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Will Perez force the dems left? This poll is closed. |
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| Yes |
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33 | 6.38% |
| No |
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343 | 66.34% |
| Keith Ellison |
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54 | 10.44% |
| Pete Buttigieg |
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71 | 13.73% |
| Jehmu Green |
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16 | 3.09% |
| Total: | 416 votes | ||
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Main Paineframe posted:The reason there are few leftist Democrats is because few leftists are running for office as Democrats and winning. If the only option for your vote is a centrist, then the question you should be asking yourself isn't "why won't this centrist turn into a leftist?", it's "why isn't a leftist running for this seat"? I understand this, and it does need to be acknowledged that for leftists or left-Dems or really anyone left of center to enact positive change, they actually need to win enough elected positions in government. But here's the thing that I think a lot of centrists in the DNC are missing, when they ask your second question: a lot of economically left-wing policies are fairly popular in those purple and red districts. The "leftist candidate" vs. "centrist candidate" debate doesn't actually run along a single axis. Just because a left-wing candidate's views on, say, abortion might be too progressive for a red district in Indiana, doesn't mean that his or her views on expanding Medicare will drive voters away as well. In those cases, candidates who focus way more on an economically progressive, left-populist platform could probably do pretty drat well in those embattled districts. There's more than one way to run (and win as) a leftist candidate. Fulchrum posted:He means running as a splitter option because going through the Democratic primary is too hard and restrictive, man, and you just get caught up in politics. Yes, that really is the reason why the Dems have been losing so frequently over the past nine years: the Greens and the other splitter options. 
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Mar 9, 2017 18:16
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Radish posted:Yeah I can GET Obama because he's a massively popular President and rode in a wave in 2008 so that at least makes sense. Clinton was a Senator a decade ago and failed twice to run for president. If that's the best they have, yeah it's not looking too rosy. Indeed. Obama has an opportunity to rehabilitate his legacy among left-Dems, but he has to, you know, show that he gets why the Dems lost in 2016. (and publicly back effective solutions to reverse that upset) And he can't ever be the standard bearer again. He's an ex-president. His actual career in office is over. He can be a kingmaker, and I hope he becomes one by openly endorsing left-economic populism going forward. But Hillary Clinton...holy poo poo. I've been disappointed with Pelosi on a lot of different occasions in the past, but I don't think I've ever heard her give such an outright stupid answer. Majorian fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Mar 22, 2017 |
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Mar 22, 2017 19:47
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Kilroy posted:The "we are capitalists, okay" was probably worse, at least within the context of what she'd just been asked. Ehhhh, maybe, but I can understand that a little bit more. While "We are capitalists" was a really bad answer, I can understand the Dems needing to say, "We're not socialists or communists," even though they should be moving in that direction, platform-wise, if they want to win a presidential election ever again. In this case, though, there's just no excuse for giving "Hillary Clinton" as an answer. There is no better way to communicate "We learned nothing from 2016" to the base.
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Mar 22, 2017 20:25
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Condiv posted:then why does nancy pelosi reject him for not being capitalist? that's why people are pissed about that answer. Did she? I'm not sure that she meant that as an explicit rejection of Sanders. I think it's important to keep in mind that, for an older generation of Americans, the world falls into a dichotomy: "capitalist" and "communist." Thanks to the Cold War, if you're not a communist, you're a capitalist, and vice-versa. (again, from the older generation's standpoint)
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Mar 22, 2017 22:40
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:It's a dead end. It's why everyone talks about single payer being so great for businesses because they're gonna be spending less in taxes than they do on their employees' premiums. Because calling for Full Communism Now is unlikely to attract more than a single-digit percentage of voters. But also because European-style social democracy is a demonstrable real-world example of an alternative to American capitalism actually functioning well.
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Mar 22, 2017 22:50
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Agnosticnixie posted:The main issue with this is that European-style social democracy is also a demonstrable real world example of something the capitalist class will get hard at work dismantling the moment they feel they don't have to bribe the poor into compliance. It only works with the specter of communism hanging over your shoulder. Well, sure, but that's why far left parties need to start pressuring more mainstream parties. JeffersonClay posted:The Nordic model is an alternative to the US tax and redistribution scheme, not capitalism. But again, this brings up the issue of definitions. Is the European model an alternative to "capitalism," when capitalism is defined as "any market-based/non-command economic system"? No, of course not. Is it an alternative to American's version of capitalism, particularly when that version of capitalism is characterized by widespread deregulation? You bet it is, and one that most Americans would probably find attractive, at that. Fados posted:Please don't look to Europe for overaching examples, pick and choose what's cool but forget about social democracy, we're fast track on the way to dismantle that. I think that's honestly what most of us are thinking: emulating the policies, but not outright saying, "Hey, Americans, we want to do exactly what Europe is doing."
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Mar 22, 2017 23:05
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:Sure, but then Pelosi's answer was ok I think it was a little tone-deaf, when the answer should have been, "Yes, the Democratic Party needs to focus on economic justice more than it has been in order to win back votes it has lost." But I didn't interpret it as an outright rejection of Sanders, or an endorsement of full-on free market capitalism. JeffersonClay posted:The defining features of capitalism are private ownership of the means of production and profits. I agree with you that the Nordic model is an alternative to laissez faire capitalism, but it's just more taxes, regulations, redistribution and services. All of which would benefit us--but whether or not they'd be popular is likely very dependent on the specific implementation. Of course, but that's the case with any policy alternative: its popularity is always going to be, in no small part, dependent on implementation. What we do know, however, are that broad-based social welfare programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and above all, Social Security, are very popular in the U.S. I don't think a lack of public support for strengthening and expanding these programs is the issue here.
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Mar 22, 2017 23:25
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Fulchrum posted:The claim is that no poor person in America respects, envies, or wishes to be a rich person ever I don't think anybody actually claimed that. Also, you don't really have to work hard to convince the rural and Rust Belt poor that Wall Street is loving them over. Saw this earlier; glad to hear it. I hope this means Schumer recognizes which way the political wind is blowing (ie: not towards centrism).
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Mar 23, 2017 18:24
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Crossposting from the "Trump Administration" thread:Main Paineframe posted:It's correct that Youngstown and Reading have very high poverty rates...but do you know what else they have in common? They're both less than 50% white. Why is a city with almost as many black people as white people being portrayed as a place where votes are decided entirely by the "white working class"? Why is her failure to carry that city being blamed on a failure to carry white voters, without even a single mention of the low turnout among the just-as-numerous black voters? The same goes for Reading, which has more Puerto Ricans alone than people under the poverty line. Why is the fifth-largest city in PA, whose population is 56% Hispanic and 14% African-American, being cited as evidence of failure to appeal to the rural white working class? From the NYT article: quote:Youngstown, Ohio, where Mr. Obama won by more than 20 points in 2012, was basically a draw. Mr. Trump swept the string of traditionally Democratic and old industrial towns along Lake Erie. Counties that supported Mr. Obama in 2012 voted for Mr. Trump by 20 points. Those are comparatively huge swings - too huge to discount the role that the white working class swinging away from the Democrats played. The reason why I didn't mention the depressed turnout among black and Latino voters in the other thread was because we were talking about whether or not the Dems' position on white working class defectors should be, "gently caress 'em, they'll die from lack of health care anyway." Plus, white people tend to have higher voter rates than black people or Latinos, which is a bad thing, but a fact. e: Voter suppression plays a role in that, and it undoubtedly played a role in this election as well. But the Democrats aren't going to be able to do anything about voter suppression tactics unless they retake power from the Republicans. They're not going to be able to retake power unless they bring back in some of the '08/'12 Obama voters who stayed home or defected to Trump in '16. e2: Also crossposted from Trump Admin thread: Majorian fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Mar 23, 2017 |
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Mar 23, 2017 18:40
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Main Paineframe posted:You're missing a few links in the chain, though. You're just pointing at places that had a large percentage swing and saying, "see, it must be the working class whites" - despite the fact that those areas are less than 50% white. As someone else pointed out in the other thread, though, those are just the inner city areas. The whole Youngstown–Warren–Boardman metropolitan area is overwhelmingly white: almost 87%. quote:Anyhow, I couldn't find results for just Youngstown itself, but I checked vote tallies for Mahoning County in 2012 and 2016, even though (as I pointed out in the other thread) the county is a lot less black and poor than the city itself is. While there was certainly a big swing in percentage, from 63-35 in 2012 to 50-47 in 2016, the real story is in the actual vote numbers: Trump got 9,000 more votes than Romney did, while Hillary got 18,000 fewer votes than Obama did. That means that half the change from 2012 to 2016 wasn't due to Obama voters flipping to Trump, it was due to Obama voters staying home and not voting at all. That's still a really big issue for the Dems, though: either way, the Democratic candidate didn't get their votes. The Democratic platform did not speak to them specifically, and/or they did not trust the Democratic nominee to make good on her promises. quote:And while I see you jumped straight to voter suppression as the only possible explanation for non-whites staying home, there's another possibility: that just like white people, they might have felt that Hillary wasn't offering them enough! Deeply embedded in the whole "white working-class" narrative is the idea that programs that help poor people aren't good enough for whites and that poor whites need specially-targeted programs for poor white people only, which is one aspect of the New Deal mindset I'd rather see gone. I mean, I agree on all of this, but the fact of the matter is, Obama also ran on a partially economically populist platform in 2008, and these counties turned out for him overwhelmingly. So the narrative that offering social welfare programs that benefit minorities as well as white people would somehow turn off too many white working class voters in these areas, doesn't seem particularly well-founded. (which I know you haven't explicitly argued, but it is an argument I've seen in this thread) Majorian fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Mar 23, 2017 |
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Mar 23, 2017 19:52
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Fulchrum posted:Wall Street is not the entirety of the rich, and leftists need to grasp this. No, but they are a pretty visible symbol, and they played a fairly pivotal role in the '07-'08 economic collapse. Centrists need to grasp this.
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Mar 23, 2017 19:59
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JeffersonClay posted:There are many confounding factors here that have nothing to do with the democratic platform or how it was sold. But it's a significant factor that the Democrats do, in fact, have the power to change. They don't have the power to change things like voter suppression. They don't have the power to change whether or not the FBI director is going to kneecap their nominee. They do have the power to actually reach out to voters who traditionally have voted for them, but are wavering. quote:And even if we assume the change had to do with policy, it makes a lot more sense that voters in the rust belt, but not elsewhere, were concerned about trade policy than the extent of the welfare state. I've posted a number of articles now of poor rural and Rust Belt white people who desperately need help from the government, and got tricked into believing that Trump would offer them better government aid than they've been receiving from Democrats. Their support for him has tapered off as it's become clear that he had no intention of making good on those promises. I realize, of course, that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," but all the evidence we have on hand does seem to point towards the unravelling social safety net as a major factor in these voters defecting or staying home. quote:If Democrats need to make some leftward concession to shore up their base, the three options seem to be trade, welfare, and wall street. My preferences would look like this: It's going to have to be all of these things, if the Democrats' best-case scenario isn't going to just be a hamstrung President who's forced to compromise on everything with a Republican Congress, Republican governors, and Republican statehouses.
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Mar 23, 2017 20:31
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Main Paineframe posted:The Y-W-B metro area is overwhelmingly white, yes...but as I pointed out in response, it's also a lot less poor, with a poverty rate of less than half of Youngstown itself. That's still over 17 percent, which is pretty high. The national average is between 13-15%.  quote:The Democratic candidate didn't get "their" votes, yes, but whose votes didn't they get? Was it the working-class whites who stayed home? Or was it the equally-numerous and even-poorer working-class blacks? Given the pattern of formerly-blue Rust Belt and rural districts going over to Trump, in lily white and racially diverse areas alike, it seems pretty clear that poor white voters played a significant role. Obama won Iowa by more than 9 points in 2008, and still held it by almost six points in 2012. Yet Clinton lost it by ten points in 2016. Trump won Maine-2 by 12 points; Obama won it by eight in 2012. quote:Did it even have anything to do with poverty at all? The poorest county in Ohio (a 91% white coal county with 30% of the population under the poverty line) voted Clinton, Athens is a college town. The University of Ohio is there, and is the biggest employer in the town. It's an outlier. In the meantime, Trump won 80 of Ohio's 88 counties; no one has done that since Reagan. Nine of those had voted for Obama in 2012. Five of those who flipped between '12 and '16 have been in the throws of the opioid epidemic: quote:In Ohio, 26 counties reported around 20 or more drug overdose deaths per 100,000 people in 2015. In all but two of these counties, Frydl said there was at least a 10 percent surge in voters who went to Trump compared with Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, a 10 percent or more drop in voters who went to Hillary Clinton compared with Obama, or both of these trends. In five counties, the shift was big enough for the county to flip from Democrat in 2012 to Republican in 2016. As the piece points out, there is also a strong correlation between declining public health outcomes, and communities that flipped. Like it or not, white rural/Rust Belt poverty and overall misery played a significant role in handing Trump the victory. We can debate over whether or not it played a bigger or smaller role than other particular factors, but to suggest that it simply didn't play any role at all, as you have, is pretty myopic. The Democrats' fortunes aren't going to turn around until centrists in the party start owning up to their mistaken assumptions. e: NPR had a good piece a week after the election on the districts turned traditionally blue states red: quote:But in Wisconsin — the state that ended up putting Trump over the top in the electoral vote early Wednesday morning — 22 counties that had once voted for Obama switched to Trump. Some of those counties — such as Sawyer, Forest and Adams — have some of the highest unemployment rates in the state. I don't think anyone is arguing that it was ONLY poor whites who made the difference, but to flat-out deny that it played any significant role is burying your head in the sand. Especially when writers like Nate Cohn kind of called it months before the election. Majorian fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Mar 23, 2017 |
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Mar 23, 2017 23:28
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Agnosticnixie posted:When was the last times the dems objectively increased taxes at the federal level? More precisely, there's a difference between the "wealthy and glamorous" (movie stars & celebrities), and corporate raiders like Jamie Dimon. The public associates George Clooney and Katy Perry and (God help us) the Kardashians with glamour. Those are the multi-millionaires that they admire. They may envy Wall Street crooks' money, but they also know that they are the ones responsible for a lot of their economic woes.
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Mar 24, 2017 00:18
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Fulchrum posted:If only we could, say, point out some kind of political ideology that actively enabled wall street crooks and tries to weaken regulations on them I hate to tell you, but a certain abuelita was a big fan of this very ideology.
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Mar 24, 2017 00:41
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JeffersonClay posted:If you can't make your point without falling back on "both parties are the same", maybe the point isn't worth making. That's not what I'm saying, though. Centrist Dems did, in fact, buy too much into neoliberalism, and that hurt the Dems' electoral prospects this time around.
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Mar 24, 2017 00:55
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Main Paineframe posted:It seems perfectly clear that poor voters played a significant role, at least. Poor white areas overperformed for Trump, poor non-white areas underperformed for Hillary, and racially diverse areas did both...so why the eagerness to keep pointing at white people specifically rather than acknowledging her general overarching failure to gain traction among poor people of any race? Because it's illustrative of how far the Democrats have drifted from arguing for a platform that includes a strong social safety net, funded by taxing the wealthy. These are communities that have traditionally been Democrat-leaning, and for the last couple decades, they've been really suffering. Bill Clinton's policies played a part in that, and while I think Obama helped alleviate their pain a bit, his administration didn't accomplish enough to give them the relief that they needed. Clinton came off as thoroughly apathetic towards their misery. That's a bad look for the Democrats, when they're trying to portray themselves as the defenders of the underrepresented and the dispossessed. quote:The "white working-class" narrative just translates to being nicer to the great white suburban expanses of the Rust Belt while ignoring the Flints and Youngstowns where the poverty is most concentrated. But again, nobody is arguing in favor of strengthening the social safety net exclusively for poor whites. Far from it - pretty much every economic justice-minded left-Dem and socialist in the U.S. will acknowledge that social welfare programs that help minorities overcome structural disadvantages need to be baked into the platform from the get-go. Majorian fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Mar 24, 2017 |
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Mar 24, 2017 01:00
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Main Paineframe posted:So, again, why say "poor whites" rather than "poor people"? It's an odd and out-of-place addition if your point is just that Dems haven't done enough for the economically disadvantaged, which is certainly true. Well, remember, this discussion grew out of someone in the Trump Admin thread saying that poor white people who voted for Trump deserve to suffer from lack of health care. If you read my commentary on the topic in other threads, you'll see that I'm pretty insistent on the Dems running on helping the poor and disadvantaged across the board. Mooseontheloose posted:Didn't the Dems vote against the TPP and the Republicans vote for TPP? Clinton hemmed and hawed on the issue throughout most of the campaign, leading a lot of people to speculate that she favored it. She eventually came out against it, but Terry McAuliffe, her friend and 2008 campaign chair, said she was secretly in favor of it. Overall, the Dems were divided on it, and Obama supported it. JeffersonClay posted:This just isn't true, expanding social welfare was baked in. The platform was as progressive in 2016 as it has ever been. Obamacare was the biggest expansion of the safety net in a generation. That's a pretty low hurdle there, you realize. Obamacare was a good thing, but it was a pretty limited expansion of the safety net, especially after decades of it being eroded by Republicans and Democrats alike. The fact of the matter is, a lot of poor communities didn't get the relief that they needed under the Obama Administration. One can argue that that wasn't all their fault, and that it was in fact mostly the fault of the Republicans, and I would mostly agree with that. But I'm a political junkie. I don't have to work three part-time jobs to keep me and my family alive. I have the time and energy to actually pay attention to this poo poo. A lot of poor rural and Rust Belt voters don't have these luxuries. They just know poo poo for them and their communities got worse under Obama.
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Mar 24, 2017 01:55
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JeffersonClay posted:So Obama helped, but not enough? I guess that's possible, but the narrative that Democrats were punished for moving to the right is plainly false. If you move four steps to the right and then half a step to the left, you've still moved more to the right overall. WhiskeyJuvenile posted:ACA was like a 25% expansion to Medicaid (58m - 70m plus another 2m in the non-expansion states) enrollment before you even get into the marketplace subsidies Per the NYT: quote:Surveys show that most enrollees in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces are happy with their plans. The Trump voters in our focus groups were representative of people who had not fared as well. Several described their frustration with being forced to change plans annually to keep premiums down, losing their doctors in the process. But asked about policies found in several Republican plans to replace the Affordable Care Act — including a tax credit to help defray the cost of premiums, a tax-preferred savings account and a large deductible typical of catastrophic coverage — several of these Trump voters recoiled, calling such proposals “not insurance at all.” One of those plans has been proposed by Representative Tom Price, Mr. Trump’s nominee to be secretary of Health and Human Services. These voters said they did not understand health savings accounts and displayed skepticism about the concept. These people thought they'd get a better health care deal out of Trump. They were sold a line by a conman.
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Mar 24, 2017 02:31
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JeffersonClay posted:It doesn't make any sense that the electorate would punish the democrats for moving to the right decades ago by picking the first opportunity after they move left to punish them. They don't really pay attention to whether or not Obamacare was "right wing" or "left wing." All they care about is whether or not they were covered for their conditions, whether or not their premiums went up, whether or not their communities were getting less depressed, whether or not the opioid epidemic stopped destroying everything around them. Under Obama, their communities continued to suffer, and again, I'm fully aware that the Republicans deserve way more of the blame for that than Obama does. But we know that because we're political junkies who have the time, energy, and education to find this poo poo out. They have none of those things, so they blame the guy in charge. Majorian fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Mar 24, 2017 |
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Mar 24, 2017 05:15
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JeffersonClay posted:Then it follows that they'll blame trump for conditions getting worse under his tenure and these voters will inevitably return to the democrats, who need change nothing to win the next election. Haven't you completely undercut your original point here? Voters can't be punishing Dems for bill Clinton's welfare policies if they don't understand policy and just retaliate against the party in power when they don't like present conditions. A: they don't have to know much about policy to know that poo poo started going badly for them in the 90's. They lost their jobs to outsourcing, automation, and the collapse of industries like steel and coal. Their standard of living cratered when Clinton started making it harder for them to survive as they scrambled to find new jobs. They may not be terribly well-informed, but they can put two and two together. B: yes, they'll blame Trump for his failure to live up to his promises, and who knows? Maybe a centrist Dem will get elected president in 2020. And then we'll have another president hamstrung by a Republican Congress, Republican governors, and Republican statehouses. See, this is the biggest bit of denial that you're in, JC: you think the problem is just with the presidency. Your strategy has failed on all levels.
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Mar 24, 2017 16:41
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JeffersonClay posted:It's really convenient for your argument that rust belt voters are knowledgeable about bill clinton's policies Let me stop you there: no. Again, they do not need to be knowledgeable about Bill Clinton's policies, to know when their careers ended and their towns started going to poo poo. Try again.
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Mar 24, 2017 17:44
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JeffersonClay posted:Again, manufacturers were moving jobs to Mexico before the passage of NAFTA, which you are still ignoring. The point that you are so doggedly ignoring is that it doesn't really matter if NAFTA was the actual, original cause of deindustrialization in the Rust Belt or not (and of course it wasn't - deindustrialization's roots go back to at least the 50's, and the decline actually started in the 70's). The point is, the Clinton Administration did very, very little to alleviate this, and NAFTA just pinned a big target on their backs that said, "Hey, that factory that just closed in your town? It's in Mexico now! But someone's net worth in New York went up, so...congratulations!" There is very, very little reason for Rust Belt voters who abandoned the Democratic Party to trust them, because of moronic "Third Way" strategies that embraced deregulation, supply side economics, and "welfare reform." The Republicans may be worse, but that's not much of a reason for those folks to vote for more centrist Dems like Hillary Clinton (or Cory Booker, or whoever they try to run in 2020). e: JeffersonClay posted:Actually that thread was about how democrats should tie Trump to the shittiest aspects of capitalism like Wall Street and environmental destruction but I guess it's too much to expect you to read for comprehension in the midst of a raging tantrum. Another thing you keep ignoring is my point that winning the presidency while leaving Congress and state governments in Republican hands (which is the best-case outcome of your strategy) is a pretty pyrrhic victory. Majorian fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Mar 24, 2017 |
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Mar 24, 2017 19:22
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JeffersonClay posted:You claimed rust belt voters abandoned the democrats because the 90's was when their jobs started disappearing and their communities fell apart. That just isn't true. Now you've completely reversed yourself and are claiming Rust Belt voters abandoned democrats because of Bill Clinton's policies. Wrong on both counts. My point has been, since the beginning of this discussion (and you can check yourself! Go back and do it!), that the Democrats failed in 2016 to make it seem like they took the Rust Belt working class' misery seriously, empathized with them, and wanted to stop the neoliberal policies that hurt them. The point isn't that the Dems were the original cause of all of this; no one here has claimed that. The point is that the Dems did not do enough to help. Your brand of pearl-clutching and concern trolling only enables that poo poo. Barack Obama himself nailed why he got enough blue collar Rust Belt votes to win, while Hillary did not: “I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa, it was because I spent 87 days going to every small town, and fair, and fish fry, and VFW hall. And there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points...There’re some counties that maybe I won that people didn’t expect — because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for.” Clinton failed to seem like she gave a poo poo about people who were really, genuinely suffering. The JeffersonClay strategy seems to suggest that there's nothing to be done about this, and the Democrats really shouldn't bother trying to recapture those voters - those that defected to Trump will stay home in 2020, and the Dems will win the presidency. This is, to say the least, a pretty short-sighted strategy. quote:I am not advocating ignoring the house and senate, quite the opposite. Opposing unpopular presidents has historically been an excellent way to make gains in midterm elections like in 2006 and 1994. The reason why the Dems retook Congress in 2006 was because the Republicans tried to privatize social security, you idiot.
Majorian fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Mar 24, 2017 |
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Mar 24, 2017 20:11
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JeffersonClay posted:Literally no one thinks that. What is your actual argument, JC? On what basis are you opposing the Dems appealing to economic justice? Be specific. Because it seems like you don't disagree with us on anything, except when you're strawmanning.
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Mar 24, 2017 20:19
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JeffersonClay posted:Here's one I made in reply to you less than 24 hours ago. So again, where's the disagreement? In what way are you opposed to appeals to economic justice? Why do you oppose the Sanders/Warren/Ellison wing of the party taking over and, you know, actually winning? Calibanibal posted:majorian, just to put this to rest, If I am not in the state of dumb leftism, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. quote:are you in the middle of an enraged tantrum y/n I am, but it's work-related, and I am good at compartmentalizing, so everyone here is safe. This is what I was hoping their response would be. "What reform will we work with you on? How about Medicare for all?"
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Mar 24, 2017 21:50
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Ytlaya posted:The reason I'm addressing these posters instead of the aforementioned dumb leftist posters is because 1. even if they sometimes have dumb reasons, the latter generally want the same things I want politically and 2. dumb leftists have very little power in our political system, so it doesn't make sense to focus much effort on them (while dumb "centrist/mainstream" Democrats do hold the most power within the party).  That's the big reason why there needs to be as much dogged emphasis on sharpening the focus on economic justice: institutional inertia. The Democratic Party has not focused more than the bare minimum of effort behind that cause for quite a while. The remaining Clintonistas need a big push to get moving.WampaLord posted:You might want to read that again. It looks to me like he's saying "expand Medicaid." What am I missing?
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Mar 24, 2017 21:56
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WampaLord posted:I'm not sure how you got from "expand Medicaid" to "Medicare for all" The point is, the Democratic response to Trump saying, "Well, I'll work with the Dems to reform health care then!  " should be to demand everything they possibly can.JeffersonClay posted:I don't think Bernie would have necessarily won. I think we need to be smart and strategic about how we structure our appeals for economic justice. I don't think the democrats' problems last election were primarily due to insufficient leftist policy. I find many of the arguments for that position unpersuasive. Whether or not Bernie would have won is purely academic at this point; it's a counterfactual, and he's not likely to run for president ever again. "Insufficient leftist policy" is an oversimplification of the problem that a lot of us are pointing out: Clinton didn't even try to pretend to want to help Rust Belt working class voters. Nobody's demanding ideological purity here. What we're saying is that, if the Democrats want to win back power in any significant way, they're going to kind of need to not look like they're giving the finger to those workers. Majorian fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Mar 24, 2017 |
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Mar 24, 2017 22:00
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Main Paineframe posted:The ACA sucked, though. It wasn't the change people needed, had several major flaws, and Dems made it worse by at first refusing to campaign on it and then refusing to admit that it could possibly be improved. Running as a "new type of politician" who promises to actually make good on providing relief for the economically disadvantaged does tend to reap rewards, though. See: Trump, Donald J.; Obama, Barack H.; Clinton, William J.; etc. Disclaimer: winning because of those promises does not automatically translate into those politicians actually living up those promises once in office.
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Mar 24, 2017 22:11
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JeffersonClay posted:Why, then, is Bernie busting his rear end to defend it? Because an imperfect system is better than a truly horrendous one. quote:Yeah, specifically the Southern strategy in response to LBJ. I think exactly the same thing just happened with the ACA. The legislators who lost big in 2010 tended to be the centrists who ran away from Obama and the ACA, not in support of it.
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Mar 24, 2017 22:16
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Main Paineframe posted:He's saying "force the ACA Medicaid expansion on the GOP states that rejected it". Like I said, I think his point is to make demands that Trump can't possibly agree with, which is what the Dems should be doing. e: Kamala Harris is also doing what the Dems should be doing: https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/845370310601953282 I like my new senator. 
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Mar 24, 2017 22:20
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JeffersonClay posted:Running away from Obamacare doesn't protect you from Republicans using it to whip up racist resentment. That's not why Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu lost though. They lost because they didn't stand for anything, because they were afraid to stand with their party, their President, and their signature piece of domestic legislation. They were spineless, and their voters didn't reward them for that.
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Mar 24, 2017 22:52
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Main Paineframe posted:It doesn't really sound like an unreasonable request at all. It's literally just "make GOP states accept the ACA Medicaid expansion". Trump wouldn't do it, but it's hardly an unreasonable request. Right, so it's good to make. Trump will reject it, and the Democrats have even more ammunition to say, "Look at this loving CHUD who promised to make your healthcare better but now won't pony up."
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Mar 24, 2017 23:02
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:Didn't Hillary say she supported a wall in the southern border to restrict people from crossing to the US? She voted for 700 miles of fence on the southern border, as part of an attempt at a deal for comprehensive immigration reform. So nah, that was just a Trump exaggeration/flat-out lie.
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Mar 24, 2017 23:04
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JeffersonClay posted:I agree that the ACA was a substantive expansion of the welfare state, and a few democrats did themselves no favors by opposing it. I also think Republican opposition to the ACA had the same racist motives and features as the southern strategy. I'm sure racist motives played a part, but did it play a greater part than the simple fact that Republican legislators have no other gods before them than corporate donors? Health insurance companies, Big Pharma, etc? I'm dubious. e: And as for the people that voted for those Republican legislators, I'm also skeptical that racist motives played a bigger role than the simple fact that the Obamacare rollout was not a perfect enterprise by any means. Premiums went up for a lot of people, not every serious condition was fully covered, etc. That was partially to be expected, and the ACA certainly got better over time, but again, I don't think one can just chalk it up entirely or primarily to working class voters who left the Democratic Party being racist. Majorian fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Mar 24, 2017 |
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Mar 24, 2017 23:10
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:So...yes? She was pro-building a fence in the southern border? 700 miles' worth of fence isn't a wall across the entire southern border, though, and like I said, it was part of a deal for a progressive attempt at immigration reform. Yeah, well, that was stupid. That was part of her reflexive tendency to try to look as tough on crime and national security as possible, no matter how bad it made her look.
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Mar 24, 2017 23:17
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JeffersonClay posted:They have no gods but the wealthy who don't want to pay more taxes. Coded appeals to racism are how they get poor people to vote against their own interests. They link welfare expansion to undeserving lazy non-white moochers. It wasn't an accident they called it Obamacare, they did so to link it to his blackness and imply non-whites would benefit at the expense of whites. Racism played a role, but I don't think one can claim that it played the only, or even the largest, role. Had the ACA worked perfectly from the moment it was signed into law, I strongly doubt voters would have been whipped into as much of a frenzy.
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Mar 24, 2017 23:40
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:I mean, at what point does it change from merely an act to literally voting for the invasion of iraq and also a giant fence built to keep immigrants out Well, for one thing, there was already hundreds of miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, and securing the borders is an important national security concern. Drug smuggling does take place across the border, and it's hardly inconceivable that a non-state actor would try to sneak a WMD into the U.S. as well. So it is the government's job to secure the border, to some degree. The question is, at what point does it stop serving national security, and just start being sadistic and cruel against undocumented workers? Given that the '06 fence bill was part of trying to actually relax restrictions for people gaining residence in the country, I don't think it falls under the latter category. The Iraq War vote, I won't defend, other than to say, as others have, that a lot of people got really stupid after 9/11. But it was a terrible, terrible mistake, and Clinton should have owned up to it earlier and more clearly.
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Mar 24, 2017 23:44
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:But she didn't say anything about any of the poo poo you mentioned and specifically said it was too keep "illegals" out It was a quid pro quo for the '06 Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act. (which ended up dying between Houses of Congress anyway) She said it was "to keep illegals out" because again, she has a dumb reflexive compulsion to try to look as tough as possible on crime at any given opportunity, no matter how self-defeating.
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Mar 24, 2017 23:59
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JeffersonClay posted:It was intensely unpopular with republicans the moment it was proposed, and its overall approval was underwater from the beginning. It didn't change much when the staggered implementation of the provisions started. Opposition was always ideological. There was a lot of ideology at play, though, besides simply racism. "Government takeover of healthcare!!!" was a pretty salient scare-line for Republican voters. The point is, again, just blaming it on racism, while not incorrect, per se, is misleading. Opposition to social welfare programs like the ACA can't just be reduced to one thing.
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Mar 25, 2017 00:08
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