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

It is the Dems' fault they never took Dean seriously as candidate and DC chair. The disappointment's even made him a Clinton supporter.

there are absolutely things he could do differently that i think would be productive and valuable. i have made a number of critical remarks about sanders on these threads! i just think, as i've said repeatedly, that clinton supporters advocating for sanders to do this or that in order to supposedly better serve his progressive agenda, is classic concern-trolling. i would accept it, maybe, with heavy caveats like "i am actually a hardcore leftist and my heart is with sanders but i am supporting clinton only for narrow tactical reasons about which we might politely disagree." the proliferation of "sanders should do X" stuff online, from people who have never wanted sanders or his message to get anywhere in the first place, is dumb and irritating. i should be clearer about not lumping all posters here into that group, yes.

as to the enthusiasm/midterm point - yeah it's an uncertain future. i still don't know what's so implausible about a progressive congressional candidate in 2018 getting sanders to show up for a rally to boost turnout/enthusiasm, but that's only one possible way he could make a difference. shakey brought up the things howard dean did within the party (after the primaries were over) that may have made a difference in the long term. perhaps sanders will follow such a path (if the party lets him). or some other one. who knows? i guess more generally i don't really get how you disentangle "enthusiasm for Bernie" from "enthusiasm for the movement at large" to the point where you can say confidently that the latter is not to be found. the enthusiasm for bernie is there because people are fucking stoked to hear somebody saying this shit, and they agree with him! that's... good for the movement, right? or maybe there's a conflation here between enthusiasm and nuts-and-bolts organizing and downticket fundraising, where when you say enthusiasm for bernie i think of people showing up for rallies, sharing shit on facebook, winning over skittish friends and family members who agree in principle but are worried about x y and z.... but where you say enthusiasm for the movement at large i think you're talking about all the downticket organizing stuff. i don't think one excludes the other and while yeah sanders might do more to push that stuff, is he really doing it any harm by providing a powerful national symbol that progressivism is not a 4% fringe idea but a huge, potentially election-winning bloc?

tbh i also haven't followed his activities close enough to say that he HASN'T been doing any downticket stuff. don't local figures (candidates, activist leaders) appear at his rallies and get to speak (in front of gigantic crowds)? i honestly am not sure. i do know that he's spent a lot of donation money giving huge props and national attention to erica garner's activism, and that of exploited farmers, in those two really beautiful (imho) short-film advertisements. i am going to go out on a limb and say they probably spent more on those than on billboards in san francisco (though i dunno, it's an expensive city). this and the fact that he pays his interns are my basic justification for giving the guy donations - isn't that a pretty direct channeling of "bernie enthusiasm" (donor money, people's likelihood to click 'share' because the video came from their hero bernie) to other progressive movements and organizing activities?

also re: co-anchoring, i endorse karl malone but i am not ready for prime-time, unless i can be that weather guy who speaks only in tribe called quest lyrics.

just have a blazer on.

And write shorter paragraphs.

yeah, i guess i don't see the sharing and big reddit threads as indicative of any kind of enthusiasm that translates into real political change. it seems more like feel good stuff to me where what i would like to see is what you call the nuts-and-bolts organizational and downticket fundraising stuff. my state has suffered under republican leadership, and i know that other states have had it much worse. so when you ask me what's more important - the good feelings + enthusiasm of the bernie campaign (which admittedly i am less optimistic about their chances of winning than other ppl) or getting toomey thrown out of office - for me it's the latter every time. if it looked like bernie was directing his young supporters into these other races it would honestly make me feel a lot better. i don't want us to get to november and toomey is winning bc well we had our focus on a campaign that ended up not coming through and then we have what? literally nothing to show for all that enthusiasm and all those facebook shares. nb i am an undecided voter who sees strong arguments for both dem candidates. i am not concern trolling - i am concerned.

okay, so fair enough. i think it comes off as concern trolling because in general you're much more supportive of clinton than most posters here (which, you're right, i should not assume makes you a clinton supporter as such), and because you seem so down on sanders even having the capacity to do any of the things it's hypothesized that he might do, so the 'advice' seems somehow less sincere. but i can relate to being concerned and worried about the prospects of things. if it comes around to november and sanders is not doing anything with his massive support base to help then maybe we can reopen this conversation.

it's a tricky one too for all the reasons that someone skeptical of sanders in the first place might point out: is it better to back a fetterman, whose politics are right on, but risk losing by a hair or more against this total asshole incumbent who will otherwise become a permanent fixture? or back a middle-of-the-road democrat that has less in common with the sanders movement (and thus inspires less roaring enthusiasm) for the sake of just getting toomey gone? (then there are lots of x factors: what if fetterman sucks as a candidate? what if his look and feel end up turning off a lot of people that agree with his message?) this is stuff that's really easy for me to say in the abstract - go left, be bold, don't look back - but not so easy for me to impose on people living in pennyslvania. also part of what i mean about it being a minefield for sanders to get into the habit of endorsing every progressive candidate for everything, or in general for people who haven't secured their own nominations to go around hitching their wagons together with unknowns - - - some of them might turn out to be raving uninformed campus liberals, some might have horrible skeletons in their closet ("BREAKING: SANDERS PAL IS PORNO KING"), god knows. i know this sounds like me arguing for the 'safe' and personally/visually normative centrist. but we're having a conversation about strategy/tactics (what's the most useful thing for sanders to do with limited money and limited hours in a day), and these things probably do enter into it.

(in the interest of reassuring you, separate from sanders: i think people will be pretty motivated by the presence of a trump/cruz at the top of the ticket to come out and vote blue all the way down. impossible to predict this far out but if the unappealingness of the republican nominee makes this even a baby-sized 'wave' election, then toomey - who didn't win by a huge margin in 2010 and has horrible approval ratings - would need a heck of an incumbency effect to keep his seat imo.)

welp, i can't think of anything, so here we go:

Conventional Mealy Mouths: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 5

no it's not funny and it's a terrible name but fuck man, i'm at work

as for 'feel good stuff' and facebook - well, i dunno. i refer to facebook, not reddit, because i am thinking of a very person-to-person kind of thing (also i have never used reddit and don't really understand it) so my model are things like my best friend going to sanders's campaign-video shoot last week in brooklyn, and sharing stuff and then catching her sisters at dinner and having a long long conversation about sanders (re: their agreement with his policies vs. their pre-existing desire to support clinton for 'historic'/female president reasons) and maybe winning one or two of them over. that's anecdotal, and it's tiny by itself, but those are real effects. given that they are her sisters it's likely this conversation would have happened without facebook (actually i may even be screwing up the order of events), but i'm just saying, it's that kind of communication that leads me to invoke facebook - - - not talking about hiveminds of bernie die-hards unknown to each other, echo-chambering their tiny world and excorciating their perceived enemies/conspiracies/whatever. though i'm sure that goes on, based on my sweaty and ill-smelling stereotype of reddit.

anyway my point is that where you're seeing "good feelings" i'm seeing a commitment to spread the word, to persuade, to fight on. it's hard for me to entirely grasp tbh because i'm still kinda cynical and inactive and old and sure, lazy i guess. this friend though, she seems really lit up, like she's been waiting without realizing it forever to hear candidates talk about stuff like this, and she's getting in touch with people doing multi-lingual voter organizing and shit. i can't assume right this second that she's going to pack all of that in once bernie quits, or that the voter organizing and registration and stuff won't end up mattering in november even if she does. i would also refer you to my post above concerning possible knock-on effects of just people staying involved and organized and getting their friends to turn up when there's a rally for the minimum wage next march or whenever. it mighta got buried in a longer post; sorry for paragraph rockin'.

oh oops. well, farewell old thread. we still have il douché and we certainly still have discontent. but it's been a good one.

Thread sucked

the new thread has close-ups of mouths, you should check it out d

I've been in and I like the look of it already, good work imo I've not felt this optimistic about a change in US politics since Bernie sanders ran for the Dems in 2016