Wertheimer

In , the , and now the the ruling parties have essentially decided to give up on this year's elections. What are they trying to avoid being blamed for? Is it more than just a global recession? Wrong answers preferred.

Here's Bernie not saying the word "genocide"

I strongly disagree with Mr. Biden on the question of U.S. support for Israel’s horrific war against the Palestinian people. The United States should not provide Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing extremist government with another nickel as it continues to create one of the worst humanitarian disasters in modern history.

. . .

Supporters of Mr. Biden can speak proudly about a good and decent Democratic president

who is committing genocide

with a record of real accomplishment.

. . . of committing genocide

. . .

We battled to defend women’s rights in the face of moves by Trump-appointed jurists to roll back reproductive freedom and deny women the right to control their own bodies.

Battled and lost, and in such a way as to make the "battle" part seem implausible

. . .

So, yes, Mr. Biden has a record to run on.

of committing genocide

. . .

This election offers a stark choice on issue after issue.

except on genocide, where the candidates are united

If Mr. Biden and his supporters focus on these issues — and refuse to be divided and distracted — the president will rally working families to his side in the industrial Midwest swing states and elsewhere and win the November election. And let me say this as emphatically as I can: For the sake of our kids and future generations, he must win.

But not for Palestinian kids and future generations. Fuck them, I guess.

Leftists who don’t like Biden don’t want to see him in office again, so they don’t want to vote for him, or they want to withhold their vote until he changes course. Seems simple enough.

But that’s not how politics works.

So announcing that you'll vote for him no matter what he does will make him change course? Is that how politics works?

Never, in the history of this country, has there been a president who hasn’t engaged in what the left would regard as unforgivable crimes. This is the nature of presidents, and politicians in general. If you, like me, are on the far left, you should never fully trust or have faith in any elected official.

But when I look at the Biden administration, I see a group of people who can be bullied in a leftist direction on some policy priorities.

Can anyone today truly argue that the world wasn’t drastically changed by Gore’s loss in 2000? Even if you don’t accept the argument that Nader’s candidacy is what lost Gore the election, how can you argue that the world wouldn’t have been at least a little better if all of those Nader votes had gone to Gore and put the Dems over the top?

Democrats have held the presidency 50% of the time since 2000.

The only possible good that can come of this wretched campaign is the ever-increasing likelihood that it will cause the Democratic Party to self-destruct. A lot of people are seriously worried about this, but I am not one of them. I have never been much of a Party Man myself. . . and the more I learn about the realities of national politics, the more I’m convinced that the Democratic Party is an atavistic endeavor – more an Obstacle than a Vehicle – and that there is really no hope of accomplishing anything genuinely new or different in American politics until the Democratic Party is done away with.

From Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

There are still no good DAs so this has to go in c/badposting

Ross Douthat: Joe Manchin Would Be ‘the Most Moderate Candidate’

I’m Ross Douthat, and I’m a columnist for The New York Times. I’m here to make the case that the Democrats should nominate the senator from West Virginia Joe Manchin.

Much of the Democratic Party and many of my friends in the media are convinced that this election has almost existential stakes for the United States of America. And if that is the case, there is a reasonable argument for the Democratic Party to nominate someone who is as close to the center of American politics as you can get, with a long record of voting for Democratic causes. So, Manchin 2024.

I’ve thought Joe Manchin should run for president for a while. In 2023, I made the case that he should run as an independent. I thought, as a moderate Democrat, Manchin was well positioned to run, basically, I argued, a kind of test-the-waters campaign.

But the reason to think of him as a plausible third-party candidate is also the reason to think of him as a plausible nominee for the Democrats — if their absolute goal is to defeat Donald Trump, no matter what.

Manchin is a guy who successfully managed to get elected to the Senate from West Virginia over the course of multiple election cycles where West Virginia was being transformed from a reliably Democratic state into a reliably Republican one. And his strategy always seemed to be: Pull a given piece of Democratic legislation more toward the middle (or toward the middle as he understood it), but be willing to vote for it when push came to shove.

He was more socially conservative in various ways on issues ranging from abortion to immigration. He tended to be more skeptical of large spending bills of all kinds, climate change legislation in particular. He did a lot of things, especially in the Biden era, that made more ideological Democrats incredibly frustrated with him. At the same time, he remained a pretty reliable vote for Democratic causes and programs and judicial nominations and everything else.

In imagining him as a Democratic nominee, you’re picking someone who in a different kind of era would have been the leader of probably a pretty big centrist faction in the Democratic Party. And so nominating him wouldn’t require the Democratic Party to radically shift its positions on almost any issue. It would be a unique signal to the country that the Democrats were willing to make a major ideological compromise, which is the kind of signal that, if you are determined to win the election at all costs, you want to be sending.

I think Manchin’s biggest challenge in the incredibly unlikely event that he was the Democratic nominee, is that because he is a moderate who is despised by key activist groups in the Democratic coalition, most Democrats are just not going to turn out for someone who spent the Biden years trying to make Joe Biden’s agenda more moderate and sometimes contributing to derailing it.

That’s always the problem with trying to nominate the most moderate candidate: You risk alienating your own base. But I think in this scenario, given the lateness of the hour and Donald Trump as the presumptive Republican nominee, that what you would gain among swing voters would outweigh what you would lose in the party’s base.

Both political parties have nominated candidates for president who are broadly unacceptable to the middle 30 percent of Americans, and it would probably be useful for the country if one of the two parties tried to nominate someone who was much more acceptable to Americans in that middle ground.