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Open thread! It’s Super Tuesday here in the US. Discuss today’s primaries, the evil that is Trump, politics in general.
I agree it’s great that Clinton has expanded her lead by 11 more delegates!
@katz
And it’s great to know that not only was it done by outperforming the polls by a large margin, it also means that the gap is closing! After all, I fail to see the utter crushings of defeat of Super Tuesday, with the reporters claiming the end of the line!
It also means that combined with Hillary consistently losing her standing in the national polls and the rate of which people have switched their supports to bernie, I can easily see a win.
Plus as a petty note your
candidate can’t seem to win tiebreakers without having her hubby practically toss the rules aside during Super Tuesday! Also CNN, stop trying to hide Bernie under one Clinton win.
Very uncomfortable seeing a female political candidate’s husband referred to as her “hubby,” particularly in the context of him supposedly helping her out in some way.
I’m not saying whether Bill Clinton did or didn’t help her in some way; or if he did, whether it was fair. I just find that phrasing very dismissive of women as individuals and not just extensions of men.
@OoglyBoggles
Clinton added to her daunting delegate lead, but, yes, Sanders can gain some momentum if he outperforms polls on March 8 and March 15. He needs to win at least one state, preferably more, and he needs to limit the blowout losses to Mississippi.
I personally don’t think he will pull that off but we’ll all find out together in nine days. If Hillary adds to her lead on March 15 then Sanders has no realistic way of overcoming a 200+ delegate deficit.
Even if he has blowout wins in Wisconsin and Washington (which is likely to happen), manages to win California (which is unlikely to happen), and win New York and Pennsylvania (which will not happen) it won’t be enough.
They aren’t running for national poll wins, they’re running in Democratic primaries and caucuses.
@OoglyBoggles
3 states? Kansas, Nebraska, and…? Maine hasn’t voted yet, and he definitely didn’t win Louisiana.
I think you’ll find that Bernie peaked around Feb 20 and has been losing ground in the national polls since then.
Plus what brooked said, national polls really don’t matter in a primary season.
I can’t tell if OoglyBoggles is a BernieBro or just acting like one in the world’s most confusing attempt to gotcha-troll us.
(Also, I totally missed Jeff K’s clarification from four days and two pages ago. Oops. Anyway: Ah, understood! Apologies, I think Oogly’s behaviour in this thread is making me dumber.)
I think Sanders is starting to show his true colours. At first I thought he was a decent bloke, albeit a bit out of his depth. However he completely dismissed some perfectly reasonable questions about cruelty in farming with a laugh and “Americans like bacon”. I can’t comment about what I think of that without breaching the comments policy and risking a visit from the Secret Service.
Now he’s done this:
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/06/politics/bernie-sanders-republican-debates-mental-health/
I was hoping Hillary would win because she’s highly competent and clearly the only credible candidate, but now I’m actively hoping she rubs Sanders face in it.
… At this point, I should really just go ahead and carve my Spongebob GIF on the moon, huh. Ergh.
Stupid and shitty comment by Sanders.
Just out of curiousity, are we really pretending as if the other candidates never said anything shitty?
Err… Who? I’m not. o.O If they never said anything shitty, they wouldn’t be politicians.
@M:
I absolutely do not have a giant space laser, but if I did then you could totally borrow it.
@ IP
It’s tricky isn’t it? There’s unlikely to be an ‘ideologically pure’ candidate who’s never said anything problematic or stupid. Then we get into the whole ‘better is the enemy of good’ debate again. The thing with Sanders though is that his shtick is that he’s the decent guy; but clearly when you scrape the surface it’s just an act.
I’m still fuming over his farming comments though, so I’d better bit comment any further on what I hope happens to him.
It was mostly a response to Alan, who said this:
As if you couldn’t make exactly the same argument in the opposite direction.
@ IP
It is tricky isn’t it? There’s unlikely to be an ‘ideologically pure’ candidate who’s never said anything problematic or stupid. Then we get into that ‘perfect is the enemy of good’ debate again. But Sanders entire shtick is that he’s meant to be the decent guy. Scratch below the surface though and we see that’s a lie.
I’m fuming with him because of his farming comments. Not just the comments themselves but the completely dismissive way he laughed off the questions. It showed that he was willing to openly treat people with contempt rather than piss off the big farming industry moguls. I’d be interested to see how much money they’ve paid towards his campaign.
Full disclosure: I’ve always thought Hillary was the better candidate anyway; she just oozes competence. But I thought Sanders might be like a US Jeremy Corbyn; someone who brings a bit of decency and thought back to politics. It’s the disappointment and betrayal as much as anything. At least the others didn’t pretend to be nice.
In all seriousness, one thing that worries me about the general election is that Clinton’s strongest showings have been in states that go red (with notable exceptions including Virginia, a lately “purple” state).
She could carry the democratic vote in all of the red states to no avail if enough of her potential electorate in the purple and blue-ish states are unmotivated enough to either not show up or write in on election day.
Full disclosure (again): I’m a Sanders supporter, but I’ll definitely vote for Clinton if it means voting against Trump or Cruz.
Editing to add: I’d missed some of Sanders apparent crappy comments. Between some medical issues and prepping for a probable international move, I’ve honestly only been grazing info this election.
@Alan
This, in my view, is the problem with a culture that focuses so much on the individual candidate rather than the ideology. I accept that every candidate will say stupid things, and no candidate will be perfect. The question is, do you believe Hillary will do something about factory farming that Bernie wouldn’t? Maybe you do, I don’t know. I see no particular reason to believe this is the case.
EDIT: In many ways, what Bernie’s voters believe matters as much as what Bernie actually believes. Bernie’s voters will expect certain things of him, and Hillary’s voters will expect certain things of her. If Hillary is elected president and there is no particular change in the next 8 years compared to the previous 8, I assume her voters would be ok with that. I don’t think Bernie’s voters would be happy with that.
@ IP
That is a question my friends and I have been discussing a lot since Sanders’ comments. It’s caused quite a split between my friends who work on Sanders’ campaign and my animal rights friends.
In practical terms we were wondering whether Bill Clinton’s role as ‘first husband’ will be a factor. Bill is pretty good on animal rights as you probably know (he’s a vegan now). But I think Hillary wouldn’t have been so crass and dismissive. The Clintons do have that ability to listen to people and at least give the impression that they appreciate their concerns (and personally I think they genuinely mean it, even if they can’t always deliver). Sanders can’t even bring himself to perform lip service when it might affect his standing with big business.
@Alan
Do you have any information on this “big business” angle? I’d be curious to know.
Listening to last nights Dem debate. Gene Kopf, father of the 14 year old girl who was severely injured in the recet Uber driver shooting, asked a very interesting question. I’m paraphrasing, but he asked: What will you do about our problem with mass shootings? And don’t talk about mental health and background checks, because that stuff doesn’t work.
Hillary’s response? Background checks! Gun show loop holes!
This is why I’m so unimpressed with her campaign. She doesn’t seem to have any ideas at all. It’s all an appeal to her experience. We all agree that she’s by far the most experienced candidate in this race, but when she opposes universal health care and free higher education, what does it matter how experienced she is if her experience is leading her in that direction?
And, to be fair, Bernie’s response to this question wasn’t much better.
@ IP
His contemptuous response to the queries was that he was just concerned for American farmers. Now of course there are some small struggling US farmers but, as we’ve been discussing with the food policy thread, agricultural interests carry a lot of clout in US politics.
The irony is he missed a trick. He could have either said that cruelty in farming was something he wanted to address or, even if he just wanted to be cynical, he could have said that he recognised that such issues were important but he was sure that the majority of farmers did try to address these issues.
All he’s done with his response is to acknowledge that US farming is generally cruel but he doesn’t care.
So either he lacks political acumen or he’s just a shit. Seems to me it’s both.
Mockingbird: While that’s a totally reasonable interpretation of the primaries, it turns out the poll evidence points the other way: 79% of Democrats say they’re satisfied with Hillary as a candidate, but only 62% with Bernie. (And the Republicans hate all their choices.)
Because the policies she supports are to the left of the status quo, and her appeal is that her supporters believe she can make the policies she supports happen and Sanders won’t be able to actually accomplish even what Hillary is suggesting. Hillary has been fairly consistent about being slightly left of center and at making slightly left of center things happen. So there’s plenty of people who want Hillary to win despite wanting Sanders’s proposals to happen, because they don’t think Sanders winning will result in a better situation than Hillary winning.
Is it even possible to discuss gun policy rationally in America? What does it say that even very policy-wonkish people like Clinton have to fall back on talking points?
(I’m all in favour of universal confiscation of firearms; but failing that I’d settle for hard data and a discussion of legal liability, neither of which seem to exist.)
The NRA is really powerful and deeply entrenched, to the point that they actually managed to specifically prohibit the US government from collecting hard data. That is not an exaggeration.
So if you’re wondering why the Democrats only push tiny changes, it’s because they haven’t managed to even get those. Universal confiscation is not even remotely on the table.
@ guy
That’s been another major point with my Sanders campaigning friends.
When the issue of electability and ‘not scaring the voters’ with anything too radical has cropped up, their view is that incremental change is something only privileged people can want. Their argument is that, for oppressed categories of people, they can’t afford to wait for things to happen in stages. Of course the counter argument is that it’s better to make accommodations to get at least some change rather than be cast out into the electoral wilderness.
It’s not unlike the debate within the Labour Party here between new labour and the Corbyn wing. Pragmatism is seen as a bit of an anathema to the more ideologically focused. Better to lose on your own terms than ‘win’ but having sold out as it were.
ETA: of course “a week is a long time in politics” so who knows what the voter mindset might be by the time of our next general election. I wouldn’t write Corbyn off. Sanders and Trump have demonstrated that, when the electorate is angry with the system generally, they may well vote for an ‘outsider’ on principle without regard to policies.