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The Democrat's roster for a Trump - beater in 2020


swordfish

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2 hours ago, Irishman said:

I agree. I think he reached too far by running for President. He would have been better suited to take on Holcomb here at home. 

I still think he believes he is above Indiana and his long term goal is on the national stage.

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Pete Buttigieg is an elitist. He should embrace it.: https://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/columnists/james-briggs/2020/02/06/after-iowa-pete-buttigieg-should-stop-trying-run-his-elitism/4669375002/

(Note: article is behind a paywall)

Quote

Pete Buttigieg has an elitism problem.

The more he tries to prove that he is not an elitist, the more obvious it is to everyone that he is. The former South Bend mayor has been unconvincingly distancing himself from his plainly exceptional status even as it has enabled his rise to legitimate contender for the Democratic nomination for president.

He doesn’t have to do that. The results of the Iowa caucuses — still incomplete as I write this on Wednesday afternoon — suggest that Buttigieg is gaining support because of his elitism and not in spite of it. When all the votes are finally counted, Buttigieg will have either won, or come close to winning, Iowa by generating more enthusiasm than expected across all demographics. He dominated among people who consider themselves “somewhat liberal” and tied Joe Biden in the race for moderates, according to entrance polls.

.....

As Buttigieg moves on, Iowa presents a solution for his elitism dilemma. Buttigieg can embrace the reality that he is far more accomplished than the average person and trust that most people, even in the Midwest, will not hold that against him.

 

Buttigieg’s most recent elitism-induced gaffe came last week when he tweeted: “In the face of unprecedented challenges, we need a president whose vision was shaped by the American Heartland rather than the ineffective Washington politics we’ve come to know and expect.

This message did not play well for Buttigieg. Critics saw it as an attempt by Buttigieg to weaponize his Midwestern sense of place ⁠— a tactic Vice President Mike Pence often deploys — by extolling the virtues of his inherently real-American life experience over the apparently tainted values people accrue out on the coasts.

...

Buttigieg (or one of his staff members) probably thought the “American Heartland” tweet would frame him as a down-to-earth Midwesterner who is focused on making life better for the typical working-class person ahead of the Iowa caucuses. Instead, Buttigieg signaled (unintentionally) that he considers the homogeneous Midwest to be a purer representation of America than places where people and ideas happen to be far more diverse.

...

Reasonable people can disagree over whether Buttigieg has the right experience to be president. But there is no denying he is more successful than 99% of Americans — even if you exclude his so-far-so-good campaign for president.

Buttigieg, who turned 38 last month, has achieved more than most people do in a lifetime. He graduated from Harvard University in 2004 and graduated from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar in 2007. He worked as a Toronto-based consultant for McKinsey & Co., spent eight years as mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city, wrote a book and, by the way, speaks eight languages.

And, yet, Buttigieg and his campaign want you to think it’s the other candidates who are elitist.

.....

The attacks against Buttigieg have become deeply personal. For example, Meagan Day, a writer for the far-left publication Jacobin, recently argued in a since-deleted tweet that Buttigieg’s 2014 deployment as a Navy intelligence officer to Afghanistan, where he quite literally could have died, was a “photo op” orchestrated “so you’d take him seriously.”

This bizarre claim reflects the extent to which the Sanders-supporting left distrusts Buttigieg and considers him an enemy to their vision of the future. Derek Thompson, writing in The Atlantic, attempted to explain the hostility that has been directed toward Buttigieg:

Young educated liberals look at Buttigieg and see a nauseating caricature, not of the person they are, or even the person they wanted to be, but of the person they’ve felt pressured to emulate but never quite became — an outcome they regard with tortured ambivalence. Buttigieg is the guy they hated in college, not only because he was obnoxiously successful, but also because his success sat uncomfortably, hauntingly close to the version of success they once felt prompted to achieve.

Derek Robertson drilled deeper in Politico and described why some on the left feel like Buttigieg is threatening to steal a moment they think belongs to them.

“Buttigieg is a young professional with an elite pedigree who’s chosen to buy into the system as a reformer instead of attacking it as a revolutionary,” Robertson writes. “To a certain class of left-wing thought leaders, he’s an unwelcome reminder of the squeaky-clean moderates with whom they once rubbed elbows.”

There’s that word again. Elite.

No matter how much Buttigieg and his campaign want to wriggle out of that label, Buttigieg wears the word elite like a tattoo on his forehead. Denying it will not make critics like him more. But accepting it could clarify his case for why he is best choice for president.

...

Buttigieg is not running for president wielding an anti-establishment sledgehammer. He is running because he sees a flawed and broken system that can be repaired. He has faith in the elites to take what is wrong with America and make it right.

In fact, he believes he is the precise elite for the job.

 

Edited by Muda69
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48 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

MP is on the record as wanting to rid us of the Electoral College, in light of the fact that he's losing the popular vote in Iowa, but winning the delegate count, if he is a man of conviction, shouldn't he put his money where his mouth is and give the delegates to Bernie?

 

WWMD?

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Michael Bloomberg and the Imperious Presidency: https://reason.com/2020/02/07/michael-bloomberg-and-the-imperious-presidency-2/

Quote

If Donald Trump could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it, what brazenness might we expect from his fellow septuagenarian Manhattanite presidential candidate, Michael Bloomberg?

The then–mayoral candidate gave us a glimpse back in 2001, when he was dumping his first tranche of $74 million into a late-in-life political career and a reporter asked him whether he had ever smoked marijuana. "You bet I did," the media mogul enthused, at a time when politicians tended to be much more reticent about such things. "And I enjoyed it."

Talk about do as I say, not as I did. During Bloomberg's three terms as mayor, the Big Apple became the marijuana arrest capital of the world, thanks to the notorious stop-and-frisk searches conducted largely in neighborhoods where billionaires rarely venture.

Hizzoner's conscience has never been noticeably troubled by such obvious disparities under the law. If anything, the disproportionate impact of his policy preferences on poorer folk has been the point.

In an April 2018 conversation with Christine Lagarde, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Bloomberg defended his fondness for taxing treats, such as sugary sodas and trans fats, that are mostly enjoyed by the non-rich.

"Some people say, well, taxes are regressive," he said. "But in this case, yes they are! That's the good thing about them, because the problem is in people that don't have a lot of money. And so, higher taxes should have a bigger impact on their behavior and how they deal with themselves….The question is, do you want to pander to those people, or do you want to get them to live longer?"

Rules may be important for "those people" but are much less so for the eighth-richest man on the planet. He is the leading financier of gun control advocacy in America—and one of the few people allowed to have an armed security detail in Bermuda. He has been positively Trumpian about releasing his tax returns, snapping at the mere suggestion that such political traditions should apply to him. And as recently as January 2019, even as the rest of the Democratic Party was finally evolving toward getting rid of federal prohibitions on the marijuana Bloomberg once enjoyed, the former mayor called pot legalization "perhaps the stupidest thing we've ever done."

If George W. Bush and Barack Obama ushered in the return of the imperial presidency, Trump represents a further devolution toward the imperious presidency. There was an audacity in Obama's pen and phone, and there was an expansive theory of executive branch autonomy spearheaded by former Vice President Dick Cheney. Trump's contribution has been more vulgar, more direct, more New York: "I dare you to stop me" mixed with "I can say anything I want."

Bloomberg's manners are more refined, but only just. There's the locker room talk about women, which he pre-emptively apologized for in advance of his presidential run. Trump may troll people about seeking a legally proscribed third term, but Bloomberg actually went there, changing New York City law near the end of his second mayoral term in order to run for a third, and then switching it back soon after winning. As The New York Times noted dryly upon the latter occasion, "Bloomberg thinks that being able to serve three terms in office is a good idea—just not for anyone else."

Bloomberg's above-the-law demeanor might seem preferable to Trump's appetite for corruption, but their approaches to how the law applies to the lowly are distressingly similar. To Trump, constitutional limits to executive power are speed bumps slowing down his policy goals, especially concerning immigration. To Bloomberg, policy ends can justify means that judges have explicitly ruled unconstitutional. "I think people, the voters, want low crime," he told the Times in September 2018, defending the practice of stop and frisk. "They don't want kids to kill each other."

It seems implausible that, in an era of resurgent Democratic populism, primary voters will reward the kind of bluenose who has appeared in skits as "King Michael." But seeing Bloomberg even in fifth place extends a worrying trend. We've stacked up so much power at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that billionaires with insatiable ambitions are eyeing the address greedily and finding market share among understandably disgruntled voters.

"The president," lawyer Alan Dershowitz said on Fox News host Laura Ingraham's show last year, "has the power that kings have never had." Until we start denuding the Oval Office, we will continue getting the royals we deserve.

Agreed.  The size, scope, and power of the federal government needs to be reduced by 25%, across the board.   Then maybe, just maybe it will once again become government by the people and for the people.

 

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29 minutes ago, Howe said:

 

It's just Uncle Joe........Nothing to see here, at least she's not African American anyhow, sooo.......Yeah, so he was just teasing......Who knows what a "Lying Dog Faced Pony Soldier" is anyway.....Something about a John Wayne movie, but IDK.......Seriously - A Lying Dog Faced Pony Soldier"........Yeah - Mayor Pete, you got nothing to worry about from Ole Uncle Joe......

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1 hour ago, swordfish said:

It's just Uncle Joe........Nothing to see here, at least she's not African American anyhow, sooo.......Yeah, so he was just teasing......Who knows what a "Lying Dog Faced Pony Soldier" is anyway.....Something about a John Wayne movie, but IDK.......Seriously - A Lying Dog Faced Pony Soldier"........Yeah - Mayor Pete, you got nothing to worry about from Ole Uncle Joe......

Finally, a Democrat trying to talk Trump voters over to his side. He's talkin' their language. They love someone who speaks their mind, right? 

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I work in a manufacturing facility represented by the United Steel Workers. One of the group leaders in my department told me last week " I have voted Democrat my whole life but the Democrat party no longer represents the working family. I will never vote Democrat again".

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https://www.analyzingamerica.org/mike-bloomberg-caught-on-tape-telling-fellow-elites-all-the-crime-is-in-minority-areas/?fbclid=IwAR3ZZgny3jVFSFvZryAAF-CAzLCqnhPmOtkAs5gvcmd8bNKXYeoWO2cyOzI

In 2015 Mike Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York City, gave a speech to the Aspen Institute and defended his strategy of aggressively policing minority neighborhoods.

A tape recording of that speech has come to light and Bloomberg, now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, was heard discussing crime and minorities.

At one point, Bloomberg is heard justifying the policy he implemented as mayor known as stop-and-frisk.

Bloomberg said “Put the cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods.”

Many people are blasting Bloomberg for the comments they heard on the tape.

Breitbart News reported the speech at the time, in which Bloomberg pushed the idea of cities taking the initiative on instituting and enforcing the gun bans.

The Aspen Times quoted Bloomberg as saying: “Cities need to get guns out of [the]… hands” of individuals who are “male, minority, and between the ages of 15 and 25.”

The full audio of the speech further revealed the racially-charged tone of Bloomberg’s comments, wherein he bluntly said of young minorities, “throw them against the wall and frisk them,” and admitted “we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods…. ecause that’s where all the crime is.”

Clips from the speech went viral Tuesday morning thanks to social media posts from President Donald Trump’s campaign and associates, such as the president’s son Donald Trump Jr.

 
 

Trump himself shared the clip from his official Twitter account, writing, “WOW, BLOOMBERG IS A TOTAL RACIST!”

However, at the time of this writing, that post has been deleted.

 

 

Trump's fault......

Seriously, does anyone think this will this impede Bloomberg's rise in the Democratic Primary run, or will the dems still try to push him up ahead of the top 3?  BTW, Biden's done .(IMHO)

 

 

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Yang, who created buzz with freedom dividend, ends 2020 bid: https://apnews.com/dac9093037af268f867ed697a09d0556

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Democrat Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur who created buzz for his presidential campaign by talking about his love of math and championing a universal basic income that would give every American adult $1,000 per month, suspended his 2020 bid on Tuesday.

“I am the math guy, and it is clear to me from the numbers that we are not going to win this race,” Yang said in front of a crowd of supporters as votes in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary were being counted.

“This is not an easy decision, or something I made lightly with the team. Endings are hard and I’ve always had the intention to stay in the race until the very end,” he added. “ But I have been persuaded that the message of this campaign will not be strengthened by my staying in the race any longer.”

....

Yang’s poll numbers were high enough, combined with his fundraising strength, to qualify him for all of the 2019 debates, though he fell short of Democratic National Committee’s qualifications to participate in the January debate in Iowa. He was, however, one of seven candidates who participated in Friday’s debate in New Hampshire. His departure from the race almost guarantees that the Democrats, who once had the most diverse presidential field in history, will have no candidates of color on the debate stage again this cycle.

...

When will Mayor Pete drop out, or he is mainly campaigning for a vice presidential bid?

 

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 I found it interesting that no one has heard from Tulsi Gabbard since she sued Hildog, and after Tom Steyer was lauded by the pundits of having a good debate Friday night, he barely beat her last night. 

Bloomberg is the wild card in this thing. I will admit that I have found this whole process interesting. I think it will take some twists and turns along the way. I think Bernie will ultimately have the support to win the nomination, but the D's won't allow it, he'll get screwed again. He is the Democrat's worst nightmare.  

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