I have been thinking about this. Who can one name, who is not in jail, and who would be eligible to be President, who would actually be worse than this moron, to lead the country through this crisis right now? Someone who is even more self-centered, who knows less about the world, less about proper management, who has had more business failures, who is even more divisive, who has more staffing problems, who is more petty, more insulting to reporters asking tough questions, and who generally would fuck things up even more than him? This is truly not an easy question to answer. Any suggestions? I am seriously finding it hard to name someone.
The republicans sure picked a doozy.
Scientologist, very bad.
That too. I was thinking of this!
Right, but that is the problem, not getting the states to approve. One example I gave was nationalized medicine. It is very popular across the board, but you could never get the republicans in congress to vote for. But individuals would.
I this this is a mistaken belief. He is not the safe choice. Someone like Booker, or others would have been much safer. Polls are a very flawed process. Most young people are not going to be a part of that process. They aren’t home at six o’clock answering their phone and taking part in polls. I am pretty sure Andrew Yang would have eventually taken enough of the independents to win. Because no liberal is going to vote infant orange.
Having said that, Biden is such a bad candidate that guys like Joe Rogan are now saying they will have to vote infant orange instead of him. I suspect Rogan was always sort of a closet conservative, but still a guy with many liberal views. And he has 30 million listeners.
I understand the voting process and I already explained this. We are not talking about the Senate here. Its the winner take all votes of each state which marginalizes the democratic process. So a candidates strategy is figuring how to win states, even by small margins, but giving up on states where they have less chance. A candidate can win Texas by one vote and get all 38 of those electoral college votes. But they can lose Idaho by 1 million votes and only give up four votes. That has nothing to do with giving small states more weight. That is what the senate does.
I agree that orange is lazy, and it is why he is so ineffectual for making policies. But I am only talking about how to handle this crisis, and in this case, for sure even Tom Cruise would handle it better.
That was supposed to be the case with Hillary as well. I knew that was really bad thinking, and a total misreading of the american psyche. There are lots of liberal minded people who don’t like her. Unfortunately almost the exact same thing is true with Biden. If you kill the liberal vote you have no chance at all. It would be the same as the republicans electing someone who the conservatives couldn’t vote for. That never happens, they never elect someone that mild.
I think I see what you mean and I agree.
Does it matter that he has dementia?
If he has a competent cabinet, and defers important decision to them, it would be better than what we have now.
That is sort of how I feel, and I hope others look at it that way. He knows what the job needs, he knows how to organize a staff, he understands the importance of the diplomats, and the protocols domestically and internationally. As long as he chooses a wise running mate, I think he still has a chance.
Safer than Bernie but she was an incredibly polarizing figure, Clinton fatigue, a long paper trail , endless investigations by the Republicans, James Comey announcing a new investigation in the final days, a woman.
All the while Trump was just a disrupter. A media whore playing a take charge businessman on TV. Tons of free airtime. She still got 3 million more votes.
She was well qualified candidate, Bernie had no chance. 3 million more votes.
Sure, they never thought Trump had a chance. Sorry , you misread the situation, liberals have experienced three years of the nightmare of Trump. They swept the House. If the Democrat loses it will not be because of overconfidence or lack of enthusiasm. Bernie’s advisors are telling him to get out, clear the field. Avoid any distractions like last time.
Every Democrat knows the Republicans will do anything to win. During this time when hundreds of thousand American’s lives are literally on the line, rather than focusing on that , Republicans spending time on getting ready to investigate Hunter Biden.
A liberal has two choices, Biden or Trump, this time Bernie will not be a spoiler, you are a not liberal or a rational person if you do not vote against Trump. Plain and simple.
The question is will Republican women vote against Trump and for Biden. Biden is the best candidate for that important demographic.
It doesn’t matter to Republicans.
I don’t know who Lloyd Green is but he seems to agree with phoodoo!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/05/trump-is-killing-his-own-supporters-coronavirus-covid-19
newton,
I believe Sanders would have defeated orange in the last election. Hillary was thoroughly flawed. Hillary only got more votes because she was running against one of the worst candidates in history. But many people still couldn’t stand to vote for her. I believe many of those same people feel this way about Biden. Liberals don’t love him, and others only tolerate him. Of course, he is still better than infant orange, but that bar is so low, almost anyone could crawl over it, yet the American public is dumb.
Rogan says he is a liberal, wanted Bernie, and say he will still vote for orange over Biden. I think there are a lot of people like him. I hope I am wrong. I personally think the best thing that could happen to america is if one of those two guys has a health issue before the election, and gets replaced by someone.
Meanwhile Infant Orange is still saying everyone needs to get back to work. Wow, great plan dumbo! How did you come up with that idea, you thought of it yourself stable genius?
newton,
I still can’t believe how badly the democrats have played this situation. All they had to do was come up with one unoffensive candidate, just somebody who seems stable, and who is not carrying around a bunch of old luggage. And they still haven’t done that. I think the best thing they could have done was let Michelle Obama run, it would have been a cakewalk. Obama would still run things, sanity would be restored, ….
But there are a million young, smart, not insane people who could run and win. Beta O’Rourke would win. Andrew Yang would win, and I actually believe easily, because he would draw a lot of disenfranchised orange voters who thought he was going to help the middle class but didn’t. If someone like George Clooney ran, he would win by probably the biggest landslide in history. I think a lot of people don’t realize, America is a majority Democrat country. The problem is the Democrats represent such a wide range of people that they cause too much division in their own party to get their act together. The republicans are not so choosy. Just give them any hack who says USA, USA, we hate everyone, more guns, more police…and they stick together.
You are allowed to believe what you want. However, this was never tested.
I would have voted for Sanders if he were the candidate. But I suspect that Trump would have beaten him handily.
You are welcome to your opinion, my opinion is he would have lost in the same places as Hillary if not more. The socialist charge would have been effective from the right wing media scrum to the same voters as Hillary is a nasty woman argument.
She had flaws, not as many as the present occupant who won. That she was qualified for the job, and smart was one reason she got the votes in addition to not being Trump.
I expect the same could be said for Obama, Bush ,and Bill .A difference is they are not women. She was more qualified than any of them. You seem to be ignoring the fact that there is lot of misogyny in the US. In the present election ,lots of qualified women, it ended up a battle of two old men.
It shouldn’t matter. Trump was an unknown last time.The press thought he would grow into the office, act Presidential. He obviously is worse than imagined. To not vote for Biden is a vote for Trump, and a least two more young conservative Supreme Court Justices. That should be any liberal’s nightmare, far outweighing likability.
Voters often choose the lesser of two evils, Trump ,as he is demonstrating, is a world class sociopath and attracts the worse people for his administration,Biden is not. That is the only necessary calculation needed. What these “liberals “ should do with all this emotional purity you attribute to them is to vote for Biden and keep the House and take the Senate. The failure to take the Senate in 2016, was as bad as Trump’s win.
Some are dumb, some are greedy, and a lot are neither. There are lots of people doing the right things. And they know the Republicans are already working to cheat their way into the win.
I agree, fear of Socialism in deeply ingrained in the US, despite the popularity of Social Security. It is why our healthcare system is a mess.
Trump’s top COVID-19 advisor Dr. Fauci publicly stated:
” The WHO’s estimated mortality rate for COVID-19 started off at 2%, Fauci said. If you count all the estimated cases of people who may have it but haven’t been diagnosed yet, the mortality rate is probably closer to 1%, he said, “which means it’s 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.”
The H1N1 “swine flu” epidemic in 2009 was even less lethal than regular seasonal flu, Fauci said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/top-federal-health-official-says-coronavirus-outbreak-is-going-to-get-worse-in-the-us.html
Dr. Fauci’s public statements matched exactly his scientific research papers:
“On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.“
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387
but..but…but.. the administration recently declared that rather than reopen the ACA exchanges so people could get iinsurance the govt would pay the hospitals directly for the costs incurred by the uninsured. Seems a bit like a single payer socialist type system if anyone were to ask me.
That might be Trump’s legacy. I hear there is the possibility to increase the number of Supreme Court judges.
newton,
To be fair, my friend, Hillary did not lose the popular vote so much as the system failed to elect the candidate who received the majority of votes, preferring instead to uphold the arcane “state’s rights” over the will of a majority of the country.
Alan Fox,
That’s extremely unlikely. Any such measure would need to be a constitutional amendment. And any constitutional amendment has to be ratified by a majority of states. And a majority of states are Republican-majority, because a majority of states are small, rural states. Which of course means that the votes of conservative Wyoming residents would count for a few hundred people from California per vote.
Schizophora,
Well, I guess alternatives are insurrection, secession?
newton,
First off, a dog with mange would be preferably to orange. A turnip would be better.
But having said that I still don’t see how they ended up with Biden. Its Hillary all over again. He has a similar amount of baggage. I don’t agree Hillary was smart, and lost because she was a woman. There are more woman voters than men. She was out of touch. She seemed like she would just say anything, if that is what the polls told her to say. She never seemed genuine or compassionate. Normal people see through people like this.
I would have been quite happy with Kamala Harris, I don’t know why she didn’t last longer. I love Warren, but I could tell her political skills were a problem, with the whole way she handled the Indian thing. She got baited and took the hook, instead of telling orange to go jump in a lake, she didn’t need to do anything to prove anything to him.
Here is what I don’t like about the democratic candidates. They listen to polls too much. Then they try to come out with these detailed plans about what they are going to do with medicare or taxes. Meanwhile, the idiot in charge has no plan for anything. So he says nothing about what he will do, other than it will be great, and then they go and give this detailed plan, and then people rip their detailed plan. Why bother? Just have some principals, say this is the principals you are going to follow, and leave it at that. And when you are debating, forget about attacking your opponents, it just makes you look defensive. Just say you think they are great also, but that you would do things a little different, and leave it at that. Stop treating voters like little kids you are trying to entice with candy. I see Biden already doing that. He says he will name a woman as VP. Why say this? What does it help? Does he thinks that gives him points by saying that? How about if you are going to name a woman just name a woman, what’s so hard about that? And then you say you chose who you thought was great, instead of saying you chose the best woman you thought was great. Why are politicians so dumb?
The one good thing about Sanders is that he would have rightly told orange off in any debates. He wouldn’t be steamrolled. Kamala Harris wouldn’t be steamrolled. Booker would have made orange look like the baby he is. I don’t see Biden as having the same tough personality to just tell him to shove it, he is full of crap. I think Biden is going to try to tap dance with him instead. But hey, if that is what you got, I guess that is it. But its Hillary again. Wtf.
Well, not exactly. Among other requirements, 3/4 of state legislatures must vote in favor of ratifying an amendment. The actual people are not involved unless the legislature chooses to put the vote on the ballot as a referendum. Most states have no provision for doing this.
Anyway, California’s population is about 70 times Wyoming.
Well, they started with 25 candidates, which ran the gamut from young to old, male and female, black to Asian to white, gay and straight, mayors and senators and governors and businessmen. Certainly you couldn’t argue with the range of choices.
And these people were gradually weeded down partially through polling results and partially through fund raising, which is a vague proxy for popularity (Sanders and Warren accepted only small donations).
And we ended up with the two oldest, whitest, male-est candidates you could select. I would run out of fingers before I ran out of candidates I would prefer to either of these codgers – one out-of-touch simpleton with an apparent inability fo focus, and one cranky rigid ideologist who would rather lose than compromise.
The only candidate who really excited me was Buttigieg, because he clearly understood the difference between politics and government. But his essentially 0% support from black voters was fatal.
What I see happening is that what mattered was name recognition. Not money (the billionaires did terribly), not intelligence, not competence. Biden was VP for 8 years; Sanders is remembered from 2016. It came down to two old old men, and a lot of “who the hell is THAT?”
Flint,
I agree with this, the problem being with the whole way the candidates are selected, starting with Iowa and New Hampshire, which makes no sense at all, where candidates are pushed out before the voting even really begins. I think the democratic primaries should be all on the same day throughout the country. Then perhaps a second cut later on or something. I agree its name recognition and money, both of which are exactly NOT what real voters want.
I would have been more than happy with Buttigieg. Oh well, let’s just hope he doesn’t screw up the VP pick. I still say Yang would have been his best VP pick, people like him. He is different, smart, and his living allowance makes a lot more sense now. Suddenly almost everyone, even republicans are saying, hey, we should pay people to keep the economy going. No shit.
I seriously doubt you’d be happy with your results. It’s clearly clumsy to have 25 candidates debating, but there’s no other realistic way to have obscure candidates get some public notice. Who among us, no matter how determined, is going to start digging into the careers and records between Bullock and Bennet? If those were your only choices, which would you vote for in a primary and why? Your proposal makes name recognition the ONLY criterion.
And so we elect movie actors, TV actors, sons of famous people, etc. These people may stink one and all, but people have HEARD of them. You can get partway around this with money, but it will cost a fortune and (we now know) must be spent keeping you in the limelight for a long time.
Flint,
I don’t really get your point. How does Iowa and New Hampshire vote when there are 25 people to choose from? Why is it any different if all the states voted?
What I am saying is, once you got to a point like now, if you threw all those names back in the bin, I am not sure Biden would come out on top. Maybe Booker would. Maybe Tom Steyer would. All I know is, there has to be a better way.
Flint,
I use Corey Booker as an example, because I think you take someone like him. he may not be many people’s first choice, but I think across the board he is someone that no one would say they actually would dislike. He is articulate, doesn’t seem too extreme to any one side, has no particular bad history, like if you just said who is someone all could accept, I think it would be someone like him. And yet he gets swallowed up by the extremes of the safe bet Biden folks (I think that is nuts) and the revolutionary Sanders crowd. But who would actually NOT like him?
There needs to be a process where all could come together and agree, ok, You want Biden, I want Sanders, but we could both accept Booker. That process doesn’t exist, but it should. That is what the DNC should be for.
I agree, Hillary won the popular vote but handily lost the electoral college. The college in which citizens of Wyoming have about four times the voting power as the citizens of California,
That is why the evangelicals love him, the great hope of overturning Roe v Wade.
newton,
Hillary won the popular vote because overall there are more democrats in the country than republicans. She was still a bad candidate.
newton,
Do you think a Booker/Yang ticket would lose to Infant/Prude? No way.
Booker would win easily.
“…the Most High God has sovereignty over the kingdom of mortals, and sets over it whomever he will.” – Daniel 5:21
No free will for us, then?
Maybe, but no Democrat wins easily. Trump has a solid backing that has never wavered, a shitload of money, the power of incumbency, the active vote suppression of the Republican Party, willingness to do anything, and Fox News. Trump has just dipped below 50% on approval of how he has responded to the virus, any sane person should be appalled by how long it took.
Cory Booker has his own issues, Yang is an unknown. At this point, Biden is the best strategy , he has the nomination, any effort to overturn the primary would just feed into the narrative of Democratic incompetence,and if he picks a strong VP that helps him in a key demographic such as Hispanics , in the midst of all the chaos, a known and normal quantity would be attractive to low information voters ,as well as those voters who realize the stakes are critical, the damage Trump could do in a second term is catastrophic.
There also is a chance Pence will fall on his sword and not be the VP.
Comforting thought, just bend over and say “ thank you ,sir may I have another?”
I think that would be called being pushed onto a sword.
I think being unknown is probably one of the best qualities for someone running this time.
Sanders was socialist , has a bad record of attracting a core demographic of the Democratic Party, is not any more attractive to those voters in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio , he still loses. If Comey had not reopened the investigation and Podesta had not clicked on the email she probably would have been good enough.
Or “To spend more time with his family”
None of the potential alternates showed the type of charisma necessary to overcome to hurdle of being an unknown quantity.
Pete seemed a little glib , though if nominated would support whole heartedly.
Alan Fox,
Don’t you know? Secession was made illegal after the civil war! In reality, there are few, if any, states with the economy to hash it out on their own. Texas maybe, and they are the ones who most frequently talk of just leaving.
Also, if you’re not aware of this, the US Senate has the sole responsibility of confirming lifelong federal judicial appointments, and they have been working overtime with their slim majority to confirm young, conservative judges. Basically, there are no options right now, because the federal judiciary has moved irrevocably to the right for generations to come, between a strong, (relatively) young Supreme Court majority and a federal judiciary stocked with young, startlingly unqualified ideologues whose main goal is to change the law in this country back to being (somehow more) in favor of old, rich white men.
Flint,
That’s basically hand-in-hand with my point. Wyoming’s state legislature counts as an equal vote to California’s, despite the fact that Wyoming’s legislature represents 1/70th as many people as California. And because the US is a republic, the state legislature is intended to be representative of the will of the people of that state; obviously, this intent is complicated by things such as gerrymandering, corruption, etc.
newton,
I still think it’s conjecture to say that Bernie would have automatically lost swing states. Many of his policy proposals actually poll with overwhelming support among the working class. What you need to realize is that the main demographic he would be unable to attract would be elderly voters who still recoil at the mention of socialism, and those voters are a solid Republican voting bloc either way. Sanders actually consistently polled high in electability, even when compared to his competition in the primary.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/02/24/polls-bernie-electibility-trump-african-american-voters/4861722002/
This was as recently as Feb. 24th
Schizophora,
Yes, I think Bernie would cross over to a lot of the working class who have been struggling for a long time, and were let down by the infants dismal tax breaks for them. Its why I feel Yang also would do well, and would be a great VP.
Schizophora,
And of course now Infant Orange is threatening to start going after their social security next term.
Try reading the full passage. Same answer for both: concurrentism.
Maybe someone with a financial stake in a particular pharmaceutical that may (or may not) be effective against it?
Oh, wait.
I found the confirmation hearings for Kavanaugh addictive and depressing. Such a display of cynicism as I’ve ever seen. (Other than the impeachment debacle).
Gregory,
It was an attempt at humour. Never mind.