Someone Has To Do It: US Elections 2020

[Incandenza]

Argh, I can't go! At least I got to see him at UCLA last summer, he was speaking at an event for striking janitors and hospital staffers.

His people have been really good with the visuals. The NH poster was genius.

[ursus arctos]

https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1233051643803062272

[Incandenza]

Biden’s campaign faltered not because of his shortcomings as a candidate, but because Trump’s extortion scheme worked, and reporters began treating Burisma as breathlessly as they treated Hillary Clinton’s emails.

This just doesn't seem true to me. I don't recall seeing a lot of scrutiny of Biden's son, but more parroting of what the president said and shrugging their shoulders and saying "who knows what the real story is?"

The rest of the article is really good, though.

[ursus arctos]

Yeah, I thought that was his weakest claim as well.

It may be that his close association with ex-Obama staffers has clouded his judgment on Biden.

[Diable Rouge]

https://twitter.com/LabourList/status/1233028773710200832

[Nefertiti2]

Sadiq Khan is both a terrible politician and a nasty piece of work

[Flynnie]

Quelle surprise on Sadiq backing the manlets in the Democratic Party.

[DCI Harry Batt]

He is *such* a wanker.

[anton pulisov]

Mayor Pete gonna be delighted with being lumped together with Bloomberg there.

[Amor de Cosmos]

I doubt he knows or cares. What influence does London's mayor have on the US electoral process?

[San Bernardhinault]

As I've mentioned before, I find the visceral reaction to, and hatred of, Buttigieg from the Sandernistas to be very strange. It's weird that Biden's bizarre comments about Mandela lead to people bringing up a puff piece about Somaliland written when Buttigieg was about 24 which has become a touchstone of conspiracy nutters. Bloomberg has had the pile-on, but he's spend decades earning it. Biden gets far less and given a much easier pass. Steyer and Klobuchar are largely ignored. There's something about Buttigieg that seems to really incense them - perhaps that his background seems so artificially constructed?

[Lang Spoon]

His bullshit gentrifying by knocking down poor neighbourhoods as Mayor is what gets me. It's like the Pathfinder bullshit Blair unleashed on the Towns North. We make a desert to create a Thriving Property Market.

[Incandenza]

Someone mentioned Pete being occupied and unable to meet with Mandela, I said the Somaliland trip as a joke. San Bernardhinault, I'm sorry, but going to a breakaway republic and meeting with local leaders on your vacation and then penning an op-ed in the NYT with a friend who works for the World Bank is...unusual. So is the NYT deciding to publish an op-ed about their 24-hour trip from them. /shrug

[Incandenza]

Went to cast my ballot at lunch. LA County has reduced the number of polling places (which are now called "vote centers"), but has made all of them open early, some starting this past weekend, the rest starting on Saturday.

We now have electronic screen interfaces, but paper ballots. You mark your choices on a screen, review them, then have them printed on a piece of paper, which you then feed into a locked box. I'm assuming that data from the machines are what the initial results will be fed from, and the paper ballots are kept as a safety measure. Even more unusual is that we can now take our sample ballot and go to the registrar website, bring up our choices, and then save/print a QR code that has your choices. I did that. Just went to the machine, scanned the code, then reviewed the choices to make sure they were accurate. I have a feeling that the machines are going to be confusing for a lot of people, though. The volunteer that I checked in with had no idea that the QR code thing was an option/

[San Bernardhinault]

The missus just stuck her ballot in the post. I kind of thought that's what everyone did nowadays, because it takes so long to decide your position on the huge number of races.

[ursus arctos]

It makes a ton of sense for California, given the complexity of the ballot

[Incandenza]

Have to say, I didn't have a lot. Besides president, there was House representative, then state assembly, LA county DA, one state initiative, a county initiative, and then the judges and because I'm registered as a Democrat, the county party representatives. I only needed to rely on voter guides for the judges and the party representatives.

[San Bernardhinault]

As someone who's traditionally voted for literally one thing at a time, and therefore the voting process takes about 30 seconds, that still feels like a lot. It's still going to take a while to fill out the form with a long queue behind you.

[Incandenza]

As someone who's traditionally voted for literally one thing at a time, and therefore the voting process takes about 30 seconds, that still feels like a lot. It's still going to take a while to fill out the form with a long queue behind you.

I'm used to there being multiple state initiatives, multiple county and local ones as well, plus things like city council and school board. Though if I was in LA I would have had a City Council election.

I'm hoping that Nithya Raman comes out on top of her LA City Council race. She has made the homelessness crisis and the need for more public housing the centerpiece of her campaign, and she is open about being a democratic socialist and has both been endorsed by DSA and has appeared on Chapo, and also has a fair number of celebrity endorsements, two things you wouldn't expect together.

[Incandenza]

[URL]https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1233085224365514752[/URL]

[anton pulisov]

The donors would prefer Trump over Sanders.

[Bruno]

Here's David Brooks today on Bernie:

No, Not Sanders, Not Ever
He is not a liberal, he’s the end of liberalism.

A few months ago, I wrote a column saying I would vote for Elizabeth Warren over Donald Trump. I may not agree with some of her policies, but culture is more important than politics. She does not spread moral rot the way Trump does.

Now I have to decide if I’d support Bernie Sanders over Trump.

We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years. The Soviet and allied regimes had already slaughtered 20 million people through things like mass executions and intentional famines. Those regimes were slave states. They enslaved whole peoples and took away the right to say what they wanted, live where they wanted and harvest the fruits of their labor.

And yet every day we find more old quotes from Sanders apologizing for this sort of slave regime, whether in the Soviet Union, Cuba or Nicaragua. He excused the Nicaraguan communists when they took away the civil liberties of their citizens. He’s still making excuses for Castro.

To sympathize with these revolutions in the 1920s was acceptable, given their original high ideals. To do so after the Hitler-Stalin pact, or in the 1950s, is appalling. To do so in the 1980s is morally unfathomable.

I say all this not to cancel Sanders for past misjudgments. I say all this because the intellectual suppositions that led him to embrace these views still guide his thinking today. I’ve just watched populism destroy traditional conservatism in the G.O.P. I’m here to tell you that Bernie Sanders is not a liberal Democrat. He’s what replaces liberal Democrats.

Traditional liberalism traces its intellectual roots to John Stuart Mill, John Locke, the Social Gospel movement and the New Deal. This liberalism believes in gaining power the traditional way: building coalitions, working within the constitutional system and crafting the sort of compromises you need in a complex, pluralistic society.

This is why liberals like Hubert Humphrey, Ted Kennedy and Elizabeth Warren were and are such effective senators. They worked within the system, negotiated and practiced the art of politics.

Populists like Sanders speak as if the whole system is irredeemably corrupt. Sanders was a useless House member and has been a marginal senator because he doesn’t operate within this system or believe in this theory of change.

He believes in revolutionary mass mobilization and, once an election has been won, rule by majoritarian domination. This is how populists of left and right are ruling all over the world, and it is exactly what our founders feared most and tried hard to prevent.

Liberalism celebrates certain values: reasonableness, conversation, compassion, tolerance, intellectual humility and optimism. Liberalism is horrified by cruelty. Sanders’s leadership style embodies the populist values, which are different: rage, bitter and relentless polarization, a demand for ideological purity among your friends and incessant hatred for your supposed foes.

A liberal leader confronts new facts and changes his or her mind. A populist leader cannot because the omniscience of the charismatic headman can never be doubted. A liberal sees shades of gray. For a populist reality is white or black, friend or enemy. Facts that don’t fit the dogma are ignored.

A liberal sees inequality and tries to reduce it. A populist sees remorseless class war and believes in concentrated power to crush the enemy. Sanders is running on a $60 trillion spending agenda that would double the size of the federal government. It would represent the greatest concentration of power in the Washington elite in American history.

These days, Sanders masquerades as something less revolutionary than he really is. He claims to be nothing more than the continuation of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. He is 5 percent right and 95 percent wrong.

There was a period around 1936 or 1937 when Roosevelt was trying to pack the Supreme Court and turning into the sort of arrogant majoritarian strongman the founders feared. But this is not how F.D.R. won the presidency, passed the New Deal, beat back the socialists of his time or led the nation during World War II. F.D.R. did not think America was a force for ill in world affairs.

Sanders also claims he’s just trying to import the Scandinavian model, which is believable if you know nothing about Scandinavia or what Sanders is proposing. Those countries do have generous welfare states, but they can afford them because they understand how free market capitalism works, with fewer regulations on business creation and free trade.

There is a specter haunting the world — corrosive populisms of right and left. These populisms grow out of real problems but are the wrong answers to them. For the past century, liberal Democrats from F.D.R. to Barack Obama knew how to beat back threats from the populist left. They knew how to defend the legitimacy of our system, even while reforming it.

Judging by the last few debates, none of the current candidates remember those arguments or know how to rebut a populist to their left.

I’ll cast my lot with democratic liberalism. The system needs reform. But I just can’t pull the lever for either of the two populisms threatening to tear it down.

[Snake Plissken]

Those last two sentences inadvertently sum up the problem. "This thing is broken, but I won't vote for fixing it."

[Bruno]

Well that's begging the question a bit, Snake. He has said he'll vote for Warren over Trump, and Warren's policy platform is pretty close to Bernie's. It's an argument against his supposed methods. And once again, I don't see how President Sanders could succeed at "majoritarian domination" whether he wanted to or not, absent an enormous wave.

[Bruno]

I don't hear many people talking about a formidable third party bid after primary season is over, but this really seems like a year for it.