YES, Bernie Sanders just made unequivocally clear that he will be rallying to help Clinton defeat Trump.
I love you, Bernie. I’ll always love you, Bernie. And I’ll be voting for Clinton in November. Just as you will be.
Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.
Good luck with that. Seriously no snark intended I hope that works out for you.
But once Madame Secretary is coronated and Bernie kisses her ring, this election will basically be over for me. Here in deep red TX it’s not going to matter much what I do so Dr. Stein will get my vote.
And I don’t believe she will manage to defeat The Donald. His masterful performance as our first Post Policy Presidential Personality (tm Amateur Socialist) is literally going to remove every molecule of air (i.e. media coverage) from her tone deaf pitiful defense of the seriously lousy status quo.
If you want a foretelling of the coming GE just study his ability to make short work of Jeb! who probably resembles her closest in terms of money and institutional advantages. It’s going to be an ugly and insane race which he will win handily.
ugh my post chocolate fueled tendency towards hyperbole apparently inspired a horrible use of “literally” which is wrong. I regret the lousy word choice and editing. The rest is fine though.
Trump ran against Jeb! in the GOP primaries. There’s a difference between those who vote in GOP primaries and those who vote in the general election.
Polls and betting odds tend to do a rather good job of predicting election results. They do not show Trump winning handily. Getting Bernie supporters on board will certainly help.
I haven’t seen the slightest evidence yet that the HRC campaign intends to do anything at all wrt policy in attempting to woo Bernie supporters.
In fact a lot of my belief that she will lose is because I see quite the opposite. Like her husband before her the campaign is turning right (or centrist if you prefer that formulation) in what I believe will be a disastrously failed attempt to capture moderate GOP voters. Who are just not buying it. Happy to be wrong etc but this is the price of defending her record.
Well all she has to do is be moderately tolerant of non white males, try to avoid a trade war and agree not to nuke the first country that pisses her off and she will capture all of the GOP she will ever get. She is a centrist but compared to a nut job con man that is still a no brainer. There are a lot of losers in this country particularly economically but even most of those will recognize that Trump is taking them for a ride. That leaves the people who want to scapegoat people who look different and if they constitute a majority then I will kiss the country good bye and leave such miserable excuses for human beings to wallow in their misery.
So many reasons not to vote for the GOP has the same debacle:
http://www.gocomics.com/bloom-county
If it is Trump versus the war monger I will vote Green.
AS “I haven’t seen the slightest evidence yet that the HRC campaign intends to do anything at all wrt policy in attempting to woo Bernie supporters. ”
If you haven’t seen movement on Minimum Wage and Expanding Social Security on the part of the HRC campaign over the last six months then you are not even looking. You may not believe that she is sincere, you may believe that she will pivot back to full blown Goldman-Sachs/Third Way positions. Fine. But saying there is not the “slightest evidence” in light of the HRC explicit commitment to Bernie-lite positioning is bullshit.
Weight that evidence like it is a feather aided by a thumb on the scale, COOL!!! Put the ‘amateur’ back in ‘Socialist’. But it exists.
Amateur Socialist,
First of all, brother… Jesus, deep in TX? My sincerest sympathies – sincerely.
A step-by-step response: HRH HRC became The Anointed One a long time ago. Bernie will never kiss her ring. Trump will never be President.
People have read into Bernie a lot of things, but they have never fully taken into account the extent to which he is a practical politician. He pushes and pushes all the time, without a trace of the self-serving (which is among the things that nauseates me most about HRH HRC), then halts to take what he can get, re-organize, and fall into attack mode again. He will not kiss her ring, but he will most certainly do everything in his power to defeat Trump. He said as much a long time ago in one of the first debates: HRC is better than Trump any day of the week. He must be defeated. Once the election is over, he will resume the push, with a wider array of powerful allies in Congress, against the Clinton administration to advance the progressive agenda he has fought for tooth and nail for more than a year. That fight will never stop for him until he is in the grave.
Prediction: Before the election in November, there will be times when you actually feel sorry for Trump. Mark my words. He is so far in over his head, so totally unqualified for the office, so ignorant of the business of either politicking or governing that there will be times when you are embarrassed for him.
HRH HRC is no Jeb Bush. Imagine: Clinton will have, along with the admittedly effete Democratic Party (which I think will be radically energized coming out of the convention by a new emphasis on truly Progressive ideas), the likes of Elizabeth Warren, who is remarkably well-received by Independents and moderate Republicans, and Bernie, with the bulk of his new army in tow, both to attack Trump every time he opens his mouth and to openly campaign against him/for HRC in every state where they have the power to swing voters. That’s the upside for her. The downside for Trump is Trump. What worked for him for the last year is no longer going to be effective – except to his own base, who would stand by him if he shot someone down in the street. The media is going to hammer him. The entire foreign policy establishment is going to hammer him. And the whole of the GOP establishment will make it a regular habit to point out that what Trump said yesterday or today or tomorrow is not what they, individually or as a party, agree with. They have capitulated to their voters; they will not capitulate to Trump.
But seriously, man, Texas. Jesus…
ilsm. Trump is the war monger. Look at specifics, he proposes to take out ISIS overnight “It will be so easy”. He has endorsed bombing their wives and children to teach them a lesson and torturing their male relatives to gain information and to “take their oil”. Which will also be “so easy”.
Ilsm I respect your conviction but MY GOD MAN how can you possibly reconcile Trumps avowed aim of taking the oil agains the “No War for Oil” position you and I agree on. It is not like Trump is going to use his great deal making skills to get ISIS is agree to us taking the oil while torturing them and their families. SOMEWHERE in that “negotiation” you end up with “Death from Above” and “Boots on the Ground”
The idea that HRC is less hawkish than The Donald is nutty. They may be equally hawkish but the difference is that HRC is not going to endorse Cakewalk.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/04/14/cakewalk
Bernie couldn’t get me to vote for that lying warmonger if he accompanied me into the voting booth, knocked me out and voted on my place.
Cool!!! Vote for Dr. Jill. Or Gary J. Or stay the eff home. But if you plan to vote Trump to “heighten the contradictions” I am inclined to assist you with that trip to the voting booth. “Hey look over there!!! It’s Halley’s Comet!! (Thunk)” Damn, a spoiled ballot.
Oh, well, Bruce, forgive me. I feel your pain.
But politics is so much fun…
and it’s a game. Glad you will vote for Hilary to stop Trump, but do you ever get the feeling that it’s the same o same o…. vote for Golman Sachs because the other guy hates women and minorities?
“Cool!!! Vote for Dr. Jill. Or Gary J. Or stay the eff home…”
Funny how you knew that when I said “lying warmonger” you knew I was talking about Clinton! Maybe it should be YOU who stays the eff home.
First of all for those of you sure that Trump will lose, job growth was super weak last month and may be in the beginning of a decline to negative from a long period of average 200,000 per month. Keep in mind that recessions are almost never forecast. We could be heading into one. If by Sept we have neg job and GDP growth and then a nice market crash, well, those double digit leads for HRC now may well be double digit leads for Trump.
Think Reagan in 80 was double digits behind Carter at this time in 80.
Oh, and then there is the minor fact that the radical Muslims are just dying, literally, to have Trump as POTUS. I mean what a marketing tool! He wants to keep all Muslims out of the US! Short term memory is two weeks. Whatever happens in the two weeks before the election is what matters, aren’t you current??? So, have several dirty nuke bomb attacks go off in US cities within two weeks before the election, that would also put Trump in, just as the terrorists want. And if that happens on top of a bad economic situation, well, 1980 all over again and GOP gains in the Senate, forget Dems taking control.
So, just to get really serious, the bottom line is nukes. Trump has been completely irresponsible on this, talking tactical nukes on ISIS (who is being defeated conventionally be a very carefully managed campaign organized by Obama), and letting Japan and South Korea have them. He is far more irresponsible than Goldwater in 64, but, heck what a great guy he is, even if 91% of what he says is total lies.
So, those of you down on HRC, fine, sit home or vote for Stein or Johnson or the Giant Spaghetti Monster From Outer Space. But the bottom line is the bloody nukes. Hillary is corrupt and a liar, and definitely hawkish. But at 3 AM she will not be shooting off nukes stupidly, something nobody in their right mind should count from the egomaniacal Donald Trump, who seems to listen to nobody. No Wise Men from the Old GOP to hold him back. We may yet wish that Henry Kissinger were in the White House whispering in his ear, really.
Barkley your “job report” was a hedonic filled mess. They changed their seasonal adjustment model and that is the problem.
Bruce, sorry but that doesn’t cut it. I guess we can agree to disagree on the semantics around my use of “slightest” but Madame Secretary is woefully short on a long long list. As I tried to mention at the end of my comment a great difficulty is in fact her long and well storied record. Wrong on fracking, on Keystone, on TPP (whatever “evolution she may be claiming now), on bank bailouts, on Snowden, on Iraq, on Libya, on criminal justice reform, on reforming higher education, on financial regulation, on lobbying and election reform, on and on and on and on. For HRC to manage addressing these and many other issues in a way that would favorably impress *this particular Bernie Sanders voter* (obviously I have no way to speak for the entire movement) she would be repudiating quite a bit of her (and by extension her husband’s) history.
Which she is not going to do. For one thing it would play right into Donald’s characterization as dishonest, pandering, crooked, etc. It’s a bridge too far and the calendar just doesn’t provide the luxury for that kind of evolution to be credible. The Democrats are going with the candidate with all the corporate money (no surprise) just like the GOP in 2012. So it goes.
Second, and perhaps more important, I don’t even believe that questions of policy and performance are going to turn this particular election. When I look at the campaign Donald has run for the nomination and extrapolate into the GE I see psychological and sociological messaging, *not policy or governing philosophy*. He’s going to win because people like associating themselves with a “winner”. One that isn’t defending a status quo that looks like the table at the top of this page: http://www.cinemarasik.com/2016/06/trump-vs-hillary-two-surprising-views-is-trump-getting-romnified/ (please note I’m talking about the table not the argument therein)
My growing suspicion of this aspect of the election was really confirmed by the recent interview on The Atlantic’s site of a 22 year old Trump supporter. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/a-dialogue-with-a-22-year-old-donald-trump-supporter/484232/ He doesn’t fit any of the prevailing stereotypes and perhaps most disconcerting, he and voters like him are likely to remain basically invisible. Right up to election day. So there won’t even be any way for HRC’s vaunted machinery to figure out how to address them.
Finally just a side note about my chosen handle, one I picked out for myself around the same time I started commenting here years ago. I’m proud of thinking of myself as an amateur socialist. If you examine the roots of amateur it’s essentially “doing something for the love of it” which reveals a lot about my political journey. I have a lot of affinity for socialist ideas for many reasons. I don’t think the pros have done them much credit, at least in this country in my lifetime, honestly. So yeah I’m an amateur.
Ms 57 I think most of my response to your comment is contained in my response to Bruce above after “Second,”.
I will match your prediction of my pity for The Donald with a similar one for Madame Secretary. She is going to be caught flat footed and ham fisted against his reality show antics which will be massively covered for free by all the major media. Because that’s what he does/is. And what they are.
For all your concern about the way he is likely to be “Attacked” by the MSM they are not going to quit covering him, basically on his terms. Did you miss the way Ailes and co. at Faux news folded like a cheap suit when he threatened to refuse them access? It’s ratings and selling ad time. He knows what his customers (the cable networks) want and he knows how to give it to them. In a way she probably never will.
“Last week on candidate trump, we watched his victorious election night coverage and HRC’s eventual painful concession. Next up the premiere episode of President Trump featuring his wacky transition team! Will fireworks erupt between Roger Stone and Speaker Paul Ryan? Tune in and find out!”
And Ms 57 I forgot to mention if my prediction turns out to be better than yours the first round’s on me, at least if you can make your way to Bastrop TX to collect. Okay either way. I think we’re all going to need a drink. No offense intended if you happen to be a teatotaler just saying.
Looking at The Donald and HRC on the stump I see Reagan vs. Mondale. All the ridicule of Ron Headrest didn’t help poor Walter.
Meanwhile I’m informed that AP, the NYT and the BBC have declared HRC as the nominee. Okay then.
This has to be great news for Clinton supporters in NJ and CA – no reason to stand in a boring line. Stay home, she’s got this!