2020 Presidential Election

[Martina]

The Castro stuff just happened. What research are you talking about? Apparently the entire country is in fantasy land because no one is talking about it. The Castro thing was massively stupid. Bernie can usually be trusted not to do things like that. He won't stay tied in Florida for long if he defends that statement during the debates.

How can he be the weakest candidate when in polls pitting each Democrat running against Trump, Bernie does the best? Asserting things doesn't make them so.

Originally Posted by BullDog

The op research file on Sanders is damning. Anyone pretending that it's not is living in a fantasy land.

No Democrat wants to run down-ticket with him. A presidential nominee is not supposed to be a huge liability for other Democrats trying to get elected.

He has all the Florida Democrats up in arms over his remarks about Castro in his recent 60 Minute interview:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...omments-117213

I hope Sanders gets hit hard at the debate. He has been skating and getting off way too easy.

He's a train wreck for the Democratic party.

Fuckery Planned for South Carolina:

https://www.postandcourier.com/polit...1d262994c.html

Who Knows How Much It Happened in Nevada:

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/02/nev...TtFuuQPNjtJuMA

The point is everyone thinks Bernie is the weakest candidate except of course the Bernie faithful.

God help us all.

[BullDog]

Originally Posted by Martina

The Castro stuff just happened. What research are you talking about? Apparently the entire country is in fantasy land because no one is talking about it. The Castro thing was massively stupid. Bernie can usually be trusted not to do things like that. He won't stay tied in Florida for long if he defends that statement during the debates.

How can he be the weakest candidate when in polls pitting each Democrat running against Trump, Bernie does the best? Asserting things doesn't make them so.

Oh, they will be talking about. You are in complete denial.

I'll be back with a nice succinct list later.

[Martina]

Here's Clinton's research. It didn't make a big splash then. I don't think it's going to discourage many people now. Some of it is regrettable and wrong -- guns. But he's been more consistent than Biden by far. And Bloomberg of course, who has changed parties. I think the socialist stuff will scare some, but the more air time Bernie gets, the more people he wins over with his decency and authenticity. People like him.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.buz...ign-had-on-ber

[BullDog]

The stuff from the Clinton oppo research isn't what I was referring to.

Yes, of course, his remarks about Castro are new - they reinforce things from his past that people are bothered about. And the Florida Democrats don't want to run with him - and people should care about the down races too and not just Saint Bernie.

Anyway, Martina, I know I will never convince you about anything regarding Sanders but other people might want to know some of the following.

This excerpt from an article sums up some of the more problematic things about Sanders. There is more - a lot more. (I added the bold).

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...n-donald-trump

Nonetheless, Sanders faces serious obstacles to obtaining the Democratic presidential nomination. The gentle treatment he received in 2016 from the media and the Hillary Clinton campaign (which ran few negative television or media ads against him) means that many Democratic voters haven’t yet learned about the distinctly non-progressive positions he has taken on certain issues throughout his senatorial career.

Vermont is one of the whitest states in the nation, as well as among the most rural, the oldest (in terms of the age of its population), and with the fewest immigrants. Sanders, to win elections, had to appeal to hunters, older voters and other socially conservative constituencies. This explains his long opposition to gun safety measures (he voted repeatedly against the Brady bill and measures to hold gun manufacturers liable for the damage done by their products), his comparatively late conversion to the cause of gay marriage (he opposed it in Vermont as late as 2006), and his nativist opposition to certain immigration reforms (on the grounds that they would undercut wages for American workers).

If Sanders wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s a safe bet that African American voters in South Carolina will hear quite a lot from his Democratic competitors about his vote for the so-called “Charleston loophole” that allowed the white supremacist Dylann Roof to get the gun he used to kill nine African Americans at a South Carolina church. And although former vice-president Joe Biden has caught heat for writing what became the 1994 crime bill – which, many progressives claim, resulted in mass minority incarceration – Sanders voted for it as well.

Democratic primary voters may also wonder how effective Sanders would be as president. His pitch to his supporters is that, if he somehow were to be elected, some sort of “political revolution” would result in Congress passing multitrillion-dollar plans for a Green New Deal, a top-to-bottom transformation of the healthcare system, a federal job guarantee, free college and student debt elimination, plus other vastly ambitious and expensive plans for education, immigration, housing and so forth.

These promises are unrealistic, and Sanders’ ability to get them past Congress would be approximately nil. The 2016 Clinton campaign’s opposition research file charged that Sanders, largely because of his go-it-alone approach, had a thin record of legislative accomplishment. “Sanders only sponsored one substantive bill that became law,” the document observed, while none of his House amendments had co-sponsors. And Sanders ranks dead last among all senators in the Lugar Center’s Bipartisanship Index for both the last two Congresses.

The chances of Sanders actually becoming president, however, are also close to nil. I say this because in 2016 I got a glimpse of the Republican party’s opposition research book on Sanders, which was so massive it had to be transported on a cart. The Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who got to see some of its contents, declared that “it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn [Sanders] apart.”

According to Eichenwald, the book includes damning material such as the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to Texas where it would be dumped in a poor Hispanic community, that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union, and that he appeared at a 1985 rally in Nicaragua at which Sandinista supporters chanted “Here, there / the Yankee will die.” And then there’s Sanders’ fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men…

After the Trump campaign and Fox News got through weaponizing this research, the usual conservative charges against Sanders – that his domestic program would cost nearly $100tn over the next decade, that he would ban individual health insurance, send taxes into the stratosphere, and sympathize with terrorists and leftwing regimes – would seem almost benign. The Republican campaign against any Democratic presidential candidate is guaranteed to be ugly, but against Sanders it would be gruesome. The result most likely would be a Democratic wipeout on the scale of Labour’s under Jeremy Corbyn.

That’s why Sanders is the preferred Democratic nominee of Trump and his aides. It explains otherwise puzzling stories such as Trump coming to Sanders’ defense against Warren’s no-female-president claim, saying sexism is “not his deal”. And while living in Washington has made me cynical in some ways, I would not be in the least surprised if conservative dollars are swelling the coffers of Our Revolution, Sanders’ dark-money Super Pac which doesn’t have to disclose its donors.

Sanders is in many ways an appealing politician whose message has resounded at a moment when both America’s economic and political systems face tremendous voter skepticism. But as a viable candidate to defeat Trump? As they say in Sanders’ Brooklyn birthplace, fuhgeddaboudit.

p.s. I hear Bloomberg is about to unleash ads on Sanders based on his oppo research.

[Martina]

Sanders held a number of jobs before he was elected Mayor of Burlington. He worked. Total bullshit. All of this is ideological, meaning you just disagree with his position, or it's not true or we've heard it before and no one cares. So harmless.

[BullDog]

I do believe a fair amount of it is true, but you missed the entire point - this is Republican oppo research that is waiting for him if he makes it to the General.

Of course if you already worship Bernie then you don't care. But oh, I don't think it is harmless at all.

[BullDog]

Oh good lord now Sanders said this tonight at a CNN town hall (after defending his comments on Castro).

Sanders: "China is another example. China is an authoritarian country, becoming more and more authoritarian. But can anyone deny – I mean, the facts are clear, that they have taken more people out of extreme poverty than any country in history."

Even if you think this is true do not say anything nice about a Communist authoritarian regime when you are trying to become a Presidential nominee and you are already tagged with the Socialist label. He just voluntarily said this. He didn't even have to mention China at all. What the hell is wrong with him.

[nhplowboi]

Bernie was elected mayor I think at age 40. From what I read he didn't amount to much of anything before that. Maybe he's a late bloomer but I think not.

[Martina]

He had a number of jobs. He worked as a carpenter, directed a non-profit which made film strips, wrote freelance, worked as an aide in a psych hospital, did research for the state of Vt, registered people for food stamps for a non profit, worked as a Head Start teacher, and other things. What he was doing was making a living while being an activist. I lived in Ann Arbor back in the day, and there were tons of college educated committed hardworking people doing all kinds of jobs so they could continue their activism. I imagine there were even fewer job opportunities in Vermont. There are lots of politicians who didn't have major careers before politics. I consider his working class roots something to be proud of.