Trump was mentioned nearly twice as often as the 23 Democrats last month.

Democratic Party leaders remember all too well the overwhelming attention that Trump, then a celebrity and colorful TV personality, attracted during the 2016 campaign, allowing him to sell his defiant appeal to independents and drum up enthusiasm in the GOP base.

“You will find yourself jerked around on Donald Trump’s chain unless you are creating fights,” said Brian Fallon, who served as the national press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

By the end of the 2016 primaries, the 12 Republican debates had been watched by 183 million viewers, more than double the 72 million that tuned in to the nine Democratic faceoffs, according to the liberal think tank NDN.

As president, Trump will have even more power to seize the spotlight this time, enabling him to eclipse Democratic events almost at will. “Think I will do many more Network Interviews, as I did in 2016, in order to get the word out,” he announced Saturday on Twitter.

Party leaders fully expect a media blitz. The question for Democrats is whether there’s any way to counter Trump’s media barrage. Few public figures are willing to be as provocative, insulting or outrageous as he is, and arguably few have his flair for it.

For now Democrats are groping toward a strategy of shooting for higher ratings — recognizing they may never match Trump — while also teeing up a slew of advertising campaigns on issues such as health care and jobs to get out their message.

Perez has made ratings a top priority for the debates, some of which will unfold over two consecutive nights. To increase interest, he allowed even candidates who are polling below 1 percent to qualify if they could attract 65,000 donors, in hopes of encouraging those donors to watch the debates because they will have a stake in the process.

Perez says that he’s optimistic and that the public has soured on Trump’s antics, but he also argues that news organizations are to blame for much of the attention given Trump over the years. “I think the media needs some soul-searching,” he said. “Too many media outlets and journalists wake up in the morning look to his Twitter feed and that dictates their day.”

Whatever the reason, the party’s candidates have drawn modest ratings. The highest-rated cable town hall session for a Democrat — Sen. Bernie Sanders’s appearance on Fox News Channel — topped 2.5 million viewers. At least a dozen others were unable to break 1 million, with six falling below half a million.

In contrast, the first Republican debate in August 2015 drew more than 24 million people eager to see Trump’s debut as an unorthodox presidential contender.

Democratic strategists note that it’s early in the process, and they contend that Trump’s combative tactics have alienated many supporters while energizing opponents. More voters will tune in to Democratic events in the fall, they say, as the presidential field narrows and candidates begin their sprint toward the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses.

Democrats have also sought to learn lessons from their 2016 defeat. In the 2018 congressional campaigns, Democratic candidates battled daily with a news cycle dictated by Trump or dominated by his controversies — such as the Russia investigation, his alleged sexual encounter with adult-film star Stormy Daniels, and his near-daily Twitter grenades on everything from migrant caravans to alleged corruption at the FBI.

The key to Democratic success this time, some party strategists argue, will be to focus on issues that affect voters’ lives, such as health care, education and wages. But news organizations often view those issues as less flashy, they say, so their candidates will have to buy ads to spread the word.

“We have a culture that rewards the clown show at the expense of real issues,” said Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, a super PAC that plans to spend heavily to defeat Trump.

“One of the biggest challenges” for Democrats in the midterms, Cecil said, “was a huge disconnect between what was being covered on cable news and what campaigns were being run on in the states.” He added, “The way that Democrats got attention on health care was they paid for it.”

Democrats outspent Republicans in the 2018 election on broadcast ads, running more than 1 million spots that mentioned health care over the course of the cycle, according to an analysis by Kanter Media.

It will be harder to follow that same playbook in 2020, given Trump’s substantial early fundraising advantage and the fact that he will be on the ballot, not just commenting from the sidelines.

“We had the luxury of Trump not being a candidate,” said Dan Sena, who was executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which coordinates the party’s House races. “We had things like the tax fight and the health-care fight that directly impacted people’s lives immediately.”

This year, Trump has continued to create storms of media coverage that have often blotted out reporting about the Democratic campaign — attacking the royal Duchess Meghan and actress Bette Midler on a recent trip to England, siding with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over his national security advisers in Japan, trumpeting tariff showdowns with China and Mexico.

Even when it comes to one-on-one conflicts, Trump has found a way to come out on top, at least in terms of media attention. When former vice president Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, traveled to Iowa last Tuesday to deliver a speech declaring Trump an existential threat to the nation, Trump responded with his own inflammatory comments.

That night, on the evening newscasts by NBC, CBS and ABC, Trump was rewarded for his quotes, which were if anything more jarring and aggressive. “He’s a dummy,” Trump said of Biden, while also calling him “mentally weak” and suggesting that he had lost a step as he had aged.

“Trump’s sound bites are more incendiary, more unseemly, more crudely insulting — and therefore spicier for TV news to use,” said Andrew Tyndall, who runs a newsletter that tracks network news broadcasts.

Long before he entered politics, a key insight of Trump’s career was that public attention, even if negative, could translate to power. As a real estate developer and celebrity, he courted controversy and conflict for decades, showing little capacity for embarrassment.

“The show is Trump, and it’s sold-out performances everywhere,” he told Playboy magazine in 1990, when asked about the criticism he got for ostentation.

During the 2016 campaign, he expanded upon the theory. “News outlets around the world are covering Trump. The key word is covering,” he told a Time magazine reporter at one point. “It’s not the polls. It’s the ratings.”

There is no doubt that he dominated the ratings in 2016, even though most of the news coverage about him was negative. Between the start of his campaign and winning the nomination, he received 63 percent of the coverage in a field of 17 candidates, according to a 2016 study by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, which used data from Media Tenor, a firm that tracks print, cable and broadcast news content.

In the general-election campaign, Trump received 15 percent more coverage than Clinton after the party conventions, the same study found.

More important, his voice dominated many of the stories no matter the subject.

“When a candidate was seen in the news talking about Clinton, the voice was typically Trump’s and not hers,” wrote Harvard professor Thomas Patterson, the report’s author. “Yet when the talk was about Trump, he was again more likely to be the voice behind the message.”

Members of Clinton’s campaign say her strategy of attacking Trump’s character in television ads, while focusing on her own policy plans, did not work and will have to change in 2020 for a Democrat to win. Trump understood better how creating conflict, outrage, and even debates about his truthfulness would lead to more coverage and ultimately benefit him, they say.

“I think what separates the people that truly could break through in their own right are people who are willing to stake out positions even when they come with a lot of controversy attached,” Fallon said.

The current Democratic candidates have latched onto a wide array of tactics as they attempt to break through the crowded field. Former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper has structured his campaign around attacks on “socialism,” Sanders has renewed his assault on the “billionaire class” and Biden has focused his campaign squarely on denunciations on Trump himself.

Others, such as Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., have tried to replicate Trump’s approach of constant media exposure, albeit in their own ways.

“One of the reasons Donald Trump thrived in 2016 was he was fearless and went in and did interviews everywhere and didn’t even care if he bombed,” said Lis Smith, a senior communications adviser to the Buttigieg campaign. “He knew if he sucked up all of the oxygen, no one else would have a chance to rise. Good attention, bad attention — all of that fed his candidacy.”

Concern that Trump will continue his dominance of the American imagination has given Buttigieg a key part of his stump speech, a promise that he could dislodge Trump as the focus of attention as the campaign continues.

“The biggest question is, ‘How are we going to win?’” he said June 9 at a state party gathering in Iowa. “The only thing we can do is to look at that show this president has created — whatever you want to call it, a reality show, horror show, game show — and we are going to change the channel to something completely different.”

 

[AmericanRose]

As we approach the new election, I'm reminded of how I first developed a real interest in politics halfway into 2016. Because of the crazy shitshow, I just had to watch the debates and see what was going on.

I hope, if nothing else, that several more people have become active in politics and will be able to help vote him out in 2020.

Buuuut I'm feeling pretty pessimistic that hacking won't happen, even if we're wiser to disinformation now.

[GreyhoundFan]

I guess Bernie wants us to have four more years of the orange toxic megacolon.

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I guess Bernie wants us to have four more years of the orange toxic megacolon.

 

I do believe he would rather see 4 more years of Trump than another D win the presidency and this is also still he sentiment of a lot of his supporters on reddit who won’t vote for anyone else.  

Im hoping the independents and centrists who went for Trump last time have wised up and will go blue and those refraining won’t matter.

fwiw I care about the primaries and have my opinions, but when all is said and don’t no matter who get the nom in team # anyonebuttrunp

[GreyhoundFan]

Seriously? "Former congressman Joe Sestak enters 2020 White House race"

Spoiler

Former congressman Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) announced Sunday that he is running for president, joining 23 earlier entrants in the presidential race.

Sestak made the announcement in a video posted to his campaign website.

“I’m Joe Sestak, and I wore the cloth of the nation for over 31 years in peace and war, from the Vietnam and Cold War eras to Afghanistan and Iraq and the emergence of China,” Sestak said in the video. “Born and raised in Pennsylvania, I grew up in this global canvas of service in the United States Navy.”

Sestak served two terms in the House, from 2007 to 2011. A retired Navy admiral, he also pursued two unsuccessful bids for the Senate, each time drawing the ire of national Democrats, who chafed at Sestak’s go-it-alone style and quirky personality.

Sestak first drew national attention in 2010 when he waged a primary challenge against then-Sen. Arlen Specter, who had switched parties to run for reelection as a Democrat.

The Obama White House, in an effort to dissuade Sestak from running, dispatched former president Bill Clinton to offer Sestak an unpaid position on a presidential advisory board if he dropped out of the race. Sestak said no. He bested Specter in the primary and later lost to Republican Pat Toomey in the general election.

Sestak pursued another Senate bid against Toomey in 2016, during which he walked alone across the state of Pennsylvania. Sestak lost in the Democratic primary to former Pennsylvania Environmental Protection Secretary Katie McGinty, who had been endorsed by then-President Obama and was boosted by more than $4 million in spending by outside liberal groups.

In his announcement video Sunday, Sestak touted his anti-establishment credentials, citing his 2010 Senate race and, in particular, Specter’s 1991 cross-examination of Anita Hill on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I disagreed that a Senator should be our party’s nominee who had humiliated Anita Hill, allowed to do so by members of our party as she testified about her sexual harassment by now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,” Sestak said in the video.

Sestak also acknowledged that his entry into the White House race comes later than the other announced candidates. He said the reason for the delay was so that he could be with his daughter, Alexandra, after her brain cancer had returned.

“Throughout this past year, Alex again showed she is stronger than me, heroically beating the single digit odds once more, drawing on the fortitude of her mom,” Sestak said.

Sestak’s late entry comes with disadvantages: The first Democratic debates are this week, and Sestak will not be on the stage. According to the Democratic National Committee, deadlines for donations and polling are on midnight on July 16, and campaigns have until the morning of July 17 to provide certification.

Asked about qualifying for the debates, Chris Baker, a Sestak spokesman, said Sunday that the campaign is “going to follow all possible avenues to reach the American public.”

“What Joe believes is important is reaching the American people with a message that will resonate with them,” he said.

Baker added that Sestak planned to visit an African-American church in Iowa in the morning followed by an event later in the day at the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum in Waterloo.

 

[candygirl200413]

On behalf of PA I am sorry to another white man adding himself into the race

[GreyhoundFan]

21 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

On behalf of PA I am sorry to another white man adding himself into the race

But he's "quirky"! As if that's a good thing. After the current dumpster fire, I want solid, boring, and calm.

[GreyhoundFan]

I love so many of Elizabeth's proposals:

 

[WiseGirl]

18 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I want solid, boring, and calm.

I want someone that can solidify the Dems and take office.  Mind you they might have to forcibly remove 45 who has such big illusions of his grandeur and effectiveness.  

Please American unite against the orange monster!

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Alisamer]

I made the mistake of clicking on Facebook briefly today, and the very first thing I see is a guy I know reposting something about the candidates speaking Spanish and calling the debate a "Mexican presidential debate" and saying "this is America, speak English!". I may have to completely stay off Facebook until at least 2020 at this point, because if I don't I'm going to start pissing people off most likely. I'm amazed at the absolute idiocy of some of the people I have to deal with day to day. I barely held back from posting "you'd prefer the gibberish our current president speaks?" or "I'd rather have Spanish than Russian."

Hello, we have a large hispanic population, Puerto Rico is part of the US, and large parts of the country were originally colonized by the Spanish and some were parts of Mexico before they became part of the US. Mexico is an important trade partner for us. Exactly WHY is it bad for presidential candidates to be able to communicate directly with Spanish speaking people? If they'll try to include people who speak Spanish, they'll try to include other groups as well, I'd think. As opposed to our clueless current president who pretends to include the working class and ends up looking like Paris Hilton on a farm.

[WiseGirl]

1 hour ago, Alisamer said:

Exactly WHY is it bad for presidential candidates to be able to communicate directly with Spanish speaking people?

Because then those scary people who speak another language will vote and we will have to become a real democracy again/they can't let their racist ways show?

I'm with you, I might not be back on FB for a long time...

[HerNameIsBuffy]

Not sure where to put this.  

My daughter called her dad yesterday thinking the news of the father and daughter dying would have finally made him rethink his support of Trump.

He asked her what that had to do with Trump and told her “that’s not my problem, no one told them to come here.”

her rage broke my heart.  She’s an adult but I held her as she sobbed - sickened and ashamed to be his daughter.

On a much less intense note had work lunch he other day where two people were Trump apologists and three of us sat in stony silence because we cant afford to lose our jobs.

I hate myself for not walking out.  But I have a family to support.  

Fuck all of this.  

[GreyhoundFan]

Kamala came out swinging on last night's debate: "Kamala Harris’s takedown of Joe Biden was more lethal than it seems"

Spoiler

Of all the Democrats running for president, the two candidates who have most vigorously touted their ability to take on President Trump himself — personally and directly — are Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.).

It’s this basic fact that helped render the big exchange between Harris and Biden on Thursday night so powerful for Harris, so potentially debilitating for Biden — and so revealing about the state of Democratic politics right now.

Harris grabbed control of the debate with a simple phrase: “I would like to speak on the issue of race.”

“I do not believe you are a racist,” Harris said. She then laced into Biden over his nostalgic recollections of white supremacist senators, describing this as “hurtful” given her own personal experience of racial profiling and discrimination.

This created an interesting tension, as Harris seemed to expose personal vulnerability even while ferociously disemboweling a rival. Biden vigorously defended his longtime record on civil rights, but Harris prosecuted Biden over his past opposition to busing, which got him to falsely disavow that opposition and to stumble into a defense of local control on the issue.

As many have noted, Harris here displayed a raw ability to cross-examine an opponent that makes it easier to envision her taking on Trump. Some Trump allies are reportedly now wary of Harris.

But I’d like to argue that there are deeper layers to this exchange, ones involving what’s really going on in Democratic politics right now and the ways Harris and Biden are entangled in some of these complexities.

Race is central to a core Biden tension

The topic of race is absolutely central to Biden’s candidacy, but it’s also the source of a big and unresolved tension at its core.

Race is key to Biden’s suggestion that our central imperative is defeating Trump and to Biden’s claim that he’s the candidate to do that. This is true in two ways: an obvious way and a largely unmentioned way.

On one hand, Biden has made his forceful denunciation of Trump’s racism central to the argument that Trump is an existential threat to our national character. He launched his candidacy with a powerful denunciation of the resurgence of white supremacy and Trump’s refusal to unambiguously condemn it, and cast the election as a referendum on whether we will permanently come unmoored from our founding ideals.

Biden’s discussion of race, then, is central to his aura as the candidate who will salvage our national character from Trump’s degradations of it and keep the arc of our history bending toward justice. He’s the American elder statesman who possesses the depth, experience and gravity to make this big argument.

On the other hand, Biden’s aura of electability turns in part on his alleged ability to appeal to the blue-collar, culturally conservative whites who turned out in huge numbers for Trump amid a candidacy of virulent bigotry that had its founding spark in the conspiracy theory that the first black presidency was illegitimate.

Where is the source of that appeal to those voters supposed to lie? Partly in Biden’s roots in Scranton, Pa., and in his image as an old-fashioned labor Democrat (never mind that he’s far less populist on policy than Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) or Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

But race is also key to that appeal. When we discuss Biden’s electability in the industrial Midwest, race is central to what we’re talking about, and we all know it.

The most charitable way to put this is that Biden comes from a Democratic Party that precedes its new “wokeness,” so those voters might be more comfortable with him. A less charitable way is that Biden’s past association with things like his opposition to busing — which meant capturing the political energy of white racial backlash — carries an implicit racial and cultural signaling that will reassure them.

One key reason that Biden’s nostalgia over white supremacist senators blew up on him is that it ripped the lid off of all this. Just as Harris does, I believe Biden when he insists he was, and is, horrified by their white supremacy.

But what still remains ambiguous is whether Biden does or does not conceive the source of his claimed appeal to conservative whites as rooted in subtle appeals to blue-collar white identity politics, as Jamelle Bouie has detailed.

This ambiguity was pushed forward when Biden adamantly refused to back off his praise for segregationist senators and, worse, when he dressed down African American Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) over the matter.

What Harris did last night

What Harris really did is to pin down this ambiguity and not allow it to remain hidden any longer. What she demonstrated is that, whatever Biden’s actual intentions, any whiff of such racial and cultural signaling no longer has any place in today’s Democratic Party.

Tellingly, this was precisely the point at which Biden was left befuddled. He simply didn’t know how to respond. He did forcefully denounce his old Senate colleagues. But he also defended his busing stance — which carried the aroma of that very same signaling. At the least, he just didn’t know how to clearly telegraph that he understands that this no longer can be left ambiguous.

It’s not yet clear how much this will damage Biden, and he still has time to find some way to convey clarity on this point.

But Harris’s precision in exposing this ambiguity was almost eerie. Biden may possess a well of knowledge and experience from having lived through civil rights tumult, but it didn’t serve him well at a crucial moment.

By contrast, Harris made a strong down payment on the idea that she’s the one to prosecute the case against Trump’s racism — a case that must be prosecuted with no such ambiguity or gray areas.

 

[AmericanRose]

I'm not sure if I've already said this here, but...
In my view, voters elected Obama because he promised hope and change. Voters "elected" (yeah, I have my doubts about the legitimacy of the election) Trump, who also promised change. The key takeaway is that voters want change. Biden... is not that. Biden is more of the old status quo. I would hope the majority would realise that they were sold a bag of goods by Trump by now, but people get very stubborn. Especially those Midwestern people who feel they're overlooked.

Of course, the other part of me views all this as pointless because there's no way we're going to have a 'free & fair' election.

[GreyhoundFan]

Junior needs to STFU and go away: "2020 Democrats defend Kamala Harris after Donald Trump Jr. tweet about her race"

Spoiler

Sen. Kamala Harris, one of only two black candidates in a field of two dozen, had a history-making moment on the debate stage Thursday night when she challenged former vice president Joe Biden over racial issues.

But as the reaction to her debate performance poured in, so did the racist attacks on social media, where some accused the California Democrat of not being black enough, and others suggested she was not really American.

On Twitter, some commenters suggested Harris was unfairly portraying herself as African American, since she is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother.

By Saturday, Harris’s campaign spokeswoman had retweeted nearly a dozen comments and articles defending her boss, and Harris’s 2020 Democratic challengers forcefully condemned the attacks on social media.

“This stuff is really vile and everyone should speak out against it,” Lily Adams, Harris’s spokeswoman, wrote on Twitter.

“The attacks against @KamalaHarris are racist and ugly,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted shortly after. “We all have an obligation to speak out and say so. And it’s within the power and obligation of tech companies to stop these vile lies dead in their tracks.”

“@KamalaHarris doesn’t have s--- to prove,” tweeted Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.)

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee called the attacks “racist and vile.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) wrote: “These troll-fueled racist attacks on Senator @KamalaHarris are unacceptable. We are better than this (Russia is not) and stand united against this type of vile behavior.”

Caroline Orr, a behavioral scientist who studies the spread of disinformation online, noted on Twitter a surge of related anti-Harris tweets that posted within minutes of each other during the debate.

“Efforts to attack Kamala Harris’ race have been around for a while, but a huge volume of tweets pushing this manufactured narrative appeared tonight right after Kamala pointed out that she was the only Black woman onstage,” Orr wrote, with images of the tweets questioning Harris’s racial credentials.

At Thursday’s debate, Harris told Biden that his past stance against federally-mandating busing black students to white schools was personally hurtful because she had benefited from that educational opportunity as a little girl. Afterward, some people on social media falsely claimed that Harris couldn’t lay claim to the afflictions of African Americans.

President Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr. retweeted, and then deleted, an alt-right commentator named Ali Alexander, stating, “Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves. She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.”

In sharing that message to his millions of followers, Trump Jr. tweeted: “Is this true? Wow.”

“This is the same type of racist attacks his father used to attack Barack Obama,” Adams said in email to The Washington Post. “It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.”

Two of Harris’s Democratic primary opponents reacted to Trump Jr.’s comment. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted: “Donald Trump Jr. is a racist too. Shocker.”

South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg wrote: “The presidential competitive field is stronger because Kamala Harris has been powerfully voicing her Black American experience. Her first-generation story embodies the American dream. It’s long past time to end these racist, birther-style attacks.”

Other fringe social media accounts echoed the birtherism conspiracies fueled by Donald Trump before he was in politics regarding President Barack Obama’s citizenship. Now they are questioning whether Harris was eligible to run for president, calling her an “anchor baby” because she was born in the United States to immigrants.

When Harris is asked how she identifies herself, she will often say, as “an American.” But recently, she’s leaned in more to what it meant to grow up black in the wake of the civil rights movement — Harris was born in October 1964, just months after the Civil Rights Act had been signed into law.

At a recent campaign event sponsored by Planned Parenthood, Harris spoke about growing up and realizing that people treated her mother with less respect because of the color of her skin.

“I remember people looking down at my mother, assuming she was somebody’s housekeeper and treating her like she was a substandard person,” Harris said. “She was a housekeeper, she kept our house, and happened to be a breast cancer researcher. There was an assumption that this woman had no power and should be given no power.”

“I realize now that I made a decision at a young age,” she said, “that I’m not going to let anybody do that to anybody else.”

 

[fraurosena]

I like how all these Democratic candidates stick up for their rival. That is how it should be done. Win on your own merits, not by degrading your opponent.

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) wrote: “These troll-fueled racist attacks on Senator @KamalaHarris are unacceptable. We are better than this (Russia is not) and stand united against this type of vile behavior.”

Out of all of the comments, I simply love Amy Klobuchar's reaction. She's the only one (in the article at least) who calls out the trolls -- and Russia -- instead of acting as if it's an American person behind these vile comments. I saw a post on twitter that after the debate there was a mass posting of identical disparaging tweets, all from accounts with the name 'Ali' in them. If I can find it again, I'll re-post it here.

[fraurosena]

Beware. The 2020 election trolls are insidious, invasive and impostrous. 

And... directly connected to and condoned by the Trump campaign.

 

[AmericanRose]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-predicted-to-lose-reelection-in-model-that-forecasted-democratic-takeover-of-house/ar-AADHrcS?ocid=spartanntp

The woman who predicted Democrats would win 42 (they ended up with 40) House seats in 2018 predicts Trump will lose the EC, 278 vs 197.

I would be inclined to agree, but I don't trust states that have electronic voting not to be hacked. ?

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an excellent op-ed by Eugene Robinson: "Never Trumpers have a decision to make"

Spoiler

Never-Trump Republicans and independents may be shocked to hear this, but the Democratic Party is likely to nominate a Democrat for president. That means they’re not going to nominate someone who thinks exactly like a Never-Trump Republican.

Break out the smelling salts. I think several refugees from the GOP, pontificating on Twitter and the nation’s leading op-ed pages, just fainted dead away.

I, for one, have pretty much had it with the chorus of center-right voices braying that the Democrats are heading for certain doom — and the nation for four more years of President Trump — if the party picks a nominee who actually embraces the party’s ideals. Elections are choices. These Never Trumpers will have to make one.

Anyone who watched last week’s two-night candidates’ debate should be confident that the eventual Democratic nominee is virtually certain to support universal health care, comprehensive and compassionate immigration reform, reasonable gun control, measures to address climate change and bold steps to address income inequality. No, this is not a Republican agenda. Outcasts from the GOP will have to decide whether to accept it, in the interest of ending our long national nightmare, or reject it and stick with a president who kowtows to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.

But don’t blame Democrats for supposedly driving moderate voters into the arms of Trump. For one thing, if Never-Trump Republicans were such brilliant political analysts, they’d never have lost control of their party to Trump in the first place.

For another, polls show that the Democratic agenda has broad public support. Yes, Trump is going to yell “socialism.” But Democrats could nominate the ghost of Ronald Reagan and Trump would still try his best to paint the apparition red. That’s his only play, whether the nominee is comfy-slipper Joe Biden, firebrand Bernie Sanders or any of the others in between.

It should surprise no one that the rhetoric in the debate was aimed at the Democratic base because, duh, that’s who decides the outcome of Democratic primaries. Nor should anyone be surprised when the eventual nominee tacks toward the center for the general election. Every winning presidential candidate I can think of has done that — with the exception of Trump.

Which brings me to another reason those demanding a super-cautious, mealy-mouthed Democratic nominee should spend some time in silent reflection. I believe Trump’s improbable election was possible because the nation is undergoing a political realignment in which the traditional left-to-right spectrum is being shifted in ways not yet fully understood. I don’t claim to have accurately charted the new landscape, but I seriously doubt that aiming for the center point of the old, obsolete spectrum will get you anywhere.

It is true that the Democrats who won House seats in Trump-leaning districts last fall emphasized some elements of the party’s program and de-emphasized others. I assume they’ll do the same thing when they seek reelection in 2020. But it is also true that Hillary Clinton would be president today if the Democratic base had turned out in bigger numbers in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And, for the record, she did win the popular tally by nearly 3 million votes.

It should be taken as a given than Trump’s hardcore base will show up to vote for the incumbent who has called himself “your favorite President, me!” The Democratic base had better be at least equally motivated to cast its ballots — especially in blue bastions such as Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia. Which means the party had better give those Democrats something, and someone, to vote for.

I hope the ancien régime Republicans — or, I guess, former Republicans — are serious when they talk about what a danger Trump is, both foreign and domestic, and how urgent it is to get him out of the White House. Do they think it would really be such an awful thing for more people to get health care? For migrant children to be treated like children, not taken from their families and caged in squalor? For universal background checks for gun purchases, supported by something like four-fifths of Americans, to be made law? For the United States to rejoin the Paris climate accord and stop artificially boosting the coal industry? For some effort to be made to address levels of inequality that would make Gilded Age titans blush?

That’s what the Democratic nominee is going to stand for, because that’s what loyal Democratic voters stand for. The party should welcome refugee Never Trumpers with open arms. But they can’t be Never Democrats, too.

 

[fraurosena]

Sweet Rufus. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Pete's response, so unlike the creature currently inhabiting 1600 Pennsylvania Ave: