Osita Nwanevu: Does not speak highly of the left's power that we keep getting washed by these guys!

We've known what's what about Biden from the jump. What we're learning fully now is how lazy the people running the party are. Purely reactive, a faith things will work themselves out till the last minute. Ironically, we saw this when they finally rushed to put Biden over Sanders in the first place.

President Biden’s campaign had a bright fund-raising spell immediately after Thursday's presidential debate, but many big donors were alarmed by his shaky showing. Some floated interventions and wondered about how to reach Jill Biden.

Major Democratic Donors Ask Themselves: What to Do About Biden?www.nytimes.com Some floated interventions and wondered about how to reach Jill Biden. Others hoped the president would bow out of the race on his own. Many came to terms with the low chances that he will do so.

Does not speak highly of the left's power that we keep getting washed by these guys!

the left complaining in 2020 "they made a backroom deal to get pete buttigieg to endorse him!" like that's really what we're losing to? It's like saying you got beat up in the schoolyard by the science club.

It's embarrassing!

Read the Sludge article on the DNC members. That is the embarrassment of the D party. Small wonder the challengers to it have trouble combatting that power.

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I never understood that complaint at the time, either. "Biden practiced old fashioned coalition building that is the backbone of democratic politics." Scandalous!

I remember 2016, when too many people were saying the DNC "conspired" to lose Bernie the nomination, and at the time I said "the guy who ran as an "anti-establishment" candidate was opposed by the establishment, and this, to you, is surprising and evil?"

So you've missed all the articles about the mood of voters being very big on 'anti-establishment' in recent years. wtf do you think Trump is? And who's in a panic now? The 'establishment' people.

You're kinda missing what I'm saying there. The establishment being opposed to the anti-establishment candidate is not "a conspiracy". It is a design feature.

In the D party, it's the establishment that has done real damage just as the anti-establishment in the R party has destroyed that party. They may not have won the day in 2016 with Biden had COVID not been dominating. Bernie had the decency to consider the impact on lives of real people.

And there's nothing absurd about calling out their damage.

I divided ppl into 2 bins: - Avatar-followers: shocked and scandalized - Policy/ideology centered w/avatar being best fit: annoyed at judgement and cynical about structure In general, the first is *always* greater, everywhere, also tend to be really loud and ranty.

Esp that contrasted with the Bernie camp insisting he could take the nom with a plurality of delegates. Bernie should have spent 2016-20 winning over skeptical reliable Black voters. And hired spox who know how to build a coalition rather than shitposting stans.

i say this as a Bernie voter and volunteer: Bernie’s surrogate game was abysmal

Good grief. A little revision? Jim Clyburn had clout. Obama had clout. Biden did no coalition building until suddenly, practically overnight one night in SC after failing dismally in three states? Several primary opponents simultaneously deciding to drop out? lol Please.

listen you fight the good fight but when you’re faced with the tidal wave of electoral power that goes with the mayor of south bend there’s only so much you can do

It is *extremely* telling who is still aggrieved about the centrists coalescing around one person (which of course was going to happen eventually) in 2020 instead of being angry at the Sanders campaign for giving up on Black voters ex ante facto. Losing by 30 points in SC was an embarrassment.

There is no path toward swinging American politics to the left without the enthusiastic buy-in of Black voters, the base of the Democratic Party and the most historically and presently economically disenfranchised constituency. Failing to make those in-roads is a preemptive death knell for the left.

The entire strategy was to eke out a solid 20 to 30 something percent plurality and it was a viable one for the purposes of winning that primary as long as the field was divided, which it was for a remarkably long time. But it was never a mass movement and folks need to come to terms with that.

Going all in on Latinos + (often downwardly mobile) young urban whites gets you a decent constituent base that is even large enough to win Western states and some lily white places like New England and the Plains, but it is not a winning coalition inside the national Democratic Party.

Especially when to get to 30% they got the bulk of their support from people that were not regular democratic voters. What did they think the 70% of democrats were going to do - split their votes and lose control of the party like the GOP with Trump. We are not complete idiots

Who has a mass movement? Trump?

that was obviously not going to work. not the plan, which was to do that in the early states and then move to bigger leads after gaining legitimacy and momentum. there was speculation of bernie winning an outright majority after nevada. and talk of couping him at the convention if he didn't.

was shaun king not the best ambassador to the black community idk

I'm just glad the centrists got what they wanted. It's working so well. Go America and go democracy! I really believe this!!!!

Eventually? lol There was a regular rolling Darling of the Day, but none of them caught on until a bunch dropped out & power stepped in for real. Clyburn gets credit for SC. Bernie had not given up on Black voters.

I am a Bernie Bro and this is cope, sorry. Bernie Sanders himself did not give up on Black voters themselves, but *his campaign* did not seriously attempt to compete in South Carolina.

Insiders recount how Sanders lost the black vote — and the nomination slipped awaywww.washingtonpost.com Ex-staffers describe what they call blunders by the Sanders campaign in South Carolina and beyond, saying they tried to raise the alarm. The disconnect with black voters continues to limit Sanders’s i...

as a Bernie Bro, i don’t think the campaign worked that hard in any state. i drove all over the country volunteering for him and everywhere i went i canvassed in neighborhoods where no one set foot there until after early voting had ended and it was too late for people to change their work schedules

Clyburn had networks there built up over decades. Sanders did 70 events, *but not these three!* Yup. I think it's hard to say his campaign did not seriously attempt to compete there. But, that's just my opinion.

The Sanders campaign was too nice to keep pummeling Biden when he was down despite everybody knowing he could bounce back South Carolina. Weird choice considering no party operatives treated Sanders that way after his heart attack.

Well, also, Sanders had a lot of trouble appealing to Black Democrats, and Biden did not.

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It was not the campaign. It was Sanders himself who told them to stop after attacking Joe after Iowa. I spoke to proton the campaign. He didn’t want to run that kind of campaign

bigger factor seems like the nevada triumph being covered in liberal media as a world historical disaster and south carolina and the endorsements as a huge relief, but idk what you’re supposed to do as the left about whether msnbc anchors sigh or not

I never understood this: Biden was good at politics, the job he was applying for, yet that was unethical? Or “the democratic party played politics” A political party was political?

It’s more like being the new guy in the science club and trying to win an office by following the rules in the printed handout and learning that everybody already knows that nobody follows the rules on the handout

ffs. He was just the first domino. It wasn't Buttigieg (who was just annoying), it was that Obama was suddenly weighing in from behind the scene. Why not just come out & be open about it? I hate these rehashes of 2016 and 2020. People can forgive/ forget, but not if wounds are picked at repeatedly.

i mean it sounds dumb but that clearly worked very well. i couldn't believe my eyes when i saw that shift in the polls. clearly the mainstream media unity narrative held a lot more sway over people than at least i realized. not a joke to figure out a way under from that.

Yeah turns out holding no institutional or media power is hard to beat. What a shocker that is

Of course he made a deal! That’s how politics works!

Tbf, pretty general story of politics in this country and most others: when you have enough money and connections you don't have to be good at stuff

Probably a few exceptionally well run societies out there where you dont get either without meeting some threshold of competence but we are very much not one of those

Rishi Sunak is discovering the limits of that axiom right now.

Hah God I hope so

Rude

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W served two terms, and he was more popular in the second one! It defies belief.

the thing for me on this front is that on the national level, the dems are VERY hunkered down. after obama cut the line, with each new election, they've made it more and more impossible for someone to do that. this is much less true on the local front, where weaknesses are multiplying.

chicago is a big point for me on this. used to be it'd be impossible for brandon johnson to become mayor of a blue machine city in a blue machine state, they'd just be fucked from the get go. nationally, dems are fortifying things to hold power, but locally, that laziness really hits hard.

(which again runs into my own bell i'm always ringing, people are building power and it's good, but so much change ends up being blocked by 'seniority/leadership doesn't want to retire and doesn't want to change and they sure as shit ain't sharing')

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