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2020 Presidential Election 2: The Primaries are upon us


GreyhoundFan

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"Marianne Williamson: After Tuesday’s debate, there’s no way I’m dropping out"

Spoiler

A few of us weren’t on the debate stage last night.

Supported by its friends and sponsors in the corporate media, the Democratic National Committee has sought to narrow the field of presidential candidates at the very moment when it should be opening up. Placing a political straitjacket on our primary system, controlling the process via money and ridiculous rules, the party is risking disaster.

The establishment’s paternalistic insistence that, in essence, “it’s time to shut this thing down” — making sure only its preordained category of people, discussing its preordained category of topics, is placed before the American people for consideration as contenders for the nomination to run against President Trump — has created a false, inauthentic piece of high school theater posing as the Democratic debates.

Last night’s debate was a lot of things, but it was not exciting. It contained no magic. If anything, it reduced some very nice people to behavior their mothers probably raised them not to engage in. Which woman who claims feminist ideals can be the nastiest to another woman? Which young person can show the greatest arrogance toward those with decades of experience under their belts? Which intelligent person can best reduce a complicated topic to pabulum for the masses?

Oh, this is brilliant, guys. Apparently, the strategy is to engage the American people by showing them the worst of who we are.

This would all be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. For reasons not easy to detect, the Democrats are held to a higher standard by the American people — who, despite a bad rap and a few spectacular failures, are usually good at smelling a rat. Try as they might to throw people off the scent, the DNC and its media pals are creating the stench of inauthenticity at exactly the moment when some blazing truths should be shining through. I heard a former senator say on one of the after-debate news programs Tuesday night, that “nobody had a really bad night tonight.” Oh, ma’am, you are so, so wrong. Everyone had a bad night.

The problem with being inside your own bubble is that it makes you blind to what’s going on outside it. The Democratic Party stands for far more egalitarian policies than do the Republicans, but it has a weirdly more elitist relationship to its own constituency. Party bosses think they know better, claiming the right through money and establishment power to wage what amounts to an insidious assault on one of the most important aspects of our democratic process: selecting the presidential nominee.

The Russians are messing with our elections? Absolutely. But so are we. The old days of political backroom deals, where a few insiders determined who the candidate would be, are back. They didn’t really go away at all; they’re simply repackaged now, standing right in front of us, rebranding themselves as an “open process.” Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: faux democracy.

“Isn’t it time for you to drop out now, Marianne?” After that debate Tuesday night, are you kidding? Let me get this right. You think a sanitized wish list of Democratic proposals, focused just enough on appealing to people’s self-interest but not going anywhere near a serious discussion of what ails us, is going to defeat the Republicans? You think your 2016 redux, containing no hint of self-reflection on what created the disaster last time, is going to fight of the specter of new-fascism?

Well, I don’t. I think the process of democracy demands, and the American people deserve, something far more real. We will not defeat outrageous lies with tepid, corporatized, compromised truths. We will not defeat a political cult leader with the same old tried but clearly no longer true. Offering people the stale alternative of political leftovers, prepackaged as bromides with all the vitality and richness of spoiled food, is an inadequate response to the challenge that confronts us.

Our task is to protect and defend our democracy from the greatest threat it has ever known, and we will need to begin by practicing it ourselves. If our political gatekeepers keep locking the gate, then the people ourselves will unlock it.

 

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An interesting perspective: "The men asking for our vote and the dudes they remind us of"

Spoiler

Apparently Pete Buttigieg had a bang-up debate performance Tuesday, at least according to many political pundits. Meanwhile, as I was skimming a CNN recap that placed the South Bend, Ind., mayor atop a list of “winners,” I was also talking with an old friend who had this to say:

“Ugh. When did Mayor Pete become that dude who throws you under the bus once you learn only one of you gets the Rotary scholarship?”

Some of his debate performance was inspired, like his retort to Tulsi Gabbard: “You take away the honor of our soldiers, you might as well go after their body armor next.” That’s a heck of a line. But I’ve always admired Buttigieg’s generally thoughtful, calming manner — and Tuesday wasn’t that. “I don’t need lessons from you on courage,” he scornfully told Beto O’Rourke. His signature move was to sanctimoniously claim he was above all this scrapping, while actively participating in the scrapping.

My sample size is tiny and unscientific, but when I floated this irritation online, the people who agreed were mostly women. Men either hadn’t noticed Buttigieg’s tonal shift or they liked it: His newfound aggressiveness came across to them as smart debate strategy for a guy who needs to make a fast surge in the polls.

What to make of suddenly being mildly irritated by Pete Buttigieg, one of the easiest-to-like candidates in the race? It wasn’t about him so much as it was about us, the women I was talking to. We’d determined that Buttigieg was behaving like a kind of dude we had seen before, a sort of megalomaniacal Eagle Scout, and weren’t sure we entirely loved.

Fair? Not at all.

But politics is often about applying our own life experiences onto candidates, to make them not humans but archetypes. We’ve seen this most explicitly with female candidates: Is Elizabeth Warren lecturing you? Is Kamala Harris yelling at you? Are they — stop me if this one sounds familiar — shrill? No, and no. And no! But plenty of male voters have watched them on the trail and come away feeling that.

This might be the first election where, when we talk about electability, we are also talking about the electability of men. Do they have the right kind of masculinity for the moment? Does it seem like they’re addressing the female candidates with respect? What kind of dude are they being?

For every man who saw Hillary Clinton as a shrew, there’s a woman who looks deep into Joe Biden’s eyes and sees only the father-in-law whose uninvited shoulder rubs end when he either loses his train of thought or decides to reassure you of his wokeness by listing all of his gay friends.

That dude.

I know one woman who confessed she’d have to really force herself to vote for Bernie Sanders — whose politics she believes in — simply because he reminds he so much of her own estranged father, shaking his index finger over the family dinner table.

That dude!

Elizabeth Warren is that woman who thinks she knows more than you? Fine. Tom Steyer is that dude who thinks he knows more than you based on once reading the book you wrote.

Kamala Harris is yelling at you? Fine. Have you met Bernie Sanders?

Are any of these stereotypes fair? I don’t know. Julián Castro and Cory Booker seemed good to me on Tuesday night, but they drove others up the wall. Cory Booker is the only man in your feminist studies course, bless him, but he sits in the front row and offers his opinion before any women can talk.

I’m slightly embarrassed by the fact that, for me, the most electrifying debate moment wasn’t a policy question: It was Harris describing a hypothetical president by casually using the female pronoun: “The commander in chief of the United States of America has, as one of her greatest priorities and responsibilities, to concern herself with the security of our nation.”

Because if you’ve never gotten to be the default pronoun — if you’ve gone through life hearing about firemen and policemen and mailmen, or if you’ve been told that “mankind” just rolls off the tongue better than “humankind,” and anyway, ladies, “mankind” tacitly encompasses women, too — if you’ve quietly lived in this world, then it’s still shocking to hear about a different world. One in which, sure, the archetypal commander in chief is, by default, a “her.”

And not that dude.

 

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19 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Can I say how delightful I find it that this ad is going to be run on Fox and Friends, in the knowledge that the tangerine toddler will be watching? 

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Gee, the mango moron's campaign and the Russians are on the same page, color me surprised (not).

 

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Her detailed plan is linked in one of the tweets in this thread:

 

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Beto is out: "Beto O’Rourke quits presidential race amid financial strains and lagging popularity"

Spoiler

Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman from Texas who burst to the national scene wielding excitement and enthusiasm, on Friday abruptly dropped out of the Democratic presidential race amid financial strains and a lagging campaign.

Two people close to him said that he would not run for U.S. Senate in Texas — as some had pressured him to do — leaving his future political plans in doubt.

“Though it is difficult to accept, it is clear to me now that this campaign does not have the means to move forward successfully,” O’Rourke wrote in a Medium post published Friday afternoon. “My service to the country will not be as a candidate or as the nominee.”

The move marked yet another sign of the dwindling of the Democratic primary field, one that is being reshaped by a handful of top candidates who have the financial resources to mount a campaign that could stretch deep into next year.

O’Rourke entered the race in March, causing an initial stir when Oprah Winfrey touted his candidacy and Vanity Fair featured him in a cover article. He met with President Barack Obama, who saw in O’Rourke some of the same hopeful political style that he rode to the White House. A documentary film about him premiered earlier this year at the South by Southwest festival.

The attention stemmed from his long-shot race against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in 2018, in which he turned a number of viral moments and a massive fundraising haul into a narrow defeat — one that signaled his promise in a red state.

But he was not able to duplicate in the presidential contest the fundraising and campaigning prowess he demonstrated in that race.

He attracted top political talent — Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, one of the most sought-after Democratic consultants, was his campaign manager — and he had one of the best fundraising hauls for his first day as a presidential candidate.

But his spontaneity — jumping on countertops, driving his own car, and treks off the beaten political path — never fully translated into a meaningful presidential campaign for voters. He struggled in debates, switched his themes and focuses often, and was uncomfortable with criticizing fellow Democrats.

He was also struggling to meet the polling threshold to make the stage in the next debate.

“I decided to run for President because I believed that I could help bring a divided country together in common cause to confront the greatest set of challenges we’ve ever faced,” O’Rourke wrote in his blog post. “I also knew that the most fundamental of them is fear — the fear that Donald Trump wants us to feel about one another; the very real fear that too many in this country live under; and the fear we sometimes feel when it comes to doing the right thing, especially when it runs counter to what is politically convenient or popular.”

O’Rourke briefly stopped his campaign in August, after a mass shooting in his native El Paso. When he returned to the campaign trail, he reoriented his focus on gun control. He took bold stands — calling for a mandatory gun buyback program — that earned admiration from some Democrats and derision from Republicans.

Trump quickly mocked O’Rourke on Twitter as Friday’s announcement emerged.

“Oh no, Beto just dropped out of race for President despite him saying he was “born for this.” I don’t think so!” Trump wrote, in a reference to O’Rourke’s quote in Vanity Fair that he was “born to be in it.”

Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa called O’Rourke “a fighter, advocate, and leader.”

“In the wake of the El Paso shootings, he made the entire country proud as he focused his campaign on ending gun violence and the rise of white supremacy,” he said in a statement. “Beto O’Rourke has done amazing things for the Democratic Party in Texas, and we look forward to his future.”

Steve Ortega, who once served on the El Paso city council with O’Rourke, said that he learned that his close friend had dropped out of the race when reporters called him on Friday evening.

“I’m proud of him. I’m proud of the race he ran. . . . Part of his charm is what hurt him in a race like this. He’s not testing and polling everything he says. He speaks from his heart. . . . He shot from the hip and wasn’t running the traditional campaign with the canned lines,” Ortega said. He said that while O’Rourke focused on immigration and gun control, voters in key states might have wanted to hear about other issues.

“I’m glad that he ran, being from El Paso, because he brought a needed voice to border issues and gun control issues.”

The news of O’Rourke’s decision slowly arrived at a rally he had planned Friday on the riverfront in Des Moines. Tickets were still being distributed at an entrance, and some supporters expressed disbelief at the news, asking to be shown some proof.

Volunteers, some of whom who had woken up early to decorate a park and line the road with signs hugged each other, wept, and sometimes screamed expletives.

“I saw him in Sioux Center, the reddest place in Iowa,” said Tammy Growth, a 48-year-old pastor. “His willingness to listen to everyone is what attracted me to listen to him.”

Ryan Holliday, 40, who had traveled from Galveston, Tex., groused that “the knives came out in the media” for O’Rourke, and said he was hurt because he didn’t have years to plan a campaign like some candidates who outlasted him.

“It’s so disappointing that he did this before Super Tuesday,” Holliday said. “We have all these new voters coming out and we needed him to come to Texas.”

 

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I would enter a contest to NOT meet the tangerine toddler.

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It's the lying liar's campaign, so of course lies are published:

 

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So this is why he’s been courting the evangelicals with this church thing he does and that Jinjer have been going to...

 

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In case anyone was confused about the types of people who support Tulsi:

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I was too worn out from the impeachment hearings to watch much of last night's debate. I've been reading a bit this morning. It looks like Joe and Tulsi didn't do well. "Winners and losers from the latest Democratic debate"

Spoiler

The Democratic presidential candidates momentarily sidelined the impeachment inquiry on Wednesday night, when they met in Atlanta for the November MSNBC-Washington Post debate.

Below are some winners and losers.

Winners

Pete Buttigieg: Buttigieg has been good in the debates, and now he’s got real momentum in the first contest in Iowa, where a Des Moines Register-CNN poll showed him up nine points last week. The question has been how he would handle the newfound pressure — and answer questions about whether a young small-town mayor has the gravitas to win the presidency. “We need somebody who can go toe-to-toe who actually comes from the kinds of communities that [President Trump has] been appealing to,” he said, adding: “I know that from the perspective of Washington, what goes on in my city might look small. But frankly, where we live, the infighting on Capitol Hill is what looks small.” On a night he seemed likely to be the target of many rivals’ attacks, his most tense back-and-forth was with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii). That’s about the best he could have hoped for, given her limited constituency in the Democratic Party.

Amy Klobuchar: She’s shown perhaps less momentum in Iowa, but she’s rising slightly. She repeatedly, and effectively, argued that she has won in a swing state, including in red areas, and her sometimes-corny jokes finally seemed to land. And in a key moment, she turned what could have been a dicey question — about her suggestion that a woman with Buttigieg’s experience wouldn’t make the debate stage — into a crowd-pleasing response about a female president. She said Buttigieg was qualified but that “women are held to a higher standard; otherwise, we could play a game called Name Your Favorite Woman President.” Then she brought down the house with this: “If you think a woman can’t beat Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi does it every single day.” She was a top-searched candidate on Google at the end of the night

Marijuana: It took most of the debate, but Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) ultimately seized upon an issue that was there for the taking: marijuana legalization. Former vice president Joe Biden said recently that he wasn’t ready for it because marijuana might be a “gateway drug.” Booker responded, “I thought you might have been high when you said it. … Marijuana has already been legal in our country for privileged people.” Given the fast-rising popularity of legalization, especially in the Democratic Party, Booker could do worse than becoming the face of that effort in the Democratic primary. And at this point, he needs to build a constituency for his struggling campaign.

The wealthy: Don’t look now, but the wealthy are suddenly getting a little bit of defense on that debate stage. The first big confrontation came when Booker differed with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on her 2 percent wealth tax on the top one-tenth of 1 percent of income. Booker said he sympathized with the goal of creating more revenue and a fairer tax code, “but the tax the way you’re putting it forward, I’m sorry, it’s cumbersome. It’s been tried by other nations. It’s hard to evaluate.” It was an interesting choice from Booker, who has been criticized as being too close to corporate interests. Later in the debate, billionaire Tom Steyer was asked to respond to the idea that he has bought his way into these debates by spending tens of millions of dollars of his own money. Businessman Andrew Yang responded, “I want to stick up for Tom.” He added: “Tom has been spending his own money fighting climate change. You can’t knock someone for having money and spending it in the right way.” Steyer seemed positively surprised that someone would defend him, and given the substance of these debates, you couldn’t really blame him.

A delayed clapback: In July’s debate, Gabbard attacked Harris, and Harris didn’t really hit back. Apparently she was ready this time. After Gabbard attacked the modern Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton for its foreign policy, Harris hit back — hard. “I think that it’s unfortunate that we have someone on the stage who is attempting to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, who during the Obama administration spent four years full time on Fox News criticizing President Obama,” she said. She said Gabbard “buddied up” to Stephen K. Bannon to get an audience with Trump and that she “fails to call a war criminal” — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom Gabbard controversially met with — “what he is.” That said, Gabbard seems to be walking right into this, so she was arguably getting what she wanted.

Losers

Joe Biden: His shaky debate performances haven’t really cost him thus far, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are almost unfailingly shaky. He even stumbled through his first answer, which was basically a recitation of his usual talking points about why he would be the best Democratic nominee. Later, after Klobuchar’s Buttigieg answer, he assured awkwardly, “I think a woman is qualified to be president.” At another point, while talking about violence against women, he said we need to “keep punching at it and punching at it and punching.” Eek. Late in the debate, he played up his African American support, saying he was backed by the “only African American woman that had ever been elected to the United States Senate”: Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.). Except he was standing a few people down from another one, Harris (which she and Booker were happy to point out). Biden insisted that he had said the “first” black female senator, but he was wrong.

The “just beat Trump” ethos: On a day in which the president’s Ukraine scandal took a serious turn — thanks to U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland implicating top administration officials and saying the Ukraine effort was undertaken on Trump’s behalf — the debate actually included plenty of talk about how the party needs to not focus so much on Trump. “We cannot simply be consumed by Donald Trump,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said, ticking off important issues such as health care, climate change and homelessness. “What the American people need to understand is that Congress can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.” Buttigieg also emphasized, as he has before, that the party needs to vote according to what happens after the “tender” moment when Trump is gone. Added Sanders later: “We need to bring our people together not just in opposition to Donald Trump.”

Tulsi Gabbard: It wasn’t just her odd strategy to continually attack Clinton and the Democratic Party more broadly. At one point, she was asked about FBI Director Christopher A. Wray saying most domestic terrorism these days is fueled by white supremacism. She didn’t really have an answer, eventually landing on the “failed war on drugs” hurting African Americans. Yang quickly followed up with a strong answer about how he learned from a former white supremacist, Christian Picciolini, whom he personally spoke to. Gabbard clearly has a plan here; that doesn’t mean it’s the right one.

 

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31 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I was too worn out from the impeachment hearings to watch much of last night's debate. I've been reading a bit this morning. It looks like Joe and Tulsi didn't do well. "Winners and losers from the latest Democratic debate"

  Hide contents

The Democratic presidential candidates momentarily sidelined the impeachment inquiry on Wednesday night, when they met in Atlanta for the November MSNBC-Washington Post debate.

Below are some winners and losers.

Winners

Pete Buttigieg: Buttigieg has been good in the debates, and now he’s got real momentum in the first contest in Iowa, where a Des Moines Register-CNN poll showed him up nine points last week. The question has been how he would handle the newfound pressure — and answer questions about whether a young small-town mayor has the gravitas to win the presidency. “We need somebody who can go toe-to-toe who actually comes from the kinds of communities that [President Trump has] been appealing to,” he said, adding: “I know that from the perspective of Washington, what goes on in my city might look small. But frankly, where we live, the infighting on Capitol Hill is what looks small.” On a night he seemed likely to be the target of many rivals’ attacks, his most tense back-and-forth was with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii). That’s about the best he could have hoped for, given her limited constituency in the Democratic Party.

Amy Klobuchar: She’s shown perhaps less momentum in Iowa, but she’s rising slightly. She repeatedly, and effectively, argued that she has won in a swing state, including in red areas, and her sometimes-corny jokes finally seemed to land. And in a key moment, she turned what could have been a dicey question — about her suggestion that a woman with Buttigieg’s experience wouldn’t make the debate stage — into a crowd-pleasing response about a female president. She said Buttigieg was qualified but that “women are held to a higher standard; otherwise, we could play a game called Name Your Favorite Woman President.” Then she brought down the house with this: “If you think a woman can’t beat Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi does it every single day.” She was a top-searched candidate on Google at the end of the night

Marijuana: It took most of the debate, but Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) ultimately seized upon an issue that was there for the taking: marijuana legalization. Former vice president Joe Biden said recently that he wasn’t ready for it because marijuana might be a “gateway drug.” Booker responded, “I thought you might have been high when you said it. … Marijuana has already been legal in our country for privileged people.” Given the fast-rising popularity of legalization, especially in the Democratic Party, Booker could do worse than becoming the face of that effort in the Democratic primary. And at this point, he needs to build a constituency for his struggling campaign.

The wealthy: Don’t look now, but the wealthy are suddenly getting a little bit of defense on that debate stage. The first big confrontation came when Booker differed with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on her 2 percent wealth tax on the top one-tenth of 1 percent of income. Booker said he sympathized with the goal of creating more revenue and a fairer tax code, “but the tax the way you’re putting it forward, I’m sorry, it’s cumbersome. It’s been tried by other nations. It’s hard to evaluate.” It was an interesting choice from Booker, who has been criticized as being too close to corporate interests. Later in the debate, billionaire Tom Steyer was asked to respond to the idea that he has bought his way into these debates by spending tens of millions of dollars of his own money. Businessman Andrew Yang responded, “I want to stick up for Tom.” He added: “Tom has been spending his own money fighting climate change. You can’t knock someone for having money and spending it in the right way.” Steyer seemed positively surprised that someone would defend him, and given the substance of these debates, you couldn’t really blame him.

A delayed clapback: In July’s debate, Gabbard attacked Harris, and Harris didn’t really hit back. Apparently she was ready this time. After Gabbard attacked the modern Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton for its foreign policy, Harris hit back — hard. “I think that it’s unfortunate that we have someone on the stage who is attempting to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, who during the Obama administration spent four years full time on Fox News criticizing President Obama,” she said. She said Gabbard “buddied up” to Stephen K. Bannon to get an audience with Trump and that she “fails to call a war criminal” — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom Gabbard controversially met with — “what he is.” That said, Gabbard seems to be walking right into this, so she was arguably getting what she wanted.

Losers

Joe Biden: His shaky debate performances haven’t really cost him thus far, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are almost unfailingly shaky. He even stumbled through his first answer, which was basically a recitation of his usual talking points about why he would be the best Democratic nominee. Later, after Klobuchar’s Buttigieg answer, he assured awkwardly, “I think a woman is qualified to be president.” At another point, while talking about violence against women, he said we need to “keep punching at it and punching at it and punching.” Eek. Late in the debate, he played up his African American support, saying he was backed by the “only African American woman that had ever been elected to the United States Senate”: Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.). Except he was standing a few people down from another one, Harris (which she and Booker were happy to point out). Biden insisted that he had said the “first” black female senator, but he was wrong.

The “just beat Trump” ethos: On a day in which the president’s Ukraine scandal took a serious turn — thanks to U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland implicating top administration officials and saying the Ukraine effort was undertaken on Trump’s behalf — the debate actually included plenty of talk about how the party needs to not focus so much on Trump. “We cannot simply be consumed by Donald Trump,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said, ticking off important issues such as health care, climate change and homelessness. “What the American people need to understand is that Congress can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.” Buttigieg also emphasized, as he has before, that the party needs to vote according to what happens after the “tender” moment when Trump is gone. Added Sanders later: “We need to bring our people together not just in opposition to Donald Trump.”

Tulsi Gabbard: It wasn’t just her odd strategy to continually attack Clinton and the Democratic Party more broadly. At one point, she was asked about FBI Director Christopher A. Wray saying most domestic terrorism these days is fueled by white supremacism. She didn’t really have an answer, eventually landing on the “failed war on drugs” hurting African Americans. Yang quickly followed up with a strong answer about how he learned from a former white supremacist, Christian Picciolini, whom he personally spoke to. Gabbard clearly has a plan here; that doesn’t mean it’s the right one.

 

Joe Biden's consistently shaky debates and still being one of the top-tier candidates is only due to the fact that his popularity stems from the fact that he was Obama's Veep, not because he's such a good candidate. He's still basking in Obama's glory. Will it wear off soon? I certainly hope so, because I don't think he's the best candidate. Heck, I don't even think he's a good candidate.

 

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E.J. Dionne's take on the debate: "A debate that actually covered the issues? This time, we don't have to imagine."

Spoiler

Imagine a debate that drove the political pundits crazy and warmed the hearts of policy wonks and voters curious about how politicians might solve problems. What would it be like to have presidential candidates score few points against each other but lay out in some detail what they’d do about family leave, housing, climate change, voting rights and a slew of other issues?

You don’t have to imagine. That pretty well describes the fifth Democratic presidential debate on Wednesday night. It covered a much broader range of concerns than the earlier encounters, including an extensive set of queries on foreign policy. While the contenders tangled over a few issues — notably, as always, health care — they avoided fireworks, cracked the occasional joke (Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota especially) and spent far more time in vehement agreement than they did in loud disagreement.

The political upshot: While several trailing candidates, including Klobuchar and Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.) and Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) did well, little happened to disturb the foursome that currently leads in both national and early-state polling: former vice president Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Biden had a painfully slow response to an opening question and an embarrassing gaffe when he referred to “the only African American woman who’d ever been elected to the United States Senate” with Harris onstage nearby. But he also had some his strongest moments of the encounters so far. He was particularly quick and clear when asked by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow whether he would seek an indictment of President Trump. Biden quickly replied: “I would not direct my Justice Department like this president does. I’d let them make their independent judgment.”

Sanders was resolutely himself from beginning to end. Counterintuitively, in a party that loathes Trump, he opened the debate by pivoting off a question about the president declaring, “We cannot simply be consumed by Donald Trump” and offering a very on-brand assertion that the economic well-being of working Americans needed to be the Democrats’ highest priority.

Warren was dominant in the early going with a brisk defense of her wealth tax, which she repeatedly described as asking those earning more than $50 million just “two cents” on the dollar. She spent more time describing the programs her tax would finance, including universal child care and the cancellation of student loan debt, than on the levy itself. “We can invest in an entire generation’s future,” she said.

Warren was not left unchallenged, with Booker sounding the most conservative note in emphasizing the need to “give people opportunities to create wealth, to grow businesses.” But it was not until Buttigieg criticized Warren’s support for Medicare-for-all — he pushed his public-option alternative, Medicare-for-all-who-want-it — that she faded back into the group.

As expected, Buttigieg, who is surging in the polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire, was tested by several of those running behind. Klobuchar, who had said that a woman with Buttigieg’s qualifications would not be taken seriously as a candidate, said she considered Buttigieg qualified but that “women are held to a higher standard.” She drew appreciative laughter when she declared: “If you think a woman can’t beat Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi does it every single day.”

The typically well-prepared Buttigieg offered his best answer of the night in addressing his lack of appeal among African Americans. “My faith teaches me that salvation has to do with how I make myself useful to those who have been excluded, marginalized, and cast aside and oppressed in society.” And he argued that the fact that he was gay — “sometimes feeling like a stranger in my own country” — created a special obligation to stand up for the rights of others.

Buttigieg probably helped himself with a tough and testy exchange across a range of issues toward the end of an encounter with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), who draws particular hostility from a large share of Democratic voters.

But such fireworks were the exception, not the rule. This was the debate that sent a signal that Democrats differ far more with Trump and the Republicans than they do with each other. The question that came to mind after some of the harsh and more narrowly focused brawls earlier in the year was: How could this party possibly unite? The question that dominated on Wednesday was: Do these contenders really disagree all that much?

Of course, they do disagree, as Warren and Sanders especially wanted to make clear by way of contrast with their more moderate adversaries. But it was a salutary break from an all-Trump, all-the-time Washington to hear discourses on how to build houses, how to make college affordable and how to help families care for their kids. It offered hope that politics might, someday, be about more than the antics of a self-involved, corrupt and out-of-control chief executive.

 

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@GreyhoundFan and @fraurosena,  kudos to you both for not having FB!  I wish I could ditch FB, but it's used as a communication channel for my volunteer work.  

@GreyhoundFan,  I was genuinely disappointed that Beto dropped out.  I'd donated a bit to his campaign.  I've donated several times to Warren and maybe once to Kamala Harris.  I told Tom Steyer's campaign to take me off their email list because we did not need another damn billionaire as prez.  

I was not pleased to come home from several weeks abroad and see a fucking billboard for fucking Tulsi Gabbard in Cherokee County SC along I-83. 

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@PennySycamore -- I have a close friend who adores Steyer. He's constantly sending me stuff from Steyer's campaign. I don't despise him, but he's definitely not in my top tier choices for President. I'm so annoyed that Bloomberg decided to throw his hat (and a crapload of money) in the ring. That money could have gone to help take back the senate or to support a non-billionaire candidate. I'm sorry that Beto's dropping out disappointed you. I wish he had waited four or eight years to try or that he had decided to challenge Cornyn for his senate seat.

There are times I kind of feel like I'm missing out by not having a FB account, but I just can't bring myself to sign up.

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"Trump’s electoral college advantage may be deepening. Do Democrats have a plan for that?"

Spoiler

The big gubernatorial victories in Kentucky and Louisiana have unleashed optimism in the Democratic Party. They underscored the story we’ve seen again and again in the Trump era: Democratic gains in the suburbs and among college-educated whites are helping Democrats assemble a potent anti-Trump coalition, even in some of the reddest parts of the country.

But behind the numbers, there is another reality lurking: It remains unclear how much this will matter in 2020 against President Trump — because of the peculiar nature of the advantage that Trump may hold in the electoral college.

A new analysis from David Wasserman for NBC News sheds fresh light on both sides of this story. It suggests that, perversely enough, the president’s advantage in the electoral college may actually be deepening, despite his party’s struggles in suburban and more educated parts of the country.

Which raises a question: Do Democrats have a plan for that? As it happens, there is an answer out there, and there are some signs they’re already gravitating toward it.

Wasserman looked at the Kentucky and Louisiana outcomes and concluded that they were plainly driven by big Democratic gains among suburban and educated voters.

Turnout skyrocketed, but on both sides, because Trump is energizing pro-Republican turnout, as well. The difference-maker was that Democrats engineered big swings in suburbs with a lot of college-educated voters, such as the areas outside New Orleans and in northern Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati.

The crucial point here, though, is that Republicans also made gains — that is, they increased their margins, as well as turnout — in more rural parts of the country. Wasserman created this chart:

image.png.aaf8839cb4198153f2100dfe6fb4e847.png

In the most educated areas in both states, the Democratic margin and turnout surged. But the same happened for Republicans in the remaining areas in the two states. On balance, in those states, Democrats still fared better from those competing dynamics.

But here’s the rub. Those same dynamics have real ramifications for Trump’s advantage in the electoral college. That’s because the states with the most-educated populations won’t be decisive in the electoral college, while the states with the less-educated populations will be crucial, particularly in the Rust Belt.

For instance, in Wisconsin, the percentage of eligible voters who are white and have college degrees is a low 27 percent. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, it’s 33 percent, according to Wasserman’s data. By contrast, in a dozen leading blue states, those voters average about 40 percent.

This means Democrats could run up huge margins in urban/suburban and cosmopolitan America, winning the popular vote by a greater margin than in 2016, while still losing in the electoral college. As Wasserman noted, the fact that Republicans are also improving in their areas suggests that Trump’s electoral college advantage — relative to the popular vote — may be deepening.

So what does this mean for Democrats in 2020?

It means they have to forget about debates over whether to prioritize the Rust Belt or the Sun Belt states — and instead treat it as a given that they must try just as hard in, say, Arizona, as in Wisconsin. Arizona, as it happens, has a higher population of eligible voters who are white and college-educated, at 39 percent.

Wisconsin will be incredibly hard-fought — Democrats there worry that Trump’s pool of support among non-college-educated whites could be even deeper this time — so Arizona might end up being essential to a Democratic electoral college victory, and must be treated as such. Florida should, as well (a win there for Democrats would essentially spell doom for Trump, pretty much no matter what happens in the Rust Belt).

A spokesman for Priorities USA, the biggest Democratic super PAC, tells me the group is already advertising in Arizona and Florida, along with Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. This suggests Democrats grasp the need to keep open as many electoral college paths as possible.

This also means Democrats will have to forget about prioritizing winning back blue-collar whites over building a coalition of minorities, young voters and college-educated whites. It’s annoying to hear that Democrats will have to do both these things — it’s an obvious point, and the devil is in the details of how to get this balance right — but it’s just true.

That’s because we don’t know how deep Trump’s pool of support among non-college-educated whites will prove to be this time. So Democrats need to do all they can to win non-college-educated white voters, keeping Trump’s margin down among them to the greatest degree possible (and because it’s the right thing to do), while also maximizing turnout and vote share among those other constituencies and in the suburbs, to offset that Trumpian advantage.

As it happens, there are nonwhite, young, and college-educated voters in the Rust Belt states, as well, even if there are lower percentages of them, and that could help make the difference against Trump’s advantage with non-college-educated whites, too.

“The 2020 battlefield is not contained in one particular region,” Josh Schwerin, the Priorities USA spokesman, told me. “There are all types of voters in each of these states and oversimplifying the demographics would take votes off the table.”

It is often said that Democrats are in denial about Trump’s perfectly good shot at getting reelected, and about his lingering advantage in the electoral college. But much of what I’ve seen suggests they understand the electoral college challenges they face along these lines.

 

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I don't get why Buttigieg leads the Polls right now? Don't get me wrong, I like him but as far as I have seen Warren has a plan for the most urgent issues. 
But I guess neither Buttigieg nor Warren will be popular in the rural areas who are critical according to the last article posted by @GreyhoundFan

Edited by Smash!
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