[PREV - BERNIE_CIVIL] [TOP]
July 09, 2018
June 15, 2022
And back to the Bernie-Hillary wars of 2016.
Back in the days when I still thought the discussions at
the "crookedtimber" site were worth following a "Tamara
Piety" posted an anti-Bernie comment that I thought was
remarkably, fractally wrong. My lengthy response didn't
make it through moderation, but why let it rot on disk
when it could be tossed on the doomfiles pile?
It's hard to believe this stuff is
less than 5 years old. It feels This was posted to a
like it's at least a decade stale. Corey Robin thread...
I don't have the link
at hand.
Tamara Piety@61:
"Sanders' many shortcomings"
Like polling better against Trump than Hillary during the
primary.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/why-bernies-strong-poll-n_b_10146980.html
"refusal to join the party he wanted the nomination of"
Nice theater in a throw-the-bums out year, don't you think?
(And going "mainstream" when people are in a throw-the-bums-out mood...
would if be unreasonable to call that "tone-deaf"?)
"hectoring posture"
Bernie keeps clocking in as the most popular politician in the
United States. During the primary, people were flocking to be
"hectored" by him in-person.
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/329404-poll-bernie-sanders-
countrys-most-popular-active-politician
"tone deafness to issues of race and gender"
I didn't think he was tone deaf on race:
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter-dem-debate/
Polls indicate black people don't think he's tone deaf:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/12/its-time-to-end-the-myth-that-black-voters-dont-like-bernie-sanders/
"Last spring, a Harvard-Harris poll found Sanders to
be the most popular active politician in the
country. African Americans gave the senator the
highest favorables at 73 percent-- vs. 68 percent
among Latinos, 62 percent among Asian Americans and
52 percent among white voters. It wasn't a fluke:
This August, black voters again reported a 73 percent
favorability rating for Sanders."
And I haven't noticed any problem with Bernie on
gender issues, myself...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/heather-gautney/bernie-sanders-womens-issues_b_8049572.html
He seemed to poll pretty well among women, as well:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/2016/04/new_poll_female_voters_flock_to_bernie_sanders_from_hillary_clinton
"yes, yes, I know about his civil rights protesting"
That's good. There were some attempts at pretending it
didn't happen.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sanders-civil-rights-photos/
(Shades of the Swift Boat, eh? When the facts are against,
re-write the facts...)
"the lack of specificity in his proposals"
https://berniesanders.com/issues/how-bernie-pays-for-his-proposals/
"the conflation of universality on health care with
single payer"
"Single payer" and/or "medicare for all" seem to be becoming
pretty popular slogans just now... but there's probably some
reason Bernie doesn't deserve credit for that.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-single-payer-bill-major-support-senate_us_59b87dc1e4b02da0e13d465f
"the not-too-subtle suggestion that Clinton was as
bad as or just the same as Trump"
On multiple occasions he said that on her worst day she was 100
times better.
https://mashable.com/2016/02/05/bernie-sanders-republican-candiates/#qnLGCPSJ88qu
"and on and on"
No doubt.
"First, there was not a lot of different between the
two candidates' platforms."
Arguably not true. Hillary was however, doing a bunch of copy
cat moves, dancing leftward:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n03/letters
"I thought he behaved terribly in the primary"
You mean, revealing Hillary's sources of funding?
"He did not win. By large margins."
The deck was stacked against him from the outset in a number of
small ways, and one large way, the superdelegate system. The
latest word I hear, by the way, is that I should not object to
superdelegates because they are people who have actually won
elections.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2018/Senate/Maps/Jun08.html#item-5
But then I don't recall ever voting for a "superdelegate".
It might be interesting to hold a referendum to see whether
superdelegates should be abolished. But that might be too
democratic for the Democratic Party.
(June 15, 2022)
Perhaps more importantly, the deck was stacked
against him by a form of what the kids like to call
"gaslighting": sure, you may like him, but those
*other* people will never vote for him, he's just
not *electable*.
It's a good thing we went with Biden, right?
Why Bernie might've lost Florida! (Oh, wait--)
And Biden, at least, is a reasonable guy who
knows how to get things done. (But then...)
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