Rangpur posted:

edit: that being said, if you think it was the superior strategic or moral choice to let the proposed ACA die because it didn't go far enough (it didn't), you've got no loving standing denouncing others as out-of-touch elitists. I don't fault anyone for complaining about the places where it falls short--join the loving club--but passing it was better than not passing it, full stop.

Call Me Charlie posted:

"How important is it for candidates to concentrate on "issues" like health care or economic equality, one audience member asked. Her answer? Not very. She said candidates moving forward should focus on "identity messages" instead, which she didn't actually define."

Call Me Charlie posted:

My state, ladies and gentleman.


Brown was right, in that her viewpoint didn't get anyone excited. After she finished her answer, the man who asked the question literally walked right out of the room as she was answering the next question.

The answer was so confusing that at roughly 35 minutes into the clip, an elderly black woman asked Brown to clarify her point. She brought up the fact that poor people of color don't get motivated to vote for Democrats because both major parties haven't done much to help those communities prosper in decades.

"You're not touching their issues," she said to Brown. "The platform has to come from issues. Can you explain that to me so I can get unstuck?"

Brown then explained that, as a person in charge of party "staffing," she's not in charge of what policies her candidates push. And then she contradicted herself a split-second later by admitting it's her job to "elect Democrats."

"My job is to elect the Democrats who go do the governance and then go figure out the policies and issues," she responded.

And then yet another audience member chided her for her answer.

"You sort of hinted when you first answered that you felt that what got people out to vote wasn't really issue-oriented," the man said. "The evidence is that that's not really true at all. Voter participation tends to crash, but when somebody tends to bring out issues, that's when [people] come out. We saw that with Bernie Sanders. And so I think you have a contradiction there."

At this point, Brown argued that poor people are simultaneously struggling to make ends meet but also don't vote based on what policies will benefit them.


She added that "they are emotional beings who are struggling to make a living, and they need to know that somebody's going to be on their side and be able to help them."

"They're struggling to make a living over issues," the audience member responded. "Those are economics."

"I'm not going to get into the hard-head debate," she said. "I'm just sharing my perspective and that we absolutely will do data testing to see which scripts work best [and then share that with our candidates]." (So now Brown's job does include deciding policy? What?)

It's worth noting that Hillary Clinton's campaign relied on data testing to an almost extreme degree in 2016 and lost catastrophically after much of that data turned out to be wrong.

Let's pause for a second: Who is not an "issues person"? Politics is entirely about issues. The basic reason you vote for anyone is because you want that person to accomplish things that make your life better. Who are these "emotional beings" that get excited about candidates but don't care about policy?

The rest of the meeting didn't inspire much more confidence. Brown was also asked about the party's plan to convert formerly red states or counties to blue ones — and her response was that she had spent the past six years working to instead turn Idaho "purple," and that's the best we ought to hope for in Florida (which voted twice for Obama).

"I think that it's unrealistic to think that you convert red counties to blue," she said. "I think you have to ask red counties to come up with a long-term strategic plan on how they're going to move the needle forward, and the FDP is committed to working with them, and making sure that they have resources to accomplish that plan."

(Genuine question: Does the party not realize it needs to win Republican-held seats to win a majority at the state or federal level?)

"I'm lost someplace," one woman eventually said. "I understand what you're saying, but I don't fully agree with it. We have lost the governorships. We have lost most of the races. But I hear the people in Washington saying, 'Change? We don't need to change.' Democrats have not won on the basis of saying, 'We are not as bad as the other guy.' If you don't run with candidates on decent issues, people are still not going to vote."

Another woman then jumped in and called the current party a "dirty church."

Brown's actual response: "I am starting to get tired."

In perhaps the most tone-deaf statement of the night, she said voters can be persuaded to go to the polls by reminding them they can "change their lives" through the "power of democracy."

So poor people have just forgotten about the power of voting rather than resigned themselves to the fact that no matter what party they vote for, their lives never seem to get better. That explains it!

NewForumSoftware posted:

You know what would have been superior reform? Just telling insurers they can't exclude people based on pre-existing conditions. There, all of the good in one sentence.

NewForumSoftware posted:

You know what would have been superior reform? Just telling insurers they can't exclude people based on pre-existing conditions. There, all of the good in one sentence.

White Rock posted:

Holy poo poo, like a real life caricature of identity politics.

I guess there really is no way the Democratic Party will learn. A rotten tree to the core, repeating the same mistakes over and over.

stone cold posted:

for starters, allowing trans people federal identification documents with their preferred gender

not technically legislation so much as policy, but it fuckin matters

Thalantos posted:

Which you can only do of you have access to a doctor to write you a letter, and the hundreds of dollars out takes to get a passport, both issues lots of Trans folks have issues with, because. ......they're poor!

We need practical solutions, and money really, really helps

DeadlyMuffin posted:

Money definitely helps, but I'm actually pretty stunned to see someone downplay the importance of trans people being able to get the correct gender marker on federal ID without having surgery. This was a big, big deal especially for people in states with lovely policies towards trans people (most of them). And for me personally.

Yes, you need a doctor's note (literally any physician you have a doctor patient relationship with). But that's a hell of a lot cheaper than requiring surgery.

Somehow I can't see people downplaying the importance of this if someone besides Hillary Clinton had done it. I mentioned it in the quiltbag thread and the literal first response was that it was probably some staffer and Clinton didn't want to do it.

That rule change had a huge positive effect on me. If you hated literally every other thing she ever did, fine. But this was a wonderful thing.

-Blackadder- posted:

It's kind of easy to see why they're so cynical, though. After all isn't idpol what Trump won on? He didn't know poo poo about the issues, had no plans whatsoever, and just stoked populist rage and he beat a candidate with literal decades more experience, who stomped his rear end on every technical point in all the debates, and who was thought to be shoe-in. Obama did pretty much the same just in a different way; campaigning broadly on the economy but talking in terms vague enough to allow people to project their own specific ideas onto him, and it worked. When was the last time we even had a winning candidate that laser-focused specifically on the issues without a healthy dose of populism?

I dare say that Hilary's problem wasn't that she used idpol but perhaps that she used the wrong idpol. There were some amusing responses to Comey's testimony from women on twitter who essentially said "welcome to our world" because they said they could relate to Comey feeling vulnerable and threatened at Trump's dinner and most women have had a terrible experience like this in the past. Would that be the majority of white women who voted for Trump? Are they the ones who can relate? Hilary mused about the low emotional intelligence of her black prison slaves and called black teenagers superpredators that needed to be brought to heel and 88% of us still took enough time out from slingin on the corner to vote for her ignorant rear end. She may think that black people have low "emotional intelligence" but clearly our actual intelligence is pretty loving high as we apparently understand that you're supposed to vote for candidates that aren't trying to kill you. Apparently the majority of white women couldn't relate enough to a white woman fighting for justice for their issues to avoid voting for an orange toad-skinned sleazebag whose self-proclaimed hobby literally consists of sexually assaulting them.

NewForumSoftware posted:

You know what would have been superior reform? Just telling insurers they can't exclude people based on pre-existing conditions. There, all of the good in one sentence.

GamingHyena posted:

No preexisting conditions by itself = no private health insurance. Whether run by the government or private companies, all insurance works only if there's enough healthy people to cover the cost of treating sick people. If insurance companies were required to accept everyone without regard to preexisting conditions, then only sick people would be on insurance since healthy people by definition could just wait until they're sick to sign up. Since your insurance pool would be around 100% sick people, your premiums will effectively equal the cost of treatment and be unaffordable for everybody. This is also the fundamental problem with "sick pools." It saves healthy people money at the cost of increasing premiums for sick people which have to be made up somehow.

Obamacare's hated mandate existed as a way to financially coerce healthy people to stay in the pool and help cover the sick. Of course, another solution is to have the government mandate everyone is in the same pool through UHC. But wishing away preexisting conditions, by itself, isn't going to do anything but destroy the insurance industry.

GamingHyena posted:

No preexisting conditions by itself = no private health insurance. Whether run by the government or private companies, all insurance works only if there's enough healthy people to cover the cost of treating sick people. If insurance companies were required to accept everyone without regard to preexisting conditions, then only sick people would be on insurance since healthy people by definition could just wait until they're sick to sign up. Since your insurance pool would be around 100% sick people, your premiums will effectively equal the cost of treatment and be unaffordable for everybody. This is also the fundamental problem with "sick pools." It saves healthy people money at the cost of increasing premiums for sick people which have to be made up somehow.

White Rock posted:

Holy poo poo, like a real life caricature of identity politics.

I guess there really is no way the Democratic Party will learn. A rotten tree to the core, repeating the same mistakes over and over.

Kilroy posted:

Kilroy posted:

Eh you're kind of missing the point. It's not exactly that people project their own specific ideas - they do that, but what they also do is they look at the things you support and that you say (and that you've supported and said in the past) to try to draw conclusions about what kind of person you are. Everyone does this a little differently, everyone focuses on different things to different degrees, and obviously it is a process fraught with error. So yes, people project their ideas, and after they get a sense of what a person is "really like" they think they can extrapolate what that person would do in this or that situation, whether they would support this or that policy, and so on.

In the case of Hillary it's not hard to come to the conclusion that she doesn't really stand for much. She's contradicted herself a lot over the years, and worse still whenever she does backtrack, if called out on it she dodges the question or pretends her current view was her real view all along, or she was being misinterpreted, and so on. She seldom shows contrition. Now it is true that the right have been taking basically everything she's done out of context (sometimes they don't need to take it out of context, though) for years and using it to smear her, but she sure has made the job easy for them. You can only twist the facts so much, and really you can just watch the tapes and be like "okay she's not an ally of LGBT, she's not an ally of minorities, she doesn't believe in much of anything, maybe she's not as bad a person as Fox News et al would make her out to be, she'd certainly be a better President than Trump, but if she's President you can't really count on her to stand for much of anything if standing for it carries political cost, because you need to have principles to want to do that and she doesn't have many of those".

And the thing is, Obama is not much better, he's just a much better orator and campaigner, and for that matter a much better politician that he's able to keep up the charade basically indefinitely. Had Hillary won in 2008 she could have ran her administration, in terms of policy, exactly like Obama did and she still would have left office absolutely loathed and probably in 2012. Obama left office in 2016 with a pretty high approval rating. This isn't an insult to Hillary though, and it's not a compliment to Obama, it's just a reflection on their ability to distract people from the issues: Obama has that ability and she doesn't. At any rate, on issues of substance he's as much a calculating and triangulating coward as the Clintons, and we see this even now with him loving up the DNC elections and taking massive speaking fees from Wall Street after leaving office.

Now, here's the thing: Republicans do this a lot less than Democrats. Republicans are not really about focus-grouping poo poo, and it is much easier for their voters to piece together what Republicans stand for based off their public statements and their actions, because those more frequently coincide. Now what Republicans do and say and what they stand for is loving horrible, but it is not the sort of horrible that is immediately obvious. They can talk about getting government out of people's way, they can talk about lower taxes, and defending our nation, in bringing law and order, and their actions in office will sort of bear that out. You have to follow politics closely to realize that their deregulation results in corruption, in economic chaos, in environmental collapse. That they want socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor and would do direct wealth transfers from the poor to the rich if they thought they could get away with it (as it is, they do it indirectly). And of course they've done nothing to make our nation more secure in terms of foreign policy or domestically: terrorism is more a destabilizing force than it's ever been and the GOP is mostly at fault for that, cops shoot black kids with impunity and the GOP is mostly at fault for that. (Again, Democrats don't do anything to stop it, if doing so might possibly carry political cost, but it's Republicans actively making things worse.) So it's easy for a Republican voter to kind of ignore the consequences of all this policy and just focus on what Republicans say they're going to do and what they say the consequences will be, and the thing is if you're white and not too poor you can usually convince yourself that it's all true. And so Republicans get a reputation for "integrity".

What we have in Trump is basically someone who combined the worst of both worlds. He's a bullshitter who stands for very little other than himself, just like a Democrat, but he speaks a language Republicans understand. And he gets to borrow Republicans' undeserved reputation for "integrity" except instead of promising the poo poo Republicans usually promise, in a lot of cases he promised to use the power of the state to make people's lives better. We see how that's turning out and hopefully he will destroy utterly whatever cachet the GOP had with its base with regard to this "integrity". That is the real damage Trump can do to the GOP and I hope it sticks. But that's kind of out of Democrats' hands - they can call attention to it but that's about it, and that is not as important as they think. It should not overshadow Democrats' other efforts, which leads me to my last point:

What should Democrats' do (or, what should the left do)? More than anything I think we need to stop making excuses for Democratic politicians. You have a nebulous track record and it's hard to figure out where you stand? gently caress you, you're out. Haven't been in politics long and don't have a history of supporting the right causes yet? Nice to have you, keep up the good work and good luck climbing the ladder, but don't think you can fast track to higher office on bullshit and empty promises. This last one is tough because the Democratic bench is seriously lacking, but if we're going to build that back up we'd better do it the right way. This way is tougher and will take longer. If your sole focus is on taking back the House in 2018 and the Senate and Presidency in 2020 then this isn't very appealing and you'll want to just focus on slamming Trump and dumping money on typical Democratic candidates in swing districts, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're making big changes for the better or building a movement that way. You're really not. But taking longer isn't as bad as you think: it's the centrist, triangulating Democrats who insist that positive change must come slowly over decades. The truth is, a solidly leftist coalition with control of the government and the enthusiastic support of the population can undo almost whatever damage the Republicans can cause and have a good start on improving things as well, in two years. Focus on that.

Crowsbeak posted:

This is a great little polemical you have written. You really should consider editing slightly and submitting it somewhere. Thanks for getting down to the problems.

Not a Step posted:

In the year 2017 I no longer have the ability to distinguish between legitimate praise and smug snark.

yronic heroism posted:

I'm not a big believer in momentum and beating expectations or whatever. I'm asking about fundamentals. Polling swings just mean lovely news cycles for the other side and the old polls didn't capture what was already going on. The real strength of weakness is in the final vote tally, not whether it met some benchmark. What I want to know is can someone not only get the votes in that final tally but keep it together for 10+ years, which I don't think labour has really done. (And US Dems haven't done in forever to be fair).

And yeah they did beat their 2015 vote share but so did May so the jump is to quite as impressive when we consider some of it is just drop off from smaller parties...

-Blackadder- posted:

It's kind of easy to see why they're so cynical, though. After all isn't idpol what Trump won on? He didn't know poo poo about the issues, had no plans whatsoever, and just stoked populist rage and he beat a candidate with literal decades more experience, who stomped his rear end on every technical point in all the debates, and who was thought to be shoe-in. Obama did pretty much the same just in a different way; campaigning broadly on the economy but talking in terms vague enough to allow people to project their own specific ideas onto him, and it worked. When was the last time we even had a winning candidate that laser-focused specifically on the issues without a healthy dose of populism?

I dare say that Hilary's problem wasn't that she used idpol but perhaps that she used the wrong idpol. There were some amusing responses to Comey's testimony from women on twitter who essentially said "welcome to our world" because they said they could relate to Comey feeling vulnerable and threatened at Trump's dinner and most women have had a terrible experience like this in the past. Would that be the majority of white women who voted for Trump? Are they the ones who can relate? Hilary mused about the low emotional intelligence of her black prison slaves and called black teenagers superpredators that needed to be brought to heel and 88% of us still took enough time out from slingin on the corner to vote for her ignorant rear end. She may think that black people have low "emotional intelligence" but clearly our actual intelligence is pretty loving high as we apparently understand that you're supposed to vote for candidates that aren't trying to kill you. Apparently the majority of white women couldn't relate enough to a white woman fighting for justice for their issues to avoid voting for an orange toad-skinned sleazebag whose self-proclaimed hobby literally consists of sexually assaulting them.

TyroneGoldstein posted:

Middle class white slobs (both genders) are the one cohort that isn't going to be blamed by name in all of this and the results will be disastrous. In fact, it's going to be tragically ironic that this past election and any negative fallout that does lasting damage to our institutions is going to be heaped on poor white people more than any other group.

Majorian posted:

To be fair, white women did take a lot of poo poo after the election for swinging for Trump, in spite of Pussygate and all the rest.

Plus, a lot of people on the left characterized poor white people as just a bunch of stupid racist rednecks whose votes didn't matter, and who didn't have any genuine grievances. I certainly did more than my fair share of this in CSPAM. (although I stand by everything I said about The Saurus, No Mans Land, Prorat, etc)

unwantedplatypus posted:

making GBS threads on poor white peoole is a favorite past time of liberals who would prefer to ignore the economic axis of social justice

joepinetree posted:

Hot take from one of the leads in Clinton's 2008 campaign and former member of the Clinton and Cuomo administrations:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/09/jeremy-corbyn-west-nato-russia-215242

So just to make it clear, higher ups in both the Obama and Clinton campaigns have now come out strongly against Corbyn and in favor of May. Remember that the next time anyone tries to claim that the democratic establishment appeals to the right because of pragmatism as opposed to sincerely held beliefs.

Majorian posted:

Yeah, it's all very well to make fun of literal Nazis on the internet, but it's important to remember there are legitimate grievances that they are exploiting to push their perverse worldview on others.

DaveWoo posted:

It's a lovely opinion, but I'm not sure why you're holding up this guy, who apparently hasn't even been involved in U.S. politics for several years, as representative of the current Democratic party establishment.

DaveWoo posted:

It's a lovely opinion, but I'm not sure why you're holding up this guy, who apparently hasn't even been involved in U.S. politics for several years, as representative of the current Democratic party establishment.

DaveWoo posted:

It's a lovely opinion, but I'm not sure why you're holding up this guy, who apparently hasn't even been involved in U.S. politics for several years, as representative of the current Democratic party establishment.

joepinetree posted:

I am holding him as representative of the current Democratic establishment because what he said is in line with the current Democratic establishment.

See also:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/08/labour-elected-jeremy-corbyn-maddest-person-in-room-bill-clinton
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/26/barack-obama-says-democrats-will-not-disintegrate-like-labour/

And, of course, anything that Obama's 2012 campaign manager, chairman of OFA and chairman of priorities USA Jim Messina has said while actually campaigning for Theresa May.

In a similar vein, this Jacobin article makes the case better than I have:

https://jacobinmag.com/2017/06/corbyn-jk-rowling-obama-blair-macron

joepinetree posted:

You can't be serious. Messina is the current chair of Organizing for Action and was a co-chair of Priorities USA.
And you really have to make an effort to not read that interview as Obama clearly stating that Corbyn is too leftwing and unelectable: