ITT: “Yeah but it’s their job to ‘appeal’ to me; it’s not my job to vote for them, and I gotta say ‘not the end of democracy’ isn’t a big selling point for me tbh. Dance for me, candidate! Dance!”
OP: These framings we see in the media have absolutely nothing to do with which candidate is more qualified to run the country
Me: Actually I would add to that that these framings are specifically inserted into the discourse by corporate media to elevate some candidates and depress some candidates, with the depressingly effective aim of making people dislike the corporate unfriendly candidates
Posters ITT: Hey like 20 or 30 of us have the exact same new framing we’d like to present that has nothing to do with which candidate is more qualified to run the country. It might be a much much better framing than, which candidate is better to vote for, or factual things about the candidate’s record. We all feel that exact same way about it being important to look at it this way.
You can have the best product in the universe, but if you can't sell it, then it doesn't matter. When trying to argue a douche is better than a turd, you really need your presentation going. None of the American politicians (except maybe Bernie) are remotely qualified to run a country of any size, so stop trying to make it about who is the most qualified.
I tried to set you up to say something like, yeah but what has Biden even done other than “not Trump” (as if that “doesn’t count” somehow as a reason to pick him instead of Trump), but you didn’t take the bait. You just came out with conflating “which product is best marketed” with “which is the product we actually want”, and somehow came down on the side of best-marketed. Idk what that’s about. And then you simply said that no one is qualified.
Idk, that’s a little bit close to teeing up what I wanted to say (talking about Biden’s qualification), so I’ll go ahead and put it up anyway.
40% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030
15% minimum corporate tax
Actual labor people in charge of the NLRB for the first time in God knows how long leading to all these union wins
Hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan forgiveness
Big wage gains at the bottom end of the scale even when adjusted for massive historic inflation
That’s a partial sampling. And that was with a pretty hostile congress and Supreme Court; most of it was watered down versions after he tried to do more aggressive stuff.
Holy Jesus is this a flawed analogy. I'll try to fix it for you:
If you go to a restaurant where for some reason every present customer votes for a cook out of a lineup of cooks who each only prepare certain dishes, and out of which only two are consistently popular enough to get the majority of customers to vote for them.
Out of these two, both let the manager pick the dishes. But one only makes meals out of tofu, which isn't terrible but not worth going out for, and the customers only vote for him because they're afraid it's the only choice that will beat the other guy. The other cook just scrapes and serves the sludge off the bottom of the stove but has run a successful decades-long campaign to convince their customers that sludge tastes better than tofu. None of those customers have ever tried tofu so they don't know better.
Despite the fact that it's obvious that the issue with this system is overwhelmingly the manager running a shitty restaurant and the cooks pitting the customers against each other, the small but vocal subset of customers who just want a steak are blaming the other customers like it's their fault.
Add in the fact that some in the group demanding to be appealled to is out of touch with where the actual populace is at to the degree that they dont even realize that to appeal to them on unpopular positions would alienate more voters than they represent. Couple that with the fact that demands on items that are unrealistic to implement without wide-scale support in the populace, and you have a small group of people you have to spend alot of energy and political capital to appeal to, in ways that are largely symbolic in practice, all while that group insults you and offers next to nothing--"Dance for our vote! Grovel for our vote you fucking murderers!!".
And then they are so perpetually online in their echo chambers they dont realize their views actually aren't very popular, so insular they wonder why the rest of us don't spend all day catering to their bullshit!
"The candidate has done nothing to earn my vote, so I'm not voting for them."
"wtf why aren't people voting for the candidate I support?! They must just hate everyone and be a fascist since they can't see the obvious righteousness of my candidate"
These people never realize that this is a two way street. If candidates are going to earn votes, that means their candidate has to earn votes too and not just accept them for granted. They have to build bridges to achieve their goals. You can tell that those burning bridges don't actually care about their espoused virtues -- they just want to be right and stick it to their enemies.
Yeah. Plus the continuation of that conversation tends to go:
"Okay. He raised literally about a trillion dollars via corporate tax increases, which he then spent on climate change and working people, achieving incremental but quite significant results."
"Yeah but did he OVERTURN CAPITALISM AND AMERICAN IMPERIALISM? Because if not PROJECT 2025 BECOMES ALL THE DEMOCRATS FAULT"
Ironically most of these people also tend to make arguments in favor of Russian imperialism when they talk about how NATO is actually to blame for the war and Ukraine should accept a peace agreement.
Yeah I never understood wanting to vote for the "guy I want to have a beer with" thing.
The guys I have beers with are nice enough and funny at times, but I sure as hell wouldn't want them running the country.
I want a boring as fuck, never misses any details, workaholic kind or person running the country. Someone I wouldn't want to have a beer with because all they ever talk about is their job.
Not true, they shifted focus to him for a while so they could do everything in their power to kneecap and malign him when he had a plausible shot at giving them the presidency in 2016, and grabbing them support from a generation of young voters who were for the only time in their lives actually wholly excited to vote for somebody, anybody, who seemed like he might care about them and want to do great things with the awesome power of the American presidency.
He was the most popular politician in America for YEARS after they decided he wasn’t their guy, and is still more popular today than either Biden or Trump.
I want to put a sad emoji here, but I can’t actually find one that is sufficient to convey what I want to express about it
Gore’s presidency would have been a continuation of Clinton’s, who were aware of the threat potential posed by al-Qaeda. So if/when the now infamous Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US memo landed on his desk on August 6th, 2001 - or the even earlier “UBL [Usama Bin Laden] Threats Are Real" memos from months earlier; they would have been taken seriously and acted upon.
Instead Bush's response was to fob it off disinterestedly, saying: "All right. You've covered your ass"
So yes, learning from earlier failings - a theoretical Gore presidency would have taken these threats much more seriously, and could have prevented the thousands of deaths of 9/11, and tens of thousands of deaths in the subsequent wars.
So if/when the now infamous Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US memo landed on his desk on August 6th, 2001 - or the even earlier “UBL [Usama Bin Laden] Threats Are Real" memos from months earlier; they would have been taken seriously and acted upon.
Acted to do what? Implement TSA in January of 2001? Create DHS inside the first 100 days? Put air marshals on planes by June?
Intelligence knew about the pending attacks, but had no real way to interface with airport security. That was the root of the problem. And nobody was going to solve it until after 9/11 because Congress would not have taken this any more seriously than they took it during Blowjob Gate, when Al Qaeda was taking pot shots at the USS Cole.
The president has quite a bit of ability to set priorities and work assignments within the justice dept and intelligence agencies and other parts of the executive branch. Unlike legislative things, he really can just say “put 1,000 people on this Bin Laden thing” one day and just from that they just go off and do it exactly like he said.
Bush did pretty much the exact opposite, actively refusing to use his leadership position to instruct the people who worked for him to do anything about the threat that they were telling him existed. Idk if anything Gore did would have made a difference, but there definitely is a consensus that Bush fucked up on recognizing and reacting, in retrospect.
The president has quite a bit of ability to set priorities and funding levels and work assignments within the justice dept and intelligence agencies.
If he's a Republican, sure.
But Democrats always have their hands tied.
Bush did pretty much the exact opposite, actively refusing to use his leadership position to instruct the people who worked for him to do anything about the threat that they were telling him existed.
Bush was fixated, laser-like, on Iraq and looking for any excuse to invade. The Al Qaeda memos were treated as a distraction.
However, the theory that he just had a big "Stop Al Qaeda" button under his desk and refusee to press it is naive. There's no real policy Gore could have implemented to stop the 9/11 hijackings that would have come into force between January and September.
At best, he could have brought on a senior staffer who better coordinated between the NSA and the FBI. But even then, you're assuming the FBI would have been in the right place at the right time to act.
Gore, personally, wasn't going to do anything to change the outcome.
While you should vote for the best possible option, I feel like these kinds of posts are constantly shifting responsibility away from Democrats for their own short-comings.
A couple of weeks ago I voted in the European Parliament elections for the option that had, in my view, the best possible agenda: socially progressive, ecologist, economically left-leaning, decent foreign policy and coherent voting records. But the campaign they ran was absolutely terrible, starting by the candidate. Even though she is admittedly an accomplished woman who has had a very solid career, she doesn't know about the concept of charisma. She wasn't selected because she was the person who would perform the best in debates or in speeches (and she definitely wasn't), but rather, because she was an option that would provoke little conflict among the different factions of the coalition. That was the sign that the internal dynamics of the coalition had degenerated and were acting out of their own inertia, rather than seeking the best possible outcome.
Expectedly, we got about half the seats we were aiming for.
The very next day, the leader of the coalition resigned from that position. Even though she's a great minister (making policy), she's proven she isn't good at keeping the aparatus under control in order to achieve good results (doing politics). It's a painful process, but a necessary one where mistakes and short-comings must be admitted in order to grow into something more virtuous.
Having read US liberals for years, I grow more and more convinced that they're instinctively hostile to constructive criticism of their party's aparatus. And, when your country's voters declare themselves to agree far more with your party's policies than those of their direct opponent, and yet they can't bury their opponent into irrelevance, you have to admit that your party is doing electoralism wrong, and must question why.
TIL Dems are responsible for the EC, FPTP instead of proportional representation for Congress, the cap on number of representatives, gerrymandering, the decades of propaganda, Southern Strategy and so on. Thank you for informing me.
Yeah I ultimately do not like their choices. They have to run candidates who will win the swing states because a cult of rabid idiots who have more voting power per person than the rest of us consistently and reliably show up and vote entirely Repub from top to bottom of the ballot.
I mean, sure, fire the heads of the party and put new people in. Fuck 'em. But they aren't going to be able to win just by running candidates who appeal to the majority of the country, because the majority of the country's votes are diluted since they reside in densely populated cities. That's a sickening reality we all have to deal with.
This is a truly terrible take. If I run a restaurant, and it goes out of business, I don't get to blame my customers. If I ever want to run a successful restaurant, I have to look at my product, marketing, and service and figure out where I failed. If Biden loses, then the Dems need to look at where they failed; I'd start with the fact that they chose not to hold a primary when the majority of their own party didn't want Biden to be the candidate.
This is a bad analogy. This isn't like running a business. Voters don't have a lot of choice over the product, they just have their vote. We have two choices (effectively) and some will reject a candidate over a single issue when the consequences are much broader.
You're right, it's not a good analogy. In this country, voting is not mandatory, election day isn't a holiday, and in many states, mail-in voting is not available and polling locations are sparse. Voting is a hardship for many Americans, especially lower income Americans. This isn't like asking someone to go to a restaurant; going to a restaurant is easier and has more tangible benefits.
However, my core point is the same. The most basic function of a political party is to get votes and win elections. If the party can't do that, the failure lies with the party, not the voters.
It's as if a town has the choice of having one restaurant and only one restaurant. We have one that meekly attempted to do right by their customers and fell short, or the other that actively tries to harm some of its customers (often your family and friends).
You only have those 2 choices. You can't get a different restaurant. You're forced to eat at the restaurant that is chosen, whether you helped choose it or not. And yes, you can blame the customers because they have literally only this option, and there is no better choice this time.
Let's fix your fixing of my analogy. Imagine the two restaurants you mentioned exist. Now imagine thinking the people who don't go out to eat are entitled.
And yeah, I know you're going to tell me that elections have consequences for everyone, whether they vote or not, but most people who don't vote don't see it that way. Sure, a small percentage of them are withholding their vote as a protest, but most of them are working class people that are barely getting by. They're not going waste what little free time they have voting for a candidate if they don't think it will help them. So stop trying to shame them into voting and give them something to vote for.
Democrats always try to straddle the fence of keeping the status qou and slowly advancing civil rights and worker protection, all the while always protecting corporate interest.
Republicans give ZERO shits about civil rights or worker rights and are balls deep in corporate money, but they keep selling themselves by pushing culture wars and pretending to be "for the people" because "tax cuts"
The average voter is dumb as shit and swallows the Republican bullshit readily because it absolves them of any blame. It's always someone else's fault, the gays, the blacks the immigrants... There is always someone to blame.
So yea... We have two parties, one center right and one batshit crazy right.
Idiots seem to not understand that if you want politics to move more left you have to defeat the far right nut jobs, you aren't going to go left by refusing to vote democrat because they are not left enough for you. You need to put pressure on the Republicans so they have to move back towards the center, then Democrats will be forced to move more left.
But this is already too much text and nuance for the average voter so they'll keep screaming about both sides and "I'd like to have a beer with x..."
Literally more people voted for Gore than Bush. Not sure what you expect the voters to do when they vote and the court just chooses the other guy
Maybe their positions were ok and the massive proven amounts of dark money had an effect? Maybe the obvious and admitted attempt at interference was successful, as they’ve been crowing for years? Nah…must be bad messaging from the dems
An attack on the capitol in 2000 would have been legitimate and justified defense of the nation after watching a Repub SCOTUS decide an election for the Repubs.
The moment Clinton announced Al Gore as his running mate he lost my vote. I was very familiar with Tipper Gore and the PMRC and had even read her book "Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society"*
There was no way I was going to vote for anyone remotely related to her to be in the White House. It was the first election I had participated in. I do not regret this vote because Clinton still became president and things didn't work out for various reasons.
These days that book couldn't even get published. The page count was too small. You can't get a book that is less than 300 pages published anymore as a standalone thing through major publisher. This should make you question how much filler there is in current nonfiction books.
I've never understood how so many voters could earnestly think that increasing the overall amount of condescension would ever actually net them more allies & supporters.
People still underestimate the damage the GWB presidency has done to the US' international standing and the living conditions of the average citizen. But sure, Gore was a huge bore with a giant stick up his arse.
On this site it's kinda hard to tell. A lot of people think that voting should just be checking the box beside the name of someone that agrees with them 100% and then everything instantly becomes they want it to be the day after the election.
More the Democrats that make-up the DNC who control the voting menu.
Take the case of Howard Dean. Destroyed electorally by the media in 2004, managed to become chair of the DNC, implements the 50 state strategy and Obama wins big.
Dean was the last Democrat marginally willing to adopt a winning strategy and he was destroyed for it. Democratic Speakers of the House, Party Majority Leader, Whips, Chiefs of Staff all vocally and vociferously against him.
He only won them Virginia which has been Blue(ish) since. He had the party do outreach in North Carolina and flipped it for Obama. His strategy even won INDIANA.
Cross reference the states the conservative cutouts are winning in the primaries with whether or not they are swing states and number of EC votes, then get back to us. In 2016, Hillary had more votes in AZ, NV, FL, OH. What do you want to happen for that shit, bank it on states like WV (+42 R) suddenly flipping blue?
Because there isn't an overwhelming swarm of people voting for anyone who isn't Repub, the Dems have to chase the reliable voters, who are more conservative.
It is the voters who are wrong, by staying home election after election or throwing their votes in the trash instead of pushing against the sliding window.
I don't like the Dem choices but IDK what the fuck else they are supposed to do once the primaries start. Running the candidate who wins with Dem voters in swing states makes sense as a strategy.
But don't worry. We the people don't actually get to vote the new fucker in chief into office. We're too dumb. The electoral college composed of some random people who we don't know is the small group that actually gets to vote for the president. Our ballots are just suggestions.
