You’re missing my point. I do support him because I have the ability to realize no candidate will 100% perfectly align with every single thing I believe. I also understand that someone in politics for decades will have voted and/or held positions that differ because, you know, everybody on earth is allowed to change their mind except for politicians.
You call it pandering for ONE reason. You don’t like Biden. If it was someone you like changing their position it would be “he was convinced to adopt a new position after being shown new data”.
Also, let’s concede it is pandering. Why should I care if it results in a policy I like getting support or even enacted? You think the people who go bankrupt in a few years and are protected are going to say “no thanks, that was all just pandering”?
Isn’t Biden just a weathervane though? Like deregulation and the crime bill, even the Iraq War, those were popular at the times he supported them. So I wouldn’t view this as pretending so much as him being for something that has become mainstream and popular.
I call it pandering because I think he’s lying. No idea why you believe him right now under these circumstances in a primary where he just got finished trying to hold the center and now needs to try to get progressives on board all of a sudden supported Warren’s bankruptcy reforms and all of a sudden had a big change of heart.
You aren’t living in the real world. You aren’t looking at these people in these situations at this moment and analyzing it. You’re basically just pulling shit out of your ass, and because that’s what you are doing, you just assume I’m doing the same.
No. He was a leader on the Iraq and crime bills. And he wasn’t campaigning then. He was doing his Senator job. He was trying to get other senators to vote along with him. Now he’s just trying to get rubes to vote for him.
Look at people’s votes (and donors), not their stump speeches.
Sorry micro I’m not the one pulling shit out of my ass or not living in the real world.
I’m the one who knows a politician needs to build a coalition to win and since the time of Ancient Athens they have done so by adopting some of the positions of their opponents.
This idea some people have that not voting against Trump is a step toward fixing the rot is really stupid. The only way to fix the rot in Democratic party is in the primaries and be more active in the party and it’s machinery. The fact is, despite online people overwhelmingly supporting Bernie, his online base can’t be trusted to show up at the polls. The Biden constituency can be trusted. So either win those people over, get more involved at state and local level, or find a way to drive turnout in 4 years.
4 more years of Trump and Republican power just leads to further demotivation of minorities and oppressed groups, more overt voter suppression and complete partisanship of the supreme court. It doesn’t accelerate a reset of the system, there’s not going to be another French revolution in the 2020s with modern propaganda and modern technology available to governments. The only chance to turn the country around is to get Democrats into power and prevent further damage from the boomer generation as their voting power dies off over the next 4 or 8 years and hope that as millennial generation ages they turn out better and shift the party left again.
FWIW, I’ve seen articles (538? I forget) which suggest that politicians generally do try to deliver on campaign promises. Whether they were pandering or not. I don’t think it’s entirely wrong to be suspicious of motives, but it’s probably not entirely right either. Getting candidates to say they support a policy probably does contribute to the likelihood of that policy being enacted, regardless of motivation.
In some sense (and I’m sure I’m stealing this idea from someone else) politicians changing their minds to support something just because now that something is more popular is democracy working as designed.
I mean, I’d still rather we nominated someone that wasn’t Joe Biden, but ceteris paribus him pandering on progressive issues is probably better than the alternative?
Biden becoming POTUS after promising to good stuff is probably better than Biden becoming POTUS after not promising to do good stuff. But it’s more relevant right now that Biden becoming POTUS sucks. And, while an awful person who promises to do good may be better than an awful person who doesn’t, the world in which people vote for people who actually hold good positions is a better world and giving people credit for being smart politicians (lying) is bad overall.
I don’t get to vote until June (maybe?) but yeah. I’m going to vote for Bernie. It seems unlikely to matter though. So I agree with your point in general but I’m not sure it’s too early for the question in the thread title.
No, I don’t think that. Particularly not socialists. I think that over the last 20 years the Democratic party has moved substantially to the left, and that is largely to the credit of progressive activists, and in the last 6 years to Bernie. But I’m not sure there’s anything you’re going to do that’s going to cause a complete transformation of the party. I think Bernie is basically right when he says that this sort of transformation requires a much larger (read: more popular) social movement. I’m not sure how likely that is to materialize or not.
I also think that in the long run the most likely way the left could gain more power in US politics involves changes to the electoral system that weaken the two-party system, i.e. changes to first-past-the-post voting which would make third parties more viable.
