Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

If he gets the nomination, obviously. But her standards of "once it's clear" would be very different from yours and mine.

i.e. after the convention. This is their last chance, remember—at least until Chelsea is launched.

yeah the only way hillary would drop out is if she's mathematically eliminated. which, with superdelegates, is probably not possible

So I guess this is where we differ. If Sanders somehow surges so strongly that he leads in pledged delegates, I see Clinton conceding at the convention.

until she realized it was over and they agreed to make her the candidate next time.

o rly

Um you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand this.

But yeah yr probably right, that's why the field was also open to....Jim Webb. And why Wasserman-Schultz got the DNC chair post.

She probably didn't leverage the PUMA vote in that meeting, either. Why do that? I mean, it's a merit-based system, right?

you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand this conspiracy i am alleging

why would they need to explicitly promise her anything? she has been a part of the party, raising funds for the party, representing the party, her entire political career. that's why almost all the superdelegates are pledged to her - not bc they crudely promised her at the convention that if she supports obama they pinky-swear they'll vote for her eight years from now.

You guys are shockingly naive about party politics.

Well he insisted he's right again, don't you all feel foolish

I guess that's one way to argue your point.

no i believe you it's just amazing that they got 719 superdelegates to agree to keep this agreement quiet including the delegates who are voting for bernie

if i were a superdelegate going for bernie i would tell cameras "the party promised hillary she would be the candidate next election and that's the only reason hillary has the majority of superdelegates right now"

there are still backdoor greasejobs in politics but they're much more difficult to pull off in this day and age due to the omnipresence of insta-media and recording technology, so I tend to feel like Mordy's otm here.

That flowchart, widely shared on my feed, is awesome for people who think being undecided between Sanders and Trump is a reasonable political stance, not so much for everybody else.

thread humorlessness reaching Park Slope Food Co-op levels

http://i.imgur.com/NZNRiXR.gif

xpost Mordy ok you are being disingenuous now. Nobody said anything about a pinkie-promise or animal sacrifice or whatever it is you imagine I'm contending. The President is the de facto leader of the party. He holds sway over party rules and appointments. He had the power to readily advance a number of political allies, Daley people, Axelrod people, etc. (Don't forget HRC coming after him for Bill Ayers, btw.) But they felt they needed Hillary's endorsement, and were probably right. The terms are tacit, for fuck's sake it's been going on for hundreds of years—getting people jobs and in general discouraging—when the time comes—other potential candidates from raising too much money in the expectation he will back them.

i don't really understand why all this matters

Some of us (me) responding (too strongly?) to notion upthread that HRC is all about putting the Party first. Carry on....

first paragraph of today's NYT story is wow

Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas traded insults on Easter Sunday morning over recent smears against their wives, while Mr. Trump ruled out creating internment camps for American Muslims and said he would study a proposal to allow delegates to bring guns to the Republican National Convention.

packs a lot in

imagine reading that sentence context-free about five or six years ago

some kind of left-wing nightmare fanfic

shit that looks like an onion article but isn't

Mr. Trump said he had not seen the petition, which is aimed at candidates like himself, and that he would have to review it before commenting, although he noted he was a “very, very strong person for the Second Amendment.”

indistinguishable from Onion

Right, he's going to "study the proposal."

He had the power to readily advance a number of political allies, Daley people, Axelrod people, etc.

I can't believe a sitting President advanced the person who served as his secretary of state instead of a Senator from Vermont with whom he'd had no meaningful dealings at all

must be a huge internal conspiracy

stoked that you can peel the scales from everybody's eyes on this, I have a question about jet fuel & steel beams when you get a minute

we're also thinking that the president is as powerful as he was in FDR's time, i.e. patronage and 'leader of his party'

though I remember rumblings about how the HI dem machine would work in Clinton's favor

i said something like this. various retired titans including akaka were praising her to the skies at the time but i should have given more weight to the tulsi endorsement/commercials (which barely work the Billionaires angle at all; they're about iraq) and to what is probably an unusually intense anti-adventurism sentiment here that i used to think was mutually exclusive as a policy- or even tone-driver w the state's economically fundamental coziness w the u.s. military, but isn't. the place is a forward outpost and a testing ground; what would they want to attack anyone for.

sanders and hrc each opened two offices here -- one each in honolulu of course; sanders one in hilo; clinton one in wailuku on maui; this is so on-the-nose people laugh when they hear it. i suspect that setting up shop in what is roughly analogous to a rich suburb is a worse strategy when what separates you from both the state's second-largest pop center (hilo) and the majority of the state's "rural" pop (the island hilo's on) is not a medium-length drive but a chunk of pacific. by a week or so before the primary i'd realized (i am in hilo) that i'd basically never seen an hrc sign, or sticker, or supporter. like i posted upthread, the poll itself (i joined the dems and everything, sigh) looked like a bernie rally. when i dropped in on the office i actually laughed cuz i opened the door (to what until late last year was a failing sex shop called "private moments") and there was the earnest, organized young left again, all on laptops just like they'd never gone away -- but in general i think the sanders victory was cross-generational here and that the parts that weren't about all-the-other-politicians-are-liars were mostly about war. just thought yall would enjoy some anecdotal hindsight pundit exegesis on the lowest-stake race of the week

Mr. Clooney slips on a pair of boat shoes and runs, like an angry, flightless bird, to a neighbor’s house.

that's why the field was also open to....Jim Webb.

Three weeks ago, I saw Webb (who I'd forgotten was actually in this early on) mentioned as a possible VP for Clinton. A few days ago, he said on TV he wouldn't vote for Clinton (but may vote for Trump). So I guess that brings that to a close.

Feel like the discussion about Clinton as heir apparent misses the point if it becomes about whether Obama and the party specifically tried to sabotage Sanders or cut deals with superdelegates or something, which no one has actually asserted; the point is that Clinton walked in the door as the party's choice, with a bajillion endorsements locked in before anybody else even declared a candidacy. It looked and felt like a race with a sitting President, where people just do not run against them. Now, whether that was a quid pro quo worked out in June 2008, I dunno and kinda doubt... but it certainly seems like party actors had decided on a nominee very, very early.

like after watching the Seinfeld finale

Hillary was the runner-up last time, and then the secretary of state. Of course she was the pre-emptive nominee.

Brace yourself for some grief over "pre-emptive," Frederik.

she was also widely popular among democratic voters and her candidacy will be a historic event

yeah i think any party is going to feel pretty good about having a candidate as ready-made as clinton waiting her turn.

doc casino otm tho -- maybe there was a deal, maybe there wasn't; i'm not sure what that changes, since she was gonna be the strongest candidate anyway

eh there were no backroom meetings just a bunch of cuomo types doing the math and deciding not to waste a year of their life. this has been a huge contributor to sanders' success - he's never had to split the not-clinton votes or spotlight. if there were one more candidate that had *any* support, the math woulda never worked out for sanders.

There was O'Malley. I suppose a more previously high profile person with a similar platform might have gotten more traction.

Might have.

yeah idk i think lumping all the "not clintons" in the same category might be a mistake, bernie sort of had his own lane and brand of followers

sure I think that's true, he just also got every "I don't really like clinton" voter too

I'm surprised O'Malley didn't get more traction! He's been, for years, that guy in Democratic politics about whom you hear "this is the guy you haven't heard of who's gonna be big."

This is the guy.

http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5159fd2ce4b01cd3b022cf44/515b91f8e4b09551b25cdfb0/515b92e1e4b09551b25cf4bf/1364955938738/MD-Luigi.jpg

tbh we don't really know and probably never will, about deals made or inquiries rebuffed or whatever. not like it's some big secret, i just mean that it's the kind of thing that history won't necessarily give us access to. the cuomos of the world deciding not to run - which i agree has been very crucial for bernie, but not sufficient in any way to his success (see: gore/bradley) - gets us to a question of causality. okay, they decided not to run. why? because it was obvious they had no chance. why did they have no chance? some of them may have simply run the same factors iatee refers to and concluded it was no chance.

but another such factor would be knowing that all the doors are already going to be closed to you and that People Who Matter have already chosen to get on board this ship. it's not the 19th century anymore but it seems pretty obvious that you don't want to be on the wrong side in terms of endorsements, aiding and abetting, when it turns out Clinton wins the thing and it comes time to see who gets rewarded and who doesn't. or there could have been conversations like "hey mr. president/other party leader, i'm thinking about running" and they say "look, i like you a lot, that would be great, but you need to know that we're all pretty much ready to root for hillary here." i think part of clinton's inevitability was self-reinforcing, and you can imagine another universe where other passable democratic candidates not named o'malley would have thought, hey, this person's been beaten once before, she's associated with very unpopular foreign policies, she has some scandals going that might peter out but might weaken her, voters are ready for a fresh face, i'll be too old in 4/8 years.... or whatever. like, without that factor of her being ensconced as the obvious candidate, and having spent years laying the groundwork to maintain that spot, it's not really so obvious.

o'malley really struggled to offer any particular reason you should vote for him, there was no message or movement or (sorry) unique selling point there. and while there may have been some clinton non-fans out there (see also the hazy poll numbers Hypothetical Biden was showing for a while) it's also pretty clear that most clinton voters have a positive opinion of sanders (they just like clinton much more) and believe it or not vice versa, so there aren't THAT many votes up for grabs in the "i just really dislike clinton and want to vote for someone else" pool. it is a non-zero number obviously! but it doesn't seem to be enough to make a campaign on, or at least nobody really tried it; even sanders has not gone nearly as far as his supporters in articulating everything that is wrong with the clinton/clintonite worldview, even if he's provoked that conversation. (so, so much more has been written about the troubling aspects of clintonism, the compromises of the 90s, the iraq war and patriot act votes, than would ever have been written had sanders not been running - but he has not gotten up and said "this party was hijacked to an ideologically bankrupt but politically expedient center-right calculus twenty-five years ago and it's time to take it back" or whatever.)

the word on her seems to be she is a cynic who will do whatever it takes for power. i don't think that's true. even her interventionist tendencies -- like her pushing to back up the rebels in libya -- seem to be borne of idealism if anything. she may claim kissinger as a friend but i don't think she is machiavellian and ruthless the way he was.

― Treeship, Sunday, March 27, 2016 6:07 AM (Yesterday)

eh, it's pretty hard to put an "idealistic" spin on her role in the coup in honduras.

she was also widely popular among democratic voters and her candidacy will be a historic event

She also sucks up cash like a SuperMop, AND considers the Mubaraks personal friends.

sick freestyle