The Transition of Joe Biden: what's everyone Yellen about?

I hope you’ll consider a donation to the Unstuck PAC forming soon. We may not be experts at political digital advertising by the time the GA runoffs come around, but at least we’ll be doing digital advertising for Dems.

Instead they’re going with:

Donald is holding up the transition and it’s going to kill some of you. Give us protection money, or we’re going to let him do it.

Looks like Tony Blinken is the favorite to be Secretary of State, but Chris Coons is in the mix.

I don’t think Blinken would be a popular pick around here, but he seems immensely competent and having the private equity guy at State instead of around domestic policy is a silver lining.

On the other hand I’d be thrilled if he picked Coons, as we’d have a decent shot at getting a more progressive Dem senator in there. Lisa Blunt Rochester would have to be the favorite, and she’s in the Progressive Caucus and her voting record is a 95% match with AOC and 98% with Pramila Jayapal. As a point of reference, Pelosi and AOC are a 91% match. Don’t want to overstate it as there is obviously vast agreement on a lot of stuff throughout the caucus.

Unfortunately the 2-5% includes the GND and M4A, but Coons is a huge believer in moderate bipartisanship so she would at least be a step up over him.

1 Like

And here I thought I was in the transition thread instead of the leftist memes thread

1 Like

13 Likes

This is really dumb. It’s time to fight the Dems AND fight the GOP. If not now when.

Calls for permanent fidelity to dems is exactly why we end up with weak politicians like Pelosi in office so much.

7 Likes

This is just patently wrong if people put in the actual work to shift the party.

2 Likes

Oh I agree that should be the plan of action. Whether or not it would actually work is where I have my doubts. The DemE crowd is deeply deeply entrenched. Successfully primarying enough of them to matter is likely several election cycles off so calling that “patently wrong” seems like a complete misunderstanding of how the Dem primaries have been going the last few cycles. Many have been primaried by progressives and most of the incumbents have won, in many cases by wide margins.

I mean hell the 2020 presidential primary pretty clearly showed that the progressive wing is a significant minority in the party. So I’m not really sure what imminent hope for progressives exists. We don’t have the power structure or the voters.

Preet!

I totally disagree with this. I think the Dem E politicians have never been weaker overall or worse led. I’m not saying that the thing we build now won’t be as weak and inept as they are when we all get old, but it’s definitely definitely time to do the necessary court intrigue to make these fossils leave.

There’s a reason why half of the stories about power struggles through history aren’t between different countries but different generations of the same countries elite. Let the battle begin IMO.

When we take these people out it’ll look like AOC bludgeoning Crowley not Bernie taking on Biden. I don’t care if our attacks risk helping the GOP in the general, our primaries should be very oriented towards survival of the fittest. Every old incumbent has to win a hard campaign every single cycle until they start mirroring us instead of expecting us to mirror them.

The Tea Party demonstrated how efficiently you can bend an establishment ‘I just want to get reelected’ politician into a pretzel. If they can get their politicians to endorse ending Democracy and the insanely cushy setup they’ve built for themselves out of our Democracy’s many flaws, we can get ours to nationalize healthcare, give the citizenry UBI, and end mass incarceration. Our shit is actually popular.

1 Like

[quote=“StimAbuser, post:186, topic:3125, full:true”]and
refusal to actually help their base.
[/quote]

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the make up of the dem base. Seems like we need to settle on this first if we are going to shift the party.

I agree with Wichita. Many people here assume the American electorate is far more progressive than it really which leads to poor political tactics.

Perhaps it’s not dems we need to shit but the electorate.

Edit: I don’t understand why the first quote didnt work?

Shifting the electorate is an important step. AOC getting on twitch to play Among Us I thought was brilliant in that regard. There needs to be an effort to deprogram the older Dem voters who are automatically turned off by anything resembling the S word.

2 Likes

It’s critical to remember that people’s views about things are largely shaped by the media, the culture, and their personal experiences. So if we want the electorate to move there are ways to do that.

I think this seems really obvious when I type it, but forgetting that people’s minds can actually be changed is where the Democrats went terribly wrong. My whole life I’ve watched establishment Dems try to triangulate what the voters want right now and give it to them. You see this in the relentless polling and the even more relentless use of that polling to discourage real action in any direction (because there are 360 degrees of options on a flat field and policy is definitely at least 3 dimensional, which means that reasonable people are going to disagree pretty widely on this stuff and a consensus is probably not ever going to happen before action is taken) by people whose bets on the status quo are paying out handsomely.

In real life there are times when my wife and I disagree about what we should do next. Then the person whose domain it actually is has the final say. We both have quite a few areas where we get the last word because we’re ultimately responsible for whatever happens in that category (In my opinion if you’re the one who will be blamed if something goes wrong you should absolutely have the last word on it). What inevitably happens is that one of the paths gets taken and it either works or it doesn’t and based on that we snap back to agreement pretty quickly. This happens with politics as well, which means that the correct thing to be doing is acting and then adjusting over and over again as you figure out what works and what doesn’t.

I’m pretty convinced the reason the country is drifting so widely apart and becoming so polarized is that nothing is getting done. There’s no way to tell who is right, and as a result there’s just an endless drift apart. It’s as though my wife and I disagree about something really big, like whether or not we want to have kids, and the disagreement just sits there and simmers. The marriage probably doesn’t survive that TBH.

Mitch has gotten the stuff he considered important done, but in the process he’s created this weird period where the federal government has been hugely eroded and hasn’t been able to correct any issues or try anything new in over a decade. I have no idea how we get back to the road from here, but where we are right now is at the bottom of a ravine.

8 Likes

i see that meme everywhere. What is it from originally? It looks so famliar.

6d0

17 Likes

Progressives may not be popular but their policies are. The majority of dems support M4A. People are dumb though. Berlie lost the election because people are dumb. I remember in NC something like 70% of democratic primary voters supported M4A, and I think numbers were similar in every state.

Yes people aren’t ready to support progressive because they’re new, young, scary, incumbents have a huge advantage, people knew and trusted Biden, were scared Bernie would lose because socialism etc. Also I think Bernie not being religious lost him a ton of the minority vote.

But many progressive policies are super popular. You don’t think if Centrist dems passed M4A it wouldn’t end up being the most popular thing they’ve EVER done?

And again I’m not even talking about them being more progressive, I’m fine with the campaign promises joe made, I’m talking about competence. These fucking ghouls are terrible and lost us the senate and are going to lose us both again by even wider margins in 2022.

As I said pick centrists, but pick competent ones. Stacy Abrams leading the DNC would be perfect, she’s a centrist, but she’s competent and knows how to win. These current ghouls don’t.

4 Likes

The thing that happened that you all say was ok is exactly the reason the primaries aren’t on the same day. Super tuesday was big enough to have the same exploitable flaw though.

Bonus points for forgetting that there was a, uh, fucking pandemic that cut the primaries short. And that they never bothered finishing the texas count. And etc.

The thing Chomsky got wrong is that the media isnt even necessary; people manufacture their own consent because they want it that way.

3 Likes

I voted for Bernie in 2016 and 2020, love the guy, think he would have been a great president. I wish more Americans agreed with me.

Understanding the difference between what I want and the reality of the the country that I live in is not “manufacturing my own consent.” It’s just acknowledging the frustrating reality. Chapo sucks when they don’t do this and they’re better when they do.

I mean, at its core, how is this argument about Bernie any different than STOP THE STEAL?

3 Likes