Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Politics In General Is it too soon to be talking 2020?

She'll introduce a few ideas that will catch the public interest and be picked up by the other candidates including the ultimate future president. So it'll be worth having her in the race even if she doesn't make it out of Iowa.

It should be open to either gender and any race, but I suspect the Democrats should run a White man to get all the misogynistic (men AND women) and secret racists on board. I think there are a lot of both and they may not even realize they are. But in 2016 a lot of White women voted against Hillary and I think it comes down to many women not trusting other women because subconsciously they see them as rivals. Now with Trump in charge, a lot of misogyny and racism has been "allowed", or even encouraged.

Too bad we are not as good as we should be, because having a woman as President would probably be a great improvement.

I think that's how it's gonna turn out this time around anyway, PIA, we had a black guy for two terms and ran a woman last time, the Democratic Party is not entirely made up of POC and women nor is it mandatory for them to run non-white and non-male candidates just to prove that they are more diverse than the Republicans.

Were gunna need a bigger car......

The left coast inna house!

Good-bye Bernie

(Originally published on Facebook)
JEFFERY HAAS·WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2, 2019

I've probably exhausted every available Bernie thread on the internet lately to say the same thing...

When Bernie was a young man, doing carpentry and odd jobs, and giving the occasional impassioned speech or doing the occasional sit-in, social democracy or democratic socialism was a very romantic thing for an intellectual Jewish transplant from Brooklyn to do in the wilds of Vermont.

Imagine it for a moment...



Your young bespectacled sweaty face plastered across the front page of the local paper, taking the town of Burlington by storm, your impassioned rhetoric swelling the bosoms of erudite young coeds, winning the local election and trying to make good on a few erstwhile and yet earnest entreaties to fair wages and decently affordable tuition.

Yep, democratic socialism or social democracy, whichever it was, must have been a huge rush for the young Bernie Sanders, because for a guy like that, being a regular old Democrat in 1971 meant you were a lot more like the past candidates of the Democratic Party, which meant you were a lot more like Hubert Humphrey or George McGovern, which meant that you were like one of the guys who lost to Richard Milhous Nixon. It meant that you were like one of the establishment, and in early 1970's Vermont, where it was still very much The Sixties, that wasn't something you wanted to be.

The fact is, Bernie Sanders stopped being a social democrat or democratic socialist the day he first set foot on Capitol Hill.
It's not because he became a sellout or a hypocrite, it's because the Democratic Socialists of America have never allowed themselves to field candidates for the House, the Senate or the White House. It's just not in their DNA for some reason.

And as you might want to point out, Bernie has been an FDR style liberal New Deal Democrat his entire life in the House and Senate.
That is what he is. But Bernie clings to old romantic notions and sentimental trappings.

A lot of ex-hippies underwent much more radical transformations, and found themselves on Wall Street as financial consultants, or in Silicon Valley, or in the halls of neocon think tanks the way former campus radical Elliot Abrams did.

And yet despite their three piece suits, many of them left one tiny tuft of long hair tucked under their collar to remind them every so often that they can still "let their freak flag fly".
They still want to be nonconformist, just not in a threatening or scary way.

And for Bernie, refusing to join the Democratic Party and running around pronouncing himself a democratic socialist means that he can tell himself that he's still the brash iconoclastic non-conformist...and not a sentimental old fool, because only a sentimental old fool would pass up repeated opportunities to completely overturn and rebuild the Democratic Party in his own image, literally making the DNC "HIS BITCH".

And if anyone doubts that is possible, I might remind them that Mr. Sanders raised almost 300 million dollars with zero corporate funding, purely through grass roots techniques at a time when everyone else said it was impossible.

Flipping the DNC and making the party his own would have been a walk in the park, given his considerable mojo and charisma, and given the fact that he could have started the effort all the way back in 2008, after another young and brash nonconformist with the funny name of Barack Hussein Obama did much the same to Hillary Clinton.
And had he bothered to do so, Bernie Sanders would have BEEN the Democratic candidate for POTUS in 2016 and Hillary would have been munching on popcorn in upstate New York.

And Donald Trump would have been a minor footnote in history, because Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders would have won by a landslide.

So, as much as I love Bernie Sanders, I am forced to reckon with the fact that Bernie, despite some of his good ideas, is a sentimental old fool. And I voted for him and supported him right from the very first day he announced, so this is not a hate piece against him, it is more of a mournful revelation about what might have been and was not meant to be, all because of the need to cling to silly notions of the past, which is what we must stop doing if we intend to win in 2020.

Good-bye Bernie.

Obvious trolling.
Bernie understands politics. Populist politics.
Hillary did not.
Obama did but, as Trump learned from, it can be phoney and you can get away with it.
The Democratic Party is a party of the top 10%. The credentialed class. Lanyard People in today's economy. All they do is talk about 'access to' or 'opportunities for'. The language is easy to spot. Always indirect. Always some vague meriticratic language with inevitable means testing limitations.
Democrats have been the party of the credentialed professional class. The technocrats. They hate populism and have a disdain for the working class. They went to the right schools, made the right career choices, made the right life choices. They're exemplars of meritocracy.
They're also hawkish. Eternally trying to pick up votes from the right wing by running Vets and military officers as some kind of bona fides on their willingness to use state violence. To prove they have balls to the mythical moderate republicans and to signal to the world their foriegn policy approach.
Economically they are neoliberal. Pathologically preferring a 'market' oriented solution to social problems. A tax incentive as opposed to direct action thru the state with most of the benefits accruing to their 10% constituents, austerity and harsh disciplining for the rest. They brought about the largest incarceration system the world has seen and militarized the police force to enforce imposed order on the swollen working class and poor.
They treat politics as a brandind exercise and product rollout. Always trying to come up with the right and necessary ingredients of aspirational tone and a smattering of rhetoric borrowed from the left, with an appropriate dose of virtue signaling to the right and donor class. All left oriented talk is forgotten once elected.
It was not nor should it be Sanders job to reform the Democratic Party. That's not politics nor how it works, is not possible to do and is a red herring you've concocted Jeff. Instead Sanders gave voters alternative rather than embarking on some kind of mythical internal party identity loyalty and some kind of follow on reform criteria you insist must be met. Much easier and effective to offer a viable alternative to the self reinforcing party hierarchy. It sure wasn't the corporate takeover path Jeff, so where do you find evidence that it should be for the left?
In the end, Sanders addressed peoples material concerns with bold direct policy proposals. The establishment candidate, caught flat footed and unprepared for this political challenge and having nothing to counter with, reminiscent of her campaigns tactics with Obama, she fell back on dog whistles, scorn and back room dealing to clinch the nomination.
She went down to the Republican challenger who used a different and darker kind of populism. Phony populism to be sure but effective. What's ironic was the fact that the Republican Party, displaying far more democratic tendencies within it, allowed the democratic nominating process play out regardless of the outcome. Centrists Dems will never admit to this nor condemn the corruption within uthe very undemocratic Drmocratic party. Sadly ironic and one wonders how much pearl clutching and Muellar investigation hyperventilating would be going on right now if it was found out that POTUS had engaged in similar financial skulduggery with the RNC before the election.
What's telling is the willfull ability of the Democratic Party to not learn. They have committed themselves to neoliberalism and are not going back to the politics of their parents. They helped dismantle the New Deal and are not looking back nor questioning the wisdom of doing so. They represent the lanyards. The self described creative class, the 'innovators' and entrepreneurs. They have turned their backs on the losers of this Chicago economy. Labor, working class, minorities and the poor.
The hard right has been stripping them off for decades while the lanyards have been showing them the door.
It would not be possible to reform these greed heads Jeff. It not Sanders job. Your insistance that Sanders tilt at windmills by bending the knee to the lanyards is a fallacy and serve no useful purpose. He has unleashed an awareness of a different kind of politics. One the party has largely spurned and, to its horror, has been found appealing with broad popular support. It turns out laissez faire economics sucks and austerity for most has a political down side.
Instead of embracing Sanders positions the party, from its recent actions, is looking to maintain its ideological grip and is looking for some kind of Sanders killer in the race for 2020. A combination of virtue signaling to Sanders base but ideologically committed to the Lanyards as Bill, Hillary and Obama.

In the interest of fair and balanced posting, let me also throw in an image of your champion as the left and right see it:

So you're saying that it is not a candidate's job to RE-FORM a party, and yet what did Trump do? It's exactly what he did, it's exactly what the Tea Party did, and it's exactly what Roosevelt did in his time or do you actually believe that the Democrats of the Wilsonian era were similar to Roosevelt?

It is not possible to do? Talk about mythical, let's explore the mythical and the viable. What's mythical about third party POTUS electability, aside from damn near everything?
What's viable about an alternative that has not and cannot seem to win elections?

And please, just because you vehemently disagree with my prior essay, that doesn't mean it is trolling. I would never dream of labeling you a troll. Keep it classy.

I'll tell you what trolling is. It's plastering a picture of Hillary and labeling it "my champion" when I've clearly stated she was not.

It just dawned on me that a LOT of the stuff being argued about has to do with privatization. Healthcare for all, for instance, is antithetical to privatization so is not deemed right for polite society. This is also true when discussing money in politics. What we have, right now, is a voting system completely in the grips of 'privatization'. As far as I can tell, the error seems to be in those things that should never be privatized. Some of those things are politics, war, healthcare, education, police, and firemen. When that stuff gets privatized then the only people who win are the very, very rich. They are the only ones who have the bucks to pay for the 'best'. Their schools are very good but grossly over priced. Same with their private police, doctors and even their political candidates.

I think what I am suggesting is that privatization has gone MUCH further than it should have a number of years ago and its continuing to this day as the very rich continue their onslaught on what should be free to citizens and provided by all citizens as part of the public good. The interesting thing is that the supposed members of the 'democratic socialists' are not supporting the socialization of this stuff so much as making the privatized stuff available to them that can't pay the bills for it. I find it all very strange. The fact that socializing stuff that everybody needs also means that everybody gets to pay for this stuff. For some unknown reason the 'democratic socialists' seem to believe that all this stuff falls from the skies which seems to me to be at least as bad as the privatization itself.

If you want healthcare for all then the 'all' has to be part of the solution - just not a bunch of 1 percenters. If, again for instance, healthcare will be provided for all then this means that, unless we are to be bankrupt in about 2 years, we need to take control of a bunch of greed businesses. Drugs and Healthcare machine producers come to mind. Basically, to provide healthcare for all the entire healthcare industry, lock stock and barrel, needs to be seriously either taken over and regulated. No more healthcare insurance, that's just an expense that we don't need anymore and the revolving door of the FDA goes away. Gov also continues to gather data and will have to also control just what healthcare does and is. In that regard they should regulate medical procedures based on outcomes. We currently have a system where there are a number of procedures that just don't work. (google "healthcare procedures that don't work" for a list of some of them)

What I am saying is that I think that most of the arguments are over stuff that makes no sense and are more distraction than anything else. Healthcare is consumed by the problems of having a system of healthcare for profit. THAT is the problem! All the rest is, basically, a distraction. Same with schools. In Washington state there is a school district that is out of money. They can't build, they they can't hire more teachers, they have no money. In the last election the PARENTS of the children, in the school system, didn't vote (something like 18% actually voted). People blame the school districts even though the voters (those actually in charge) could actually fix the problem if they actually voted. This is my reason that I think that voting should be mandatory. Seems that the voter in the U.S.A. just can't take time out, from their incredibly important lives, to do the basics and actually vote! This is, I think, a pretty basic problem and if we can't fix that one then all the rest is just a given, ie. we give up and depend on 'the lord' to make it all right (them who take care of themselves now only have myth value)

So, basically, we are a lazy people, unwilling to actually embrace any thought of being responsible for our own actions or lack thereof. If this doesn't get fixed I fear its all gonna come down around our heads.

Well Jeff I'm not sure what to make of it but a bespeckled sweaty faced transplant intellectual jew that is now a sentimental old fool kinda feels like trolling to a Sanders supporter but if that wasen't your intention then I apologize. Dog whistling?

It's amazing how relentless you are in condemning Sanders for his refusal to bend the knee or failing to remake the Democratic party in his own image.
No, it's not his responsibility. I don't even know what that means or what that would look like. Would he have to buy it with his 3oo million? Does he go Oprah with a 'you have a new car and YOU have a new car!'. Tell me what making the Democratic party a bitch looks like or mean.
It does divert coversation away from Sanders political position that's challenged the governing power for decades though. I don't know if that's your intention or not. Should any outside challenger remake a political party before running "as a"?

Franklin was a class traitor. A rare thing in politics from the top. He understood his people well and, I believe, knew how to manage them better than any democrat since. Opportunities were unique to his time but you could easily compare his administration to Obama's and draw your own comparison. Franklin didn't have a Gietner in his cabinet and hated Harvard men. It's remarkable how much he didn't allow bankers to craft economic policy. Not so with Obama.

Again, this centrist vs. socialist posting war is futile and can't be won. I really don't understand where your coming from with all the qualifiers you insist on from Sanders. You seldom talk of his record or ideas preferring credentialing and qualifying.