Needs a dislike button. This is too much to get into, but there’s no chance you can defend any of this post with facts.
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I, too, am interested in skydiver’s take on that.
While I prefer Warren, the things I prefer from Buttigieg are his commitment to democracy reform (DC & PR statehood, fighting voter suppression and gerrymandering, etc) and the way he is able to think outside the box in branding/messaging as a Democrat.
I’m certainly not gonna say Soros is free from the stink of being an investor. But his foundation does do a lot of things I deem respectable in the world.
Such as the immigration reform and donating $33m to Civil Rights groups as reported in that wiki article.
If you guys want to have the argument billionaires shouldn’t exist or something, that’s another argument.
And to honestly state my position I was for Pete when he emerged as a candidate, but have since moved to Warren as she has adequately addressed my concerns with her. Being the awkward professor type in previous interviews I had seen before she was a candidate.
Bernie is an old man.
If you can’t see that Pete (like the vast majority of presidential candidates through history) is massively ambitious and has been carefully building the kind of resume that gets him into the WH some day I can’t really help you. And my skepticism is malleable. There are lots of scenarios where he does great work for the next 9 years and is the Dem nominee in 2028 with my full throated support.
I’m sorry but I do find insane amounts of ambition followed by a careful tour of corporate/military power into a standard sort of fund raising operation super suspicious. Because it is.
The military doesn’t need to be cut because it’s inefficient. I guess inefficiency should always be cut, sorta, but efficiency in the military might be worse than inefficiency. The military needs to be cut because it does too much, not too little.
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Please tell me one thing that Bernie Sanders has ever admitted he was wrong about. One thing. Because it sure as fuck wasn’t Venezuela or price controls in general.
Venezuela drink!
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Yeah. I like Bernie a little more on some things, and Warren is probably better on policy detail (though that’s overrated - Bill Clinton was great on policy detail - there are plenty of positions in the government below the office of POTUS for details), but Bernie is getting up there and slowing down a bit. As it is I’m equally happy either either of them.
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Realistically, if a Dem wins the presidency in 2020, is your expectation that this person will be a one or two term president? If you think 2 term president, do you think this person would be able to hand off the presidency in 2028 without a huge fight?
What candidates do you think have the highest likelihood of being a 2 term president from this field?
Keep in mind there hasn’t been an electable VP for a president in this country for 19 years. You can debate about Gore being electable since he did actually win, but didn’t assume, but if you do include him as not electable, you have to go back to 1984 for the last time a president had an electable VP.
This time, the VP needs to be someone who could be electable in 8 years, if the president gets 2 terms. This is why I think Pete will most likely be the VP nominee if he doesn’t get the nomination unless the nominee is Biden. Beto was originally angling for VP, but knows that’s not going to happen now. Castro is also someone I’m rooting to become VP. I can’t see Harris ever being a Veep. It’s just not in her arc.
To be clear, I’m not talking about baby killing. I’m saying that we were involved in unjust wars that were making the world a worse place. I can empathize with someone who signed up for the military thinking that they WERE doing good things, but I cannot support that person being president.
I think most people who sign up for the military do so, at least in large part, with good intentions. I think the same thing about police officers. A disproportionate number of both of those groups are also violent, racist, and just generally not great people, and have gravitated towards jobs that reward those tendencies - but there are also plenty of police officers and servicemembers who are great people.
Nobody thinks being a veteran is dishonorable or wrong in any way… And I appreciate that you served our country even. But it does mean that you’re unlikely to agree with my deeply held belief that our military is about 700% too big given our geographical location.
I generally think people sign up for the military for either noble or practical reasons. I won’t be able to find this now, but I read somewhere there was a program run by the military to help people in the very undeveloped world with food and reading and writing and such and the military found that the program was inefficient and not meeting goals for helping the people in the country, but they kept doing it because it was so good for the morale of our troops.
This may be insulting, but I think people who join the military are more naive than immoral and it’s not at all surprising they recruit 17 year olds.
I don’t think we need a particularly electable VP. They should balance out the ticket and help where the nominee is weak with the electorate. If they want to be president in 2028 they can win the primary fair and square.
2024 itself is less important than what we do with the results of a probable wave election in 2020. We need to think like we have 4 years to get a set number of things done, and we need to pick those things very carefully so that we are popular enough to pick up seats in the midterms and 2024 so that we can keep building momentum going forward.
Not with me, and please keep talking about it because that’s what makes this forum better.
Someone up thread said that “we should consider” is a huge tell. I agree. It’s a tell that someone is willing to listen to inputs and form a policy based on those inputs. I am far less likely to trust anyone who says “this is what we’re going to do, no ifs ands or buts.” Because plans change, politics is fluid, and things have consequences that may not be intended or foreseen. This is why Bernie isn’t my number 1 pick.
As someone who has been immersed in conservative spaces most of my life (though, in college and the 2000’s it wasn’t nearly as fucking crazy as it is now), Pete’s ability to speak about progressive values in a way that conservatives and moderates actually listen to is a huge plus in my book. And yes, he’s progressive. “Progressive” and “yelling angrily all the time” are not the same thing.
His approach to dealing with Trump is also spot on. Call out the bad shit, then stop talking about him at all. Turn the convo to how we’re going to restore freedom and democracy and give people a reason to vote FOR us.
Yes, I like that he’s a Rhodes scholar, that he’s a veteran, that he’s a Christian who actually follows the tenets of christianity, and that he refuses to go negative about his fellow candidates. Here’s the thing. On this board and in the far left space, those things might not play well, but in the VAST MAJORITY of the electorate, they do.
As for policy, democratic reform is my number one, because all of the other promises depend on it. No one else is making that their day one issue, the thing they would spend all their political capital on.
I also really like how he frames climate change as a national security issue, because it is.
The only thing about Pete’s campaign I have an issue with is he’s running a general election campaign right now, which gives me a ton of faith that he’d win that in a landslide, but i don’t think relying on never trump republicans and center-right people who say they like him to register dem and vote for him in the primary is a winning primary strategy.
And I know you all are going to quote that part and say “see, moderates like him, he MUST be bad,” well, then you’re part of the problem of divisiveness in this country.
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My main point of that post was to ask you if you think the Dem president is most likely to be one term or two term? If you think two term, who do you think are the most likely candidates to be two term presidents in this climate?
Another way you could think of this is which candidates would still have a chance of winning in a normal presidential election if they were not running against Trump? Which ones cannot beat anyone but Trump in this climate?
I would say, and I’m not sure how much Pete has done this, that liberal or left veterans do make very good arguments against war. Like John Kerry did when he came home from Vietnam. So I wouldn’t be quick to dismiss them.
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Like I said, you’d be wrong about that. I know a ton of veterans (especially those who were in my career field) who would love nothing more than to cut out all the rot and downsize to acceptable levels.
FYP