• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

2020 Democratic Presidential Nominees

Bernie Bros, on the whole, were willing to vote for Clinton. I'm calling you a Bernie Bro because you are "stanning" for your dude and nothing he does - even when pointed out by activists who you would otherwise support (e.g., your 100000+ posts on "F is for Fascism") - beyond a few logistical campaign gaffes can possibly be wrong. You also have been arguing utterly illogically when it comes to Pete's progressive credentials and label basically anybody who disagrees with Pete as a bully. People are unwilling to argue with you because you're acting like Bernie Bros act. It's neither worth it nor particularly rewarding when there's just no way you'll move anywhere on the guy.

As for the content of the protests and dispositions of the activists - your dude, like Bernie Sanders, has a lot of blindspots as a privileged white dude in the United States and it's great that activists are identifying them and holding Pete accountable. It's laudable that Pete, like Bernie, is receptive to the feedback and seems to be incorporate into his campaign. Again, it makes me like him as a politician, not a presidential candidate.

As for being in a different, less polarized-era: sure, but this also feels like an ahistorical #whytry take. After listening to the history again on slow burn, Clinton's campaign seems a bit like Obama's campaign in terms of how he beat out establishment candidates and drew on his red state credentials to take the party to the center-right in an election against a fairly popular center-right president.

I want Buttigieg, Abrams, Gillum, Castro, and O'Rourke to win elections with DNC and grassroots support. Let's give them that support moving forward and as they navigate higher office in their respective states. They do not need to be presidents and do not have the skills (particularly, on the policy and interpersonal side) to be presidents. I have worked closely with two mayoral administrations now (De Blasio and Garcetti) who oversee gigantic populations, aging infrastructure, massive infusions of funding for progressive policy intervention. De Blasio is an idiot, but Garcetti is considered by the DNC establishment to be a rising star. He's also a fairly competent mayor. I don't think that either of those guys are close to having the chops necessary to oversee the Executive Branch of the federal government.By electing Buttigieg, you're setting him up for failure.

Castro isn't going to win and nobody talks abut him on here. I have advocated for him to drop out and run for awhile now, but continue to support him because he's nominally in the race. I also drop his name a lot because you and #whytry brigade continue to paint me as a Bernie bro and board progressives' definition of progressivism as Sanders purism. (That is a bad faith posture and a bad faith argument, but you and the others know that already and persist anyway).

There are plenty of receipts of me holding unqualified candidates to that same standard. Say what you want about Castro, but he at least sat on a Cabinet and oversaw a federal agency. He's still not qualified, imo, but he's a hell of a lot more qualified than Buttigieg, Yang, Steyer, Bloomberg, Wiliamson, and whoever else is rounding out bottom of the primary field these days.
 
I kinda hate the qualified argument. Nobody is qualified for the position. It’s the worst and hardest job in the world and requires a weird egomaniac willing to make impossible choices that will leave half the world hating you at all times. Nothing can prepare you for it or make you more qualified for it. I guess that’s why I rely so heavily on what you’ve said and done and not on any other kind of checklist.
 
Strick, I’ve disagreed with Pete and said he was wrong plenty of times. Go back and look. I think he’s the best candidate and he’s definitely not the caricature you make him.

Townie, that’s basically how I feel about qualifications. We aren’t going to get young dynamic candidates if we force them to become establishment first.

Given that we are probably a generation or two away until we have a broad array of white male politicians without blind spots with respect to race, let’s just get rid of the qualifications talk.
 
Seems like Hogg and most of the anti gun protestors are generally ok with Bernie’s gun record the last decade or so. But if protestors on that front or like...idk free trade or something else Bernie is weak on wanted to civilly protest his event I’d be ok with it. And given his past lack of focus on racial equity in his campaign I’d definitely be ok if BLM protestors were at his events making noise.

But it hasn’t happened like that because Bernie is the most popular politician in America.

And this actually did happen to Bernie the first time around. Somebody with less of a life than me will have to pull the receipts, but from what I can recall, the Sanders supporters on here were supportive of activist involvement (and resistance) to the Sanders campaign. The only thing that generally annoyed progressives on here was the astroturfed "Sanders = Sexist" rhetoric that ran rampant during that period.

That's kind of funny to me for two reasons.

First, Mayor Pete's ascendancy (not to mention Beto O'Rourke's) both in terms of establishment support/media coverage vs. the lack of establishment support and media coverage of candidates like Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and my dude Kristin Gillibrand actually demonstrates this type of institutionalized misogyny that the Clinton campaign and its supporters complained about.

Second, Ph is forgetting that activist intervention actually made Sanders into a much better candidate, better suited to deliver on his promise of advocating for racial and economic justice platforms and more suited to accommodating a bigger and more diverse tent in the progressive democratic movement.

I'm not sure if this is irony or what, but the discourse around Pete on here and in the national media is really telling if we look back to 2016. The media, the shameless sensationalists that they are, have an excuse because they are what they are. RJ, too, because he's an idiot. Ph engaging in these weirdly ahistorical talking points is legit weird to me. Hence, why I'm going with Buttigieg Bro from here on out.
 
I kinda hate the qualified argument. Nobody is qualified for the position. It’s the worst and hardest job in the world and requires a weird egomaniac willing to make impossible choices that will leave half the world hating you at all times. Nothing can prepare you for it or make you more qualified for it. I guess that’s why I rely so heavily on what you’ve said and done and not on any other kind of checklist.

Two points:

1) It's not true that anybody is forcing young dynamic candidates to become establishment first. I think that the "qualifications" conversations that happen in good faith are happening around legislative experience. I actually think that being in Congress will benefit, not compromise forthcoming Tlaib or Ocasio-Cortez candidates, just as being in the Senate definitely benefited the young, dynamic Obama candidacy. There are a lot of young progressive leaders floating around Congress and state/city governments around the United States. Let's advance their candidacies organically instead of anointing people who have never even dealt with a state congress, let alone a national congress. What you've said and done tends to track with experience of some kind in both administrative and political dimensions of leadership.

I think what the Trump presidency has revealed is that "qualified" means and carries a bit more weight than that.

You need to have a network of competent people to place in important jobs; you need to be able to be accountable, on behalf of the American people and the world at large, to what those agencies do in your name. That's why I think you need, at least, Cabinet experience to even be considered a legitimate Presidential candidate. Obama may be the smartest American president of all time and it still took him most of his first term to figure out how the Presidency worked.

You also need to competently run the executive branch and, by extension, must know how to interface with Congress (in times of partisanship and bipartisanship). The buck stops with the president when it comes to the administrative state, but it also stops with the president when it comes to the political state. I want somebody who understands how policy works from conception to execution. Typically, legislators have an idea of this because it's their jobs to legislate.

I don't know what y'all think Mayors do and how that job varies across different types of cities, but if you look at the mayor of South Bend and think that he's most qualified to pick up the mess that will be the post-Trump administrative and political "states," then we'll have to respectfully agree to disagree.

Strick, I’ve disagreed with Pete and said he was wrong plenty of times. Go back and look. I think he’s the best candidate and he’s definitely not the caricature you make him.

Townie, that’s basically how I feel about qualifications. We aren’t going to get young dynamic candidates if we force them to become establishment first.

Given that we are probably a generation or two away until we have a broad array of white male politicians without blind spots with respect to race, let’s just get rid of the qualifications talk.

There were a bunch of non-white male qualified candidates. Over the course of this primary cycle, I backed three of them. Two remain and I am backing both. Instead of backing Pete, you might have considered backing one of them and still might if you're going reject the importance of experience based on "identity politics" kind of argument.

Furthermore, that Harris is out and Buttigieg is polling 3/4 is, frankly, kind of disgraceful. I never loved Harris as a candidate (I don't like Klobuchar, either), but there are some folks who will pick any combo of white/dude over a non-white male candidate. It is what it is and y'all have showed your cards the next time y'all wanna argue about institutionalized racism and sexism in the primary process and in the Democratic establishment.

Ph, I just find your discourse on here increasingly hypocritical. I know that you have disagreed with Pete and said that he was wrong. A lot of those responses have been responses to my posts, which is why I don't need to go back and look at them.

What you are unable to see (and why I'm calling you a Bernie Bro) is that Pete's status as "best candidate" is your opinion. I largely agree with your perspectives on his record and have walked back a few of my takes on his career that haven't been grounded in empirical reality. Those conversations have also happened in dialogue with you, which is also why I think your shorthand denigration of my Pete perspective as "caricature" is Bernie Bro-esque online discourse behavior.

I disagree that he is the best candidate and I have told you why; like everyone, we're all entitled to our opinions on who is the best candidate. It's possible to not conflate these two strands (and respective styles) of argumentation, but like a Twitter Bernie Bro, you have just turned this into "me vs. Pete haters." It's neither accurate nor productive and, overall, just isn't a productive frame for discourse (which is what we should have learned in the fallout from 2016).
 
I have posted a lot of words on here today in response to a lot of posters and perspectives, so I'm going to take a break for the evening and let more posters contribute.

I am particularly interested in knowing more about where folks stand on a lot of these issues (particularly the seemingly eternal dialectic of experience/lack thereof mattering presidential primary politics, institutionalized racism and misogyny in the DNC, media/pundit discourse around candidates depending on different identity axes, etc.), and I'm happy to engage with your words if you will engage with mine.
 
You’re misremembering history. Amy, Kamala, and Kirsten ARE establishment Dems. I’m not going to claim there isn’t misogyny in media but they aren’t/didn’t poll well because women aren’t supporting them.

Pete didn’t get “unearned” media attention. The whole argument that he got media because he’s a white man falls apart given the number of “qualified” white men that got no media traction at all. All you possibly have is that he got more attention for being the first openly gay candidate. I would argue that hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention and I would have thought given where we were not long ago.

Pete’s mainstream media attention rose and fell with his polling. Pete’s polling rose because he went on any podcast or radio show he could find including some other candidates wouldn’t go on and he impressed people. He put in the work and it paid off. If you weren’t paying attention it feels like he came out of nowhere. Sure. But if you were, he earned his spot.
 
Last edited:
What would my views on Pete’s status as the best candidate be other than my opinion?

Why is it when I have an opinion people are like “Ph doesn’t think his views are an opinion.” What else would it be? If I say “Pete is the best candidate” it couldn’t be a fact. So what else do you think it is? What a weird thing to say.
 
You’re misremembering history. Amy, Kamala, and Kirsten ARE establishment Dems. I’m not going to claim there isn’t misogyny in media but they aren’t/didn’t poll well because women aren’t supporting them.

I'm only going to respond to this one because you seem to be willfully mis-rpresenting my positions.

They can't be establishment candidates if the establishment had no interest in supporting their candidacy. I'm not a great writer, but I try to be precise with my language. I'm talking about their presidential runs. The "establishment" consisting of influential Obama and Clinton-ites, not to mention donors and Democrat elites (if you buy recent press), really seem to prefer Pete to the field. That's all I'm saying.

As for your point about polling well because women aren't supporting them - I have no idea what you're arguing. They never received any traction. Kamala fell, but the others never polled all that well. Pete was polling at 0% once upon a time, too. There are a few possible explanations. One is that there isn't any misogyny about this and Pete is a white dude, but also does the work. The second is that he got a major bump from press coverage (owed in part to identity politics, in part to an impressive resume, and in part to an inspiring platform [at the time] and discourse] and built a legitimate candidacy by doing the work. The third is that there is a misogynist conspiracy by the Democratic establishment against women in this field. I think 1 and 3 are unlikely because I'm not crazy. Your theory that media attention rises and falls with polling doesn't match what actually happened.

All I'm saying in my post is that the women that I mentioned were known commodities and yet haven't really gotten a fraction of the national news coverage (not to mention cold hard cash) that candidates like Beto and Pete have received this time around. Pete has hustled, but he's also received a ton of attention that the mayor of Miramar, for instance, didn't get. Both young mayors with virtually zero political resume, the young white child of a college professor who is mayor of a midwest college town, one becomes a legitimate candidate in December 2019.
 
Biden at a forum for Democratic candidates in Iowa "I may be Irish, but I'm not stupid."

Lolol this is gonna be like the trump thing where the dumber the shit he says and does, the better his numbers go
 
Strick, women aren’t dumb. They know who is running and chose not to support Amy, Kamala, and Kirsten. I was shocked by how much hate there was for Kirsten among women in progressive circles. A lot of it due to Franken.

Candidates earn traction. Biden and Bernie earned it through previous campaigns. Warren earned it through her previous work and Senate and hard work. Even Beto earned it by taking on Cruz in a high profile race. You mentioned Wayne Messum. I didn’t hear anything from him between the beginning and end of his campaign.

Pete was grinding at the beginning of his campaign. He worked hard and impressed, gained in the polls, and earned mainstream coverage
 
Last edited:
Pete's good looking and impresses most who listen to him. You white dudes with a problem with him are way over thinking things.
 
Yep. I also think people underestimate how a four person stage will look with three olds and a smart telegenic young guy.

They’re going to pull their hair out when black voters start swinging from Biden to Pete and the old black ladies start saying he reminds them of JFK. Pete and Chasten give the old ladies two nice young men for the price of one.

Here is a straight forward solution to the primary demographics problem. Compress the early schedule. Put he Iowa Caucus on a Saturday. Have the NH and SC primaries the following Tuesday. Have the Nevada Caucus the next Saturday. It’s not the total shake up we need but it maintains much of the current system and gives Iowa and NH less weight.
 
Last edited:
Man this Biden NPR interview is not good.
 
Is that the one where he said more people should be Republicans?
 
Not sure. I didn't hear all of it. It was an interview with an NPR person. It was a long interview because they aired long segments of it then discussed his answers. They specifically said he was very long winded in some parts they skipped through. It was unnecessarily contentious. It was a really bad look.
 
Biden still promised he'd be able to "work things out" with Graham if they both wound up together again in Washington, DC, after the election. "Nothing's gonna snap back; we're in a totally different world," Biden added. But he said he believed there will be "serious consequences" for the Republican Party as Americans reckon with Trump.

"It’s not like there’s going to be some great epiphany and people are going to wake up and go, 'Oh my god, I'm now a Democrat.' And if you hear people on the rope line saying, ‘I'm a Republican,’ I say, ‘Stay a Republican.’ Vote for me but stay a Republican, because we need a Republican Party."

He later added that he's concerned about what would happen if the Republican Party were totally "clobbered."

"I'm really worried that no party should have too much power," he said. "You need a countervailing force."
 
Back
Top