I am as far from a left-wing radical as it’s possible to be, and I even have a lot of sympathy for the notion that no one really has the power to wedge Biden out of the nomination if he chooses to go down with the ship. I even sort of understand if people don’t want to talk too much about the fact that Biden is a terrible nominee because he’s the nominee we’ve got.
But I really cannot tolerate these transparently bullshit lines about how bypassing Harris is unthinkable because she’s a woman of color or this Ohio nonsense means that it’s madness to have a convention. Or the thing about campaign finance law that I have no direct understanding of, but I can tell it’s a lie based solely on who talks about it and the way they talk about it.
I don’t get too worked up about garden-variety political massaging of the truth, but the kind of brazen dishonesty we’re seeing from Biden die-hards is a different thing.
It’s not about her being a woman of color, it’s about a Political Process that bestows a sense of legitimacy to the power the candidate holds if elected.
The days of Open Conventions as a legitimate means to select a candidate have passed us by. For better or worse, we have a much more open Primary System where the voters of that party accept the nominee because it was done through a Democratic selection process.
Bernie voters would have been absolutely apoplectic had 2016 and 2020 had no Primary System whatsoever and the delegates at the convention just nominated Hillary and Biden. As much as the Bernie contingent can say that the party swayed the primaries, everybody still got a vote and Hillary and Biden won legitimate elections to be nominated.
At this stage in the game, the sitting Vice President and the current Vice Presidential nominee on the President’s ticket is the only person who has a sense of legitimacy to be the replacement candidate if the President steps down. We require a longer process to determine that in an open Democratic process than we have time for at this stage.
Yeah it’s a characteristically radical perspective that they think the most important thing about people who want to tear up the existing system and fundamentally transform it is the specific characteristics of the imagined system they want to build.
Similar to right after the debate when she came in saying how we couldn’t even change him on the ballot because state laws and all kinds of stuff even tho he wasn’t even nominated yet and she knew this cause she knows these things and turns out that was all bull and it can definitely be changed before the convention obviously.
I get what she’s being told but feel like probably being told that by Biden die hards
Kamala Harris was not selected as Vice President by a democratic process. Yes, the Biden-Harris ticket was elected, but this is not really any different to saying that if the DNC were to decide on a new candidate at an open convention, voters would have the opportunity to approve or not approve of that candidate at the general election. The objection “but this is the only option voters who wanted to vote Democrat were given!” applies equally to the election of Harris as VP.
Whether the legitimacy questions outweigh Harris’s weakness as a candidate is something I’m agnostic about. To me it doesn’t really matter as it’s a question of political viability within the party. If support can be obtained behind Harris as a unity candidate then that’s what should happen, if support can be obtained for a brokered convention then that’s what should happen. The important thing is getting rid of Biden, however that can most easily be accomplished.
The legitimacy argument just smacks of the same old game where democrats self-impose rules that don’t actually exist. It reminds me of the football coach who has to ESTABLISH THE RUN.
Not a perfect analogy, but in 2008 you heard lots of arguments about why Hillary had to be the nominee, despite polls consistently showing that Obama would fare better in the general. She has more experience, ipso facto she’s the better and safer candidate. We know how that turned out.
So yeah, I’m highly, highly skeptical that general election voters will care one iota about the legitimacy issue. Particularly in this case where Biden/Harris didn’t “win” any kind of competitive primary.
Everyone should lay off Sky. She is not the reason we are in the mess and if we have any shot of beating trump we need people like her to not second guess the koolaid they are drinking.
We need as much enthusiasm as possible.
Trump vs Biden is just professional wrestling.
The down ballots are going to be way more important for the next 2-4 years.
to the extent this is true, it’s a wild system if it stays true even when all the priors change or because the key info was withheld from us. In 2019 part of the reason everyone didn’t lose their mind was because of the strong implication from Biden—and the explicit statements of some of his supporters—that this would be a one-term deal and would serve as a bridge to the next person.
but way worse is learning that for the last year minimum the president of the united states and his inner circle of pantsless burn victims has been methodically hiding his mental decline from the people of the united states i.e. the 150 million actual people who are more or less trying to make an informed decision. I know that folks rightly get antsy when you start throwing around words like treachery, but to me that’s getting in the ballpark
it’s about a Political Process that bestows a sense of legitimacy to the power the candidate holds if elected.
playing a shell game with your two-term aspirations as an 81yo and then squelching all debate about your candidacy, while at the same time concealing that your brain is softening into a circus peanut (a pertinent if tasty fact that, if known before an Open Political Process, would get you yeeted into the potomac) seems like the sort of thing that should make a sense of legitimacy go poof. It has for me, anyway. Who cares about a sense of legitimacy if it hangs on a lie?
