I will keep doing, but not worth it! The 2016 Presidential Primary Voting Thread

my fave part of that debate was bernie's *even on our WORST days we're a hundred times better than the republican candidates*.

cuz it was true. even if you hate everybody.

little bonding moment there.

still, older lunch xp

if he's elected Oliver Stone has his political Porky's movie in development.

rubio is my school year : /

it's funny how rubio has gotten the tag of "oh he'll be our obama, with the youthin' and the energy" and cruz is basically the exact same age. both a few years younger than obama when he started, actually; the only presidents inaugurated at a younger age were jfk and teddy roosevelt, maybe bill clinton (not doing the math to bring cruz up to inauguration day).

yeah but did Teddy, JFK, and Clinton smear petroleum jelly on their faces like Cruz

Yeah, Cruz just seems like an oily old dude. Like, I'll bet his medicine cabinet is indistinguishable from that of an incontinent septuagenarian.

Much as i'm allergic to JFK worship (being an Irish Catholic child from the '60s), Pierce had a good line about Marco tryin' it on:

(Brief Historical Note—when Marco Rubio was 26, he was about to take a job on the Miami City Commission. When JFK was 26, he was towing an injured shipmate between enemy-held islands with his teeth. Just sayin'.)

well he certainly had the teeth to do it.

i was gonna say obama was the first black president of the harvard law review at 26 but i looked and he was 28...slacker.

Yeah, there's a weird sobering/horrifying effect of when ("serious") presidential start gettin' _uncomfortably_ close to one's age. Like, "oh shit, Cruz was a freshman only 6 years before me. Oh God."

I'm reminded of Dave Barry of all people writing about the shock of realization of his own age when he first saw an airline pilot younger than himself.

Random video game side-note:

Which feels more accurate: Cruz as an froshling Princeton student be playing an NES, a Sega Master System, or the Atari they all still had?

Or was he the kinda dude who would brag about his new Amiga to everyone? "Look at these graphics!"

obama is 7 years older than me. he's my brother and sister's generation. the foghat generation. tail-end boomers technically. whereas i am of the X. he seems way older than me though. i mean, he's an adult and all that.

Was at HLS the same time as Cruz (he gpt his JD the year I started); his reputation as a creep was well-established.

now that we're quoting Pierce:

he rest of the debate rocked back and forth. HRC pretty clearly won a long section on foreign policy, which actually is her wheelhouse and not ground on which Sanders can truly compete, except to remind America that HRC voted for the Iraq war in 2002. But this previous interchange—over who is a progressive and why, and about what is discreet influence peddling and what is not—would have been impossible had Sanders not jumped into the race and if he had not caught fire the way he has. It is simply not credible to believe that the debate would have been this sharply joined if it were HRC and, say, vice-president Biden were running against each other. Without Bernie Sanders, it is hard to imagine HRC fighting as hard as she has to defend her progressive bona fides. Gone is the DLC spouse who talked about "super-predators" and jailing incorrigible juveniles—mainly, African-American ones—before trying to help them.

This one small slice of the debate demonstrates that, at least for a moment, Hillary Rodham Clinton is being forced to campaign in a way that would have been unthinkable for her a year ago. Without the Sanders campaign, the Clinton campaign likely would have been an endless chorus of banality about "families" and "helping the middle class." It certainly wouldn't have been about defending her as a woman of the progressive left. This is quite the damnedest thing.

xxpost Yeah, I was really thrown when I realized that Cruz is less than a decade older than me.

Cruz is five days shy of being exactly one year older than me.

you guys celebrating with pie, beer, and a reading of the Confederate constitution?

I really hit a nerve with Pollitt on Twitter the other day, she wasn't a fan of my phrase "Boomer narcissism"

― Iago Galdston, Friday, February 5, 2016 4:01 PM (1 hour ago)

katha pollitt is the fucking worst, her politics-free "go hillary!" piece is almost as bad as joan walsh's

so, are there any sane republicans left? i never hear about them. aren't there any older people with money who just want, like, decorum and a strong military and lots of tax breaks and who aren't all LET'S BUILD A WALL MOTHERFUCKERS and all that? maybe there aren't any left. i mean dubya was kind of an old school choice bred to look after the money and he was pretty fucking nuts. i guess romney wasn't completely nuts. romney looks like a classy guy right about now.

Clinton's definition of "progressive" is laughable

I mean, aside from the things highlighted in that Pierce quote, I do not mind Clinton the moderate. For purely selfish reasons driven by my personal class and privilege, I flourished under the policies of her husband. I think people in my situation would continue to flourish, regardless of color, were she to continue them. I think people of my class will experience long-term benefits from either Sanders or Clinton based on the platforms they are campaigning on now, particularly when compared to the Republicans. I also think Sanders will be normalized towards the right pretty quickly into his presidency by virtue of the situation in Washington, so his actual achievable platform is not far removed from Clinton's. Policywise I don't see enough distance between them for me to rabidly back one over the other.

Both of them have extreme supporters who suck hardcore. Clinton's extreme supporters suck in a way that I have become numb towards over the past 7.5 years, whereas Sanders' extreme supporters exist in a bubble that I've interacted with but have largely been able to avoid dealing with on a sustained level until this primary season, so right now I am finding them much more irritating. I am attempting not to allow that to cloud how I view the candidates, neither of whom I believe is defined by the irritating segments of their fanbases.

This is several paragraphs to say I still don't care who wins the Democratic nomination; that person has my vote until they personally insult me on national television, at which point I'll probably just write in my dad like I did in 1992.

xp: most of the sane Republicans have turned into Democrats

there are still moderate republicans but they never get much higher than, like, the city council level. the way the national party has gone has made it very hard for anyone to win any prominent office w/o mouthing all the usual insane rhetoric or adopting extremist stances. i read an article a few months back about the current mayor of san diego, who's apparently a moderate republican (note: i'm not from san diego so i don't know whether this is exaggerated) and is already getting pressured to state his views on trump, etc.

barney frank: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/three-reasons-why-things-will-get-harder-for-bernie-sanders-213591#ixzz3zJYfdm4L

so, are there any sane republicans left

I've got some in my family and I've urged them to vote for Hillary.

I surveyed my uncle, he was generally non-commital but said he would be ok w rubio, christie or the donald

i can totally see the current repub governor of the state i live in running in 4 years a la romney. now i see he's backing christie. he doesn't seem totally insane. though he does remind me of an attack on titan monster.

Charlie Baker says GOP's 'slide' led him to Chris Christie - The Boston Globe

baker kinda the moderate i'm talking about now that i think of it!

Ha, I totally forgot who the "new" governor was; for years, I would just excitedly say, "IT'S PAT PATRICK'S SON!"

"the GOP slide" sounds like a particularly sad line dance

Jeb leads it by sadly intoning, "Please slide."

@BillKristol
Note to @JebBush re your snarky comments about @marcorubio: Rubio is as qualified to be president as G.H.W. Bush was when he ran in 1980.

in that he is a natural-born american citizen over the age of 35, that is true

Kristol otoh not qualified to wipe his own ass

Good news is the 3 TV screens in the lunch space were NOT CNN today! They were on the local TimeWarner news channel, which featured a remote from New Hampshire reporting on crushed Trump fans after the snow made him skip a planned fly-in appearance.

I really have no interest in that old john Barney Frank's opinion about anything.

"Please slide."

lolol, really need a Cha Cha Slide/Please Clap mashup.

great post, dan

I think people of my class will experience long-term benefits from either Sanders or Clinton based on the platforms they are campaigning on now, particularly when compared to the Republicans. I also think Sanders will be normalized towards the right pretty quickly into his presidency by virtue of the situation in Washington, so his actual achievable platform is not far removed from Clinton's. Policywise I don't see enough distance between them for me to rabidly back one over the other.

this, pretty much. the reason i'd prefer bernie is 1) i'd hope that at least by starting out from a more strongly liberal position, his compromises would be more palatable, and 2) foreign policy (or more accurately, not hillary's foreign policy)

better the Devil you don't know, i always say. He might have candy.

mmmm, devil candy...

as we get closer to november, remind me to ask dan what his dad's name is

had the same thought! Jill Stein again won't cut it for me.

just one position paper on Glass-Steagall and Mr P is in

starting out from a more strongly liberal position, his compromises would be more palatable

otm. the optimal starting position on inauguration day is the one that's furthest to the left while still resulting in an electoral victory. Clinton has her cautious opinion on where that sweet spot might be, while Sanders is more about shooting the moon.

Chas Pierce on the Kissinger ref:

Dear Ms. HRC: There is being tone-deaf, and then there is not being able to tell the difference between the New York Philharmonic and an abbatoir.

No interest in HRC's sweet spot.

You and Bill probably share that in common.

great post, dan

lol thank you k3v, but I will admit that I initially thought you were referring to:

"the GOP slide" sounds like a particularly sad line dance

and I was thinking to myself "damn, has the bar fallen that low"

thought this was interesting from 2008:
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.php?ind=D&cycle=2008&recipdetail=S&mem=Y&sortorder=U

the only sane republican I know is a hardcore Zionist and opposes Obama/Clinton/Kerry on grounds that they are 'very anti Israel" which is preposterous to me. That said she feels completely let down by everyone on the Republican side this time.

iirc sheldon adelson is bankrolling rubio's campaign

i don't think either clinton or sanders is going to radically reform the US military. without googling, who said: "I will protect America, defend our interests and values, embrace our commitments to defend freedom and human rights, and relentlessly combat terrorism."

Eugene Debs

George Lincoln Rockwell