[Discussion] The (likely) Depressing Road to the 2020 Election Thread

It's going to be a circus.

Will 45 get impeached or step down or challenged? All 3? MAYBE.

Will the democrats eat themselves alive and hobble literally every potential candidate before the primaries are done? PROBABLY.

Talk about that junk here.

I wonder how many progressive Democratic primary voters Bernie's campaign thought he'd reach going on a conservative propaganda channel.

He'd said in another interview that he wanted to go on Fox because there are not enough voices on Fox countering the Trump/Fox narratives, and that it would be the only chance for some of them to hear Bernie's words come from his own mouth.

Seems legit. The strategy then is to change some minds about voting for Trump again in 2020.

Fox's strategy having him on was to hopefully catching him saying sound-bytable things like (not an actual quote) "China is our enemy" which is something they tried to make him say. From what I can tell so far they were laying out the landmines (really clumsily) and he wasnt stepping on them.

Anecdotally I've talked to some Trump voters that said they would rather have voted for Bernie.

Makes little sense to me but caught up in decades of propaganda against Hillary, somehow that made sense to them

polypusher wrote:

He'd said in another interview that he wanted to go on Fox because there are not enough voices on Fox countering the Trump/Fox narratives, and that it would be the only chance for some of them to hear Bernie's words come from his own mouth.

One, he needs to win the Democratic primary before he even begins to worry about reaching out to Fox News viewers.

Going on Fox News, especially at what's basically the beginning of the primary, sends the signal that the one group Bernie cares the most about is angry old conservative white guys who are never, ever going to vote for any Democrat. At best it could be spun that he's really eager to win back all of his bros who voted for Trump.

Two, Fox News is a propaganda network. Their on air personalities are spreading lies and conspiracy theories that are literally endangering the lives of Democratic representatives like AOC and Ilhan Omar. Why any Democratic candidate would think that it's more important for conservative viewers to hear what they have to say than it is to protect their colleagues is beyond me.

OG_slinger wrote:

Why any Democratic candidate would think that it's more important for conservative viewers to hear what they have to say than it is to protect their colleagues is beyond me.

Think you're missing the wood for the trees. Getting in front of those people and showing them that "liberals" aren't the cartoon villains they're being fed IS protecting his colleagues.

Jonman wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

Why any Democratic candidate would think that it's more important for conservative viewers to hear what they have to say than it is to protect their colleagues is beyond me.

Think you're missing the wood for the trees. Getting in front of those people and showing them that "liberals" aren't the cartoon villains they're being fed IS protecting his colleagues.

Not to mention, this may be beneficial to Bernie in the primary if it convinces the center left part of the party that he can pull in the moderates. No idea if it would work, but it's at least a valid strategy.

So one town hall is going to miraculously undo the hours and hours of demonizing content the channel pumps out each and every day?

Media Matters found that Fox News mentioned AOC nearly 3,200 times over a six week period. That's about 76 times a day.

Bernie's little town hall isn't going to make a dent in the brainwashing of Fox News viewers who are still going to hear how AOC and Omar are destroying America dozens and dozens of times a day from multiple people who they trust as being the only unbiased and honest tellers of truth in news.

That's a sort of 'perfect is the enemy of good' perspective. In that world, the only thing to do is nothing.

He took half a day to reach a small town affected by economic changes. The people there were probably typical for one of his rallies (There was a lot of yelling from the crowd but I didn't pick up any distinct words, or whether they might have been supporters or haters). That Fox televised and ran the interview was almost incidental from a campaign logistics perspective, as in Bernie could have been there doing that anyway.

After watching it I think it was a good event to do and I'd be interested to hear what a Fox News viewer thought of it.

OG_slinger wrote:

So one town hall is going to miraculously undo the hours and hours of demonizing content the channel pumps out each and every day?
.

Make your mind up boss. Either it was "only one town hall" or Bernie missed his golden opportunity to protect Omar from the assassination squads. Which am I supposed to believe now?

Jonman wrote:

Make your mind up boss. Either it was "only one town hall" or Bernie missed his golden opportunity to protect Omar from the assassination squads. Which am I supposed to believe now?

You're the one who argued Bernie was really saving AOC and Omar by appearing on Fox News.

I just pointed out that his little political stunt wasn't going to make a dent in how the average Fox News viewer thought about AOC, Omar, or any Democrat because they are bombarded with so much negative and fake information from Fox News hosts.

Bernie's simply not that persuasive and the Fox News audience isn't that receptive.

Stele wrote:

Anecdotally I've talked to some Trump voters that said they would rather have voted for Bernie.

Makes little sense to me but caught up in decades of propaganda against Hillary, somehow that made sense to them

I know a lot of deeply conservative people in my hometown area in rural Iowa who were just as full-on for Bernie in 2016 as I was but ended up going back to voting party-line when he lost out on the primaries. It’s weird but there’s something about his economic rhetoric that reaches across the party divides in ways that I’ve never seen other candidates match. It probably helps that so many mainstream Dems are constantly reminding everyone that he’s “not actually a Democrat.”

Its a kind of populism. Trump's a populist too and there are some people that only a populist can reach.

Bernie also may be reaching out to Independents who incidentally can also vote in many Democratic primaries, or who switched to being Democrat specifically to be able to vote in Democratic primaries. It's also not like he is now somehow prevented from Democratic town halls because he set foot in a FOX studio a time or two. It doesn't need to be either/or. It can be both/and. And at the end of the day if he does win the Democratic primary, he is going to need to reach both/and.

I don’t think democratic (small d) candidates can truly rule out Fox News viewers as voters until we begin honestly and soberly considering violence against them.

So far not a single Democrat (large D), liberal, and even leftist has, to my knowledge, advocated firebombing the Fox News headquarters in New York. Including me. So until then, as much as they disgust me, Bernie is probably right to reach out to them.

ruhk wrote:
Stele wrote:

Anecdotally I've talked to some Trump voters that said they would rather have voted for Bernie.

Makes little sense to me but caught up in decades of propaganda against Hillary, somehow that made sense to them

I know a lot of deeply conservative people in my hometown area in rural Iowa who were just as full-on for Bernie in 2016 as I was but ended up going back to voting party-line when he lost out on the primaries. It’s weird but there’s something about his economic rhetoric that reaches across the party divides in ways that I’ve never seen other candidates match. It probably helps that so many mainstream Dems are constantly reminding everyone that he’s “not actually a Democrat.”

Many of my deeply stupid and moderately racist family members from Pennsylvania were Bernie supporters who were brought in by his more fair economic and tax plans. These people are fairly poor and keep getting stretched further every year as their costs go up but their paycheck doesn't. They saw the stacked deck against Bernie in the democratic primary and chalked it up to more of the same sh*t that happens every election, the people in charge will never let an outsider get in because their ideas will help average people.

For the life of me I have no idea why they thought that Trump was the next best thing to Bernie but that is the direction that they chose. But if Bernie was up against Trump I know most of my family would have switched and voted for Bernie.

Player Hater wrote:
ruhk wrote:
Stele wrote:

Anecdotally I've talked to some Trump voters that said they would rather have voted for Bernie.

Makes little sense to me but caught up in decades of propaganda against Hillary, somehow that made sense to them

I know a lot of deeply conservative people in my hometown area in rural Iowa who were just as full-on for Bernie in 2016 as I was but ended up going back to voting party-line when he lost out on the primaries. It’s weird but there’s something about his economic rhetoric that reaches across the party divides in ways that I’ve never seen other candidates match. It probably helps that so many mainstream Dems are constantly reminding everyone that he’s “not actually a Democrat.”

Many of my deeply stupid and moderately racist family members from Pennsylvania were Bernie supporters who were brought in by his more fair economic and tax plans. These people are fairly poor and keep getting stretched further every year as their costs go up but their paycheck doesn't. They saw the stacked deck against Bernie in the democratic primary and chalked it up to more of the same sh*t that happens every election, the people in charge will never let an outsider get in because their ideas will help average people.

For the life of me I have no idea why they thought that Trump was the next best thing to Bernie but that is the direction that they chose. But if Bernie was up against Trump I know most of my family would have switched and voted for Bernie.

A LOT of voters were/is hungry for someone different than the same ol' same ol' do-nothing Democrat or Republican. The problem was that some people went for Trump simply because he was a) that "you're fired" guy from tv and b) "spoke his mind" and didn't sound like a politician. (The bad part is that they forgot to listen to what he was actually saying.)

People are seeming to support Bernie also because he's painted himself as an outsider, even though his politics couldn't be more different than Trump's.

Why the Media Dumped Beto for Mayor Pete

Burning with the velocity of a prairie fire on a gusty Indiana day, Pete Buttigieg scorched the airwaves, seared the podcasts, and charred the press this week as he ignited his presidential campaign, temporarily torching his Democratic competition in the process.

The secret to Buttigieg’s publicity run was no secret, wrote Matthew Yglesias in Vox. Like Molly Bloom in his favorite novel, Ulysses, he can’t stop saying “yes”—to media invitations. In recent weeks, he’s appeared on a CNN town hall, Ellen, A-list podcasts and Morning Joe, and been featured in New York, POLITICO Magazine, the Atlantic and much more. But saying yes is never enough to hold the press spellbound. Buttigieg has satisfied the ravenous press corps’ appetite by offering them an entire menu of newish things—no, make that an entire food court of newish things—to write about. He’s the youngest candidate in the field (at 37, he’s the only millennial except for Tulsi Gabbard), he’s gay and married, he’s an Afghan war veteran, he’s a Rhodes scholar (as is Cory Booker, but never mind), he plays a decent piano, he’s a churchgoer, he’s the mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana, he once gave a TEDx talk, he worked as a McKinsey consultant, he’s a polymath, he’s as earnest as a preacher, he’s an old person’s idea of what a young person should be like, and he’s figured out how to package progressive ideas as moderate.

The Buttigieg boom has also benefited from the stumbles of our previous political shooting star, Beto O’Rourke. Was it only weeks ago that the press began swooning for O’Rourke like a drunken conventioneer, writing about him with the same frequency it does for Buttigieg today? The things that once seemed so appealing about O’Rourke to the press—the generalities, the platitudes, the offhanded charisma, the rolled-up sleeves—seem off-putting now. The clearest sign of the press corps’ O’Rourke infatuation was its routine reference to him by his first name in its stories—something it has moved on to doing with Buttigieg. Such shameful and transparent familiarity.

Having stripped the Kennedyesque Texan of his novelty, the press corps has dumped him for the Kennedyesque Hoosier like a speed-dater on the rebound from a Tinder relationship gone bad. Its transition to Buttigieg has been seamless, finding in him another candidate who speaks complete sentences, who likes the camera almost as much as it likes him, who subscribes to the usual Democratic articles of faith and scans like a lost episode of The West Wing.

The fear of boredom plagues political reporters. Assigned to a well-known candidate, their first question is, “Haven’t we read this all before?” They crave novelty and newness, for the underexposed over the overexposed, and that prejudice gives relatively unknown candidates a leg up on established ones, especially in the early months of the campaign. Booker and Elizabeth Warren, whom the press once treated as fresh, almost delectable personages a couple of years ago, are now dismissed as known, lackluster quantities.

A budding candidate like Buttigieg, on the other hand, gives reporters and editors a sense of discovery as they unearth the details from old lawsuits and busted business deals, gaffes preserved by C-SPAN, and tales from schoolmates. If a candidate’s personal history is ordinary, reporters can burn through it in a couple of weeks. But an extraordinary personal history like Buttigieg’s makes for an endlessly writable event. Think of Buttigieg as a newborn just delivered to his newsroom parents, his every grin and wink and grimace worthy of endless analysis and discussion, and you begin to fathom the press corps’ fascination with him.

Candidates benefit from having some triumph over adversity in their résumé. It can be as simple as getting shot down in enemy skies, suffering the premature loss of a loved one, or rising up from poverty. On this score, Buttigieg seems to have let the press corps down. He did come out of the closet at 33 on the op-ed page of the South Bend Tribune, but today deliberately soft-pedaled the event. Smoothed of the standard rough edges, Buttigieg’s life has a soft radiance to it, making him a bit of a walking miracle for journalists who’ve never encountered such a person.

There are two problems with generating political buzz through news coverage, as O’Rourke can tell you. The first is that it’s hard to sustain the note. Having told a candidate’s story, reporters grow bored unless he presents evidence of his viability. In the pre-primary days of the campaign, they want to see big, noisy crowds at his rallies. They want to see the campaign treasury gushing with cash. They want to see a campaign organization take shape and rising poll numbers. They want to see a winner in the making because few reporters really want to write about losers.

The second and more cautionary problem is that after all these years we’ve failed to learn that media infatuations are rarely a good proxy for voter enthusiasm. National political reporters live in a bubble that extends from New York to Washington, which makes them better at taking a colleague’s pulse than a standard-issue voter’s. (Remember how the press went gaga for John McCain?) Reporters get stampeded into overcovering a new candidate because they don’t want to miss the boat. Voters, on the other hand, move more cautiously, often taking months or a year to sort out the candidates. Reporters are fickle. Voters are loyal.

Finally, whenever national political reporters look at the ambitious, conspicuously educated, ticket-punching, aggressively tame candidate Buttigieg, they can’t help but see themselves. Think of their coverage as modest self-assessments.

Article wrote:

scans like a lost episode of The West Wing.

I loled.

I have noticed that we haven't heard much about Beto since Pete bubbled up.

One of the few things about Pete that nags at me is his faith. This is hard to enumerate so please be gentle with interpretations. I'm not sure a person who seems so rational and reasonable can also have such a vocal and active faith, because the two are so rarely in balance. I can't think of any human examples. It makes me personally suspicious that one is an act. I'm ok with faith being an act at most levels, a way to connect with the mid-west and the south. I'm not ok with reason and rationality being an act.

His record as a mayor and his stated views all make me think he'd do a great job in ways that are needed right now. If he had the ticket my reservation wouldn't keep me from voting for him.

Unrelated: One thing I don't see any candidate talking about are things related to preventing the next Trump; namely codifying all the 'traditional' things about presidential candidates into law (emoluments, tax releases, making obvious corruption impeachable)

Are you equally disturbed by Ilhan Omar's faith?

I finally got around to watching Maddow's interview with Buttigieg last night with my wife. We were both greatly impressed. I'm not watching much on the campaigns yet, because it is just too early. But I did want to check out Buttigeig.

He seems to be exactly the kind of politician we need right now. I loved his reasoning for serving and what it did for him. I love that he uses smart and specific language too make his points, like comparing his radical ideas to change the Supreme Court and electoral college as using the constitution and the process to shore up our democracy where it has failed.

He might be our #1 preference right now. Still a long ways to go. First primaries are almost a year away.

Well emoluments are already coded into law... i think the trouble is how do you control someone who's response to laws isn't "Is this legal" but "what are the consequences if i ignore the law" when that individual is also specifically shielded from consequence.

thrawn82 wrote:

Well emoluments are already coded into law... i think the trouble is how do you control someone who's response to laws isn't "Is this legal" but "what are the consequences if i ignore the law" when that individual is also specifically shielded from consequence.

TO WHOM ARE YOU REFERRING?

thrawn82 wrote:

Well emoluments are already coded into law... i think the trouble is how do you control someone who's response to laws isn't "Is this legal" but "what are the consequences if i ignore the law" when that individual is also specifically shielded from consequence.

By giving all the evidence to congress, which is what Mueller was doing, and Barr was trying to prevent. I don't think a sitting president should be indicted. He can face charges when he leaves office. That's why impeachment exists.

We do not want a system in which a GOP AG can indict a Democratic President in order to jam him up. It needs to be handled by the the Senate, by politicians that will have answer to their constituents. That's where this has to go now.

And the House is already using subpoena power to acquire evidence from a lot of sources to add in addition to the Mueller Report.

Jayhawker wrote:

Are you equally disturbed by Ilhan Omar's faith?

Interesting non-sequitur. She's not running for president and I essentially know nothing about her.

oilypenguin wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:

Well emoluments are already coded into law... i think the trouble is how do you control someone who's response to laws isn't "Is this legal" but "what are the consequences if i ignore the law" when that individual is also specifically shielded from consequence.

TO WHOM ARE YOU REFERRING?

Jayhawker wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:

Well emoluments are already coded into law... i think the trouble is how do you control someone who's response to laws isn't "Is this legal" but "what are the consequences if i ignore the law" when that individual is also specifically shielded from consequence.

By giving all the evidence to congress, which is what Mueller was doing, and Barr was trying to prevent. I don't think a sitting president should be indicted. He can face charges when he leaves office. That's why impeachment exists.

We do not want a system in which a GOP AG can indict a Democratic President in order to jam him up. It needs to be handled by the the Senate, by politicians that will have answer to their constituents. That's where this has to go now.

And the House is already using subpoena power to acquire evidence from a lot of sources to add in addition to the Mueller Report.

I was obviously referring to the President, but this is pretty much what I'm alluding to. The president is awful and shouldn't be there, but it is the House and most especially the Senate that is failing in this situation.

Buttigieg at this point gets my vote if he makes Acid8000 one of his campaign themes

polypusher wrote:

Its a kind of populism. Trump's a populist too and there are some people that only a populist can reach.

The common clay of the new West?

I hate to say it but the last time we didn't have a populist president was Bush Sr.
Obama, Bush Jr., Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy were all populists.

I'd wager it is a side effect of television. And now that we have social media, we
certainly aren't going back.

fangblackbone wrote:

I hate to say it but the last time we didn't have a populist president was Bush Sr.
Obama, Bush Jr., Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy were all populists.

I'd wager it is a side effect of television. And now that we have social media, we
certainly aren't going back.

Yup, and I'd add that we don't even need an explanation like television, because both Roosevelts were populists. Heck, Andrew Jackson was a populist. Maybe even Jefferson, if I'm recalling things correctly?

Found this in the Wikipedia article for Woodrow Wilson even:

Roosevelt emerged as Wilson's main challenger, and Wilson and Roosevelt largely campaigned against each other despite sharing similarly progressive platforms that called for an interventionist central government.[107] Wilson directed campaign finance chairman Henry Morgenthau not to accept contributions from corporations and to prioritize smaller donations from the widest possible quarters of the public.[108] During the election campaign, Wilson asserted that it was the task of government "to make those adjustments of life which will put every man in a position to claim his normal rights as a living, human being."[109] With the help of legal scholar Louis D. Brandeis, he developed his New Freedom platform, focusing especially on breaking up trusts and lowering tariff rates.[110] Brandeis and Wilson rejected Roosevelt's proposal to establish a powerful bureaucracy charged with regulating large corporations, instead favoring the break-up of large corporations in order to create a level economic playing field.[111]
H.P. Lovesauce wrote:
polypusher wrote:

Its a kind of populism. Trump's a populist too and there are some people that only a populist can reach.

The common clay of the new West?

I think we made this joke a few weeks ago but

IMAGE(http://d1hg6wdwbisxfa.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/18085134/Mel_Brooks_interview_-_BLAZING_SADDLES_article_story_large.jpg)