Tag: #bernie

  • Watching, Waiting, Hoping

    Just waiting for the final vote counts to come in.

  • Moderates Don’t Get It

    I like Bret Stephens, and I know that he is a very smart guy. He is knowledgeable, logical, and pretty funny as well. He put out this op-ed in the New York Times today, titled, “The Democrats Are in Trouble: The party’s riskiest bet is now its likeliest.” A little dramatic, but hey, they guy is trying to sell papers here.

    Bret starts off by saying that he is/was for Bloomberg, but Mike melted down at the debate, and now the Democratic party is in dire straits because, as Bret sees it, Bernie is now going to win the nomination.

    Stephens then rhetorically asks, why Democrats want to risk it with Sanders, to which Bret answers;

    “Maybe it’s because they have overlearned the lessons of the 2016 election: that nominating the centrist and responsible candidate served them poorly. Or maybe it’s because they’ve reasoned that “electability,” being an insufficient requirement for the nomination, is an unnecessary one as well. Or maybe they feel that, when their hearts scream Yes, it’s best to ignore the brain’s screams of No.”

    Sadly, what will cause the Democrats to lose in the Midwest, which is where this election is really coming down to, is this thinking that people in the middle of this country want a person to be reasonable and logical, and to have a plan that appeals to everybody. That’s the “electability” that Stephens refers, and that might be a winning argument if the other guy was Mitt Romney or John McCain, two who also tried to run campaigns aimed at the middle and “electability.”

    Except, that’s not who is running.

    Look, I don’t like Trump, but compared with a Democrat moderate, Donald comes off as the cool guy who doesn’t give a fuck. That makes voters excited, and excited voters show up.

    Bernie has the most excited votes behind him, and they will get others to show up with them.

    Again, people, there are no significant numbers of swing voters out there. Again, read “The Audacity of Hate,” if you don’t believe me. To that, I just have to add, Democrat moderates, ya’ll gotta chill out, man. Bernie is not the problem.

    The belief that logic will beat passion is.

  • Don’t Fight the Last War

    There is a very good chance that Democrats will lose this next election, ensuring that Trump gets four more years. It’s not that Democrats are moving too Left. It’s the fact that there really aren’t any more moderate Democrats left.

    It was hammered home to me in “The Audacity of Hate” by Thomas B. Edsall that I read yesterday. Edsall starts the piece by referring to Karl Rove and Matthew Dowd deciding on a “Base Strategy” for the Bush ’04 campaign, wherein they would go after the social conservative base by appealing to fear and anger. The reasoning; less than 1 in 10 voters was considered to be “swing voters.” Turning out the converted made more sense than hoping to convert the questionable. And it worked. It worked so well, that Trump did it again in ’16, and he’s trying again in ’20.

    But the Democrats are still playing a game of winning moderates over, and they have a serious fear of Bernie. This is where they are making the same mistakes they made with Hilary. Sure, moderates would save the party for the future, but the base will win the election. You need people excited and enthusiastic about winning to get out there, and talk up Bernie, and get people to show up in droves.

    Can Bernie actually deliver all of his promises? No, but has Trump delivered on any of his? Trump’s base thinks so, and they will show up in the polls.

  • A Billionaire Has to Go to Jail

    I think I have written before on how I disagree with the common belief that when Ford pardoned Nixon, it was in the best interest of the country as a whole. That somehow, Nixon going on trial was a bridge too far for the American people to handle. The resignation and pardon where the period of that era in history, and we all decided to move on, and be Americans again, with never having to speak of Watergate again. I have heard this thought all through my schooling, and still it gets brought up whenever Watergate is mentioned. I agree that the pardon allowed people to move on, but there were unforeseen consequences.

    What I hold to is that Ford’s pardon of Nixon set a precedent for all Presidents; that they are above the law, and Presidents will protect their own. Clinton could have release information on Reagan over Iran/Contra but didn’t. W Bush could have released information on Clinton but didn’t. Obama could have released info on W but didn’t. And if one group is above the law, why not another group?

    This is now bleeding into the world of business, and as Bernie would say, the billionaire class. No one who orchestrated the Crash of 2008 went to jail. Obama and Holder can continue to tell me that banks paid a price for their misdeeds, but those CEO’s are still running those banks, and are creating a new bubble. Hell, even though journalists have been writing about Jeffery Epstein for some time, only now are people coming around to the realization that a billionaire is getting away with a crime that he should have been sentenced to life in prison for.

    The cure to this problem is simple; a billionaire has to go to jail. A President who breaks the law has to be put on trial. The rule of law has to be upheld.

    Kind’a simple.