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Never Biden Movement (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter jon_mx
- Start date
Navin Johnson
Footballguy
KiddLattimer
Footballguy
wikkidpissah
Footballguy
i won't vote for Biden, but i was out of the process until Peteyjudge drew me back in. i voted for President from 1972 til 2008 (only twice - McGovern & Obama - for major party candidates) but, when Obama was inhaled by the process by June of his first term, my fear that the system was broken was confirmed and i made a small oath not to vote for national office until money no longer had status as speech. the Kennedyesque public-service nature and unprecedented inclusiveness of Mayor Pete changed my mind for a while, but......
i will not vote for anyone i don't believe will be a good President, no matter how bad the other option. Pony Soldier Joe represents the same rot which invited rottenness in, and an erosive option is not such an improvement over a corrosive one that it can be considered a positive action, which is part of the sacred responsibility of a vote.
i will not vote for anyone i don't believe will be a good President, no matter how bad the other option. Pony Soldier Joe represents the same rot which invited rottenness in, and an erosive option is not such an improvement over a corrosive one that it can be considered a positive action, which is part of the sacred responsibility of a vote.
Last edited by a moderator:
ren hoek
Footballguy
Good piece:
I’m a Bernie volunteer. Here’s how Joe Biden can win Bernie voters.
Sean Moorhead
Mar 18 · 10 min read
I’m a volunteer with the Bernie Sanders campaign. I’ve been observing conversations between Biden voters online and have not seen much gloating about his victory, which now looks inevitable. People are concerned about having lost the youth vote by, in some cases, fifty points or more. They are concerned that the coalition Biden has assembled is not quite equal to the Obama coalition. They want to figure out what concessions will win back the Sanders wing of the party. It is this same dim sense of danger that makes birds fly to high ground before a tidal wave. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "I don’t like Bernie or his Bernie Bros, but that energy…”
I campaigned for Bernie in the 2016 primary and voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election. Actually, in spite of my reservations about the party, I have, as a form of harm mitigation, chosen a straight Democratic ticket in every election I have ever voted in. I will probably volunteer for Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts after the Sanders campaign concludes. Because I’ve texted literally tens of thousands of Bernie voters, I wanted to offer some suggestions about what the party (and you as individuals) can do to ensure that enough of them show up in November to beat Donald Trump.
I am also writing because, although I have disliked Joe Biden for years, I think most of you recognize his flaws and support him because you are fighting to bring decency, dignity, and integrity back to the White House.
Please do me a favor and read all of what follows even if there are parts that make you want to stop and draft a rebuttal. You can think I’m mistaken, but my object isn’t to convince you, just to give you an idea of how my friends on the campaign think. There are two instances of profanity which are unfortunately necessary for dramatic effect. If you don’t want to read every word I have to say, please stop here.
The answer is that you can do nothing. The opportunity to win back Bernie's voters came and went four years ago. Bernie could spend the rest of the year campaigning for Joe. Joe could promise to abolish private property by executive order on day one. It would not be enough.
Bernie was projected to win a decisive lead on Super Tuesday. Biden was, everyone thought, on his last legs and had not campaigned or established a ground presence in many states. Then, in the days immediately before Super Tuesday, several of his opponents dropped out. Their endorsements and a raft of others carried him to victory.
This was a message to Bernie voters: "#### off. We would rather drag Joe Biden over the finish line, knowing that he is no longer mentally competent, than cede anything to the candidate who is winning your votes by fifty points or more."
You may disagree with me about Joe Biden’s mental competence. That’s fine. It has been reported that party insiders believe what I believe about Joe. You could say listen to his speech, he talks about unity, he is not telling Bernie voters to go pound sand, but that is the message my friends heard.
We have all spent the past four years arguing about whether Bernie Bros are alienating voters by being rude on Twitter. My personal feeling is that if people care enough about their candidates to get into fights about them on Twitter, the fighting is not what made up their minds. It doesn’t bother me if you are rude to the Bernie Bros. I know how intolerable we can be. We specialize in intolerability. You have to react in whatever way feels natural. The way the Biden campaign won made a greater and more unalterable impression on us than any sweet or stern words you have for us now.
Toward the end of a primary there is often talk to the effect that even if your candidate didn’t win, he changed the conversation, whatever that means, and might be able to whisper ideas in the winner’s ear or even to hold him accountable, whatever that means. This was a fantasy when it came to Hillary Clinton. It is a joke when it comes to Joe Biden. If Biden were the kind of candidate who could be pushed left, no one in the party leadership would have endorsed him. It doesn’t matter if he makes Free College for Some a plank of his platform, and it doesn’t help that he spent decades cultivating the image of a conservative’s kind of liberal.
I know by this point you have all kinds of desperate or righteously angry appeals in mind. "Think about Trump’s racism. Think about the kids in cages. If nothing else, think about the Supreme Court!" Sorry, that #### doesn’t work anymore. Never mind Biden’s role in getting Clarence Thomas on the Court. This primary came down to one candidate who gave Strom Thurmond’s eulogy and another who — I know you are tired of hearing this — marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. It came down to one candidate who wanted to break up ICE and another whose boss built the cages that Trump filled with children. We know how you chose.
For various reasons, you believe that Joe Biden’s faults have been exaggerated, that Bernie Sanders is the real racist, that Obama’s militarization of border enforcement was fundamentally different from Trump’s. Even to level these accusations at a Democrat strikes you as whataboutism or — worse — dezinformatsiya. You believe or say you believe that when we talk about the Democratic establishment coming together for Joe Biden, we are talking about elderly Black voters in South Carolina rather than the party machinery. That’s fine, but all of your arguments, however eloquent, are of interest mainly to people who think like you. They are good for lengthy Facebook replies that begin "Oh yeah, well…" Writing may make you feel better, which is valuable, but no one on my side cares. It’s Charlie Brown’s teacher going wah-wah-wah at this point. If you want, in 2020, to make the case that Joe Biden voted against school integration for liberal reasons or because he had a problem with the way it was being done, knock yourself out. Maybe Samantha Bee will have you on Full Frontal. But in the 1970s the battle lines were quite clear. Joe Biden chose the side that was bombing school bus depots. The battle lines are quite clear now, too, and have only gotten clearer since most of the candidates who were called progressives or competitors to Bernie instead endorsed Joe. As far as most of us are concerned, Bernie could not have asked for a more dramatic illustration of the corrupt political and economic system he is always yelling hoarsely about.
According to the New York Times, Bernie Sanders was the most donated-to candidate in almost every district of every state in the union. He has a volunteer corps of over a million people. He lit a fire under a bunch of us who spend most of our time joking around on Twitter. I have never seen more people give freely to something bigger than themselves. It was not enough to win, but it was something unique in recent history.
If Sanders drops out of the race and endorses Joe Biden, that network of volunteers and grassroots donors will vanish like frost. The problem is not that Sanders lost but that he was defeated by main force. You don't see it that way, but my friends do.
You are going to have to count on losing more Bernie Bros than Hillary lost. Maybe you don’t need them, but you do need to take stock of your own forces. Your army is consultants, suburban parents, journalists who are addicted to Twitter, and senior citizens who are addicted to MSNBC. Also, possibly, the handful of very confused senior citizens who have wandered onto Twitter.
I have been giving about twenty to thirty hours a week to the Sanders campaign, which amounts to a few more than six hundred assignments requested. The top texter has requested, last I checked, over eleven thousand assignments. The total number of volunteers on the text team is over thirty thousand. On a slow day, I sign up maybe a dozen people to join us as volunteers. Other texters have told me much the same. You can do the multiplication.
If you want to beat Trump, you will have to work harder than we did and rally more of your people to volunteer. Name recognition is enough to win a primary. It is not enough to win a general election. You need hundreds of thousands of people texting, making phone calls, knocking on doors. You cannot be satisfied with knocking on doors locally, either. We had people who spent every weekend busing into neighboring states. I know this would be harder for Biden voters, who are generally older than us and may, like Joe, have mixed feelings about busing. Have you ever met a Hmong or a Bhutanese person? We had organizers working with them. You have won the black vote, but you cannot take anyone else for granted.
I understand: You have a small business, you are on the board of a local charity, you have two kids or three grandkids to look after. You have to be so many different things to so many different people. Our advantage in that area is that we are only ever one thing, namely losers. We are losers when we wake up and losers when we lay down to sleep. We have dead-end loser jobs or no jobs at all. We date losers or do not date. We can argue about what Bernie did wrong, but the problem may simply be that he ran a campaign by, of, and for losers.
You have to be so many different things. I know how hard it is. Now there is one more thing you have to be: winners.
I said before that you are fighting for decency, dignity, and integrity. I believe that. Unfortunately, none of those things are real. They have no mass, volume, or color. You can't cut off a piece of decency to eat.
Laozi says (in Thomas Cleary’s translation) "When the Great Way is abandoned, there are benevolence and duty. When ingenuity emerges, there is much fabrication." What this means is anyone’s guess. What I am going to say for the sake of argument that it means is that by the time you begin to give names to your values, your thinking has already reached an advanced stage of degeneration. Values do not exist, either. Right now thousands of people who claim all kinds of different values are dying from the same germ.
We talk about values and about politics and government for ease of communication. The words don’t refer to a certain group of people, because we have seen, in every month of the Trump administration, how quickly those people can change. We talk about institutions and institutional norms. Sometimes I think the simplest reason that Trump upsets people is that he demonstrates every day that those things do not matter. If enough people agree that you are the most powerful man in the world, you can do whatever you want. For everyone else, what matters is that when you are sick, your ability to get medicine depends on decisions made by people who do not know or care about you. That’s real.
That is why we are fighting for real things like healthcare and housing. It’s why we’re so fierce. We can easily remember and explain to other people what we are fighting for and no amount of arguing can make us feel foolish about it. (Of all the people who said, “Liz has a plan for that!” how many could explain in detail what Sen. Warren’s plans were and how they differed from Bernie’s?) Every day is full of little reminders. If you go to McDonald’s for lunch and see, at the deep fryer, a man who is way too old to be working for minimum wage, you know exactly what a Sanders presidency would do for him, likewise if your coworker is sick and still coming to work because she’s out of sick days, likewise if your friend lost his job and cannot make his student loan payments. We do not need compassion. Our compassion consists in fighting for the wellbeing of people we hate. That is how you have to live.
I will help you out. I will vote for Joe Biden and even volunteer for him unless — I add this exception not as a means of escape but because we live in such strange times — the Democratic party collapses and there is a credible third-party campaign to replace it. Most of my friends will not vote and will not help, and to tell you the truth, I don’t blame them. You’re thinking of privileged college-age hipsters who listen to socialist podcasts. I’m thinking of Latino guys with undocumented parents who have never believed in a politician before, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are not going to get in line to crank the lever for Joe Biden.
The other day I saw someone on Facebook write to a Bernie Bro, "Now listen here, you will vote as you are told." He got the same response you will get even if you practice empathy and nonconfrontation. Don't waste your time anymore. Out-text us, out-phonebank us, out-canvas us. Campaign in every free hour you have.
You may object that none of this is so easy when you have a small business, you are on the board of a local charity, you have two kids or three grandkids to look after. You're probably right. On that point I have no advice to offer.
I’m a Bernie volunteer. Here’s how Joe Biden can win Bernie voters.
Sean Moorhead
Mar 18 · 10 min read
I’m a volunteer with the Bernie Sanders campaign. I’ve been observing conversations between Biden voters online and have not seen much gloating about his victory, which now looks inevitable. People are concerned about having lost the youth vote by, in some cases, fifty points or more. They are concerned that the coalition Biden has assembled is not quite equal to the Obama coalition. They want to figure out what concessions will win back the Sanders wing of the party. It is this same dim sense of danger that makes birds fly to high ground before a tidal wave. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "I don’t like Bernie or his Bernie Bros, but that energy…”
I campaigned for Bernie in the 2016 primary and voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election. Actually, in spite of my reservations about the party, I have, as a form of harm mitigation, chosen a straight Democratic ticket in every election I have ever voted in. I will probably volunteer for Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts after the Sanders campaign concludes. Because I’ve texted literally tens of thousands of Bernie voters, I wanted to offer some suggestions about what the party (and you as individuals) can do to ensure that enough of them show up in November to beat Donald Trump.
I am also writing because, although I have disliked Joe Biden for years, I think most of you recognize his flaws and support him because you are fighting to bring decency, dignity, and integrity back to the White House.
Please do me a favor and read all of what follows even if there are parts that make you want to stop and draft a rebuttal. You can think I’m mistaken, but my object isn’t to convince you, just to give you an idea of how my friends on the campaign think. There are two instances of profanity which are unfortunately necessary for dramatic effect. If you don’t want to read every word I have to say, please stop here.
The answer is that you can do nothing. The opportunity to win back Bernie's voters came and went four years ago. Bernie could spend the rest of the year campaigning for Joe. Joe could promise to abolish private property by executive order on day one. It would not be enough.
Bernie was projected to win a decisive lead on Super Tuesday. Biden was, everyone thought, on his last legs and had not campaigned or established a ground presence in many states. Then, in the days immediately before Super Tuesday, several of his opponents dropped out. Their endorsements and a raft of others carried him to victory.
This was a message to Bernie voters: "#### off. We would rather drag Joe Biden over the finish line, knowing that he is no longer mentally competent, than cede anything to the candidate who is winning your votes by fifty points or more."
You may disagree with me about Joe Biden’s mental competence. That’s fine. It has been reported that party insiders believe what I believe about Joe. You could say listen to his speech, he talks about unity, he is not telling Bernie voters to go pound sand, but that is the message my friends heard.
We have all spent the past four years arguing about whether Bernie Bros are alienating voters by being rude on Twitter. My personal feeling is that if people care enough about their candidates to get into fights about them on Twitter, the fighting is not what made up their minds. It doesn’t bother me if you are rude to the Bernie Bros. I know how intolerable we can be. We specialize in intolerability. You have to react in whatever way feels natural. The way the Biden campaign won made a greater and more unalterable impression on us than any sweet or stern words you have for us now.
Toward the end of a primary there is often talk to the effect that even if your candidate didn’t win, he changed the conversation, whatever that means, and might be able to whisper ideas in the winner’s ear or even to hold him accountable, whatever that means. This was a fantasy when it came to Hillary Clinton. It is a joke when it comes to Joe Biden. If Biden were the kind of candidate who could be pushed left, no one in the party leadership would have endorsed him. It doesn’t matter if he makes Free College for Some a plank of his platform, and it doesn’t help that he spent decades cultivating the image of a conservative’s kind of liberal.
I know by this point you have all kinds of desperate or righteously angry appeals in mind. "Think about Trump’s racism. Think about the kids in cages. If nothing else, think about the Supreme Court!" Sorry, that #### doesn’t work anymore. Never mind Biden’s role in getting Clarence Thomas on the Court. This primary came down to one candidate who gave Strom Thurmond’s eulogy and another who — I know you are tired of hearing this — marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. It came down to one candidate who wanted to break up ICE and another whose boss built the cages that Trump filled with children. We know how you chose.
For various reasons, you believe that Joe Biden’s faults have been exaggerated, that Bernie Sanders is the real racist, that Obama’s militarization of border enforcement was fundamentally different from Trump’s. Even to level these accusations at a Democrat strikes you as whataboutism or — worse — dezinformatsiya. You believe or say you believe that when we talk about the Democratic establishment coming together for Joe Biden, we are talking about elderly Black voters in South Carolina rather than the party machinery. That’s fine, but all of your arguments, however eloquent, are of interest mainly to people who think like you. They are good for lengthy Facebook replies that begin "Oh yeah, well…" Writing may make you feel better, which is valuable, but no one on my side cares. It’s Charlie Brown’s teacher going wah-wah-wah at this point. If you want, in 2020, to make the case that Joe Biden voted against school integration for liberal reasons or because he had a problem with the way it was being done, knock yourself out. Maybe Samantha Bee will have you on Full Frontal. But in the 1970s the battle lines were quite clear. Joe Biden chose the side that was bombing school bus depots. The battle lines are quite clear now, too, and have only gotten clearer since most of the candidates who were called progressives or competitors to Bernie instead endorsed Joe. As far as most of us are concerned, Bernie could not have asked for a more dramatic illustration of the corrupt political and economic system he is always yelling hoarsely about.
According to the New York Times, Bernie Sanders was the most donated-to candidate in almost every district of every state in the union. He has a volunteer corps of over a million people. He lit a fire under a bunch of us who spend most of our time joking around on Twitter. I have never seen more people give freely to something bigger than themselves. It was not enough to win, but it was something unique in recent history.
If Sanders drops out of the race and endorses Joe Biden, that network of volunteers and grassroots donors will vanish like frost. The problem is not that Sanders lost but that he was defeated by main force. You don't see it that way, but my friends do.
You are going to have to count on losing more Bernie Bros than Hillary lost. Maybe you don’t need them, but you do need to take stock of your own forces. Your army is consultants, suburban parents, journalists who are addicted to Twitter, and senior citizens who are addicted to MSNBC. Also, possibly, the handful of very confused senior citizens who have wandered onto Twitter.
I have been giving about twenty to thirty hours a week to the Sanders campaign, which amounts to a few more than six hundred assignments requested. The top texter has requested, last I checked, over eleven thousand assignments. The total number of volunteers on the text team is over thirty thousand. On a slow day, I sign up maybe a dozen people to join us as volunteers. Other texters have told me much the same. You can do the multiplication.
If you want to beat Trump, you will have to work harder than we did and rally more of your people to volunteer. Name recognition is enough to win a primary. It is not enough to win a general election. You need hundreds of thousands of people texting, making phone calls, knocking on doors. You cannot be satisfied with knocking on doors locally, either. We had people who spent every weekend busing into neighboring states. I know this would be harder for Biden voters, who are generally older than us and may, like Joe, have mixed feelings about busing. Have you ever met a Hmong or a Bhutanese person? We had organizers working with them. You have won the black vote, but you cannot take anyone else for granted.
I understand: You have a small business, you are on the board of a local charity, you have two kids or three grandkids to look after. You have to be so many different things to so many different people. Our advantage in that area is that we are only ever one thing, namely losers. We are losers when we wake up and losers when we lay down to sleep. We have dead-end loser jobs or no jobs at all. We date losers or do not date. We can argue about what Bernie did wrong, but the problem may simply be that he ran a campaign by, of, and for losers.
You have to be so many different things. I know how hard it is. Now there is one more thing you have to be: winners.
I said before that you are fighting for decency, dignity, and integrity. I believe that. Unfortunately, none of those things are real. They have no mass, volume, or color. You can't cut off a piece of decency to eat.
Laozi says (in Thomas Cleary’s translation) "When the Great Way is abandoned, there are benevolence and duty. When ingenuity emerges, there is much fabrication." What this means is anyone’s guess. What I am going to say for the sake of argument that it means is that by the time you begin to give names to your values, your thinking has already reached an advanced stage of degeneration. Values do not exist, either. Right now thousands of people who claim all kinds of different values are dying from the same germ.
We talk about values and about politics and government for ease of communication. The words don’t refer to a certain group of people, because we have seen, in every month of the Trump administration, how quickly those people can change. We talk about institutions and institutional norms. Sometimes I think the simplest reason that Trump upsets people is that he demonstrates every day that those things do not matter. If enough people agree that you are the most powerful man in the world, you can do whatever you want. For everyone else, what matters is that when you are sick, your ability to get medicine depends on decisions made by people who do not know or care about you. That’s real.
That is why we are fighting for real things like healthcare and housing. It’s why we’re so fierce. We can easily remember and explain to other people what we are fighting for and no amount of arguing can make us feel foolish about it. (Of all the people who said, “Liz has a plan for that!” how many could explain in detail what Sen. Warren’s plans were and how they differed from Bernie’s?) Every day is full of little reminders. If you go to McDonald’s for lunch and see, at the deep fryer, a man who is way too old to be working for minimum wage, you know exactly what a Sanders presidency would do for him, likewise if your coworker is sick and still coming to work because she’s out of sick days, likewise if your friend lost his job and cannot make his student loan payments. We do not need compassion. Our compassion consists in fighting for the wellbeing of people we hate. That is how you have to live.
I will help you out. I will vote for Joe Biden and even volunteer for him unless — I add this exception not as a means of escape but because we live in such strange times — the Democratic party collapses and there is a credible third-party campaign to replace it. Most of my friends will not vote and will not help, and to tell you the truth, I don’t blame them. You’re thinking of privileged college-age hipsters who listen to socialist podcasts. I’m thinking of Latino guys with undocumented parents who have never believed in a politician before, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are not going to get in line to crank the lever for Joe Biden.
The other day I saw someone on Facebook write to a Bernie Bro, "Now listen here, you will vote as you are told." He got the same response you will get even if you practice empathy and nonconfrontation. Don't waste your time anymore. Out-text us, out-phonebank us, out-canvas us. Campaign in every free hour you have.
You may object that none of this is so easy when you have a small business, you are on the board of a local charity, you have two kids or three grandkids to look after. You're probably right. On that point I have no advice to offer.
Golf Guy 69
Footballguy
Was all in on Bernie, now voting Trump. Joe is worse than Trump IMO, pro war and is willing to cut social programs. Trump is going to kill him in a face to face debate.
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SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
There's a lot of this horseshoe stuff going on, it's true, it's a thing and it was in 2016, but I seriously don't think it concerns the Biden campaign.
The Commish
Footballguy
Help please....how is holding the same position anything but "the same"? Why is Trump willing to cut social programs "better" than Joe wanting to cut them?
KiddLattimer
Footballguy
I 100% won't vote for Trump, but I don't know if I will vote for Biden either. After Trump's handling of Covid I thought about it for a minute, but then I quickly get reminded by Pelosi/Schumer how terrible the Dems are with their means tested emergency payments, etc.
Then again I live in New York where I probably won't get to vote in the primary and my vote doesn't matter in the general. Yay democracy.
Then again I live in New York where I probably won't get to vote in the primary and my vote doesn't matter in the general. Yay democracy.
Since you are not in a swing state, you are a little more free in who you can vote for. It is at least encouraging that terrible democrats are starting to get primaried, like Lipiniski losing to Newman in Illinois. While it is not the same as Sanders winning the primary, there is at least some change happening even if it is not at the presidential level.
tommyGunZ
Footballguy
I'd posit that KiddLatt and I agree on ~ 98% of the issues, and even those we differ on, our differences are a matter of tactic, and we likely share similar end goals. The fact that folks like Kidd Latt don't understand how much better Biden is for progressive policies than another 4 years of Trump is a definite failure of messaging by the Biden campaign, and something they should work on before November.
Leroy Hoard
Footballguy
Mile High
Footballguy
Exactly. 4 more years of Republican appointed judges will put a big clamp down on progressive goals. Cutting off their nose to spite their face.
KiddLattimer
Footballguy
Oh I get it, and I agree he's better (Charlie Brown's rock is better) ... where we disagree is how much better. Biden spent most of his 40 years either not being interested in or working against policies that matter most to me, so it's a tough sell.
At this point I do hope he wins though
This would go a long way
tommyGunZ
Footballguy
I don't believe this is true. Biden has fought for progressive issues for decades. Was he as progressive as you would have liked? Obviously not, but the idea that he was actively fighting against progressive policies as a whole is essentially labeling him a conservative Republican, which we both know is BS.
KiddLattimer
Footballguy
"Progressive policies that matter most to me" was my quote. My main issue is ending the wars and he played a major role in leading us there. My #2 issue is single payer, which he has shown very little interest in, if not outright opposition (his quote about vetoing it last week).
Some other progressive things he's done well on, other things he's done a little but at least that's something.
I'm not a "Never Biden" voter... I'll give him a fair chance to earn my vote, but he's got to at least try to acknowledge these concerns. Maybe work with Tulsi on some kind of end to the wars, work with Warren on some kind of healthcare compromise... stuff like that.
ren hoek
Footballguy
-Opposed gay marriage
-Opposed abortion
-Opposed desegregation
-Opposed bankruptcy protection for debtors
-Opposed singlepayer healthcare
-Supported the Iraq War
-Supported the Patriot Act
-Supported coups in Latin America and Ukraine
-Supported mass incarceration
-Supported the drug war
-Supported the apartheid state of Israel
-Supported cuts/freezes to Social Security and Medicare
What were the progressive issues he fought for?
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ShamrockPride
Footballguy
Don't bring logic or facts into the equation on this board. Remember: Facts are attacks.
ren hoek
Footballguy
I want to understand why people keep saying Biden is progressive on net. Even fatguyinalittlecoat, who is very thoughtful and considered on these things, said he's something like an '85' to Bernie's '100'. But I don't understand where that belief comes from. I forgot to even mention that Biden supported freeze/cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
msudaisy26
Footballguy
This is pretty much where I am at right now and you said it very well. The only difference is my vote does count.
I guess it just depends on what you can swallow, where even if Biden is a 20/100 on the Sanders scale, if every Republican is a < 20 it is still objectively better, while also overwhelmingly unsatisfying. Even though he is not a good candidate, I have more faith that his cabinet would not be 100% grifters looking to profit off their position while deregulating the industries they are supposed to manage compared to if Trump wins, and it would allow someone like RBG to retire while still having some semblance of balance in the SC until McConnell says
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tommyGunZ
Footballguy
Supported gay marriage
Supports a womans right to choose
Supports civil justice
Supports a public option
Opposes the War in Iraq
Supports the ACA
Supports increased taxes on corporations
Supports decriminalize of marijuana
Supports free tuition at community colleges and state universities
Supports large investment in renewable energy
Supports $15 minimum wage
Supports increased gun control
Supports DACA
Supports increased tax on $400k+ for social security
We can do this all day. It's lame. But even more lame when you're reaching for stuff from 1975.
tommyGunZ
Footballguy
It's because many who are critical of Biden for not being progressive enough overlook the hundreds of other issues he's with you on. Look, I get it, Biden isn't my candidate either. But this idea that he's not liberal overall is nonsense. Here's his ideology score from on-the-issues.net: https://www.ontheissues.org/images/s080_020.gif
tommyGunZ
Footballguy
This is disappointing. Biden may not be your first choice, but he's a huge leap forward from Trump. Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
msudaisy26
Footballguy
Sorry, but I disagree. You don't get my vote because you are slightly better than the next guy and I believe if more people voted this way we would be much better off.
ren hoek
Footballguy
You're talking about the platform he's selling himself on now, which he can discard the second he acquires power. His positions on social issues never came around until it was politically convenient to do so.
I'm talking about the stuff he actually fought and stood for for the lion's share of his career, when it counted the most. Watch him talk about the death penalty and tell me how progressive he is. That's who Joe Biden is. The Hyde Amendment, the Anita Hill hearings, votes for the Iraq war and ever-expanding militarism, raking in cash from the oil and credit card industries. Feels like we're being gaslighted harder than ever.
The General
Footballguy
ShamrockPride
Footballguy
We'd certainly be out of this never ending turd vs polished turd system we're stuck in.
ShamrockPride
Footballguy
tommyGunZ
Footballguy
That's just it. You're not being honest with yourself if you believe Biden is "slightly better than the next guy". Not only is Trump diametrically opposed to you (if you're progressive) on the issues, he's also absolutely incompetent. Biden isn't "slightly better". Come on.
msudaisy26
Footballguy
KiddLattimer
Footballguy
msudaisy26
Footballguy
You choose to go on the platform he is using while trying to get elected. I choose to go based on his action while he was in office. So I don't think you are being honest with yourself. You are seeing what you want to see.
Leroy Hoard
Footballguy
tommyGunZ
Footballguy
Bernie will endorse him. Warren will as well. Tulsi did yesterday. Every other Democratic candidate has endorsed him as well. Barack Obama supports him and loves Biden like a brother.
But I'm the one not being honest?
msudaisy26
Footballguy
The General
Footballguy
There may be some truth in this.
However now we are presented with 2 options. You pick the better option.
ShamrockPride
Footballguy
I will not ignore a 3rd option (or 4th, if you choose to sit out) just because you and most others who do actually get out to vote choose to be willfully ignorant of it.
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sho nuff
Footballguy
I took that option last time around (voted 3rd party). I knew it didn't matter here as Trump was going to kill Hillary.
I won't do that again no matter what it looks like he will do here. Because 4 more years of him will be a disaster for the left from the standpoint of judges in this country.
I guess you guys have significantly more faith in the American voter than I do, where there is some point that things would get bad enough for a socialist revolution or whatever you desire. I have seen enough interviews with farmers that have lost everything due to Trump policies, and know that they have lost everything due to Trump policies, but who then say that they are going to vote for him anyway to be pretty confident this will never happen. Frankly, the average person is not very intelligent or politically aware. Probably less than 1% of the population is as politically aware as the people in this forum and know none of the minutia, just whatever their uncle posts on facebook. There will also be no situation where the Democrats move leftward after losing elections, they will instead take to heart that if the right wing party keeps winning, I guess we need to become more right wing and chase after centrist voters in Ohio. The voters are still trending further left, especially the ones under 40, but there are still too many conservative old people with control over both primary voting and in office, but hopefully with a few election cycles, further primaring of bad democrats etc we can get somewhere. Republicans winning will essentially erase all possible gains IMO. There is also no chance of having multiple parties unless we come more of a parliamentary system, since the Republicans will always get in line and vote for their candidate, it would just become a one party system rather than two.
I mean, I cannot force anyone to vote Biden, but if that is too much to handle, at least vote blue down-ticket. If we can at least win some state governments to prevent them from continuing to be massively gerrymandered in Republicans favor I think it would be a massive improvement, look at what Virginia has been able to do once Democrats took over statewide office, it has been a fairly progressive policy landslide in what was a solidly red state recently.
I mean, I cannot force anyone to vote Biden, but if that is too much to handle, at least vote blue down-ticket. If we can at least win some state governments to prevent them from continuing to be massively gerrymandered in Republicans favor I think it would be a massive improvement, look at what Virginia has been able to do once Democrats took over statewide office, it has been a fairly progressive policy landslide in what was a solidly red state recently.
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tommyGunZ
Footballguy
Again, the entirety of leadership on the "progressive" left (Bernie, AOC, Tulsi, etc.) will be getting behind Biden. But you guys know better, and know that Biden really isn't much better than Trump? Really?
The General
Footballguy
I get the philosophical arguments for if you constantly vote for the lesser option you don't get the results but it didn't happen and here we are. Bernie lost, Pete lost, Klobacher,, and whoever else you preferred. That's reality. How we ended up Biden is a mystery to me as well but it is what it is.
The courts being shaped, environmental regulations, just having to listen to this dude's nonsense, etc...this is what we are picking now.
Thankfully you are in NY (it appears from your profile info) and it won't matter in the Presidential election.
The General
Footballguy
tommyGunZ
Footballguy
Yeah, and it's more than this, as Biden has definitely shifted his platform left on some issues to cater to progressives. Who'd have thought that a candidate running to the left of Barack Obama would be shunned by the progressive left as "no better than Trump". It's mind boggling.
msudaisy26
Footballguy
You are really trying too hard. They are getting behind the candidate in their party with the exception of Bernie. It has nothing to do with being progressive, they will say what will get them the most votes. Al If they do they will go back bickering among themselves like they were 2 years ago.
Sorry, but that isn't good enough for me and it shouldn't be good enough for you, but by all means continue to tell me my values aren't correct and keep us in this cycle of picking horrible people for our leaders.
Leroy Hoard
Footballguy
msudaisy26
Footballguy
He is moving left to get votes. I highly doubt he tries to move any policies left if gets elected.
Mile High
Footballguy
And in 4 more years they will find it even harder for their points to even matter.
msudaisy26
Footballguy
Mile High
Footballguy
Why do you think the Republican Senators are not voting on anything other then adding judges?
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