Warren Elizabeth
There is another set of primaries tomorrow. Bernie and Biden are neck-and-neck in current total delegates, with Biden taking the lead in polling for tomorrow.
Warren has spent a week not doing anything but complaining about Bernie and going on a comedy show.
Today is the last moment Warren can endorse either Bernie or Biden and look like she means it. If she endorses today she can claim it was for impact on the next set of primaries.
If she doesn’t do it today, she clearly dithered.
The case for her endorsing Sanders is simple. His policies and politics are far closer to hers. So much closer that there is no comparison between Sanders and Biden in this regard.
But more than that, and perhaps worse, is that the bankruptcy bill Biden championed and helped force through is why Warren claims she went into politics. It is her political raison d’etre. It is her origin story as a politician.
If she doesn’t endorse Sanders, not only is she not supporting the politician who wants to do most of what she wants to do, she is failing to oppose the politician who she claims has been her nemesis.
On top of that, she will be forfeiting a leadership position in the left-wing progressive movement, a movement large and powerful enough to challenge the Democratic political machine.
In 2016, she slid on not endorsing anyone, but this time tens of millions of passionate Sanders supporters, many of whom feel they need universal health care to survive, student debt relief not to be poor, and a vigorous climate change plan to have a future, aren’t going to forgive sitting on the sides.
If she sits this one out, then she’s just a Senator again. Plus, she’ll probably be primaried.
I also keep seeing arguments that Warren owes no one anything, and I find that strange. She’s a sitting Senator whom millions of people supported in the primaries. It seems to me, at least, that she owes those people something; that if she believed in her policy platform, if she believed those policies were good for the country, that she owes her supporters an attempt to get something similiar through with Bernie, because Biden isn’t going to do it. Heck, he’s floated Jamie Dimon and Bloomberg’s names as potential cabinet members.
Meanwhile, we’re coming up on another finanical crisis, thanks to the Coronavirus and Russia deciding to crash oil prices at the same time as demand is already slumping. The big banks are going to need another huge bailout–again, Warren’s reason for being in politics.
She won’t fight to have Sanders in charge, so that Wall Street isn’t bailed out while ordinary people aren’t?
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that if Warren doesn’t endorse Bernie, it looks like she has no principles and doesn’t care about her followers. (No, don’t use electability. Sanders polls better against Trump and doesn’t have dementia.)
It makes it appear that she’s primarily concerned with only one person: Elizabeth Warren.
I hope that isn’t the case, but she’s running out of time to prove it isn’t. In fact, if you read this post by email tonight and she hasn’t endorsed him by then, she’s probably too late.
I confess to some anger over this, but I also feel sadness. When a politician who had a chance at greatness proves that they are primarily moved by self-interest, not by the principles they espoused, it is a cause for sorrow. We sneer at politicians precisely because so many of them seem to have no real beliefs, but it is ennobling when we find one of the few who aren’t like that.
I had hoped Warren was among their number, and my anger is genuinely partly moved by sorrow. As I said repeatedly throughout the primary, though I preferred Sanders I would have endorsed Warren if she were the nominee.
And everyone knows that if Sanders and Warren’s positions were reversed, he would have already endorsed.
May Warren prove her that followers were right to trust her, that her origin story was real, and that she stands behind her plans.
(If anyone else is getting bored of “all primary all the time,” yeah, posts on other subjects soonish.)
Edit: I changed the wording from “neck-and-neck” in first paragraph after commenters pointed out I obviously hadn’t read the polling from today and yesterday. Yup, Biden’s pulling ahead substantially, my bad, I had only looked at current delegate totals. Guess Americans really do hate the ideas of universal health care, their children not being debt slaves, and not dying like flies to climate change.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Warrengotohell
1. She has done nothing but talk shit about Bernie supporters since she dropped out.
2. She\’s clearly not endorsing either candidate for now, maybe she\’ll endorse Bernie after it\’s too late.
3. She\’s a neoliberal who wanted to change things on the margins slightly- crumbs for the peasants.
4. She is not progressive. She was never progressive. She supported endless wars, Trump\’s military budget etc. You aren\’t progressive if you\’re pro-war. Period.
5. Best thing at this point is to vote Trump back in and destroy the Democratic party.
Joan
I agree. There were even times in this primary when Warren was to the left of Sanders and challenged him to release more policy proposals. If I recall correctly, Warren came out with a student loan debt forgiveness plan first, in addition to the free public tuition proposal, and Sanders followed. Her pivot toward the establishment was indeed strange, and I wonder if she took on staffers from other campaigns that influenced this. If she had remained the Elizabeth Warren we grew to love by watching her chew out Wall Street executives and fight to go after them, she’d be unstoppable.
Stirling S Newberry
Vote Biden. Because demented people need a president too!
Seriously, does no one read the news? Obama was a genius, but he could read the writing on the wall. Biden is like “What’s a wall?”
Zachary Smith
I supported Gabbard for a while, then I supported Warren for a while.
Looking back, I feel more than a little gullible and foolish.
Ian Welsh
I actually don’t expect her to endorse either Biden or Sanders. I suspect she thinks she can maintain viability with both sides that way, but I think it means neither side will ever trust her.
someofparts
https://twitter.com/BenjaminPDixon/status/1236602198815117313
450.org
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/03/09/free-press-poll-joe-biden-bernie-sanders-michigan-primaries/4998584002/
That’s more than an inch. If the poll was reversed, you could be sure Biden would beat Bernie in Michigan despite what the polls say but for some odd reason, the reverse is not true or will not be true. Funny that. Or not. Black folk be lovin’ Biden. Corn Pop was a bad dude. But he still be votin’ for Biden.
Who wants to rub the hair on Uncle Joe’s legs? Me, me, I want to. I want to learn all about roaches and rain barrels and rusty razor blades.
Willy
For another clue as to why people like Warren capitulate to the establishment, here we have progressives Krystal and Saagar capitulating to economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, who claims that The American Dream is Not Dead and How Populism Will Kill It:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHFMr2Hx7Fw
Nothing he says jibes at all with my own personal experience. I would much prefer to be doing my old career which I trained well for and excelled in, sitting in a cubicle/office making reasonable money, with enough time left over to do my own little challenging projects off hours. As a result of this “American Dream” I now have to go against my basic nature and deal extensively many families in their homes for my current survival needs. The vast majority of these people are “middle class” and under the kinds of economic stress which our American Dream parents never had to deal with. Ageism, weak unions, outsourcing, undocumenteds, global warming, global diseases, a “me first” cultural consumer mentality where nobody is ever quite good enough because they don’t own enough and the poor are just being whiny losers…
All the statistics cannot be lying. Yet the slick talking Mr. Strain seems to have all his own special statistics.
Maybe I’ll pick up a copy of his book at a thrift store someday, if I ever have the time. But I’ve got a very strong feeling that it would wind up being hurling against a wall, right next to the dent my Dianetics book made.
I think these politicians get ‘interventioned’ by charming operatives in sheep’s clothing.
Ian Welsh
Yes, corrected the neck and neck wording. I hadn’t looked at the monday/sunday polls before posting this piece, only the current delegate totals. If something doesn’t change soon, Bernie’s sunk.
Pity. But Americans will get what they deserve, alas.
Dave Dell
I feel/think Sen. Warren is going to remain neutral in hopes of a cabinet position in the Biden administration. She could be the “appease the progressive wing” cabinet member.
As a sitting Senator there’s really no downside to her non-endorsement. Not picked for a cabinet post? She can still be a pain in the ass to the monied interests as a Senator.
Dan Lynch
If you go by Warren’s voting record, rather than her campaign promises, she is a moderate Republican. She has always toed the establishment line on anything that mattered. Why would you expect her to buck the establishment this time?
Second, you are thinking in terms of policies and values. You and I think in terms of policies and values, and that’s fine, but not everyone thinks like us. Many people think, instead, in terms of power. Liz assumes that Bernie will not get the nomination, never mind the White House, therefore Bernie can do nothing increase Liz’s power. To maximize her power, Liz will want to suck up to the establishment, as she has a history of doing.
It’s about power, and Bernie has none.
someofparts
I really like Krystal and Sagar so I had to check out their capitulation.
It doesn’t scan quite that way for me.
First, I think they did do push back, both of them.
Second, these days, I do want to have a conversation with people from the other side of the fence if it can be constructive instead of manipulative.
Just knowing the guy was from AEI told me all I needed to know. If they were giving his book away for free I might be willing to use it to line the bottom of my cat’s litter box.
That said, check out the kind of thing you can see from the right-wing these days:
https://www.foxnews.com/shows/tucker-carlson-tonight
or this
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/02/11/professor-mark-blyth-political-economist/
Willy
@ someofparts,
AOC speaks of the 60% of Americans who make less than 40K, adding that whatever the establishment is doing isn’t working for them. But she forgets that some of them may be happy enough with their smart phones and big screen TVs, and rationalize that they don’t own much else.
Tucker is starting to speak like Bannon, who says that if the right doesn’t do something about the powerless American worker that the left will. But to me it looks like the sanctioned leaders of the New Right makes appearances (trade, china, the wall) but still bows to the oligarchy (Trump 101). In my book that’s called “con artistry”. Maybe we have to go through a con artistry phase before hitting bottom.
But at least the Pandoras Box of populism has been opened. I can’t imagine things getting easier for establishmentarians unless programs to give out free drugs and circus entertainments is mandated.
LeVar Ravel
Well put, Ian.
Today’s young are lopsidedly more liberal than older Democrats, and they’re the party’s future (if it has one). But Warren is 70, so perhaps she figures she won’t be in office when they rise, and has no need to join in their fights.
The future leaders will be younger liberals, the Tulsi Gabbards and Ro Khannas, not the young establishment Joseph Kennedy IIIs.
Hugh
I expect Warren to endorse DCW Biden some place down the road when he has safely wrapped up the nomination and her endorsement, mixed in with those of numerous other Senators and pols, won’t even rate a footnote.
I think, like Hillary before her, she blames Bernie and his supporters for her own failures and mistakes. She isn’t a progressive. If she was, she would have endorsed Bernie and been out on the campaign trail with him. She very obviously and meaningfully hasn’t. To understand Warren, it is important to remember she was a Republican until she was 47. And it wasn’t that she had some coming to Damascus moment and moved toward the Democratic party. It is rather that in its rightward march the Democratic party came to her.
Other things she shares with Hillary are that both are elitists with a strong sense of personal entitlement. Both are deeply anti-populist. There are also their political instincts. While Hillary’s were one-of-a-kind atrocious, Warren’s are still pretty bad. And both seem to have this really singular gift of not learning from their mistakes.
So no endorsement for Bernie. She will sit on her hands for a while, then go back to business as usual. And if she gets primaried, she’ll blame that on Bernie too.
Stirling S Newberry
DJIA 23,850.36 −2,014.42 (7.79%)
Which number is Number 11 on down days
Hugh
Stirling, I can already hear Trump blaming the Democrats, especially Nancy Pelosi. Oh,and maybe the Fed too.
different clue
Once again I predict: Warren will NOT endorse Sanders. Not today and not tomorrow. And not before DemCon 2020 in Milwaukee.
That is my prediction.
different clue
Wait, what? . . . ” Russia” going to crash oil prices?
Well then, it is definitely Saudi Barbaria which plans to utterly and devastatingly crUsh oil prices.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
She is 70 years old, as Mr. Ravel said.
Has it occurred to any of you lot that she may have decided she wants to retire from politics, while she still probably has several years left to enjoy that retirement?
Stirling S Newberry
> Stirling, I can already hear Trump blaming the Democrats, especially Nancy Pelosi. Oh, and maybe the Fed too.
This is noise. The real economy in the issue.
different clue
I predict: Warren will not endorse or support Sanders. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
Zachary Smith
An off-topic rant on Coronavirus concerns this headline:
*** Exclusive: Millions of masks stockpiled in Canada’s Ontario expired before coronavirus hit ***
{trial} Exclusive: Millions of masks stockpiled in Canada’s Ontario expired before coronavirus hit
In my humble opinion this is 95% foolishness. Some models of masks I’ve seen have straps which amount to a large rubber band, and it’s true this rubber will rot. A very simple fix is to staple on a new elastic strap. Sewing works too, but that’s really slow and tedious. The rest of the mask ought to last for a very, very long time if kept away from moisture which might cause mould. Or safe from insects and rats.
Manufacturers put expiration dates on Everything these days. I just dug out an unopened 26 ounce salt canister, and it has “Best By 03/21/21” printed on the bottom. If this salt is kept dry, I’d not hesitate to use it 100,000 years from now.
Ontario needs to give a few employees the job of spot-checking their mask inventory. Probably most of them are as good as the day they left the mask factory.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-canada-supplies-ex/exclusive-millions-of-masks-stockpiled-in-canadas-ontario-expired-before-coronavirus-hit-idUSKBN20W2OG
edmondo
Why the hell would she endorse Bernie? At best, Bernie has a couple of eeks left before he drops out and endorses Biden. Bernie is a sheepdog. If you remember that, everything else falls into place.
StewartM
IBW
Has it occurred to any of you lot that she may have decided she wants to retire from politics, while she still probably has several years left to enjoy that retirement?
Exactly how difficult or exhausting is it for anyone–70 year old or otherwise–to say “I endorse XXX for President”? That doesn’t exactly entail a huge caloric expenditure.
No, her career is not over. She is simply waiting, high-school fashion, to see who’s the ‘in crowd’ so she can join in and play. This differentiates her from Bernie, who does not play the DC party circuit, does not seek to be a part of the ‘in crowd’, and pushes as hard and as long as he can practically speaking to advance the causes he believes in without caring much whether or not he’s pissing people off by doing so (the 2016 election, for instance).
I like Bernie because I think that’s the way I would be, most of his ‘respected colleagues’ are intellectual lightweights and morally dubious and untrustworthy, Bernie has said he likes to get out of Washington and all its ‘phony friends’ who only want to befriend you (just like Richard Rich in the play A Man for All Seasons for their own career interests.
dbk
Ian 1: “It makes it appear that she’s primarily concerned with only one person: Elizabeth Warren.”
Agree.
Ian 2: “I confess to some anger over this, but I also feel sadness.”
Agree.
Ian 3: “Guess Americans really do hate the idea of universal health care, their children not being debt slaves, and not dying like flies to climate change.”
Um.
The U.S. is currently suffering from a massive case of cognitive dissonance.
Stirling S Newberry
Joe Biden. Because his stupidity will get us out of this mess.
Hugh
“Has it occurred to any of you lot that she may have decided she wants to retire from politics, while she still probably has several years left to enjoy that retirement?”
You mean like DCW Biden? So she ran for President to signal that she wanted to retire? Aren’t there less extravagant ways of retiring, like issuing a press release?
“The real economy in the issue.”
Well, yes, and it sucked for most Americans before the coronavirus came along.
Stirling S Newberry
Joe Biden. We Don’t Need Understanding.
Stirling S Newberry
> Stirling, I can already hear Trump blaming the Democrats, especially Nancy Pelosi. Oh,and maybe the Fed too.
There is a point where the ordinary consumer runs out of money,(Smith) Usually, they go on a splurge first. (Marx)
450.org
Oh sure, enjoy retirement considering what’s going down. Kicking back at the beach on Martha’s Vineyard on a 130 degree summer day watching the sea level rise in real time as wild fires decimate the interior states all the while sucking back a minty, frosty COVFEFE-19 until it’s her turn — to die.
450.org
different clue
My lonely comment sits and weeps in moderation.
Olivier
At this point americans have the values of a coven of satanists, so they’ll get what they deserve indeed.
Marcus
Re: getting what they/we deserve…
I wonder about what, to me, is the elephant in the room. Americans, among other first-worlders, and even among all the developing countries, feel they are entitled to a first-world, consumerist lifestyle. Corporate-funded or Anti-billionaire, nobody is challenging that.
I often find myself hoping that individual people that don’t self-reflect get what they deserve. And it usually doesn’t happen. But en masse….maybe
Anonymous
She (Warren) a straight-up shill and a sell-out.
We can play the NPC game and pretend otherwise.
Stoller brings up some good points, why doesn’t Bernie call himself an FDR New Dealer instead of a (democratic) socialist?
Why doesn’t he fight? Don’t wanna hurt the people who are killing us’ feelings?
Gatekeeper?
It doesn’t matter. I’m part of the ‘precariat’.
I’ve worked union from one end of this country to the other.
Bernie or Biden (God help us) might lose because of guns and immigration.
Guns are for tyrants, not for hunting.
Most people I work with feel the same way.
Anecdotal I know.
Immigration is killing what’s left of the native working class. saying so is not racist, making it so will backfire, big time.
Notorious P.A.T.
” Guess Americans really do hate the idea of universal health care, their children not being debt slaves, and not dying like flies to climate change.”
They sure do. At least, the baby boomers do.
bruce wilder
I cannot help but think a lot of people have a serious problem discerning moral reality and sorting it all out. Maybe, it is social atomism — the isolation inherent in a social world more virtual than real, where people have few friends and do not discuss politics (or anything else) with each other so much as they simply mimic poses they have seen or heard acted out on tv (or radio or social media) repeating memes seeded by professionals.
It is exasperating, watching people gloss over the unsuitability of Biden on so many dimensions and then rationalizing their support of Biden as a question of “electability”. What are we going to discuss after that groundless assertion has been laid down? When your brain cancer reached state four and you began hallucinating? There is no reason whatsoever to think Biden should be President. Chair Perez changed the debate rules yet again so Biden does not even have to show up at the candidate debates! They are doing this deliberately. They know he cannot perform reliably on stage, but . . . it does not matter to them, to Biden’s supporters great and small.
KT Chong
She is NOT going to endorse Bernie. Period. Should be obvious at this point that she is an opportunist who is out for herself.
KT Chong
Ultimately, Bernie bet on the wrong strategy. He bet on youth turning out in large numbers to vote. It was a high-risk strategy with huge payoffs.
Well, youths have not turned out in large numbers. His high-risk strategy has failed.
Like in a battle or wars, if a general attempted a high-risk strategy and it did not pan out, it would cost him the battle/war. That is what happening to Bernie right now.
KT Chong
And I don’t want to hear any more millennials complaining and whining about student debts and how their lives suck because of what the boomers had left for them, because fuck ’em.
Dan
All of Italy is shut down. Permission required to move around the nation, even for health emergencies.
In New York City:
For two women who had learned just the day before that they had tested positive for the coronavirus, the call on Saturday from the New York City Health Department offered some implausibly good news.
One of the women had to stay under quarantine. The other, who had been without symptoms for a few days, was free to go about her life.
As strange as that sounded, what happened next further underscored the haphazard oversight of the quarantine process, one of the most important tools that public health officials have to curb the spread of the coronavirus outbreak.
Hours after the initial call, a Health Department worker came to the apartment where the women had been staying since they returned sick from a cruise, the women recalled. He told them not to open the door and he slid a sheet of paper under it. They said they were told to sign the document and slide it back out.
It was an isolation agreement: Both women were confined to the apartment indefinitely, until the Health Department declared them safe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/nyregion/coronavirus-ny-quarantines.html
different clue
Warren will never endorse or support Sanders at any present or future time.
Hugh
Bernie didn’t bet on the wrong strategy. He was winning by the rules the DNC had set down. What happened was, when Bernie looked like he was going to win, the DNC started changing the rules. The debates were changed to include Bloomberg. Then Buttigieg and Klobuchar were ordered to stand down and deliver their support to Biden on the very eve of Super Tuesday. Now Biden is being stage-managed much like Ronald Reagan was, and for the same reason. And the DNC has changed the format for the next debate to a townhall to help cover up Biden’s mental deficits.
What we are seeing is a replay of 2016. The DNC will rig the process until it, and those pulling the strings behind it, like Obama, are sure they get the result they want. I don’t see how they think that they will get enough Millennials and progressives to win in November given their cheating again and such a decrepit candidate as Biden. I can only think that they are serious about preferring to lose with Biden than win with Sanders.
anon
I would have voted for Warren had she been the nominee, but I find her unlikable, petty, and selfish. She should be above using the sexism card and Bernie supporters to explain her loss, but that is what she and many of her surrogates have been doing since she dropped out. So, part of her decision not to endorse Bernie is due to his supporters being mean to her on Twitter, so now she’s going to deny all of Bernie’s supporters health care and student loan forgiveness as her revenge?? Maybe Warren’s former colleague, Drucilla Cornell, was right about her being a relentless and ruthless nihilist.
As Benjamin Dixon wrote on Twitter: If mean tweets are the worst you have to worry about, you’re pretty damn lucky. And, as Glenn Greenwald wrote on Twitter: I found the Maddow/Warren interview so telling: two extremely rich, powerful people declaring that of all the grave problems ordinary Americans face, the mean tweets which its elites must endure online is near the top of the list, meriting a large bulk of time in the interview.
I’m don’t use Twitter, but I’ve checked the tweets of Bernie supporters occasionally during this primary. I have found Warren supporters to be condescending and demeaning toward Bernie’s women and women of color supporters. I heard one Warren supporter on Democracy Now refer to Nina Turner as a token black woman and Jason Johnson called black female Bernie supporters as the “island of misfit black girls.” But Sanders is the only candidate being questioned about mean tweets from random nobodies that Sanders has no control over.
Although I believe that Warren is genuinely upset and salty about not being even close to winning the nomination, and using Bernie and his supporters as her scapegoat, ultimately, I think she is and always has been a very calculating self-interested person. When people show you who they are, believe them. Warren already showed her true self in 2016 when she waited on the sidelines rather than endorse Bernie. A true progressive would have had no qualms endorsing the only progressive in the race without reservations. Warren’s choice to withhold her endorsement once again should surprise no one who was paying attention and taking notes from 2016 and throughout this primary season when Warren tried to assassinate Bernie’s character by implying he was a sexist, not shaking his hand after a debate, and choosing to take super PAC money just to suffer an embarrassing loss on Super Tuesday. Imagine if Bernie had done this! It makes sense for Bernie to stay in the race when he’s running against the “moderate” neo-liberal wing of the party, but he would have without a doubt backed any progressive candidate with a shot at winning the nomination.
Zachary Smith
https://www.ianwelsh.net/once-more-on-elizabeth-warren-in-her-moment-of-truth/#comment-111176
The DNC wants to change the rules AGAIN? A quick search found this to be true.
*** The format for the next debate in Arizona — their first since Biden’s blowout Super Tuesday victories — would have the candidates seated for the first time this election cycle and take multiple questions from the audience. In the prior 10 debates, the candidates stood at lecterns and nearly all questions were asked by the professional moderators.
Likely Biden’s handlers figure he can’t stand and chew gum at the same time, so they try to get him a chair. Audience questions can be arranged to be of the “nerf ball” variety. The same “arrangers” can see to it Sanders has to quickly comment on a series of Brain Twister/Rocket Science questions.
I don’t know what the end game is for the DNC – they can’t possibly nominate an early-stage dementia patient, can they? Maybe the idea is to crush Sanders, then switch to an alternate Ticket Leader. I’m already seeing hints this could be Hillary. Or maybe install Harris or some other reliable hack as VP, then discover before the election Biden has a health problem which forces him off the ticket. VP moves to the top, a new hack quickly installed as replacement VP, and they’re good to go.
Might Warren still be hoping to be the first or ‘convention’ VP?
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/07/bernie-sanders-joe-biden-arizona-debate-123467
anon
Zachary, I have heard the names of Hillary and Harris floating around as possible VP picks. I’m almost certain that a woman will be picked as Biden’s running made, but I don’t think it will be Warren. The moderates do not trust her. Now, Bernie’s progressive supporters don’t trust her either. The establishment will of course use Warren to help Biden get elected, but Biden probably sees Warren as an untrustworthy threat to the status quo. He will want an even more awful neoliberal like Hillary, Harris, or Klobuchar working alongside him.
KT Chong
Hillary, because she is the worst person ever.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
“Hillary, because she is the worst person ever.”
I suggest you look up these names: Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Caligula, Torquemada, Ivan the Terrible, Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il, Fidel Castro, Osama bin Laden, Che Guevara, Charles Manson, Richard Speck, Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh…
If La Clinton can outdo any of them, she must be Lucifer herself.
“She turned me into a newt!”
*plaintiff is not a newt*
“…I got better.” 😆
Zachary Smith
https://www.ianwelsh.net/once-more-on-elizabeth-warren-in-her-moment-of-truth/#comment-111182
Your list is poorly constructed. Take Charles Manson. Like Hillary, he didn’t personally kill anybody. According to the Wiki, the man is responsible for 7 deaths.
By way of contrast, Hillary has caused the deaths of tens of thousands (minimum) to millions. She wasn’t tagged “Butcher of Libya” for nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXDU48RHLU
Yet there are people who worship this woman in the same fashion as the Bushbots did their torturing Codpiece Commander. As the Trumpies do their obese orange slug.
different clue
@Zachary Smith,
Given the newest rules ( as of this moment) for the next debate, and if the question-sorters do indeed throw some speed-of-light shurikens at Sanders, and IF he gets a plausible opening to do what I am about to suggest . . . . that he passes on some particularly difficult questions about rocket surgery and hands them to Biden.
” You know, my friend Senator Biden made this topic one of his special areas of expertise during his longgggggg and dis TINGGGGG uished career in the Senate. And I think it is only fair that my friend Senator Biden get the first chance to answer this question. And then I can add to the answer if there is anything left to say. Joe? . . . .”
” I . . . I . . . . you know – – – the Thing!!”
It would be the sort of Joe Jitsu I would love to see.
different clue
@K T Chong,
I have read that a lot of millenials and other young people DID show up, but that the anti-Sanders youth-haters ALSO showed up in record amounts to vote as suggested.
And Hugh mentions the sudden dropping out of the other “moderates” all throwing their delegates and support to Biden. Obama has very swiftly gone from ” you don’t have to do this, Joe” to pulling every string for Biden. I wonder if the Clintobamafia has some kind of thumb-lock placed on Biden and has made him an offer he can’t refuse.
My state has its primary tomorrow. I will see if turnout is heavier than normal for these things. And I will see if that includes a heavier-than-usual youth turnout.
Dan
This is what Hillary knowingly inflicted on Libya:
https://i0.wp.com/wrongkindofgreen.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/libya-before-and-after-1.jpg
And then she laughed about it.
Tom R
Today I voted for Bernie. I’m in Washington State, and it’s all mail-in, so I’m almost late in voting for an election that’s officially tomorrow. But it was down to Bernie or Joe, so I voted, as in 2016, for the guy that’s talking about an America I want to live in.
I did not vote with great enthusiasm. I think Bernie’s way too old to be president, and clearly in danger of dying in office with no clear successor to his “movement” or his policies. I haven’t seen that’s he’s got lots of allies or a strong network to run the federal government. It’s not clear to me that he’s a good executive or a good negotiator. Most governors at least learn to be executives; senators tend to miss this training. But Joe Biden seems cognitively impaired. I’m not with Ian that it’s dementia or Alzheimer’s: that diagnosis is for doctors. But he is clearly not as sharp as he was in 2016, and also way too old to be president. As, obviously, so is Trump.
For me this was not a great primary. And I’m living in a town already haunted by Covid-19, a far more important concern. But if I thought about who had an answer for this, it was far more Bernie than Joe. We need full univeral coverage and full funding of public health — that system would be ready to address Covid-19 far better than our current costly, sporadic approach that has let this pandemic spread much farther than it should have.
This isn’t just about Trump. It’s about a legacy of shrinking and hampering and bad-mouthing government that started with Reagan and never stopped. One character who really championed this was Grover Norquist, who famously declared: “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” And he got most Republicans to pledge to not increase any taxes, a obviously dumb and limiting pledge in the face of all kinds of possible crises. Both Joe and Bernie never took that pledge, and neither of them have that kind of anti-government attitude fully embraced by nearly every Republican.
So maybe Bernie will carry on, but his odds are slim. He’s caught on a bit with Latinx, but his turnout with young voters is no better than before. He cannot catch on with African-Americans en masse, even if Jesse Jackson endorses him late in the stretch. I don’t expect him to get the nomination, and I hope to hell he supports Joe a lot better than he did Hillary. We will need a full court press to drive the Orange Nazi from office and save the Supreme Court. To say nothing of addressing climate change, which is something that Bernie addressed better than any other candidate. Which was really what made me vote for him, rather quickly after I opened my ballot.
KT Chong
Last year I said Bernie seemed to have the strategy that relied on young voters to turn out in records, but he did not actually have a strategy to directly motivate and turn out those young voters. I suggested a strategy for accomplishing that:
Given that Bernie has the endorsements of all the teachers and teacher unions, make those endorsers do some work: get the teachers to call and network their former students, (i.e., young people in late teens or twenties,) organize the teachers to call and directly motivate young people to vote, maybe a day or a few day before the polling days. Direct and target “marketing”.
Yet somehow could never get the suggestion to the Bernie campaign; but it is too late for it now.
Hugh
KT, it is a lot simpler. Millennials are heavily into social media. You make voting for Bernie the cool thing to do and oh, it’s your life and my life. So if you can’t do it for yourself. Do it for the rest of us.
When dealing with disaffected groups, you need a hook, an intro. It doesn’t matter if it is superficial. It is about getting their attention so you can tell them directly we need you. We need your vote. Come onboard.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Driftglass makes the point for moderate liberalism over radicalism better than I can:
https://driftglass.blogspot.com/2020/03/have-fun-storming-castle.html
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
(1) Overthrow the existing system.
(2) …
(3) Utopia!
It’s the Underpants Gnomes model of social progress. 😛
Stirling S Newberry
> Driftglass makes the point for moderate liberalism over radicalism better than I can:
Then it is a bad case. Every developed country has a universal health system, except one. It isn’t very hard, though the costs need to be spread around. It also cost less to bill, a lot less. In the case of health care, it does make sense to bill a majority of people. There is some profit to be made at the high end – the top 5% or so. It is not “messy and expensive” it just does not work as a profit maker.
Are the difficulties? Mainly if you want “cheap,” twice – as the UK does. Then there is the eternal lowering of cost, which means the worry for profit, for the whole society. It is a choice, but it largely has different people die, so that others can live. It is a Rawlsian equivalence – you know which bucket you are in, only then can you know if it is worth it to you.
So yes, some things are messy and complicated, and we have bright people working on it all the time. But what is messier is why people should die, so that other people should have the right to fornicate with 2-year-olds. That’s messy. And immoral.
I could go one about climate change, but I have real work to do.
The US is the holdout. I humbly submit that if we, alone, have the problem, it is because a few people want to benefit from it.
Z
Biden’s handlers are floating around Mikey $B and Jamie Dimon for cabinet positions setting the stage for Warren to come to the rescue as running mate and eventual step-in for Sloppy Joe once they put him out to pasture shortly after the convention.
There’s no way they can run Sloppy Joe in the general election if they are able to hide him enough that he gets the nomination. Who makes the most sense? He obviously doesn’t need any juice with blacks and Harris isn’t very popular among them anyway. Amy K is a Sarah Palin in some ways though smarter. She won’t hold up to scrutiny. It’s Lyin’ Liz, the “progressive”, that’s been in the plans since early in the year, I’d bet. She went after Bernie on the contrived misogynist nonsense as a proxy for Biden to damage Bernie’s campaign.
Z
StewartM
IBW
(1) Overthrow the existing system.
(2) …
(3) Utopia!
Except Bernie is hardly a Mao or Lenin. He’s actually the very ‘moderate liberal’ you say you support. What the other Dems actually are are conservatives or reactionaries who want to go backwards at a slower pace than Repubs.
(And don’t mind what they *say*, mind what they *do*–just take a look at the actual policies of Clinton and Obama and compare them to what they promised; you’ll see that what they really were willing to spend political capital on was NOT their vaguely liberal hopey-changey campaign promises, but on deregulating Wall Street, destroying assistance for the poor, free trade deals (Obama promised that he’d renegotiate NAFTA, instead he gave us another NAFTA with South Korea and tried to ram TPP through) and gutting Social Security.)
zac
My impression is that Warren has had a bunch of consultant assholes pissing in her ear telling her to jettison this economic populist stuff, distance herself from Bernie\’s \’socialism\’, and become the standard-bearer \’for women\’. She\’s drunk the kool-aid and retroactively recast herself as the new Hilary, and Bernie as either counter-feminist or an embodiment of the glass ceiling on the left. it\’s pretty sad.
Sid Finster
How did the heroes (and I say that without snark or irony, for they did heroic things) of the Civil Rights Movement become Team D apparatchiks?
How did firebreathing Sixties radicals, folks who were blowing up things and people one week, how did they “evolve” (as they would say it) into meek supporters of “changing the system from within the system”?
Co-optation, how does it work?
ponderer
Warren may just be stalling so as to not offend future voters, she can run in 2024 without Sanders or Biden. The DNC is making an example of Sanders and he is too weak to do anything about it, just like 2016.
Trump has this one in the bag, just like 2016, well, except Biden probably won’t remember losing while Hillary could never forget.
Z
Sid,
They got them invested in the stock market through 401Ks and whatnot which gave them a small stake in the status quo, though obviously a controlling one in regards to their political philosophy.
Z
nihil obstet
More on the Driftglass link — I managed to get through the first third or so of the silliness and then decided it wasn’t worth the time to keep going with nonsense.
The people who think revolution will bring utopia are like the right wingers who don’t believe government ought to build roads or public schools. There may be some, but they are few. Driftglass sounds here like a Fox network personality caricaturing the left.
You can defend a moderate approach when the approach is moving towards improvement. Does Driftglass think the last 40 years of neoliberalism has been a success that we keep moving on with? From war to finance to health to public infrastructure, the moderates have made things worse for the majority of Americans.
As a side historical note on revolutions — these revolutions generally did make things better. Revolutions are scary, with serious harm to the guilty and innocent alike. They happen only when the situation is pretty bad. (As opposed to coups, which happen when the rich are unhappy.) But after revolutions, life span tends to increase and literacy jumps. This was why after WWII third world countries looked to the Soviet Union rather than the West, whose policies had immiserated their populations. Thus the West found the Cold War necessary. The collapse of the self-styled socialist government in the Soviet Union resulted in reduced life span and education.
And of course, Driftglass’s emphasis on complexity was no doubt leading to “solutions” like Obamacare, a 2300 page bill with nearly 11,000 pages of regulations for implementation. Is it any wonder that the professional/managerial class believes that governance should embrace complexity, especially since it guarantees that the unworthy will not be able to slice through the thickets of genius surrounding it?
KT Chong
The personal touch. Having teachers personally call their former students, young people whom they know personally, would be infinitely more effectively than using social media to motivate young voters.
So far, all the social media has not been able to motivate young voters to turn out. You see all the positive buzz about Bernie on the social media, but then the young voter turnout has not materialized. So far they have been nothing more than just a bunch of whiners online.
anon
Z – Harris would make better sense than Warren or Hillary, both of whom are unlikeable to the general public. Harris might be better able to convince more women, minorities, and young moderate Dems to go to the polls.
Z
Anon,
You have a higher opinion of Harris as a politician than I do.
Hopefully we won’t have to find out who was right in regards to who Biden would choose as his running mate.
Z
highrpm
bernie the not-fighter.
just watched kyle kulinsky’s tube post of yesterday, The Strategy Bernie Needs to Beat Biden. my god, bernie’s playing nice with dementio joe. when asked, “can biden beat, trump?”, bernie answers, “yes, i think he can….and if he gets the nomination, i support him.” !?!!!??? what?!!!? bernie — and his campaign staffers — still making the same mistake after the 2016 disaster?!!!? nature is cold, cruel . politics uses the predator-prey model, for the most part. geez, bernie.
anon
I heard an older black man say just now that he will be voting for Biden because he never heard of Sanders before. Biden’s name recognition and being Obama’s VP for eight years are the two main reasons I think older blacks vote for him. Younger blacks, like younger whites, vote for Sanders based on actual issues like healthcare, student loan debt, and childcare.I haven’t heard anyone say they dislike Sanders, but older voters just aren’t as familiar with him as Biden.
anon
I don’t have a high opinion of Harris but I don’t underestimate the average American’s reason for voting for a candidate being based solely on identity politics or how good a politician looks.
Willy
IBW, we’d probably be less “radical” and more moderate if our current moderate leaders weren’t so full of shit, didn’t play so dirty, and didn’t usually wind up fabulously wealthy after their public service. The results they’ve been providing for the last 40 years kinda taints their brand, methinks.
krake
All liberalism is ‘moderate’. That’s why its enfeebled proponents are always being railroaded by the class-warriors and culture-killers on the right.
A case for liberalism is a case for surrender.
Willy
Krake, it isn’t just the milquetoast quality of being moderate, but the absolute bullshit coming from our so-called moderate leaders. That’s the main problem with the Driftglass post. It ignores that “moderation” is an excellent position from which to serve oneself as a covert and corrupt conservative.
The “moderate” solutions of which Driftglass speaks is theoretical. They haven’t happened in reality. Not for a long time now. The Clintons promised American workers greater prosperity if we’d just let the our jobs go overseas, because even better jobs would be there for us. When those jobs didn’t appear for most, they told us that we needed to get better educated. So we did and tuition costs skyrocketed. And then those jobs got sent away. So now we have to continuously re-educate ourselves at great expense, just to stay in the middle class. Our parents usually just had one worker, one job. That’s quite a contrast.
That’s just one example.
The Clintons themselves are now quite wealthy. Check out what Chelsea is up to. And for all that wealth they produce little more than bullshit. But I’m sure that China thanks them. “Hope and Change” only got us 8 more years of Dubya, but it made a former community organizer quite wealthy.
So now we have Elizabeth Warren. If one does some simple investigative homework they’ll find plenty of evidence that she’s been an opportunistic liar, a political opportunist, and some say, nihilist. Maybe she’s being misunderstood, but she sure smells like more hope and change bullshit. Promise us all this health and prosperity and then blame “political reality” when you cannot deliver. As if you weren’t smart enough to understand political reality before you made all the promises. Or blame the Russians. Or those mean Bernie Bros. And then badda bing, she’s living on a multimillion dollar estate.
Ye shall know them by their fruits. We’ve been fooled enough.
different clue
@highrpm,
Sanders really said that about Biden? Sanders really said he would support a nominee Biden?
This is not satire?
A lot of Sanders supporters will be demobilized and demotivated. Hopefully enough will take it upon themselves to put Sanders’s name on all 50 state ballots as a no-party Independent candidate for President. It would give movement-members a chance to see how many of them there are. It would be a morale-rebuilding and restoring exercise. It would help that movement stay together enough long enough to find and elevate a plain dog mean and jack acid nasty candidate to carry their interests forward.
I also hope that Tulsi Gabbard has enough supporters to get her name on all 50 state ballots as a no-party Independent candidate for President.
If Sanders and Gabbard were each on all 50 state ballots, it would give us a chance to see who will vote against the Trumpo-Bidenite Depublicratic mainstream candidates.
highrpm
@different clue,
kyle kulinsky’s tube post of yesterday, The Strategy Bernie Needs to Beat Biden. my god, bernie’s playing nice with dementio joe. when asked, “can biden beat, trump?”, bernie answers, “yes, i think he can….and if he gets the nomination, i support him.” , watch the video between 9:00 and 10:00. kyle kringes @ bernie’s not wise responses at 9:30 ff.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
@ nihil obstet:
(1) Proof, please?
(2) Even if that be correct, as you said, revolutions bring serious harm to people of all categories. Why should I risk any number of nasty things, up to and including premature death, when–while my life is hardly everything I might wish it to be–it is reasonably secure, and modestly comfortable?
Do you postulate an afterlife, in which I can be rewarded for such risk and possible self-sacrifice?
If yes, can you prove it?
If no, would I not be remarkably foolish to run those risks of reducing both the quality and the quantity of my one and only life?
@Newberry:
Uh, who is suggesting pedophilia?
Benjamin
@Ivory Bill Woodpecker
” Even if that be correct, as you said, revolutions bring serious harm to people of all categories.”
The status quo is killing people by the bucketful right now.
“Why should I risk any number of nasty things, up to and including premature death, when–while my life is hardly everything I might wish it to be–it is reasonably secure, and modestly comfortable?”
Shorter: ‘why should I care about other people?’
And you’re reasonably secure? Good for you. Tens of millions aren’t though.
It’s your selfish intransigence that brings about revolutions. When the polite avenues of change that you approve of and consider legitimate fail the populace, the populace will take more direct routes.
If you’re lucky you won’t be put up against a wall and executed.
nihil obstet
Ivory Bill Woodpecker,
As long as you have food and shelter, you’re almost certainly not going to revolt. If you’re reasonably comfortable, you’ll oppose revolution. I thought that was a lot more implicit in what I said than “There’ll be pie in the sky by and by.”
Benjamin
@Dan
I’ve seen Woodpecker outright reject attempts to educate him about Clinton’s key role in the destruction of Libya over on The Confluence (he seems to think NYT is some radical leftist newspaper and refuses to read it).
It’s kind of pointless trying to argue with him (I say, despite doing exactly that) because facts literally don’t matter to him.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
@Benjamin:
Benjamin, I will complete my 57th solar orbit in May.
It is far more likely that I will die of natural causes, perhaps cardiovascular problems, perhaps plain old age, than by violence.
Do all the inhabitants wear goatees in your parallel universe? 😆
Benjamin
@Ivory Bill Woodpecker
The fact that you’re the better part of sixty and yet so ignorant (aggressively so) is embarrassing.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
I’m too old to be embarrassed, Benjamin. I find I’ve entered the DGAF stage of life.
Or did you mean you somehow find my alleged ignorance embarrassing? That would be odd, if true.
Willy
A current Republican Party strategy is to take over the worker vote by throwing workers a few crumbs from time to time, so they can then pursue their actual agendas. The Democratic Party strategy is to alienate the worker hoping they wont vote Republican.
This doesn’t seem like a winning strategy.
anon
The New York Times’ take on why Warren won’t endorse Sanders:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-endorsement-bernie-sanders.html
Stop blaming “Bernie Bros.” and your unsubstantiated story about Bernie telling you a woman couldn’t win for your political cowardice, Warren. Of course the Bernie haters, which are many in the Democratic Party and at the New York Times, loves this reason because it places the blame squarely on Sanders and his supporters rather than Warren and her online trolls. Please, Massachusetts progressives, vote Warren out of office.
different clue
I suspect that Warren’s report of “what Bernie said at that dinner” to be just as truthful as her persistent claims to be a Cherokee.
Her collusion with CBN to try ambushing Sanders with a “hot mike” showed her to have zero character or honesty. The clumsiness of it all showed her to have zero political skill. If she would have had Roger Stone skills to match her Roger Stone goals and desires, she would have pulled it off.
Her evident bad character renders her level of ” kwah lih fih kay shuns” to be irrelevant and useless.
I would be surprised to see her win her next Senatorial election or any other election after this.
different clue
Did I say ” CBN”? Of course I meant ” CNN”.
Willy
If Warren doesn’t have some kind of coolness up her sleeve that makes everybody say, “Ah-so! That was pretty unexpectedly brilliant!”, she’ll just go down as another worthless politcal hack, just another nihilistic POS.